Age of Wonders 4 Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

Age of Wonders 4 Free Download GAMESPACK.NET Age of Wonders 4’s structure should be familiar: you start with a single city, erect new buildings, develop the surrounding provinces, recruit armies and explore the map to find treasure and new enemies. Resources like food, gold and mana must be managed, rival rulers can be engaged diplomatically or aggressively, and eventually you’ll start working towards one of the victory conditions, perhaps focusing on magic, or maybe just conquering everyone. But the latest game in this long-running series is still distinct from its forebears. It makes this clear right away, when you pick the foundations of your magical empire. First, there’s the map. There’s an abundance of premade maps, including ones that are part of the story-driven campaign, but you can also spawn your own, selecting its traits. Maybe you want to conquer a frozen wasteland full of monsters, or a fiery hellscape split up by a molten sea, where the only safe route across is underground. There’s no dearth of compelling choices here, letting you make all sorts of exotic battlefields. TOP/BEST ADULT VIDEO GAMES IN UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA)

Age of Wonders 4 Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

As much as I enjoy building a legacy in a 4X game before starting over to do it all again, the fact that my legacy follows me in Age of Wonders 4 feels much more rewarding. And the faster pace of its very strong campaign mechanics and pretty good tactical battles make it feel like I can write a new chapter of this saga in a reasonable amount of time and still have time to do something else on my day off – especially with the very well-done story realms. Cranking all the dials up to maximum weirdness can lead to some edge cases that ruined my fun a bit, but it’s not that big of a price to pay for the vast map and empire customization we get to play with. It really is wonderful. A nymph’s ability to convert enemy units is an entirely different kind of support unit to the Wildspeaker’s ability to summon and empower animals, and I’d likely keep them in entirely different armies, but being able to identify them at a glance – and whatever unit enchantments might apply, and how I might consider them in turn order and positioning – makes tactical play so much cleaner. It’s not a substitute for considered tactics, but the breadth of Age of Wonders 4 would become a slog without it.

Guide your empire to greatness – but the story doesn’t end with your victory or defeat!

In general, Age of Wonders 4 tries to avoid being a slog – to the extent that you could almost ask the game to play itself. Your cities can be automated, your exploration can be automated, and your tactical combat can be automated. It’s a little hit and miss – the cities I let automate their own expansion seemed to contribute poorly to my economies, and the auto-explore often sent my scouts to the corners and edges of maps – but the auto-combat is mostly very good, struggling only with multi-hero stacks. Speaking of depth, in yet another layer of strategy, your choices during a campaign have far-reaching effects not just on how your own civilization develops, but how others see you as well. Ruthlessly slaughter some vulnerable NPCs or renege on a treaty? Sure, you’ll benefit handsomely in the short term, but your high-minded neighbors won’t forget. Irritate them too much, and you just might give them enough grievances to justify a war against you. The same goes for showing generosity to monsters and getting a little too friendly with the forces of darkness. Age of Wonders 4 throws plenty of choices at you as well. The main goal, as with any grand strategy game, is to increase your settlement’s prestige and influence over the land, ideally while maintaining happiness at home and avoiding revolutions. Eldest Souls

Age of Wonders 4 Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

You’ll explore maps of varying sizes, gather resources, and build and research improvements – but you’ll also encounter dozens of important juncture points along the way, where you have to exercise your authority and make a choice. Pantheon quests are one of the unique features, and how you approach them has a substantial effect on much of your game. These function almost like story quests or world quests for your ruler and play into Age of Wonders 4’s broader narrative beats. Others involve how you treat friends and foes and the kind of nation you want your leader to rule over, whether it’s a benevolent academic empire or a nasty, cruel cesspit of brutality. I only had time to play a few campaigns as a few different factions – these aren’t fast affairs, especially on larger, more complex maps – so it’s tough to say how fresh these choices feel after, say, three campaigns as the Cursed Toadlings. With the amount of variation and choice here, though, including the option to create your own race and faction, I feel pretty confident saying it won’t bog the experience down even if some of the same choices pop up every time.

A new event system provides unexpected levels of storytelling for 4X games. See your decisions shape the world around you, from growing cities and roaming armies to world-warping magic effects

What you do on the home front is all fairly standard for the most part. Build farms, mine resources, and keep people happy so your city gets bigger. You can build outposts on conquered provinces, discover wonders, and build massive armies, assuming you have the food and money to support them. Again, it’s pretty standard with a handful of small departures from the norm – factions aligned with the darkness don’t have to worry about citizen happiness, for example – but if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it etc etc. This amount of customization doesn’t always come without some hitches, though. Remember that cool ice queen map I mentioned? I made a badass race of wolf-riding frost vikings to tackle it, but I found that its provinces were often affected by a modifier called Arctic Blizzards that isn’t visible in any way on the map, and it blocks your units from healing even if they’re parked in your capital city. You have to actually mouse over a unit to see if they have the modifier, meaning I was constantly marching my armies around in the snow to find a safe province where they wouldn’t freeze to death. Elderand

Age of Wonders 4 Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

That’s a pretty big oversight for such a punishing mechanic. And even completing their final transformation into beings of pure ice didn’t remove the penalty! I found more strange edge cases like this the more tweaking I did with my campaign setups. Sure, you can play on a Dune-like desert world where everyone’s capital starts underground, then infest it with Cthulhu monsters, but you might find the mechanics haven’t really been fine-tuned for all the possible, weird combinations yet. It’s in the creation of your prospective empire where things get really interesting, though. By selecting the physical form, traits, cultural leanings and societal quirks of your people, you’re able to create all sorts of unusual empires, from sinister mole-people with a penchant for cannibalism to industrious goblins who just want to build epic cities and make new friends. Through these choices you’ll determine your empire’s starting bonuses, alignment and magical affinities, establishing how you’ll influence the world. Nearly as important is the creation of your ruler. If you pick a mortal champion it will be from the same species you just created, while Wizard Kings can be from any species.

Explore a new realm with each game – or create your own! Challenge new variations and combinations of locations and features, from frozen wastelands ruled by ice queens to desolated ruins where dragons roam

Initially you’re just selecting their physical appearance and starting weapons, but over the course of the game you’ll find plenty of new gear and XP to bolster their power. Rulers, and the heroes you’ll recruit later, represent the most powerful units in the game, and while they can benefit your empire by governing cities, where they really shine is in the tactical battles. Your long-term goal might be to transform your empire’s citizens into undead monstrosities themselves. The downside of this style of empire creation is that, while some of the choices you make can have a big impact, a lot of it is highly situational or under the hood, or more flavourful than practical. In the early game in particular, you won’t notice a whole lot of difference between your industrious goblins or sinister mole-people. You’re not going to get the sort of wild variety that you’ll see in, say, Amplitude’s Endless series, where each faction has dramatically different, bespoke playstyles with unique systems at their disposal. At least not at first. Once you start building on top of these foundations, however, your experiences will start to become more distinctive, leading to a much stronger mid and late game.

Age of Wonders 4 Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

While those early turns can be a bit repetitive, the creation process still ensures that you’ll start with a well-defined empire and thus some clear goals in mind. If you’ve crafted an empire of evil doers who use soul magic, for instance, you’ll want to start getting into fights quickly, stealing enemy souls to fuel an undead army. Your long-term goal might be to transform your empire’s citizens into undead monstrosities themselves. That’s what Age of Wonders 4 calls a “major transformation”—one of several ways you can enhance your empire’s denizens. Where I’m used to auto-resolves relying on comparative calculations, Age of Wonders 4 appears to model out the fight behind the scenes. If it calls a victory with one archer lost, and I hit replay, I get to watch a fight where that one specific archer goes down, rather than them being a low-tier sacrifice. It’s nice to be able to trust it to mop up fights that were overwhelmingly in my favour – and get my hands dirty for the interesting ones.

Fights against opposing heroes (the limited number of units with unique equipment and special abilities), twenty-four vs twenty-four fights, Ancient Wonders, and sieges are some of the most involved tactical battles Age of Wonders 4 offers. Sieges get a special mention for being Age of Wonders 4’s solution to the slightly boring, static problem of city defence: instead of keeping a garrison around, highly fortified city centres take multiple turns for an attacking army to break down. As the attacker, you can spend resources on siege projects to shorten that time, but the idea is that it gives the defender sufficient notice to zip back to their centre before it becomes vulnerable. Once fully besieged, battle plays out around narrow chokepoints in broken city walls, and it’s a real test of whether you’ve assembled the right armies, and know the best way to use them. ELDEN RING

ADD ONS/PATCHES AND DLC’S:Age of Wonders 4