With a finished commander - a member of the Vanguard, an Imperial faction that’s just come out of cryosleep - the demo takes us to a new world, vibrant and alien, and upon landing, the first colony is established. For colonists, it could change how they deal with the environment they live in, while soldiers can become freakish monsters, able to stab enemies with their sharp but fleshy appendages. Take the genoplague, for instance, which lets you mutate soldiers or whole colonies with a virus that rewrites their DNA. “And often very nasty things.” The team delved into a bag of sci-fi tropes and picked out a wide range of powerful futuristic or alien tricks. They’re the product of Imperial research divisions that allow you to do “very special things,” Sas explains. Instead of classes, there are secret technologies, leftovers from the Star Union, that give these leaders an edge. Instead of having classes, like Age of Wonders 3, more emphasis has been put on their species and equipment. It’s still a 4X game with turn-based tactical combat, but heaped onto that frame are a multitude of new ideas, at least for the series, starting with the commanders.Ĭommanders are Planetfall’s leaders and a faction’s primary hero unit, able to explore the planet, chat to aliens and then murder them. More than Age of Wonders 3 in space, Triumph seems to be making a concerted effort to ensure that Planetfall is its own thing, not just in terms of setting, but fundamental game mechanics as well.

It’s a good middle-ground between doing something that’s close to our hearts, but also something that allows us to experiment.” “It gives us more opportunities than a direct sequel would ever give us. “We’ve been working on fantasy games all our lives, but we also had the fantasy of making a sci-fi game,” says Lennart Sas, Triumph Studios’ CEO. It swaps magic for mechs, pitting alien races against each other in a galaxy reeling from the collapse of the last great space empire, the Star Union. Triumph Studios’ latest 4X outing, Age of Wonders: Planetfall, does away with all of that. For nearly two decades, the Age of Wonders series has been firmly entrenched in a fantasy realm, with all the tropes that accompany it: Orcs, Halflings, meddling wizards and flying lizards.

Age of wonders 3 factions