With every new edition, tactical strategy fusion series Age of Wonders has changed up exactly how it works – and Age of Wonders 4 showed its priorities as soon as it let me make a faction of mystical, arctic-dwelling wolf-riding dwarves.
After choosing a campaign, the first choice you make is whether to use a pre-made faction or customise your own. Where in Age of Wonders 3 you could alter your leader’s appearance, your empire was functionally a combination of race and class – Orcish Theocrats, or Dwarven Dreadnoughts. Here, I find myself picking my way through a menu that feels a lot more like RPG character creation: choosing a body type (with swappable perks), culture, society, and early specialisations by way of that first Tome of Magic – and, of course, appearance customisation.
Culture, and your first Tome of Magic, determine the pool of units you get. A dwarven knight in a feudal society is the same as a human knight in a feudal society – but I can upgrade them very differently. But taking enchantments through the Tomes of Magic – whether its unit enchantments that apply to just support roles, or racial enchantments that apply to all dwarves in my empire – can take base armies down a very different route, especially with the ability to mix tomes of different affinities. Mixing Order and Nature tomes within a feudal culture feels distinctly different to mixing Chaos and Nature tomes within a barbarian culture. Even with a nature tree in common, it’s druidic paladins versus primal hordes.
Source – eurogamer.net
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