Hey Subterranean Dwellers and Extremophiles! I’m Bas, you may know me from the Hand-Crafted Region dev diary. I’m back to bring you more on the changes that are coming to the landscapes of Age of Wonders 4 in the free update alongside Giant Kings.
It’s time for us to delve into the depths and the scorched south of the realms, as we’ve made various updates and improvements to Lava and the Underground! Put on your hardhat and keep all arms, legs and other appendages inside the mine cart during the tour.
A Giant Ruler gazes on his personal Lava pool.
Lava Update
We start off with all the updates on Lava. Lava in Age of Wonders 4 used to be identical to the Void hexes: completely unpassable and unusable for empires and units, having the role of being a dead space. However, there are plenty of fire related fantasies a player can create with their race and empire, especially with the recent addition of a Fire Giant ruler. These fantasies could never be fully fulfilled without the ability to use lava to your advantage, therefore we wanted to make lava into something that could be explored and exploited, just like a forest or a mountain! First off, Lava now appears in annexable provinces in Desolate regions on the surface. The lava in the Underground has also been changed from large unannexable regions to smaller and annexable ones.
Lava appears in smaller and annexable regions. Lava will also still show up in smaller quantities mixed with land hexes.
When lava is at the center of a province, you’re able to build 2 Lava Province Improvements on it instead of the normal Land or Water improvements:
- The Smelter Mine, which works exactly like a mine and looks like a steel forge powered by lava.
- The Cinder Conduit, which works exactly like a conduit and looks like heated obelisks rising out of the lava.
The Cinder Conduit in all its glowing glory
The Smelter Mine in all its smoldering splendour
All empires, even those without any special adaptations, can annex lava with these new province improvements. But since they are valuable and are an extreme type of environment. We add a base -15 City Stability penalty to provinces with lava. This represents the harsh conditions and difficulty of extracting resources from the lava.
Luckily, there are ways to ignore these penalties if the city’s race has one of the following adaptations or transformations:
- Desolate Adaptation
- Underground Adaptation
- Scions of Flame Transformation
- Demonkin Transformation
The new Volcanologists’ Guild City Structure.
Next to being annexable, Lava also now has become traversable! Much like Water, only a few units have the ability to traverse Lava. Unlike Water however, there’s no lava embarkation/transport, meaning that lava will be very difficult to access. The following units have access to traversing Lava:
- Units with Lava Walking
- Units with Floating or Flying movement
Some units taking a nice dip in the lava.
Of course, this means you may not be able to traverse entire armies across the lava, but fret not, Lava walking units have the ability to build Roads across the lava! These roads create paths for the other units to cross the lava. You can simply do this by unlocking the Road Building society trait and sending a unit through the lava with road building enabled.
The humble, non-lava walking piglet thanks the stellar, lava walking Chaos Eater for building the way forward.
Next to building in Lava, you can also find 2 new pickups in the Lava - the unguarded Molten Treasure and guarded Molten Weapons. These give more than other pickups, since they are harder to reach.
The Molten Treasure pickup.
The Molten Weapons pickup.
With the new lava update, lava has become more interactive, especially for those who want to pursue the fantasy of pyroclastic industry or a fiery elemental society. Note that the lava that came from most special realm traits will now also be annexable and we’ve added new Void variants of Lava realm traits to preserve the experience the other realm traits provided.
Now, time to steer this minecart down into the depths!
The Underground
Originally in Age of Wonder 4’s Underground we tried to achieve an Underground generation that would work both for players that started on the surface and wanted to explore the underground for treasure and for players who wanted to build an empire in the network of caverns in the Underground. Furthermore, to create some variation in the Underground, we also included the Ashland, Snow and Ice overlays in the Underground. Appearing in some of the caverns and allowing players with arctic or desolate adaptation to also benefit from some areas of the Underground. However, we identified following issues:- The Ashland, Snow and Ice feel placed at random, and don’t nicely fit in with the rest of the Underground visuals.
- By trying to go for 2 target experiences at once. We instead landed on a generation that couldn’t comfortably achieve either.
- The regular Underground clime (also called the Rock clime in the studio). This hosts all the regular Underground visuals you’re familiar with.
- The Arctic Underground clime. This has all the original overlays of the regular Underground except cavern floor, which is replaced with Snow and Ice.
- The Desolate Underground clime. This has all the original desolate overlays except the Cavern Floor, which is replaced with Ashland and Lava.
The old Underground cavern with snow and ice.
The old Underground cavern with ashland and lava.
The new Arctic Underground clime.
The new Desolate Underground clime.
With these changes you can easily identify the clime of a cavern as you approach its bedrock and earth walls, making it easier to find these caverns in case you’re looking for lava, or perhaps if you have the Underground adaptation trait.
While we’re on that topic, in order to support Ashlands and Snow even better, Underground Adaptation now allows you to build farms on Underground Ashlands and Underground Snow too. Finally, terraforming effects that spread Ashlands, Snow or Ice now also work in the Underground!
You surely have heard by now that we have a new Dungeon overlay in the Underground, which can be found in some of the Hand-crafted regions and can be built by your empire with the new Tome of the Dungeon Depths (sold as part of the Giant Kings DLC). The Dungeon visuals even changed based on the clime they’re in!
Dungeon visuals in regular Underground, spread by a player.
Dungeon visuals in the Arctic Underground
Dungeon visuals in the Desolate Underground
Lastly, let’s cover the changes to Underground map generation. As mentioned before, we have two target fantasies for the player for the Underground. We’ve focussed on making the standard Underground better suitable for the players that like to settle in the Underground, as we noticed the tendency for players to ignore the Underground when playing on the Surface.
We’ve made caverns form in a less stretching pattern, made them more spacious overall, filled them with more nodes and added more connections between caverns. This way Underground settlers will less frequently run into dead ends or have difficulty expanding or finding suitable locations to found cities.
Some example of old Underground generations. Note that caverns tend to stretch into singular directions. And not all caverns are connected with one another.
Examples of new Underground generations - more spacious caverns, and more connections going between them.
We still wanted players to also be able to experience the Underground as an explorer - mainly playing and settling on the surface, but being able to gain treasure in the depths below and even annex partially underground in order to grab more nodes or Ancient Wonders. Therefore, we added a new realm trait called Explorative Underground. The realm trait is pretty self-explanatory, so check it out below!
The new Explorative Underground misc trait.
Some example generations of the new Explorative Underground.
And there you have it. There are also numerous smaller tweaks to the Underground, but we’d be digging for a while to show them. So discover all the ins and outs of the new Underground and Lava in the upcoming free Ogre Update to Age of Wonders 4, released alongside Giant Kings on April 1st!
