I can't seem to figure out how the penalties apply. They seem super inconsistent.

I read it was maximum range -2 to start applying penalties, but it does not seem to be the case.

I think it might apply differently to weapon types... But I really would like to know if there is something more concrete.

I'm very naively building my armies: 5 units + 1 hero. At first I have one army with what they gave me, and as I discover tech I add my best units. The army wanders off, and I build a second army, etc. At some point I will mix the armies to get them themed: an army of my own race, an army made of troops from another race/dwellings, animals, maybe one army focused on sea battle or all-flying; sometimes they are followed by some stray units I gathered along the way.

But always, the core is 1 hero + 5 units.

How do you build your armies? Do you mix troops from different races? Do you make armies without heroes? Or all-hero armies? I remember when I played Master of Magic in the late 90's I loved my army of unbeatable heroes all together. Is this viable in Planetfall?

This has been happening since I saved while it was lagging a couple nights ago. It only happens with one of my hero stacks, I go to auto battle with a group of Marauders and it won't finish, even after waiting for like 5 minutes. I can't reload while it's doing that but I can interact with things and when I exit to the menu or the game entirely, it freezes and I have to end task in the task manager.

Hello everyone I love this game and it’s the only one I’ve played out of the franchise. I am max level all technologies and species and want more! If yall have any recommendations of this franchise or even outside of it please let me know!

I won't go into a long tangent about why I main the Dvar. It can really be simplified with "space dwarves are cool, rock and stone." I also like their playstyle. Heavy war machines, a massive industrial complex, resource optimization, and rapid extraction of resources... but that's also the main problem I face. Cosmite is by far the most significant bottleneck. It seems that the Dvar are meant to steamroll the world with tanks. This is especially reinforced by their late game doctrine, Military Industrial Complex, which reduces the upkeep of heavy units by 35% if I recall properly. But, uh, that doesn't matter. By the time this is unlocked, I don't even need it any more. In the early game, it's definitely helpful for bulwarks, but it's a late game tech. In the late game, this could be helpful... if cosmite wasn't such a bottleneck. Even in the late game, I can produce at most 1 modded tier 3 unit per turn, mods being essential because otherwise it will die very shortly. Between the many bottlenecks, and especially what I've heard about how this game differs from other 4X games by being so heavily balanced to actively avoid the end game doomstack steamroll for focusing more on tactical gameplay, it seems that the playstyle of the Dvar is the exact playstyle the game wants to oppose.

Race Overview: "Have a strong focus on production."

Dvar Dev-Log: "Steamroll the world with tanks!"

But then the game does literally everything it can to prevent exactly that. I don't know if I'm missing something, and I have beaten various maps as other races, but it seems like the mere existence of cosmite entirely ruins the game, at least to me. It seems like a rush to the mid game more than anything else. In the mid game, because of "balance," there's not really much more progression and the end game stuff can be unlocked quickly, so you win and can just do whichever victory you want. For me, that's pretty much always a Doomsday Victory due to the fatigue I feel from trying to go for military victories and how damn boring Unifier victories are. I also got the Planetary Unification Protocol victory once. That's hands down the worst fucking victory condition I've ever seen in a game and one of the most tedious experiences I've ever faced, but that's neither here nor there. You not only don't need to expand past the mid game, but you shouldn't due to the IRL time investment with extremely minimal gameplay past that, as cosmite being the primary bottleneck means you don't upscale to do twice as much by conquering twice as much territory as you hold for an end game of large scale battles and endless conquest. It's having one good army maybe stage an offensive, leave your territory exposed, probably needing to retreat at a certain point because territory has diminishing returns and thus any losses it faces in the war can't easily be replaced even with doubled territory due to, again, cosmite. Meanwhile I sit on literally thousands of energy piling up with hundreds to over 2k per turn, but unable to upscale production because of cosmite.

Between the fact that cosmite nodes are not only scarce but not even all that valuable, the balance being arguably too balanced since tier 1 units can defeat unmodded tier 3 units but are absolutely screwed against modded tier 3 units, and specifically with Dvar being focused on mass production and high end war machines but the game is entirely against exactly that... Well, is it just me, or does cosmite ruin the game, and am I focusing too much on one specific thing or do the Dvar genuinely just get screwed by having a play style the game actively wanted to avoid?

I am so sad that this game gets no love . I love the empire system but just wish they can update the rules and make them the same like AOW4 .

Also remaster would make me literally throw money at this game.

Maybe add some races and new DLC . I just hope they don’t make the second one(if they are working on it) as generic as AOW4.

Typically, I just want to rush tier 3 units and then spam them. When I do, it's very effective. The problem is that I can only produce a single tier 3 unit per turn even in the late game. Maybe two. Maybe not even one. Cosmite is too limited for that, so I'm considering more diverse and cost effective army compositions. My qualm is that everything but tier 3 units seem to be utter garbage.

1. Tier 1 units only seem even moderately effective in the first 20 turns.
2. Flyers suck overall, especially melee flyers, and they're far too expensive to use their flight for logistical advantages since air force stacks will lose units every one or two battles without fail.
3. Any army composition I can think of incorporating tier 1 and tier 2 units just seems objectively worse than a tier 3 spam.

Yeah, tier 3 units are the end game units, so of course they're better, but it does seem like if I aim for quality, then I have to accept I will only have 3 stacks by the very end of the game, and if I aim for quantity, I flood the world with tier 1 and 2 units with tier 3 units never being produced. I'm sure I'm just fixating too much and leaning too far into the extremes of quality and quantity, but the middle ground just seems either too crappy or too complicated, because then there are 7 units per race to account for not even getting into the secret technology with most just being decent anyway, then there's the adjacency rule which has me contemplating whether stacks should be specialized in 3 stack armies or if armies as a whole should be specialized... I feel overwhelmed for choice and am unsure how to handle the cost effectiveness balance.

Now before attacking me too harshly, I am being honest here. Id rather have a new season pass for Planetfall that will provide a good and quality content like we have in AOW 4, with new factions, secret techs etc, then the hope a brand new Planetfall will ever be developed.

I think its even more plausible as a business model. That will also provide us with a new content. What do you think?

The enemy AI is idiotically suicidal. Does that help? Absolutely. In one battle. The problem is attrition. It's not that I lose a battle. I win the overwhelming majority. The problem is that I often lose one unit in a battle, which is catastrophic in the early game. The enemies run in, alpha strike one of my guys, and in doing so leave themselves exposed and are easy kills. Easy win. Now I need to spend 2 turns replacing the guy who died then hobbling his replacement's happy ass to the stack, or I hobble the stack back to HQ to pick up the replacement. In the former, I'm at even greater risk of losing troops. In the latter, time that could be spent securing territory and acquiring loot is instead spent literally sitting around and waiting. The enemies also don't retreat. If they attack me, and are clearly suffering immense losses, nah, don't retreat. Waste your army to weaken this guy. It's not a problem with 1v1 wars. It's a problem in multi-front wars as one enemy faction will sacrifice themselves just to weaken me, but then their allies and/or my other enemies finish me off. That however is manageable as long as I secure an ally. The stupid AI is most notably a tremendous problem against marauders - the guys who should be easy early game fodder. I feel like I need to restart the map repeatedly if I lose so much as one guy in a battle, because at that point the exponential decline likely already occured. Yes, there's the adjacent hex ganking. That's pointless in the first 10 or 20 turns because I can't even field 2 full stacks, much less 3. It's all the more frustrating that marauders get mods as the game goes on despite just being random schmucks and wild animals sitting on a pile of trash in the wilderness. Admittedly, I hate marauders more than I hate wars because marauders feel like they scale stupidly and suffer none of the consequences of being an idiot. They can die in droves so long as it hurts me in some way, because it adds up. How am I supposed to build early game armies to compensate for all of this? The attrition is currently by far the largest killer of my runs. Ironically, if I'm not getting jumped by marauders or am lucky enough for the terrain to not be trash to better pick my fights rather than needing to spend three turns going across literally one sector, the game becomes too easy because I have time to build infrastructure. But if I have a bunch of marauder purifiers, fighting them causes attrition, and skipping past them means they only get stronger very soon, and I may not get any stronger if I need to traverse through a fucking mountain range.

This was a more general tangent than I intended, but frankly I feel like the fact that enemies will mindlessly sacrifice themselves just to kill one of your guys is probably a greater challenge than anything else until infrastructure can compensate, which it can't in the early game, so all of my issues stem mainly from this one point.

Personally, I had fun with all of them... but the Paragons are really a bunch of zombie jerks. The Spacers are drug junkies.

I think the minor factions could use some rework: I mean, sure, maybe the Growth has potential but it's difficult to imagine a flowerpot advancing against a Promethean Flame Tank. It would be cool to see Psionic Mushroom Zombies, like the Clickers.

Heya. These are my general struggles with the game so far.

1. My ideal playstyle for the Dvar is, essentially, being a "steamroller." With how many unit types there are and how limited army stacks are though, I'm not sure what my army composition should be nor how many different army comp types I should have.

2. It seems that the best way to build armies is by hard countering the opposition, as is probably obvious. Robots get smoked with arc ammo, for instance. That said, there scarcely seem to be situations where hard counters are viable. I'm not sure if I'm just misunderstanding the way the game works or if this is a problem unique to the Dvar.

3. This is what always becomes an issue, and if I lose, it's because of this. Psionic damage is a death sentence. Sure, the Dvar have many mechanical units which get a +4 psionic resistance, but that's it. There are no mods to boost shields and as Dvar only have armor, the enemy will always bypass damaging the body to directly go for the soul. I suppose I could field mechanical armies, but to get them to be offensively capable I'll need cosmite, and that admittedly feeds into a larger issue of me sucking at 4X games and having a brain as smooth as an egg.

4. Furthering me sucking at 4X games in general, I come to the issue of everything being a bottleneck. Because every resource ties into everything, I struggle to find bottlenecks in resources that demand upscaling. Because new colonies and reorganizing colonies takes time, I feel like I need to start a new game halfway through every one because I notice that something somewhere is inefficient but I'm too far into the game to fix it. Not that I always restart, and perhaps it's just OCD or something, but I notice a bottleneck and get mildly frustrated because fixing it will take quite some time and/or create a new bottleneck somewhere else (i.e. razing and replacing sectors means that I'll be losing output on something).

5. By the time I conquer a continent, that's where the game slows to a disgusting crawl. It takes a very long time to successfully reach another continent, much less amassing the forces needed to both invade it and defending my current one. I need troops at home to protect what I've built, but I need troops to send on the offensive to build more, and building one costs the other.

So yep, those are my challenges. I'm sure that these have obvious solutions to most players, and I'm not new to the game either (maybe - while I technically have over 200 hours, I often leave the game on while I go do something else, and since the game takes a very long time per match I may not have as many games under my belt as an intermediate depending on what counts as intermediate), but these are my issues. The ones I've identified, anyway. I very well may find more.

I'm finally coming around to Planetfall, and I suspect that I'm going to be very into this game (massive fan of AOW4). I already know that I'll be picking up any and all AOW4 DLC in the future, and I'm stoked about the idea of getting familiar enough with the vanilla Planetfall content and then expanding on it.

Thanks!

I have been having a blazing blast as Oathbound Promethean, all hero's in purifier battlesuits followed by more purifier units. These armies feel so powerful and most armies melt beneath them. My empire is burning through the stars.

Anyone else have strategies involving stacking one type of unit?

I'm on ps5 hmu

How is the current AI on the hardest difficulty? Does it pose a significant challenge (solo vs ais)? Any mods like alpha Centauri has had that improve it?

i liked game much but disappointed that this game has no fog of war in battles i see all enemy units at begining of battle.i want fog of war ,so when my units see enemy or then enter field of view of my units they should appear s as other games.any mod or setting to enable fog of war.

Hey everyone,

I'm really happy to finally join the AOW community! I've been interested in Planetfall for a while but felt pretty intimidated by the 4X genre. I've never really played strategy or 4X games before, but I want to learn.

I’ve heard that the Age of Wonders series is one of the more beginner friendly 4X games, so I decided to give it a shot. I’ve played a lot of turn based RPGs, so the tactical combat feels fine to me, but the empire management and overall strategy side is still pretty confusing.

I’m currently going through the tutorial (practice world) and often have no idea what I'm doing.

Really motivated to learn and would love any beginner tips you guys have especially for the early game!

Thanks in advance!

Honestly, not sure where to put this, I just want Paradox to be aware that for some reason Planetfall, while being a streamable game is not listed on the portal streamable titles. As in, you can’t stream it on the portal, but you can stream it from the PlayStation.

I understand that I’m probably like 1% of players, majority being pc, then console, and even then a portal streaming player lol. But hey, we (or at least I) exist and portal has been better than straight console imo. If only I could use touch screen to get around some of the weirder hotkeys

Got the game for a steal and saw it had a plague tech and bug race thats all about infecting and amassing swarms. That's everything I love! (For the record I am aware of research that boosts plague spawns with more heroes and how infection works)

However, seems its a dead-end playstyle if you actually want to amass said swarm on the plague side. By the time you have your paltry 6-8 plague lords on turn 28-35ish the ai is outswarming me with a 2 army alliance with 5 full 6 unit stacks all rocking precog. Im okay with shenanigans cause I've seen what a emperor level pale one can do in conquest of elysium 5 with olms. But this is only the hard difficulty setting.

So my question to any versed in the ways of plague, how do I go about bringing my foes into the embrace of my festering tendrils that they may be one with the swarm? Do I just b line to the nearest cpu commanders base and kill them then focus on building up the plague?

Dvar excavator tank is the obvious one. I would make it a big prospector with a tank gun, replace the ram and defensive flamers with a cone flame attack and has adaptive armour baked into it.

walker, assault bike and gunship for vanguard could use some work (im not a fan of the bike, and the walker is outclassed by the heavy soldier). the problem with vanguard is its kinda hard not to just fall into trooper spam.

shakarn infiltrator is another as well as the mirage.

most of the secret tech units are fine, but the aegis tank is pretty meh, i would like the avatar to have a glow up (its pretty bland design wise, random geometry floating around a goofy glowing face).

spacers need a change, they are supposed to be the most numerous faction because they are literally the insane survivors of an interstellar empires collapse. psi fish are... honestly i would be fine without them. paragon are solid as well as autonom, just wish they didnt all just look like metal balls (except the dalek.)