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Season Greetings to all Honored Godir, 
Hero Class Updates
Even More Skirmisher Weapons & Loadout Updates
Ambitions
Astral
AI
Among the available tabs will be the "BETAS" tab.
The Tiger Beta should be listed in the dropdown menu under "Select the beta you would like to opt into:" A restart of your Steam Client may be needed if the Branch isn’t visible.
Hero Class Updates
Ambitions
Rulers!
Follow us and be the first to know when we drop new content!
Honored Godir,
In case you or your friends never had a chance to explore the unlimited worlds of Age of Wonders 4, the game will be available for free from 19:00 CET on Thursday, November 7, until 19:00 CET on Monday, November 11. Play alone or with friends, create your perfect ruler, and become a part of our lovely community!
Honored Godir,
We told you about the content of Ways of War, we showed it to you during the streams and dev journals—and now is finally the time to experience it yourself as both Ways of War and Tiger Update are out now!
New Forms: Simians & Ogrekin
New Culture: Oathsworn
New Tomes
New Content: Intrigue Happenings
New Realm: Paradise Divided
Hero Ambitions
Hero Skill Rework
Quality of Life and more
Image description: Ways of War teaser image, showing the Blossom node TC map in the foreground and an Oathsworn city in the background.
Image description: Early thumbnail concepts for the Oathsworn Culture.At this stage we place most importance on creating a diverse lineup that is easily distinguishable in tactical combat. In order to do so, we break the characters down to their most basic shapes (literally - peep the Minecraft looking breakdowns underneath the drawings). More explorations:
Image description: Early thumbnail concepts for the Oathsworn Culture.If you’re wondering what the little numbers under the concepts mean in that image (I get it, I’m nosy too); those are counting how many unique tops, bottoms, and shoes the 3D character artists will need to make. 
Image description: More detailed concept explorations of 5 units.But ultimately we decided that this direction was edging too close to the High culture aesthetics, which shares a lot of the visual language space we were exploring. Both are order cultures, but they have very different views on what constitutes ‘order’. We wanted the Oathsworn culture to look more conditioned for war, as ‘Ways of War’ might suggest ;)
Image description: Side by side comparisons of the concept art and 3D of Oathsworn culture units.All of these units also needed new weapons, which were made by our 3D Artist Lara. Two of these are Free Patch pantheon unlock variations, let’s see if you can guess which are which!
Image description: Finished weapon models for Oathsworn Culture & Pantheon unlocks.As we were exploring the new weapons, our animator Michiel started fighting ghosts in the office. 
Image description: GIF of Michiel swinging a long wooden sword in the office.
Image description: GIF of the Avenger units’ Helmsplitter animation, a heavy downward swing of the sword.And before I could bring my concerns about this sword-swinging to HR, he clarified: “Yes, sometimes I’m scared of hitting things (or coworkers!) when swinging the wooden sword around. But in those cases I’ll swing a pen instead of the wooden sword. Safety first!”
Image description: GIF side by side of Michiel’s reference footage and the Honor Blade’s Defensive Strike, a cross-legged jump with a stretched out sword strike.
Image description: Early concept for the Oathsworn city + a subculture variation.The city tiers were especially influenced by the beauty that is Thai temple roof tiers, where the more important a building is, the more roof tiers it’ll have. Fully an aesthetic choice rather than it being functional, and as artists we can’t get enough of useless aesthetic choices :D
Image description: In-game screenshots of Level 1 and Level 4 Oathsworn city models.There’s also a ton of work to be done for the Oathsworn city sieges, as we need unique wall and house visuals with destructible variants. Lara did all the work modeling these as well as creating unique textures, check out the cool sculpted dragon detail!
Image description: One of the new materials made for the siege map, its use in-game shown on the left.
Image description: Different house and tower model variations.It’s super satisfying to see all these assets come together and get to enjoy them while my units get absolutely smashed into the ground because of my poor strategic planning and inability to make friends (not quite sure I’m still talking about the game).
Image description: GIF of in-game siege battle footage.Lastly for the Oathsworn culture, I’d like to mention the crests that you see in the subculture icons: 
Image description: Oath of Harmony, Righteousness, and Strife subculture icons.
Image description: Concepts of the ‘School of {Subculture} SPI’s at the top, and screenshots of the in-game models at the bottom.They also show up in spells and abilities, I imagine Ana might’ve gotten sick of looking at them…
Image description: The ‘pledge’ unit enchantments shown on a Goretusk Piglet, which grant the cultural devotion mechanic to non-cultural units.
Image description: The ‘seal’ link effects, inflicted by the Sealbearer unit.
Image description: The finished tome art for all three subculture tomes, from left to right: Harmony, Righteousness, and Strife.Every culture and subculture comes with a tome, and although not present in tome selection, you can still find these in the encyclopedia or your tome library! The art for them was made by our 2D and concept art intern Alex. Here’s the start to finish process:
Image description: Concepts for all three subculture tomes, starting with concepts on the left and with the finished tome on the right.
Image description: In-game visuals of the Simian and Ogrekin forms in the Physical Form selection menu. The Simian have slender bodies with prominent ears, mouths, and skin patterns. The Ogrekin have muscular bodies with prominent teeth and multiple horns.To us, it seemed obvious which forms we needed for this expansion. You’ll recognize the inspiration we took from Journey to the West, and folklore such as the yōkai. These forms hope to fulfill two very unique fantasies as they inherently take such different approaches to war, diplomacy, and ruling their realms.
Image description: Headshots of 10 different Simian Rulers, sampling some of the available customization options.The Ogrekin, on the other hand, would not be praised for their swiftness. They are big, brutish, and dominate with a fiery spirit. The latter is entirely literal, as they come with the new free patch 2-point form trait Inner Fire, which increases their fire resistance and makes melee attackers sustain fire damage. Their appearance is characterized by a multitude of horns and teeth; sharp & stabby was the memo.
Image description: Headshots of 10 different Ogrekin Rulers, sampling some of the available customization options.Inner Fire is not the only new free patch damage type specific form trait, we liked the concept of this so much that we added three of them ;)
Image description: Inner Fire, Inner Frost, and Inner Lightning form traits. All cost 2 trait points and give +3 Elemental Resistance and make the attackers sustain 3 Elemental Damage.By the way, both the Simian and the Ogrekin come with tails, but as part of the free patch any forms with tails now have a tail slider that changes the length of the tail or removes it entirely. :)
Image description: 5 progress pictures of the Accursed Ogre. 2D head concepts, full 2D concept, and then three versions of 3D & VFX with increasing polish.The first iteration of the sculpt may have been closest to the concept, but we felt like it was missing something. There’s no need to go back to making new 2D concepts, we can simply paint over the 3D or try out changes directly in 3D. We found that adding tattoos to the upper body and hue shifting the red to a cooler tone really helped enhance the contrast around the unit’s face and pull attention to the new Ghostfire FX, made by Ana:
Image description: Accursed Ogre in the encyclopedia, showcasing the Ghostfire FX.Whereas the troubleshooting happened mostly in 3D for the Accursed Ogre, our exploration for the Radiant Guardian (from Tome of Prosperity) was done mostly in 2D. We started off with a different idea entirely, thoroughly exploring feline and canine concepts inspired by Chinese guardian lion statues.
Image description: 2D concepts of the Radiant Guardian inspired by Chinese guardian lions, all four-legged with big teeth and golden decorative elements.Although we loved this idea, there was something that we (and especially our concept artist Ollie) loved more. This other creature kept popping up in our research and rent free in our minds. “Turtles…, turtles..., turtles…”, the voices chanted. Louder and louder, until Ollie’s brain exploded and out came my personal favorite unit:
Image description: 2D concept front and back of the Radiant Guardian as a turtle, with a horned mask as shell.Once we saw this concept there was no going back! Having plenty of canine and feline wildlife units already but not a single turtle (the shame!), it was an easy call to make. We also got the opportunity to add some fun animations such as a unique defense mode:
Image description: GIF of the Radiant Guardian’s defense mode animation, where it jumps into its shell.And butterfly FX added by Ana, because that is exactly what it was missing:
Image description: Radiant Guardian in the encyclopedia, showcasing small butterflies flying around the unit.
Image description: GIF of Blossom Node TC map in-game.
Image description: Blossom Node ‘surrender’ event image + how it looks in context in-game.A new wooden UI Skin made by Alex:
Image description: Ways of War UI Skin elements, carved wood adorned with rope & coins.And finally finishing off the DLC showcase with the inspiring designer words, “we need another icon”:
Image description: Varying icons made for Ways of War.
Image description: Before (left) and after (right) of the front-end faction selection screen.New faction customization interface, because we were just as sick of the sliders as you! Sliders work well when options are on a sliding scale (such as ‘Head Size’ or ‘Tail Length’, seen in the image below), but not so much for helmet or outfit options. In those cases, we’ve now replaced the sliders with icon previews.
Image description: In-game screenshot of the customization item icons being used in the place of sliders.In early AOW4 development, we’d considered making 2D icons for all the customization options. But the workload of this would be huge, and it’d limit the amount of options we could add in the future as we’d always have to reserve extra time for making 2D icons. Our principal 3D tech artist Allert was instead able to set up 3D item previews so they’re grabbed automatically, and won’t give us additional work when adding content in the future. This system should also work for mods.
Image description: Before (top) and after (bottom) of the ‘Lightning Blades’ enchantment visual.
Image description: Before (top) and after (bottom) of the ‘Flameburst Weapons’ enchantment visual.
Image description: Added visual distinction in the form of spikes to the TC unit banners, which previously could only be distinguished by color.
Image description: Added visual distinction to the TC hazards, which now use up/down arrows for positive/negative warnings respectively.
Image description: Tweaked colors on the battle prediction bar for better visual contrast.And as a last highlight, the much requested option to disable the angelic transformation glow!
Image description: ‘Angelic Transformation’ major transformation with visuals enabled (left) and disabled (right).Just like that, I’m all out of images! I hope you enjoyed this behind-the-scenes look at what the art team has been up to, and most of all I hope you enjoy playing with the new content. :)
Spooktacular Rulers!
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