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Ayalin Premium Tribe Invasion

Heyy you, yes you there- did you really think you were gonna wait Age of Wonders 4 comfortably installed in your sofa, without any new battles to win and any new monsters to slay? Well you were wrong!;)

I am really happy to present you what will be without a doubt my major last mod on Age of Wonders III, aka Premium Tribe Invasion, which contains more than 100 new units, certainly as many new abilities with their own unique visual effects, and a complete rework of nearly all Adventure/Defenders/rewards sets of the game attached to structures with dedicated thematic battle enchantments which (I hope) will surprise you in a good way and challenge your game tactical skills.
And to celebrate the end of what was a long funnel of hard work for me, I will *try* for the first time to setup a small stream on Twitch every Sunday evening, at 10pm CEST. Gameplay showcase for ~2 hours, then do a little bit of modding- feel free to join if you want to learn more about advanced Aow III gameplay or if you have any questions about the mod or the modding engine. You can find my twitch channel along with all the stream replays here- https://www.twitch.tv/etheralayalin

The major goal of the mod, aside from all the new content mentioned above, is to infuse a touch of “Roguelike/Roguelite” feeling (a genre which I love playing as much as 4X games actually) to the main game experience by the introduction of a new game concept close to neutral factions, the concept of “Tribes”.
Tribes are basically not numerous enough to be independent factions by themself, but not weak enough to be simple wanderers on the world map. And you will only be able to make yours their exotic powers if you manage to beat them in specific locations, mostly all Treasure sites which populate the map.

This is the “Roguelike” touch mentioned above- while “Tribe” Defender sets will give you a much harder time than classic sets, the quality of rewards being given will match this difficulty. By beating Tribe defender sets, you will be able to unlock new “above-the-curve” units and new spells for your empire, meaning that the intrinsic RMG aspect of Treasure site locations coupled with the RNG of Adventure sets will influence your development strategy even harder. Thanks to the high amount of new Adventure sets introduced by the mod, all your games should feel even more different from one to another as you are not guaranteed to always face the same adventure sets when exploring structures in the early/mid game.

Last but not least, and this is definitely a premiere for me, five storylines taking their roots in the core timeline of the official Age of Wonders story have been imagined, one for each tribe, and you will find pieces of their story when reading the description of the various treasure sites of the game. If you already know my previous work, you know this is not something I usually do as I don’t feel very self-confident on this matter and am much more gameplay focused, but in this case it really felt like I had to do it for the Mod to be even better and bring together all the new content.
To my own surprise, the storyline did eventually feed the core gameplay design behind all these new units (their look or their abilities) much more than I anticipated initially, and some kind of positive back and forth between gameplay intentions and the narration did happen during the course of the mod production. At the end of the day, while I cannot say if my stories are any good, I am confident that at the very least the whole piece makes sense.

Before going any further, there are a few important things that you really need to know before trying the mod (and I hope you have read that far in):

- This mod is made by an experienced player for other experienced players who enjoy solo play and who do not find much challenge left in the base game even on Emperor difficulty. I also used to be a world of warcraft player doing mostly (high level) Pve content, and I have designed all the Tribe encounters with this kind of “Pve High level” mindset. In other words, if you blindly auto-battle or do not respect and read carefully what Battle enchantments or units are doing and do not adapt your strategy accordingly, you will (should?) bite the dust pretty quickly.

- Following the point above, some important global game settings, notably regarding the AI are being changed by the mod (spoiler- AI gets a buff so that it does not get rekt by neutral encounters). Please refer to the dedicated topic for the exact list of changes.

- This mod also recycles a large amount of content from my previous work, mostly abilities (the ones introduced by all the hero reworks notably, which will now appear on certain units) and visual effects. Therefore, all premium classes (7 mods) as well as Empire and Specialisation mods are required to play with this mod. This is not super ideal but doing so saves me a ton of time and allows me to develop content much faster.

There is honestly a lot more to say about the mod but the most important points are covered- considering the content size of the mod and its implications for the game experience, I have created separate sections with further detailed explanations for each topics:

Regarding general feedback about the mod, global settings affected by the mod, how the game experience feels like, please refer to this post (see below in the discussion list, links cant work)

Regarding the balancing of encounters, strategy to play against, synergy between units or the balancing of units themselves, please refer to this topic (link to come but the topic is in the discussion list)

Regarding feedback about the lore of the different tribes, how the story is being delivered in the game, please refer to this topic (link to come but the topic is in the discussion list)

For bug reports, suspicious interactions, missing text or icons etc, please report everything in this section (link to come but the topic is in the discussion list)

The following topic lists all the various improvements and future content updates that I am willing to do as long as passion is there (link to come but the topic is in the discussion list)

Localisation- Sorry french fellows, this time only English localisation so far. But French will come eventually.

Finally, a few content (only 3d pre-rigged models, but no texture except one) from other mods not done by myself is being recycled into this mod and you can find here the exact list with also some special mentions for other great modders whose work did inspire me for my own unit designs. Please reach out to me if any of the content listed in this section is an issue (link to come but the topic is in the discussion list)

I hope you will enjoy the mod as much as I enjoyed doing it, feedback will always be welcome, and you can be sure that I will be active for some time on this mod for balance and bug fixes at least. Regarding larger content updates, I have to admit it will depend on how much I enjoy Age of Wonders 4 and how much possibilities there are with the Aow4 modding engine. If Aow 4 does not set the bar high enough, I might continue providing important content updates on this mod for quite some time actually (modding both Aow 3 and Aow 4 is also a door which is definitely not closed!).