Developers, what's wrong with you? Based on the quality of my connection (which the game determines by its internal logic), the game blocks my ability to host games. I bought it to play with friends, why do that? Who cares about ping in a turn-based game anyway? The game is from 2014 and this problem STILL HAS NOT BEEN SOLVED, ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

I really tried to like this game, I gave it ~5 honest tries, but it just would not make itself likeable. The soundtrack is mostly pretty good, graphics etc are nice too, but who cares about that, right? It is all about the gameplay and here this game is just lackluster.
Everything is very poorly balanced, the CPU enemies cheat blatantly by always knowing where you are and the early game is horrendously imbalanced. I even bought the DLCs because they got praised as "one of the best in gaming history", hoping it would change this, but they just introduce laughable strong new races. Combat boils down to using range and hoping that your 80% CC goes through. Some units are never viable, not even for free and not even on the first bunch of enemies you will encounter. The story maps are way too long too. End game just is bigger number better, be it max range of abilites or just simply tier. Tier 4 units are always stronger than any tier 3 unit, meaning if you rush building these you will very likely not lose any fights after that, not that exciting.
AOW Planetfall probably ruines every other AOW game for me, because 3 and 4 have the exact same flaws which make them just not enjoyable, at least for me.
I also support simply not buying their games, because the malpractice of releasing half games and selling everything worthwile through expansions did not change over the last 15 years.