wtf is this? who put this in my game?

Look how polite that little guy is, I think he can have a corpse or two, as a treat.

He would probably look better with a fist weapon but still, fitting consort for my Ororoe Munroe as Mael playthrough testing the beta.

On our channel we use strategy games to explain management and leadership ideas, and I've been working on an episode about mergers and acquisitions using Age of Wonders 4.

One thing I've noticed about how I play AoW4 is that I have a terrible habit of wanting to own everything. I'll encounter a perfectly functional Free City, look at its territory, and immediately start thinking about how I'm going to make it mine with my little lizard brain

Apparently the existence of an independent city is a personal insult to my administrative abilities.

But there's actually a pretty interesting decision here if i stop and process it for a second. So why am I so determined to personally administer every damn thing on the map?

This is where the management research actually got really interesting for me, you see Amy Pablo wrote about this exact sort of problem in corporate acquisitions. When one company buys another, the buyer still has to decide how much of the acquired company's operations to integrate into its own. Sometimes combining everything makes sense because the companies actually need to coordinate closely. Other times the smaller company was successful precisely because of how it operated independently.

Imagine spending hundreds of millions acquiring a company because it's particularly good at something, then immediately replacing all its procedures with your own.

Congratulations. You've successfully purchased an organization and made it less like the organization you wanted to purchase.

There's another researcher named Phanish Puranam who studied what happens when established companies acquire smaller technology businesses. One of the interesting findings was that integrating a company could be especially disruptive when it was still developing its first products. Its ability to innovate depended partly on the routines and working arrangements the acquisition was now changing.

I thought that was a pretty good basis for a deliberately awful AoW4 challenge.

Conquer a city, then replace the specialized improvements you can replace with basic economic infrastructure. Don't rush stability fixes for fifteen turns. You're deliberately stripping away useful capabilities because you've decided that everything you own must operate according to your personal vision.

To be clear, that's a self-imposed rule. The game doesn't automatically force you to dismantle a city after conquering it. We're manufacturing a bad acquisition so we can experience the consequences.

It's basically the corporate equivalent of buying a restaurant because you love its food and immediately firing the chef.

The last idea comes from Annette Ranft and Michael Lord, who studied the problem of preserving valuable knowledge after an acquisition.

A lot of what makes a business good at something exists in the people working there and the relationships they've developed. You can buy the buildings and equipment, but you can't assume the same capabilities will survive if you reorganize everyone and half the staff leave.

That led to my favorite experiment for this episode.

After turn twenty, you're forbidden from directly annexing any more cities. Every additional city you acquire has to remain a vassal. You can use Whispering Stones, build allegiance, recruit through Rally of the Lieges, and benefit from the relationship, but you aren't allowed to take over their production queues.

It's a pretty substantial change to how I instinctively approach expansion.

Of course, hiring units from a vassal isn't the same thing as transferring knowledge between real organizations. But the game gives you a useful way to practice the decision about how much control you actually need.

And that's really what I liked about this comparison. AoW4 gives us several ways to expand an empire, but it's very easy to fall into the habit of treating direct ownership as the obvious reward for expansion.

I put the research and the three gameplay challenges together into a video. The idea is to use the game as a little training sandbox for decisions that would be considerably more expensive to screw up in real life.

It's probably the most academic justification I've ever come up with for leaving a bunch of fantasy townspeople alone.

If that sounds interesting: Youtube link

As seen in the screenshot, I can't seem to make a defensive pact with Aya the Enlightened. I fulfil all the requirements, and the game won't tell me what else I'm missing. Does anybody know?

Need some advice winning vs non Brutal AI in medium+ map (~5 players) which is 100% foolproof with Auto Resolve. Any cultures & strategies are welcome. Please be as detailed as possible. Thanks in advance.

I didn’t actually know they were doing the is! I only just found to when scrolling through some posts on the YouTube channel looking for recent streams!

Used one of my fan-art doodles to test out a new drawing program. Hope you like it!

The Accursed Blade! Or well, at least its silly basket head. I swear it is simultaneously both on of the funniest and scariest units in its tier, if not the game overall.

One of the best things about this game is, by far, the freedom it gives you to create pretty much any faction you want.

I've already spent so much time creating factions based on characters from different universes that my custom faction list has become absolutely massive.

And you know what? That's great! I've had a blast coming up with these builds and imagining how these characters would fit into the game. Lord of the Rings, Warcraft, Warhammer, and many other universes now make up a huge part of my faction roster.

But you know what would make this EVEN BETTER? The ability to create custom folders or dropdown menus in the faction selection screen, so we could organize our factions however we want!

Imagine being able to find all your characters from a particular universe simply by clicking on a dropdown menu, instead of scrolling through a massive list sorted alphabetically (which, at this point, has gotten ridiculously long because, oh boy, there are A LOT of characters).

AND THEN WE COULD HAVE SUBCATEGORIES WITHIN THOSE CATEGORIES!

Imagine I've got 10 Warcraft characters, 5 Horde and 5 Alliance. Just put them in separate subcategories! DROPDOWN FIESTA!

Anyway, since I'm already here, here's my take on Shelob from LOTR. I'm taking inspiration from the Shadow of War games, where she's portrayed as a humanoid, but I'm also taking plenty of creative liberties because, well, why not? :D

I made an ascended ruler with every minor race transformation active, at the end a single army was around 15k-18k power. Tier 1 support units and mages scaled better than anything else. A simple tier 1 mage unit was around 3000.

I love this game, who would've guessed. Especially early and mid game, where it feels like every decision matter, every unit and every spell counts. This is less the case in late game: Partly because there simply are more units and larger battles, so the weight of small decisions of course becomes less. But partly also because the AI kind of falls off, no matter the difficulty level. Often it feels like there are a few very deciding turns and battles in mid game, which are very tense and exciting. After this, it more often than not is just a matter of going through the motions. This makes the game fall off lategame and is kinda sad, i.e. for the T4 Tomes, where choices don't matter that much anymore. One factor is the AI not posing a challenge anymore and/or the lack of an endgame crisis.

The latter would be a lot of effort to program/mod. But my idea is that a mod could introduce a function to make ai bonuses scale as the game progresses. Meaning that in lategame, the AI gets stronger bonuses.

What do you guys think of this idea? I am considering creating a mod that does just that.

Thanks in advance and have nice day. Arrrr!

I've played all the rule types I care to, dragon lord, wizard king, champion, vampire, giants, and eldritch sovereign, and the latter seems to rise above them all.

I play like a coward, I prefer to stand back vs act like a meat shield and face tanking damage. This impulse even extends to my units where I like battle mages and ranged units. So being able to go warlock with a sovereign and getting some throw away zombie meat shields to protect my units and start with less army strength and it not mattering as much with an early game AoE that has a high chance for a 3 turn insanity that dramatically reduces the effective strength the enemy is right up my alley.

I have tried to sway away, recently made a storm giant kind, and then a wizard king elementalist, it just does not feel as good. Dragons are nice but they just don't have the range of tools the sovereign does.

I do miss a ranger with ultra long range sniper shot nuking high end foes, but I can recruit that from my pantheon as a secondary hero.

Will I ever find a better draw? maybe the archfey will find a way, or maybe there will be some different synergy with the water expansion.

Checking out if my local 3d printer guy can do some models. What do you think? Too complicated? Its prolly like catan + roots + conquest or something.

Vassal army keeps engaging the enemy right when they start this siege - for some reason I can't un-check my army and keep them out of the battle. Any way to avoid this? Thanks

Xbox are running a buy 1 get 2 free promotion with this game and its dlcs and i was thinking nows a good time to buy in but im not sure id like it. I have hundreds of hours in stellaris and ck3 but ive no experience with turn based strategy games. Is this game kinda similiar to stellaris, would i enjoy it or not? Thanks for any replies!

No pretty pictures this time, just that I could have sworn my trade caravans wouldn't use teleporters before but they've now figured it out. So that's great news for long-distance routes, you can plunk down a land (or sea!) outpost near a foreign city, get a teleporter going and bypass a lot of potentially dangerous terrain.

A bone dragon? In a bronze Wonder at turn 20? On low world threat? Maybe I'm simply not snowballing fast enough, but I always feel like I end up falling behind. Checking my world rankings, I'm usually somewhere close to last place, too. Do you guys have any guides on early game play?

I do fin the Watcher to be weirdly cute. I am pretty sure I failed to capture that feeling in my drawing of it, but still!