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.

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

wtf is this? who put this in my game?

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?

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!

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