Brainstorm to make multi-race gameplay more meaningful and viable
AoW4 is my favorite fantasy strategy game, period. And I think many of you folks would share the same sentiment. The amount of freedom to create your fantasy kingdom is astounding, and each DLC and major update bring more to the table.
However, I often feel like something is missing. After watching the 3 year anniversary stream, listening to the brains behind the game talking about past and future of it, it dawned on me about what I miss the most — playing a multi-race kingdom. Think Rampart, my favorite faction from another fav of mine, HOMM3. Measured by AoW4 system, Rampart consists of centaurs, dwarves and elves, with high tier units being magical summons and mythic creatures. In previous AoW titles, multi-race gameplay is plenty of fun. In AoW3, there’s racial governance system that brings a variety of improvements to the races under your control. And in AoWPF, you get to research a whole tech tree from another faction if you control one city of theirs.
Some may argue that we can already do it in the game right now, by being the keeper of other races. But I think it’s rather clear that there’s little to no incentive in doing so. The reason for this is threefold.
Racial transformations are crucial milestones that shape your gameplay. So to keep a race “viable”, you have to strengthen them with transformations. But your secondary races usually need to play catchup on transformations. And having to apply all those transformations to another race (and god forbid a 3rd even 4th one) is both costly and tedious.
If they are of a different culture, then there’s no good reason to use their cultural units because they don’t have synergy with your primary race culture. Even if you used the synergy spell, cultural units are generally weaker than tome units anyway.
Form traits don’t matter that much unless you’re min-maxing. But if you’re a min-maxxer, you wouldn’t use anything without your handpicked trained either!
All of this means that currently the game discourages you from using more than your primary race. So I have been thinking about ideas to improve the game on this area. Here are some of mine:
- Make races closely tied to affinity gain. So players either don’t get more affinity from tomes altogether, or get it at a reduced rate (something like every 3 affinities from tomes is actually 1). Instead, extra affinity generates on a cadence based on all your available races and their affinities. For example, if you went all-in on order creating your primary race and you currently only have it available, then you cannot auto generate any affinity other than order. However, if you got another race with shadow and nature, then on next affinity gain, you can choose from order, shadow, or nature. Maybe also make it proportional to the total racial affinity distribution so you gain more order if you choose it since your order pips are much more than the other
- Make terrain preference more important. Well this is basically rehashing the AoW3 system. Every race needs to choose favored and hated terrains on creation. A city in an unfavorable terrain is punished more than it is right now. Units fighting on unfavorable terrain have lower morale etc. This incentivizes you to utilize specialist races to colonize or fight in specific regions
These are just rough ideas not meant for scrutiny. But I’d like to hear what you folks think on this topic 😊