Age of Wonders: Planetfall

A lot of people seem to misunderstand the game, so I figured I'd clarify it. This is a wargame, not a civlike. It contains civlike mechanics, but if you attempt to play the game passively, building up your empire and economy, you're going to find yourself quickly falling behind, running out of resources, and losing. This is a game about building big armies you use to invade and take land and resources, then turn those resources into more armies, more land, and more resources. City building is far more simple and straightforward than Civ, and can easily feel like there's nothing to do if you're not building armies because city upgrades come far slower than your building of units.
Units can have long, detailed statblocks with a long list of benefits, and can then be customized to do all manner of things. A basic soldier wielding an electrical rifle in the early game can quickly become a unit who wields a chain lightning stun rifle that ignores cover. A soldier with a plasma launcher can equip themselves with a medical kit and the means to heal and empower themselves from the flames they create and form a rolling barrage of fire that incinerates anything that dares to approach them. These are not expensive lategame units, these are basic cannon fodder. Late game can include things such as teleporting tanks, hovercrafts that can call down orbital bombardments, multiple flavors of mecha, and drone swarms.
This is a game about building armies and waging war. If you're like me and your average 4x game descends into a blood bath that would make Khorne proud, this is among if not the best 4x games on the market. If you want to play sim city, look elsewhere, as this game does not cater to that sort of play.

Soapbox Time! Good game, bad content practices.
Planetfall reminds me a lot of Evolve. That's not a good memory to have. Where the game itself is actually very good but because of idiot marketing decisions you never feel like you've quite got the complete game. Evolve had so many possible pre-order versions that it was like trying to navigate the Crystal Maze and figure out which door got you closest to the finished product, and then purchasing the rest of the bits piecemeal.
Here you had a similar problem, bits of cosmetic content locked behind a time limited newsletter, bits of cosmetic content tied to pre-orders, bits of cosmetic content tied to a deluxe version, a planetary scenario (which turns out to be one of the five "officially listed" scenarios) locked to the deluxe or top version. So like, really?. EDIT: The commanders that come as base do not use any DLC cosmetics. I'm not sure about random generated.
The game itself is good. Not great. But good. I suspect it will be great when Triumph eventually get around to finishing it some three expansions down the line. What we have here is a typical Paradox product. The core is well put together, but it's just that. The Core. This is not the complete experience. We'll get that and when we do it'll be magnificent, but you'll have to pay extra for that.
Paradox, this has to stop. It's time we talked about this.
I get it. Your long term support of games is legendary. But Stellaris was a case in point. When it came out it was a mess, a buggy, confused, chaotic mess. There was a lot of promise and potential under the hood, and it had original ideas (some of which you've murdered on the altar of efficiency), It's become a much more mature and complete game as you've added to it, but once again, the cost of entry and the cost of what you need to make the damn thing what it is now are two very different things. Let's not get into Crusader Kings 2, that thing is a nightmare if you've not been fortunate enough to get the DLC on a sale.
Planetfall is slated for three expansions, by the end of which I strongly suspect we'll see how the game is supposed to feel like with everything it's supposed to have. Six factions and six secret techs is not exactly a bounty of options, and when you get into the meat of the game those secret techs just feel like different damage types as opposed to anything really ground shaking. Where's the cool tech specific buildings? I get that Age of Wonders games have been predominantly all about the units and making them unique and interesting but given there's been additional focus on making city development more significant with the advent of sectors it feels like one side got significantly more care than the other.
The way to win feels very defined, and being creative whilst welcomed at the micro level, is punished at the macro.
You end up with a lot of units that overlap each other because your racial and your tech dump a lot of units out and if you want to blend the pair to max your hero potential you'll end up with similar damage paths for both tech and race. There's precious little to really make races stand out except for these ethereal "doctrines" which are passive buffs in the main. The real issue is your Commander defines your primary damage path and you're going to want to max that since then you get all the useful benefits from following the tree (so making sure you throw out lots of pyro toting units if you're running a promethean commander).
Running different *types* of commanders sounds like a good idea until you realise it puts you at a research disadvantage for your doomsday weapon victory path, so taking on non specced commanders means you'll only invest in those at a minimal level.
This game could have stood to have learned from Endless Legend in some aspects, such as integrating minor races (as opposed to just buying units from their leaders or only being able to integrate from their leading colony), and having more, and more diverse minor races as a result. The city building side is *nearly* there but again, lessons from Endless Legend would have been really helpful.
The area where Planetfall shines is tactical combat, where once again large scale battles can result in brilliant, drawn out tactical battles, and where individual units can be god damned heroes. AoW 3 before it shined in this regard, and that element hasn't dimmed, you just wish it had learned from other games to get the other small elements right.
And you wish Paradox had learned not to make their content model so opaque and unpleasant.
Closing thoughts
It's good. It's held back from being great from a paucity of content and Paradox once again proving what you get in the box isn't the finished product, and due to the vagaries of pre-orders, various editions and time limited content campaigns, you may not even get everything even if you try.
The game marches very strongly in combat, but the stuff outside of it feels very much hollow, this was forgivable in AoW 3, it's *less* forgivable now. This is something that I had issues with previously, now it becomes a legitimate complaint. If Triumph decide to make another Age of Wonders, this is now something that -needs addressing-, because the empire management side feels perfunctory and misses elements that would make it feel more viable.
Verdict: Recommend, on discount - How much of a discount depends on you.

I was holding back on my review until I thought I've played enough to understand how the game works, the different mechanics, played different factions and different specialisations. The game has a lot to offer, a lot of new stuff compared to AOW3, some similarities to other games too.
The Good:
Unit, faction and specialisation variety. There's 6 Factions and 6 specialisations all with their own units plus NPC factions with their own units and they all can be modded with 3 different mods. Insane amount of different stuff to try and use. A lot of flexibility and options.
Triumph got rid of the physical and elemental resist system of AOW3. Instead now you have 2 different protection (Armor and Shield) against all damage and resistance against status effects like bleed, blind, stun..etc. Combine that with the ability to mod units and you get a system in which a levelled up tier 1 unit can stand it's ground against a basic Tier 3 or even tier 4 unit so AOW3 tier 4 spam is not necessarily a winning strategy in Planetfall, which is great.
Modding units gives you a lot of flexibility to design your units, make them glass cannons or "tanks" to soak up damage,you can give them AOE effects or change their Kinetic damage to Arc to be more effective against machines, you can give them extra health or health regen.. it's up to you. You can get mods and units from dwellings (independent NPC factions) too so the possibilities are almost endless.
The tactical combat has been reworked too. The most significant change is the cover system and the chance based hitting in which you can actually miss opposed to AOW3's system where you always hit, even if it was only for 1HP. Some people like it, some don't all in all with all the changes to combat combined, I prefer Planetfall's system to AOW3's
The Sector system is an another big change which I love. I remember how many times I started with a Sorcerer in AOW3 and wanted mana nodes but all I got was gold and production and when I started as a Warlord wanted gold and mana but found 8 mana to 1 gold and 1 production. Whit the sector system this is gone. If you need food you specialise your sector on food and expand to sectors where there's food. If you need Energy (money) than you just specialise on energy and level up your energy sectors. It's a lot more flexible system than AOW3 population and border based one. Basically sectors are your traditional "mines" but you can decide what sort of resource you want them to produce.
The other great thing is colony defences. You can build defensive buildings in your colony which provides you with militia units to defend your colony AND your sectors TOO which means your economy is protected and "turtle" strategy is a lot more viable option than ever before.
Operations are great. Do you remember how annoying the constant Empire "upgrade" spell spam and disjunction spam was in AOW3? There was a mod to disable disjunction so you and the AI won't be able to remove spells from each other (wasn't a great solution either) It's all gone. Now you can still try to use some operations (spells) on each other but all faction has operation defences too with which you can lower the chance of success of any enemy operations.
These are the main changes that makes the game better than AOW3 and it seems Triumph has listened to all the community feedback they've been given to AOW3 and sort the biggest problems out in Planetfall so kudos to you Triumph Studios!!
The Ok:
Graphics and Music and animations are ok but nothing spectacular.
Diplomacy is ok at best but let's face it AOW was never about the diplomacy but the units, faction diversity and tactical combat.
The Bad
Some of the voice over are horrendous (looking at you Dvar)
There's some bugs where the game just stops working,the battle doesn't end, some desync issues in Multiplayer (not too common) Some interface issues,information missing here and there...
Nothing major and I don't want to list them all here one by one but there's certainly stuff to work on.
....And The BEST: That freakin' "Eat Dust" ability :D That just made me laugh. Some great sense of humour right there :)
As you probably guessed by now I'd absolutely recommend the game,even at full price but it certainly isn't for everyone.
Not a diplomacy based game, not a Civ-like empire building either, although the economy is important to support what the game is GREAT about which is tactical combat.
If you're into unit customisation, unit diversity, finding and using faction, unit and mod synergies to find a combination that suits your play style the best and use all that to conquer the world than this is the best game for you to pick up and play. You better be ready to read a lot! :)

This game very nearly got a "no" from me and I held off reviewing it for quite a while, because I was trying to decide if I wanted to recommend it or not.
Let me give you the short version, first: I am enjoying this game; mostly. But, there are so many problems with it that I know that a lot of people who buy it are going to come away from it disappointed. It is buggy, it has countless misleading ability/item descriptions that tell you that things should work one way when in fact they work a completely different way, it has awkward animations that always feel stiff and cheap (unfortunately, a trademark of the Age of Wonders franchise), and worst of all... it was developed by a company that is now owned by Paradox, a studio that is infamous for pushing excessive, overpriced DLCs for half finished games while they completely ignore bugs and broken content for months or even years after release. Yet, here I am, with a three digit play time, buying those DLCs the day they come out, so... clearly I can't say that it isn't fun. If you want to know more, read on.
I have been playing Age of Wonders since I was fifteen, and I'm thirty five, now. I have never seen an entry in the series that I haven't liked, and I bought this game as soon as I got the chance. Age 2 advanced the series from Age 1 by a lot, and Age 3 was the best the series has ever been. But this one... it feels a lot like a re-skin of the last one; maybe more like a well made sci-fi mod, than a sequel. If you are old-hat and hoping for another revolutionary leap in the franchise, you won't see it here. Much, if not most, of the content is recycled from Age 3 and while there are many changes, nothing that has been added is actually new. Maybe some things are new to this series, but they're all things you've seen in other 4X titles, before. You'll recognize things from Endless Legend, especially, and some stuff from Civilization, too, and even a bit from Europa Universalis, to boot, but nothing here is original. Even the sci-fi 4X premise, itself, has already been done to death in the last five years, so you'd better already be a fan of this stuff if you're coming to this table.
That being said, I do feel like this game does all of those things much better than they've ever been done before, and presents itself as a very ambitious (if not unpolished) member of that well-known sci-fi 4X club. If you like the genre then you'll find that this one has quite a lot of content and is fun enough to keep you clicking the 'End Turn' button several thousand times (and pushing on through all of the bugs). The graphics are nice, though not fantastic, and the different races are all interesting and richly developed. They not only have a lot for you to unlock and play with, but they have plenty of lore and identity, too. The Secret techs are cool, the NPC factions are cool, and the unit mod system gives you lots of options for personalizing your units as you build your empire. Playing it all over again, with a new race and tech combo, leads to a very different experience than you had the last time, and that's super important in a game like this.
The turn based combat is fantastic, and is among the best I have ever seen in a 4X title. Psychic soldiers who infect the enemy's mind with evil spirits, causing them to explode and release ghosts onto the battlefield, dinosaur-riding amazons shooting laser arrows, bugs that eat you and poop out giant maggots, deathbots that fire plasma cannons that light the battlefield on fire; it's all great. But then, Age has always had great combat. It might stand out when you compare it to everything else you've seen on Steam, but it isn't much better than what we got in the last game, and to be perfectly frank, I much preferred the high-fantasy aesthetic to the sci-fi aesthetic. Dragons, spells, undead; that was more my jam, than aliens and laserguns. I miss the wizards, a lot.
Plus, the combat experience, while great overall, is persistently hindered by ability/item descriptions that mislead you as to how they work. You'll go and use an ability that says it causes your unit to turn rabid, and attack the nearest enemy with bonus damage, only to find out they'll attack anyone nearby and you wind up killing your own dude. You'll activate a power because it says your Xeno creatures are immune to it, and it'll turn out theyre not. You'll target a machine with an attack that says it works on machines, only to find out it doesn't affect that machine, for some reason. You'll try to equip a mod that turns all of your psychic attacks into poisonous fire, but for whatever reason the game will tell you that the unit in question has no psychic attacks, even if he has three...
The game could be awesome, but it's broken in so many ways and it just feels more like an awkward spinoff than a proper sequel. And, because it's owned by Paradox, now, the devs are hard at work on their upcoming DLCs instead of fixing anything, and I am left to wonder if that means its problems will ever see real attention paid to them. Many of these issues have existed since launch, and their updates contain a nominal offering of remedies, at best.
So... overall... this game is fun, but the acquisition by Paradox has seriously tarnished it and holds it back. If you're really into 4X games, you'll like it, especially if you're into the sci-fi aesthetic. If you've played all of the Age games, before now, you'll think it's "ok", and have some fun. But... if you're new to the franchise, and you want to try it out, just go and get Age of Wonders 3. It was leaps and bounds ahead of this thing in quality, had more content, and was a lot more stable. It remains the paragon of the series, while this will probably fall off the radar in another year or two.

A few weeks ago I was locked out of another game due to server issues. By chance I saw that Planetfall was on sale (-50%). I never looked back and became instantly addicted. This game truly deserves all its positive reviews. Even the negative reviews do not report game breaking technical issues or bugs. Some reviewers just preferred a previous game from the same developers (Age of wonders 1-3) Some have criticized the visual appearance of the game. (Looks fine to me, very nice artwork on the unit cards, research tree and encyclopaedia are a bit minimalist, decent tactical combat graphics) Some people just gave up on the game after less than 10 hours.
I can confidently recommend this game for people who like 4X games (Xpand Xplore Xploit Xterminate) such as Alpha centauri, Civilisation, Warlock, Master of Magic, Endless legend, Stellaris and others. It is a fine mix of strategic map management and tactical combat. Tactical combat has similarities to X-Com but without the brutal rng failures and timer (you do have dice rolls and skill checks but you also have a drop down box detailing combat events for all the hardcore game nerds) . Once you start understanding the wonderful complexities of different possible builds and strategies it begins to feel like an advanced form of chess where you want to plan your colony expansions several turns in advance and grab special structures that will give you special bonuses.
Units can be enhanced with mods in so many different ways. Armies consist of 6 units (including a hero who can also be customized with melee or ranged weapons, offensive or defensive mods, perks to enhance the hero or the army) Your starting faction and planet can be customized (in so many ways it will make your head spin) or randomized.
There is an amazing level of complexity that will appeal to most strategy players who like to figure out the best possible builds for their factions.
The game rewards exploration. There is true joy in discovering rare items after defeating powerful enemies in dangerous locations.
The game will appeal to players who like to expand all over the map without expansion penalties. (You still have to manage your economy and be prepared for invasions) There are many paths to victory. Diplomacy may look deceptively simple but it is actually quite a juggling act among all the major factions. And it seems to work for me so far. You must also handle minor factions that can sell you techs and units to improve your armies and offer quests, bounties, rewards or make demands.
AND there is a cool Science fiction story (about the fall of a galactic empire and the struggles of various factions in the ensuing turmoil) that plays out during the campaign. I enjoy discovering the backstory for some heroes and factions. With branching story lines you may even want to play the campaign more than once if you don't spoil it by researching it on the web.
BEGINNER TIPS: Do the tutorial (first campaign mission) The game will suggest you play the practise planet before you do the second campaign mission. Do this. Choose hero Helen Shaw for the practise planet. (You will learn more about Helen during the next campaign mission.) You will feel lost at this point. ("What do I do next?") Find the you tube video "Planetfall 10 beginner tips" by Frost Ees OP
Have fun. Experiment. Discover.
I can easily see myself playing over 1000 hours of this game.

If you enjoyed Age of Wonders 3, then you will like this game. It is similar enough to 3 that it should be fairly easy to get into, but also has enough new things to be both deeper and more interesting and provide a new experience. If you have never played an Age of Wonders game or 4X in general, this is still a solid turn based strategy to dive into.
Pros
- High quality graphics with a broad color palette
- Solid music and sound effects
- Sector system makes the world feel valuable and gives deeper, more meaningful choices to expansion and warfare (Annex, Colonize, or make a Forward Base are all meaningful decisions for each sector)
- Unit modding and gear options are a lot deeper than 3 and makes even low tier units viable in the mid to late game
- World Gen... the maps for this game are pretty, and flow together nicely to feel like an alien world
- Passive scanner (this makes things like finding barbarian camps in the fog a lot easier, and means you aren't likely to have a marauding stack run in from the fog of war and cap an unguarded town in a single turn).
- New and Improved minor Factions that eventually become mututally exclusive
- Improved Diplomacy (from previous titles), Cassus Belli and claiming mechanics
Neutral
- Lack of a few freedoms from previous titles (i.e. building roads... they are now automatically made in owned sectors)
- Unit classification isn't as straight forward as in AoW 3 (fewer broad non-function based titles in Planetfall, instead of more specialized but easily understandable titles from AoW 3... i.e. Planetfall has a Core type, where as AoW 3 would have Archer, Infantry, or Pikeman as types... which type tells more about that unit from a glance?)
- Multiple science trees is fresh for the series, but players will likely quickly decide on optimal build paths, making decisions here less interesting. This could be improved on by semi-randomization or other methods to mix up the fixed research trees (other 4X games have used the "pick one of many options" method where some or all tiers of research have mutually exclusive choices that makes it so players have to make important choices between tech options that impact an entire game). This could even be an option at game creation (fixed trees vs. semi-random or pool system like 3).
Cons
- UI feels a bit cluttered in some places and some art choices make things not obvious to find or are hidden in menus
- No more dual/tri layer maps (AoW 3 had the underground layer, and AoW Shadow Magic had both the underground and the shadow realm in addition to the overworld map)... maybe one of the future DLCs can bring back this feature... this game being sci-fi, adding a space layer with ships and maybe even other planets or asteroids could bring a unique flavor to this
- No dungeons (mid to end game points of interest on the map housing some of the more challenging and rewarding fights in the game)
One of the nuances of the Age of Wonders series as a whole is that they tend to lean more towards the combat side of strategy and less towards things like diplomacy and espionage than other 4X games, making previous entries feel much more 4X-lite. This title, while still having that combat leaning feels like more of the other "X"s to the 4X are fleshed out and more interesting than previous titles. That said, I wouldn't mind a bit more depth to diplomacy and more non-combat interactions between players (human and AI), it's a new direction for the game to grow in (and it has made some good steps that way with this title).

Full review (including score):
Written review below!
The rundown:
Pros:
+ Great learning curve
+ Cool province system
+ In-depth tactical combat
+ Fun & dynamic quest system
Cons:
- Lackluster AI
- Disappointing diplomacy
- Unplayable late game
- Technical issues
Age of Wonders is back, this time with a sci-fi theme instead of the fantasy theme seen in each of its predecessors. As someone that hasn’t played an entry in the series since the release of AoW3, I was excited to jump back into it and see what was in store.
NOTE: Had to trim about half of the review to fit Steam char limit, check video for full version!
This is a review of the singleplayer only.
Pros:
Great learning curve. As with most 4X strategy games, one thing I dread is having to spend hours reading tutorials just to grasp the basics and get rolling. With Planetfall though, I had no such difficulty getting into things. The game provided a tutorial that barely took an hour to complete, but managed to teach me just enough to get going on the campaign immediately afterwards. Within just a few hours, I was flying through combat, managing a bunch of colonies, and maintaining faction relations with ease. It did take longer to fully understand the combat, but I feel like the devs did a good job easing the learning curve overall.
Cool province system. Part of the reason why the game has such a great learning curve is the general lack of micromanagement when it comes to colonies. This is done through the game’s use of a province system, where the entire map is divided up into a random amount of provinces dependent on map size. These provinces can serve as the foundation for a colony, an extension for a colony, or can be made into a smaller forward base.
The forward bases require no management outside of defending them and the colonies themselves are all managed on one space. There’s no need to place buildings on every space, no need to manage each province individually, and no need to shuffle around workers every turn. Now this may be a con for some, but given the combat-heavy focus of the game, it allowed me to spend more time having fun with the combat.
In-depth tactical combat. On the surface, Planetfall looks just like your everyday 4X strategy game. However, once you get into combat, you’ll find that it’s effectively two games in one. On one side is the 4X strategy, but on the other is the in-depth turn-based tactical combat. I like to describe it as a blend of Civilization and XCOM, with both sides being equally developed and both sides being important to winning the game.
However, these two sides are not distinct from each other, they overlap in several key areas. For example, the entire tactical side to the game relies heavily on the unit mods applied to units when outside of battle. A huge chunk of the tech tree is dedicated to these unit mods, which affect everything from damage output, to accuracy, and even add some special abilities like being able to teleport. It was quite cool how both of these sides interacted with each other and the combat was made a lot more complex as a result. It’s the classic “easy to learn, hard to master” situation.
Fun and dynamic quest system. Although Planetfall does have your standard victory conditions, there are also a variety of quests to take advantage of along the way. If you’re playing a regular scenario outside of the campaign, these usually come from factions. The tasks range from taking down pirate hideouts, to killing a certain number of units from a designated race, to even helping with production and research projects. trimmed...
Cons:
Lackluster AI. When you’re in the tactical battles, the AI is actually pretty good and absolutely crushed me for the first several hours that I played the game. However, when playing the 4X side to the game, the AI is anything but good. I could not go a single game without running into an AI leaving their units standing still, walking around my own defenseless units, attacking my units in a way that doesn’t benefit them, and even outright ignoring victory conditions.
To give an example, I was going for the doomsday victory condition as the syndicate, which requires me to build 3 structures in 3 separate colonies and defend them for 10 turns. So upon triggering the countdown, a bunch of factions declared war on me, as they would lose the game otherwise. However, despite having a bunch of factions surrounding me at the time, only a couple of them tried to stop me, and only with a couple unit stacks each. I wasn’t that far ahead military-wise either, so it just came across as odd that all of these factions would just let me win.
Disappointing diplomacy mechanics. As someone that generally likes to take the diplomatic approach in 4X strategy games, I was bit a disappointed with how useless it seemed to be here. My main issue is with how allied factions act when called to war. When forming a defensive pact or alliance, one of the conditions is that both parties be available to go to war if either is attacked. That sounds great in theory, but in practice it practically never happens. That is because the game allows the option to pull out of an alliance or defensive pact whenever either party is called to war.
As a result, the AI rarely helped me when I had war declared on me. In fact, in all of my time with the game, I only ever had 2 factions come to my aid. 95% of the time they would just shrug off my calls for help and break up the alliance or defensive pact. I don’t know if I’m just unlucky, but it really made my diplomatic efforts feel like a complete waste if the AI could just dissolve it like that.
Unplayable late game. Unfortunately, Planetfall suffers from the same problem plaguing many other 4X strategy games: that being the very slow load times during the late-game. As I play a lot of these games, I’m used to seeing load times around a minute per turn, but Planetfall easily takes the cake. Once you get up to turn 80 or so on a decently-sized map, the load times can take upwards of several minutes. In fact, on one of the game’s earlier campaign missions, I managed to get past turn 100, where the load times ended up taking around 4-5 minutes to complete every turn. And this is with the game installed on an NVME SSD and running a Ryzen 3700x, so I imagine the situation will be much worse for those with older CPUs and slower hard drives. Most of the games I played finished well before this became a problem, but it was frustrating when I did run into it.
Numerous technical issues. Planetfall also has a bunch of other technical issues. Among these are some more minor ones, like flickering textures and the varying volume of voiced lines. However there are several major ones that I kept running into, including units getting stuck when transitioning to new turns, units getting stuck spinning in circles while in battle, and even some bugs preventing me from progressing in campaign missions. Aside from those issues, I did run into a total of three crashes, although no progress was lost due to the game’s autosave. These are probably issues that are going to be patched with time, but as it stands, they are quite annoying.
Overall:
Planetfall is a decent strategy game overall. The combat is fun, the province system is great, and the quest system is pretty cool. However, the game is brought down by its lackluster AI, disappointing diplomacy mechanics, and numerous technical issues. It may be worth waiting for a few patches to fix up those technical issues first, but in its current state, the game is at least still fun.
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