With each new release, the tactical-strategy fusion series Age of Wonders has completely changed the way it works – Age of Wonders 4 showed its priorities as it made me a faction of a mysterious, arctic-dwelling wolf-riding dwarves .
After selecting an event, the first choice you have to make is whether to use a pre-made faction or a custom faction. In Age of Wonders 3 you can change the appearance of your leaders, and your empire functions as a combination of races and classes—orc theocracy, or dwarven dreadnoughts. Here, I found myself choosing my way through a menu that felt more like RPG character creation: choosing body type (with interchangeable perks), culture, society, and early specialization through the first spellbook- And, of course, exterior customization.
Culture and your first spellbook determine how many units you get. Dwarf knights in feudal society are the same as human knights in feudal society – but I can upgrade them very differently. But acquiring enchantments through the Tome of Magic – whether it’s a unit enchantment that only applies to support characters, or a racial enchantment that applies to all dwarves in my empire – can take a base army down a very different path, especially when able to mix Different affinities in the case of spellbooks. Mixing order and nature in a feudal culture feels very different than mixing chaos and nature in a barbaric culture. Even with a common nature tree, it’s a druid paladin versus a primitive horde.
The units you can recruit and how they play change even more when you play on the strategy map, as the cities you vassalize and the ancient wonders you explore also unleash unique units. It’s the kind of depth that allows for incredible min-max, but Age of Wonders 4 explicitly recommends that you don’t worry about the numbers, and explore the themes and aesthetics that you find interesting. Hence: the mysterious, arctic-dwelling wolf-riding dwarves.
Despite this complexity, I was surprised how easy Age of Wonders 4 was to pick up. It removes a lot of easy shortcuts – orc warriors play like x, elf archers counter with y – so tactical combat can be very parsing-intensive if you’re just relying on tooltips and identifying models. Instead, unit types have large, readable icons above their heads, making it easier to read the field at a glance.
Nymph’s ability to transform enemy units is completely different than Wild Whisperer’s ability to summon and buff animals, I’d probably keep them in a completely different army, but be able to identify them at a glance – no matter what unit the enchantment might apply to, and how I Consider their order and positioning in turn – makes the tactical game clearer. It’s no substitute for thoughtful tactics, but Age of Wonders 4’s breadth would be lackluster without it.
Overall, Age of Wonders 4 tries to avoid being a dull game–so much so that you can almost let the game play itself. Your city can be automated, your exploration can be automated, and so can your tactical combat. It’s a bit hit and miss – the cities I have them auto-expand don’t seem to contribute much to my economy, and auto-exploration often sends my scouts to the corners and edges of the map – but auto-combat is mostly fine, just Struggling with multi-hero stacks.
Where I’m used to relying on comparative calculations for automatic resolution, Age of Wonders 4 seems to simulate behind-the-scenes combat. If it declares victory when one archer loses, and I click replay, I’ll watch a battle where a specific archer falls, not that they’re low-level sacrifices. It’s nice to be able to trust it to remove the vast majority of fights in my favor – and get my hands dirty for fun.
Fighting enemy heroes (with a limited number of units with unique equipment and special abilities), twenty-four versus twenty-four battles, ancient wonders, and sieges are some of the most complex tactical battles Age of Wonders 4 has to offer. Sieges are particularly noteworthy, as Age of Wonders 4’s solution to the somewhat tedious, static problem of city defense: instead of keeping garrisons around, heavily fortified city centers require multiple turns of attacking armies to break down.
As an attacker, you can spend resources on siege projects to shorten the time, but the idea is to give defenders enough time to quickly get back to their center before becoming vulnerable. Once fully besieged, the battle unfolds around the cramped fortress with its crumbling walls, the real test of whether you’ve got the right troops together and know how to best use them.
To me, some of the most interesting strategic decisions in Age of Wonders 4 were diplomatic decisions, not military ones. On one map — since realm maps are also deeply customizable — I’ve played close-knit factions across landmasses divided by oceans, where wildlife haunts endlessly.
I ended up being besieged by my north and south neighbors in a position with the coast on one side and mountains on the other. As I expanded south, my northern neighbors—advocates of aggressive expansion— initially warmed to me. However, when I tried to appease my southern neighbor by avenging my grievances, he ended up becoming unhappy.
My attempts at diplomacy didn’t go well, as my neighbors to the south refused to appease, and declared me their rival – making their grievances with me more important than my grievances with them. When they start taking aggressive action against me – building outposts directly on my borders – I still can’t declare war on them unless it’s deemed irrational and therefore evil, because in the balance of things , I wronged them even more. Meanwhile, my northern neighbors were growing resentful of my lack of aggression.
Strategically, I made a series of poor choices – I should have declared my southern neighbor my opponent and allyed with my aggressive northern neighbor – but I didn’t want to be in this situation” The desire to “bad guy” led me to choose more interesting corners. I fought two wars, won them, made sure both my wars were “reasonable”, had room to expand and had no impact on my faction. I was too busy dealing with the situation, and failed to get rid of the pests on the mountain, and now there are bloodthirsty wolves everywhere.
Age of Wonders 4 made an excellent sandbox, so the sudden limitations of the campaign scene made me not like those too much. On larger maps, with pre-determined scenario villains and occasional fixed relationships with surrounding independent cities, there’s less room for this push and pull of hostilities and alliances. The tension between “this map is trying to explore a story” and “this map wants me to snowball toward a specific victory” frustrates me, and paradoxically, my lack of direction.
While I mostly raved about its design choices, my time with Age of Wonders 4 was also plagued by numerous bugs and performance issues. I get crashes more often than not and have to save and reload to fix soft lockups or broken UI issues. Less disruptive, but still disturbing, is the fact that in moments when accuracy is critical, I noticed that my economy counters weren’t quite adding up.
Age of Wonders 4 made room for curiosity-driven play, bringing new meaning to the “exploration” part of 4X. It’s amazing how it balances depth and customizability without being too dense or overwhelming, making “what if?” as worthwhile a question as “what’s next?” I’ve been praying for a smooth fix to the performance issues I was having before starting over, but I’m still looking forward to doing it again.
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