Age of Wonders 4

Most 4X games give you a nation. Age of Wonders 4 lets you design one. That difference sets the tone for the whole game. It’s also why one of the oldest series in strategy gaming feels fresher than many newer ones.

Triumph Studios made the game, and Paradox Interactive published it. The Dutch studio has worked on this series since 1999, and Paradox bought it in 2017. The game launched on May 2, 2023 for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, at $24.99. It is clearly most at home on PC, and this review covers the Steam version.

The premise is simple. You play a Wizard King who returns to claim a realm. You explore, found and grow cities, fight or negotiate with rival rulers, and research magic. The game sits between two traditions. On the world map it plays like Civilization or Endless Legend, with expansion, economy and diplomacy. When armies meet, it zooms into hex-based tactical battles that owe more to Heroes of Might and Magic and the classic Master of Magic than to any modern 4X game.

Customization is the big selling point. You assemble a faction from a body type, cultural traits, society traits and magical leanings. That can produce something as specific as cannibal halflings, as elegant as mystic moon elves, or as traditional as standard high-fantasy dwarves. Your choices change how you play from the first turn.

This is a strong fantasy strategy entry for Paradox, and it competes directly with the long-running historical 4X series for the “one more turn” audience. It mostly earns that position, although some of its problems are ones the genre has never solved.

• Faction Creator: You combine body types, cultures, society traits and starting magic to build a people that is genuinely your own. These choices affect unit rosters, economic bonuses and diplomatic standing, so they’re more than cosmetic.
• Tomes of Magic: Research works through themed books of spells, and the books you pick change your people physically over a campaign. A faction can gradually become angelic beings or servants of chaos. Your research choices show up on the map.
• Turn-Based Tactical Battles: When armies meet, the game moves to a tactical hex map. Battles range from small fights with roaming monsters to large sieges with dozens of units on each side.
• Morale System: Units waver and hold depending on how the fight is going. A wearing-down war of attrition is a real risk, and every engagement adds a psychological layer.
• Event-Driven Storytelling: Narrative events respond to your decisions, which gives each campaign a sense of authorship that most 4X games lack.
• Realm Customization and Mods: Custom map settings, varied realm types and extensive mod support give the game a very long life.

The Faction Creator Is the Real Product

Many 4X games treat customization as a pre-game menu you skip. In Age of Wonders 4 it’s the main draw. The faction builder separates your physical form from your culture, so the visual identity of your people is independent of how they play. A race of armored lizardfolk can be a scholarly High culture or a feral Barbarian one. Society traits then push the economy and diplomacy in specific directions.

Your choices ripple outward. A trait that makes your people hostile to neighbors makes peaceful expansion harder. A magical affinity points you toward certain Tomes and away from others. A good creator doesn’t just offer many options. It makes those options matter, and this one clearly does.

That makes faction design part of the strategy layer. Before you place a city, you’ve already committed to a plan. The best 4X games make you feel smart, and this game starts doing that before turn one.

Tomes and Transformation: Progression You Can See

The Tomes of Magic system is Triumph’s most elegant idea. Most 4X research trees are spreadsheets: you unlock a production bonus and move on. Here you research Tomes grouped by magical affinity, and they give you spells, units and empire upgrades. The biggest of them physically transform your population.

When your stoic dwarves sprout wings and halos after you commit to Order magic, the change carries real weight. It ties your mechanical choices to a visible story about who your people are becoming. Deep into a campaign, the faction you built at the start has turned into something you shaped along the way.

The trade-off is commitment. Tomes push you toward affinity combinations, and some are built to be noticeably stronger than others. Players who optimize will find dominant paths fairly fast. For most players, though, the system makes progression feel like your empire is changing and not just its numbers.

Combat: Where It Earns Its Keep

The tactical battles are the game’s strongest feature and its biggest time cost. Each unit gets a limited number of actions per turn. Flanking, positioning, retaliation strikes and terrain all matter, and the morale system keeps things from becoming a simple trade of hit points. Units that get surrounded or badly mauled lose their nerve, and armies that are winning gain momentum.

The sieges stand out most. Attacking a fortified city means getting past walls, defensive structures and garrisons. Reckless frontal attacks get punished. Disciplined army composition, with healers, ranged support and a solid front line, pays off over and over. This is the design that separates Age of Wonders from Civilization, where battles resolve as abstract dice rolls.

The friction is pacing. Fighting dozens of battles yourself over a long campaign is draining, so the game leans on auto-resolve for lopsided fights. That’s sensible, but it highlights a contradiction: the game’s best system is also the one you learn to skip. The more a campaign snowballs, the more often you’ll press auto-resolve and the less tactical engagement you’ll get.

The Empire Layer and Its AI Problem

On the world map, the game handles expansion well. You claim provinces around your cities, which turns land use into a meaningful puzzle. Should a given hex become a farm, a mine, a magical node or a defensive fort? The pace of exploration is good, the map is full of roaming monsters, ruins and resource sites, and the event system adds narrative moments that respond to your decisions.

The weak point is your opponents. The AI and diplomacy are the game’s clearest flaws, and Steam reviewers say so often. AI rulers are reasonable in the early turns but struggle to coordinate pressure once you build momentum. Diplomacy works mechanically, with alliances, grievances and treaties, but it rarely creates the tense negotiations the systems seem built for. Rivals feel more like obstacles than schemers.

That feeds straight into the late game. Once your empire snowballs, which happens with depressing regularity against standard AI, the last third of a campaign becomes a cleanup operation. You know you’ve won, and the game asks you to keep proving it for twenty more turns. This is a long-standing 4X problem and not unique to Triumph. Age of Wonders 4 doesn’t solve it, though, and its early game is strong enough that the contrast is obvious.

Replayability and the DLC Question

Varied realm types, custom map settings, story realms and an active mod scene give the game a lot of replay value. Few 4X games make a third or fourth campaign feel as different as this one does, mainly because a new faction design really does change how you play.

The catch is that Paradox runs a well-known DLC business, and Age of Wonders 4 follows it. A steady stream of paid expansions and content packs has added new Tomes, cultures and systems. Much of it is good, but the full experience now costs much more than the base game. The base package is complete and generous on its own. The worry is that the most interesting new design work increasingly sits behind additional purchases.

Triumph chose a bright, painterly fantasy look, and it works. The world map reads clearly, with distinct biomes, legible terrain and cities that grow visibly over time. Unit models carry a lot of personality, which matters more than usual here, because the transformations from the Tomes need to look dramatic to land. They do. A faction mutated by Chaos looks unsettling, and an Order-transformed one looks luminous.

The interface is dense but well organized. Layered tooltips explain nearly every number, and the game leans on them heavily in the early campaigns. Even so, the onboarding is steep. The tutorial covers the basics, but the interactions between traits, Tomes and province improvements take hours to understand.

A turn-based game of this scope is light on hardware, and the design keeps most of a campaign moving at a comfortable pace. As usual for the genre, AI turn times are built to grow in the late game on large maps with many rulers. That makes the late-game slog worse: as the strategy becomes less interesting, the waiting gets longer.

On Steam, Age of Wonders 4 runs where it belongs: on a PC with a mouse and keyboard. The game depends on precise information, such as hovering over hexes, digging into nested tooltips and checking unit stats mid-battle, and a cursor does all of that with almost no effort. Hotkeys make city management and army movement fast once you learn them.

The console versions exist and are serviceable, but this is a text-heavy, menu-heavy strategy game. Mouse precision is a real advantage over a controller, not a matter of taste. Steam users also get the easiest access to the game’s mod ecosystem, which over time has become a big part of its replay value. Players who expect to spend hundreds of hours with the game should buy it on PC.

Age of Wonders 4 is one of the most creatively generous 4X games on the market. Its faction creator turns preparation into strategy, its Tomes make progression something you can see, and its tactical battles have a depth the rest of the genre rarely tries for. The first half of a campaign is excellent: discovery, identity and smart military decisions keep pulling you forward.

The second half is weaker. Passive AI, thin diplomacy and the familiar 4X snowball turn many campaigns into a formality well before the victory screen. The DLC strategy, while not predatory, keeps raising the price of the complete game.

The best parts outweigh the flaws, but only for the right audience. Triumph Studios made a game about authorship, and treated that way, it holds up for hundreds of hours. Buy it to build empires, not to be challenged by rival rulers.