A serviceable strategy game that has some interesting ideas that unfortunately translate into plodding unengaging gameplay.
The aspect of being able to create your own race and modify them as the game goes on is excellent and thematically can give your race a different feeling. While the differences aren't massive as it's only a handful of spells, of which you likely won't immediately learn them all, over time it adds up and you can steer your faction in certain directions.
An issue is that since each spell isn't particularly impactful, it's not really that exciting getting new spells (which is more or less the replacement for technology tree) when in civ there's certain techs that really change your position such as unlocking your special unit or a tier upgrade or special building to get a big jump, and that's very much missing from the overworld campaign.
Where AoW4 puts it's eggs is in the tactical combat, everything eventually ends up there and it's.. ok. Their isn't exactly much maneuvering or positioning as the maps are relatively small and the game encourages you to clump up because of accuracy and that moving can take away from how many attacks you do, and it pays to be aggressive taking out enemies off the map. There are status effects but most aren't impactful since once your forces have met the enemy combat only lasts ~3-5 turns. But after the first couple you're either almost guaranteed to win or not. It does get old and it's pretty easy to just gang up on the AI overall.
Which the AI isn't very brilliant in any situation and I found them most passive. You generally have to just make your way to them for any war to end. In tactical maps they'll just run over bad areas on the map rather than shift around them.
And as for the city building it feels kind of stripped down in some ways. Pretty much you build structures internally so actual size/map placement generally doesn't matter with the exception of your main tier settlement building and special buildings which take up a province on the map. Generally you can just build them all over time as there's very few that have some sort of draw back. And map expansion you lock yourself in mostly with what you want the new province to produce.
There is also an underground map which I don't think execution wise ends up being that interesting and you have to swap your map around to see it. You can build cities there but it honestly felt more tedious to keep in mind.
And the UI is not great, there's a lot of information that would be great to see in terms of what other free/AI cities have that you can't see, or even get a vague idea how powerful or ahead someone is to know if you need to address it.
Overall again had some interesting ideas but in the end, the execution left a lot to be desired where I wasn't really excited to play the game so much as just end them so I can do the pantheon tree.
The aspect of being able to create your own race and modify them as the game goes on is excellent and thematically can give your race a different feeling. While the differences aren't massive as it's only a handful of spells, of which you likely won't immediately learn them all, over time it adds up and you can steer your faction in certain directions.
An issue is that since each spell isn't particularly impactful, it's not really that exciting getting new spells (which is more or less the replacement for technology tree) when in civ there's certain techs that really change your position such as unlocking your special unit or a tier upgrade or special building to get a big jump, and that's very much missing from the overworld campaign.
Where AoW4 puts it's eggs is in the tactical combat, everything eventually ends up there and it's.. ok. Their isn't exactly much maneuvering or positioning as the maps are relatively small and the game encourages you to clump up because of accuracy and that moving can take away from how many attacks you do, and it pays to be aggressive taking out enemies off the map. There are status effects but most aren't impactful since once your forces have met the enemy combat only lasts ~3-5 turns. But after the first couple you're either almost guaranteed to win or not. It does get old and it's pretty easy to just gang up on the AI overall.
Which the AI isn't very brilliant in any situation and I found them most passive. You generally have to just make your way to them for any war to end. In tactical maps they'll just run over bad areas on the map rather than shift around them.
And as for the city building it feels kind of stripped down in some ways. Pretty much you build structures internally so actual size/map placement generally doesn't matter with the exception of your main tier settlement building and special buildings which take up a province on the map. Generally you can just build them all over time as there's very few that have some sort of draw back. And map expansion you lock yourself in mostly with what you want the new province to produce.
There is also an underground map which I don't think execution wise ends up being that interesting and you have to swap your map around to see it. You can build cities there but it honestly felt more tedious to keep in mind.
And the UI is not great, there's a lot of information that would be great to see in terms of what other free/AI cities have that you can't see, or even get a vague idea how powerful or ahead someone is to know if you need to address it.
Overall again had some interesting ideas but in the end, the execution left a lot to be desired where I wasn't really excited to play the game so much as just end them so I can do the pantheon tree.