Age of Wonders 4: Premium Edition

Age of Wonders 4 is a turn-based 4X strategy game wrapped around an RPG spine, and that combination is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Triumph Studios essentially asked: what if you could build your own fantasy civilization from the ground up, race traits and all, and then watch it clash with procedurally generated rivals across maps that shift in tone based on the story tomes you unlock? The answer is one of the most customizable strategy experiences available on PC right now, and the Premium Edition bundles in the expansion pass and day-one content, which matters because the expansions add meaningful new race forms, biomes, and ruler options rather than cosmetic fluff. The core loop works like this: you design a ruler with a chosen background, physical form, and culture, then pick a starting tome that seeds your magic specialization. Those choices cascade. A culture built around industrious underground dwarves with a chaos magic affinity plays almost nothing like a nimble forest society leaning into astral tomes. Both of those play differently again once you start annexing provinces and absorbing their population into your society, which shifts your available transformations over time. The "society evolution" system is genuinely one of the smarter 4X mechanics released in recent years, because it makes expansion feel like character development rather than just clicking tiles green. Combat is tactical and hex-based, with unit stacks that level up and unlock skills the longer they survive. Hero units are the RPG heart of the game - they carry gear, gain levels, and can swing a close battle if you have positioned them intelligently. The magic system rewards players who commit to a tome synergy rather than dabbling, which is a sensible design call. What doesn't always work as well is the AI, which on standard difficulty plays conservatively enough that the mid-game can feel like an extended cleanup job rather than a genuine geopolitical rivalry. Crank the difficulty up, or play multiplayer, and that problem largely disappears. There is also a story campaign that provides guided scenarios if the sandbox feels like too much all at once, though be honest with yourself: the sandbox is the real game, and the story missions are more tutorial scaffolding than narrative destination. For RPG players wandering over from something like BG3 or Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, the character writing here is thin by comparison. Your ruler is a mechanical avatar more than a person. The worldbuilding is evocative, with the Astral Sea framing and the lore baked into each tome having genuine flavor, but do not expect companion arcs or branching dialogue. What you get instead is systemic storytelling - the narrative of your campaign is written by the choices your build forces you into. That is a different kind of RPG payoff, and a legitimate one, but worth knowing in advance. The filler risk here is not bad quests but rather late-game turns where you are processing an empire that has grown past the point of interesting decisions. Some sessions end with housekeeping rather than drama. The Premium Edition makes sense as the entry point given how substantially the expansions change the available faction combinations. Starting with the base game alone and adding later means potentially replaying early hours to access new content properly. If this style of fantasy 4X is on your radar at all, this is the version to get. Monika, Scout Team