That's not entirely true. The storyline is placed in 5 story realms that are listed in the same place as others when you start a singleplayer game. Quite a few classic AoW characters appear in it. Also partially true. The flow of creating a race is as follows:

- pick a race appearance (human, elf, orc, goblin, etc.). these have some static traits.
- pick a race culture (feudal, high, dark, mystic...). these also have some static traits and will affect which units you get in your main race's cities.
- pick two additional society traits.
- pick your first tome. this affects your starting magic/upgrades, but you can pick any other tomes later on
- customize your ruler (class, appearance, starting weapons) and last touches of the race appearance

The difference from prior AoW games is that you don't get the same race presets, but get to tinker around with them more. Arsenals of feudal and dark cultures, and the way they start the game are not the same.

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Additionally, the game has the most similar city region system to AoW Planetfall, BUT the regions are smaller and there's more of them.

A BIG change is also the splitting of building and unit queues. Unit training speed is not affected by the Production resource (hammer) but Draft (sword) and allows you to build structures and units at the same time in the same city.

Diplomacy is more meaningful and elaborate, sieges are meaningful and give the defender time to react, auto-combat doesn't fail as often, tomes have come a LONG way since version 1.0, map customization and variety is higher than before, the city cap (which can be raised in the mid- and late-game) prevents snowballing...

The only big downside is the gutting of naval combat (basically there are only a few neutral water-only units like krakens, but player-produced ones just embark, and melee ones switch whatever they have for a ram attack while ranged/magic ones just do their thing).

The story realms are a mixed bag - the map templates and special rules they chose were actually nice and creative, but the difficulty skyrockets in realm 3, and realm 5 has the difficulty and narrative as if it skipped at least two prior missions.

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Worth noting is that a lot of the game's criticisms online came before the major updates - at launch, the game was buggy, incredibly desync-prone, while tomes that bring spells and unit upgrades (even some unit unlocks) and affect your affinity in the empire development tree - had actually little effect and were a chore to even choose. The devs went berserk in the first two months to fix bugs and then rebalanced the game plus new content without even mentioning the DLC.

Now, to mention the DLC - there are two major and two minor ones.

Of the ones currently out, Dragon Dawn is minor and adds the Dragon Lord ruler type that plays quite differently to regular Champion and Wizard Kings, two tomes, one map template, and the lizard racial type. Empires & Ashes is the major one, with the Reaver culture that is basically the Commonwealth/Dreadnoughts from AoW3, avian race, 4 tomes and 2 new story realms (first one is pretty good, second one starts interesting but derails mid-game).

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If you played Planetfall, you'll be right at home with AoW4 if your main way of play are skirmishes or multiplayer with friends. If you haven't, treat it like Sid Meier's Civilization, where each new numbered title has the same core gameplay, but adds and changes a lot of things that come down to personal preference.

The race customization is quite similar to Stellaris, where you have a lot of freedom to play around with the many options.

@Plok_HR
Very good summary!

The biggest "objective" problem right now, is that its massive underground is not so massive and underground with sectors just does not work at all in AoW4.

Planetfall had no UG, the first AoW with the sector system.

Now the sector system from PF, that was incooperated into AoW4 works fine on the surface, but fails to work in the underground.

Some cities are just limited to 3 sectors despite having pop 5 or higher, due to unhibatable bedrock blocking them to expand and other limiting factors like big lava pools.

In short, we have a completely unplayable non working underground in AoW4 and dev tried to improve it several times and it never was fixed up to this day, so almost 1 year after release.

Even water maps work better with city sectors, imagine that one.

Try to expand with other cities in the ug, other than your capitol that you start with and you will quickly run into some limiting issues, you can basicly forget about expanding too much in the UG, its basicly just for outposts and rare resources.

Thats really the biggest - objective- difference between AoW3 and AoW4.

AoW3 likes the UG, AoW4 don't

Its at a very odd place with this right now, there are topics about it on the official forums.

If you liked planetfall you will probably like 4 as well.
Personally I didn't like planetfall but bought 4 thinking it would be more like 3.
It wasn't and I deeply regret buying it.

First biggest downside, gameplay-wise is the Pantheon, where gameplay customization options are locked behind tens of hours of grind. Said customizations include society traits, main hero starting items, mounts, item-forged items.

Second biggest downside is that you can't effectively blockade a player in their castle (they can just move-in and attack your weaker forces), can re-enforce castles even through blockade/ siege, and you can't do anything about it.

The other biggest downside is from GOG: the Pantheon save file isn't backed-up by Galaxy (only individual saved games are). So if you change hardware, re-install OS or something else, that data needs to be backed-up (and GOG doesn't tell you that in the store page).

I regret buying it.

Well, I've got Planetfall - I've played it just a little to see what it's all about. But for me - even in Strategy Games - campaigns are a MUST. I don't care that much about hipercustomization - IF there is no story (in most cases) for me it just sucks. And Planetfall DOES have campaigns.

Then you shouldn't get AOW4. They might have added some campains later, but the base game didn't have campaigns in the traditional sense.

And it's probably hard, if not impossible to have a proper campaign with the way the game is set. Races are pretty much cosmetic and you pretty much do whatever. This also hurts the game as pretty much everything is random, way too random to the extend it hurst the game.

If you like customization (it has even more than planetfall) you will probably like it. Personally I feel the customization of races greatly breaks immersion. The use of sectors (like in plaentfall) instead of a global map for cities is also a sore spot for me.

That sucks. What's the point in making a fantasy game, if races are cosmetic and don't really have any specific traits. Yeah, I get why they did that. Cuz there is a lot of idiots that complain all the time: "I want this, I want that... I want an elf with a tail that is a necromancer that loves ponies and is in love with a transgender Orc! I kant kustomizeeee!". Unfortunately, this is the "modern Gen-Z gamer" for ya.

But seriously, it is very postmodern and it is sad that postmodernism gets its way into Medieval-like game universes.

It's also way too postmodern for my liking. It has the usual woke stuff like Body Type A and B, making a man and having people calling you "empress" and shit like that. It feels out of place and forced.
I am not sure how deeply this stuff is integrated in the rest of the game as I gave up on it pretty quickly. (not that it has much of a story per se).

The game also has serious issues with the random generation. A lot of stuff it creates (maps, heroes, races etc) feel out of place and break immersion. It feels like randomization for the sake of randomization.

Finally, my biggest gripe is still the races. I play a fantasy game with a set of expectations from medieval and fantasy lore and the game pretty much throws it out of the window. It sort of tries to justify it in the lore by having multiple worlds and stuff, but it doesn't make much sense. If you want multiple worlds just make it set in space. It doesn't make sense to have multiple worlds but they are all stuck in same technological level in the medieval period.

In coclusion, it feels like the game is aimed at people who like hyper-customization and lots of options. Sadlly the game suffers in other aspects for it. They probably wanted to allow everything to be unique (heroes, races, etc) but it they all just end up the same as people will just pick the most OP traits.

The only difference is they don't force you to choose specific traits for specific races. You are free to design the perfect orc society by your standards (or Tolkien's etc.). "Racial purity" is the player's responsibility when they set up the game. And also as the player makes all the choices for their civ as they advance through the game.

-edit- feels like I didn't complete the thought so...
If you want elves who like the forest and are good at bowmenship and magic then make it so. If you want scary undead types with lots of status attacks like paralysis, then get busy. etc. The game only makes it so you don't *have* settle for the game designer's idea of elves and orcs and dwarves. You can do your own thing *if you want*.

I loved this game. Had a blast with it. (Own the game on GOG, have like 25 hours on it [ got the premium edition]) and got it again on steam, as wasn't happy with how often the cloud saves activates on galaxy (on the end it might be the same on steam, but whatever).
On my GOG time, I was mostly learning the game (getting the tutorial, this was my first AoW, so it took some time).
Then on Steam. I did what looked like some campaign :the rise of the godir scenario/ campaign, I forgot how they call it (plus, since I'm french, my game is in french).
And this is bias, but I had a blast with it. OK lots of customisation, but there is quite some preset champion (and maybe some coming back from previous titles, but I can't tell).
I knew I could custumize a champion, but I have a knack for preset champions (same with master of magic, it looks for me than making your own is the better option, but I just want to start with some preset ones first).
I did rise of the godir 1,2,3,4 with preset champion. And with 5, I made a custom one (wonder if someone who talked about a difficulty spike spoke about that one).
Also, nice adition : you unlock more preset champion as you play the game (former allies or opponents).
And also, with the pantheon, there is there : the champion that won the game (with extra skill, and all the change you made [ be careful, all race transformation is for your leader in this case, it does not give your troops the bonus you would get if you used the spell]), the opponents you met with some bonus (like the transforùation spell they used, just like told before). And sadly seems the pantheon is saved localy and not on the cloud.

For me that's a good thing, as I don't like this hidden map, so I craft my game with the smallest and unplayable undeground.