Age of Wonders: Planetfall
I've gone through another phase recently of trying to like 4X games. It's a pretty varied genre on the whole, but I often find there's an issue with each game I can't get past. Usually it's that there's just too much to keep track of and they're too complicated, or too long. AoW Planetfall seems to be in a pretty good middle ground there because it's _mostly_ all about the military. There's not a lot of questing, and very little diplomacy past being able to buy units from other factions. It's still a little slow, but overall I really enjoyed it.
Pros
- It's Sci-Fi!
- Beautiful landscapes and art style
- Combat is much better than Endless Legend (where you couldn't even control your units directly)
- There are separate research trees for military and social
- You can mod units
- There are hero units with their own names, skill trees and gear
- Decent background music
- Auto and manual battle options
- Lots of unit types (like over a hundred)
- You can click on enemy units to see everything about them; stats, weapons, abilities etc
- It's military focused (only money and research, nothing like diplomacy or faith from Civ)
Cons
- The tutorial put me to sleep. There's a popup window and voiceover every time you do anything for the first 2 hours of the game
- The UI can be unclear. For example, there is actually an indicator that tells you if your unit will be able to see/shoot at an enemy after moving, but it took me a while to realise that's what the green/yellow crosses meant. What do the numbers in the bottom right of equipped weapons mean? Why do some armies have a golden cup above them when they're not the target of a quest? What does "only works if this hero is the commander of an army" mean if there are two heroes in an army?
- Every time I loaded a game, it reset all the tutorials, so all the popups came back in all the windows again
- After a while, you end up just auto-battling because there's so much combat
- Still a bit slow. It took about 10 hours to finish one game