YMMV / Age of Wonders: Planetfall

• Awesome Music: The overworld soundtrack can be a little forgettable, but still atmospheric. Some of the combat soundtracks stand out, however. Wave of Hostility, is a fantastic, high-intensity electronic tune perfect for huge colony fights, whether you're trying to punch through the opponent's defenses and claim their colony for your own, or on the defensive side and trying to hold of waves of enemy troops trying to take what isn't theirs. Mechanized Assault is also pretty epic and can really capture the feeling of a massive invasion if it plays at the start of massive 3v3 stack battles.
  • The expansions add some new music of their own, the main menu theme of Invasions arguably stands out among the other menu themes, and fits the insidious nature of the Shakarn. While Invasions' main combat theme, Carnage Abyss sounds worthy of its name and can give off a strong sense of urgency, desperation or ferocity depending on your situation in a fight. The other combat theme from Invasions, Element of Surprise, is also pretty catchy, but never seems to play during normal gameplay, either it has been Dummied Out and only exists in the game files, or only plays during a specific event in the Invasions campaign.
  • The third expansion, Star Kings, gives us the track From Within the Void, a quieter, more atmospheric yet equally catchy combat track that sharply contrasts with most of the other, more bombastic, combat themes, providing a more foreboding and tension-filled vibe that goes surprisingly well with large battles.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: The Doomsday Victory is one of the easiest paths to take: not only does pursuing it give out some of the best Doctrines in the game, but its defensive-leaning strategy of turtling your guys near your cities and doomsday machines is much more straightforward than constantly trying to conquer with huge, energy-sapping armies or the annoyingly tricky path to a Diplomatic victory. While launching the doomsday project will instantly cause war with everyone not in some kind of pact with you, anyone who IS in a pact with you will be inexplicably on-board with having the atmosphere set on fire, or being subjected to mind-melting psychic waves of evil, immediately forming alliances with you. Play your diplomatic game right, and you'll just be able to sit back for the ten turn countdown until you win without anyone coming after you. Finally, each and every secret tech path has an achievement for doing their doomsday project, so you pretty much need to take this path for 100% Completion.
  • Just as in Age of Wonders 3, attacks which can stun enemy units are extraordinarily powerful, because they both force enemy units to waste their turns and leave them vulnerable for additional damage. Syndicate and Assembly players are therefore best served by unlocking "stun module" mods as quickly as possible and equipping their basic infantry with them, ignoring most of their tech trees and other troop options.
• Demonic Spiders: When playing on continental maps, players will inevitably have to deal with the ocean, either to clear out water-based Cosmite nodes or travel to another continent or island that cannot be reasonably reached with Teleporters in time (or straight up do not have Teleporters on them). During this time, it is inevitable that players will encounter one or both flavours of aquatic marauders that can potentially deal extreme damage, even to land units that are amphibious/floating and thus don't suffer from embarked penalties, the two main naval marauder types are:
  • Imperial Submarines, rogue subs that come in three variants: Regular, Inferno and Behemoth. All three have powerful attacks that stagger non-resistant units, apply Turbulence (a heavy accuracy and speed debuff) to Fliers, and in the case of the Inferno, strip shields in an AoE and create burning hazards on the water. Not only that, they are capable of launching torpedoes and firing their main weapons in the same turn, and said torpedoes can strip armor (in the Behemoth and regular subs' case) or shields, respectively. Also, since they are crewed by rogue, decayed Paragon according to their flavour text, they are all mindless and therefore immune to morale reduction and psionic status effects.
  • Chelus (plural Chelii?), giant, spiky sea turtles capable of launching armour-piercing spikes and munching on your ships and embarked units, stealing life in the process when eating off of cyborg and mechanical units. They possess high amounts of armor and are immune to flanking thanks to their shells, and gain a further armour boost when right next to each other. They can prove to be extremely hard to crack if you don't have any psionic attacks or copious amounts of armor melt with you.
  • For more land-based threats, the RPR (Reaper) bots can potentially qualify as this in the early game due to their plethora of powerful abilities, especially against the mostly biological/infantry-based armies that most players tend to field early on. The three Reaper units are: The Liquidator, a Heavy melee fighter that can inflict a special variation of poison that stuns instead of damaging biological and cyborg units. The Stalker, a sniper with an evasion-boosting leap and a powerful point-blank secondary that can escape (similar to the Syndicate Runner) upon its first death while also getting another evasion boost in the process. And the Culler, a unit that is somehow both mindless and psionic with a powerful psionic melee attack (naturally ignoring both shields and armour as a result) and a ranged secondary that strips all buffs off a target. Ironically, the last one is perhaps the least dangerous due to being larger and easier to focus fire than the other two.
  • The hostile armies the Psi-fish spawn if at war with the player can be very challenging for most races to deal with in the early and mid-games, as they resist most damage and field a variety of rather nasty abilities and powerful attacks. Their dwellings are always on water sectors, to potentially include lakes otherwise surrounded by land, making them a challenge to clear and cut off their otherwise endless waves of reinforcements.
• Disc-One Nuke: Tech rushing is this in essence. If you focus heavily on research early on, play your cards right, and/or get lucky enough with research pickups and anomalies, you can potentially get T3 units researched and an elite barracks for producing them around roughly turn 20 or earlier, giving you an edge in unit and/or mod quality fairly early on. Though if you attempt this in multiplayer, you better hope to go unchecked or otherwise be prepared to defend against and survive a regular rush.
  • The Galactic Empire mode introduced as part of the free updates in the "Triceratops" patch is an alternate form of the regular singleplayer skirmish in which you have a persistent "empire" and pool of heroes that can level up and let you unlock more stuff to take that you otherwise wouldn't be able to in regular SP and MP gameplay. As you win scenarios and conquer planets in Empire mode, you gain experience and levels depending on your chosen starting race/tech and bonus objectives you've completed, at later levels, these give you "tech aptitude" in the respective races and techs, which means you will start with additional technologies unlocked from the get-go for the respective race or tech. At high enough levels, this can potentially mean starting with a T3 racial or weapon mod or T3 secret tech unit on turn 1.
• Game-Breaker: Several of the Tier IV weapons qualify.
  • Death's Gaze is the most absurd of the lot, and by a pretty significant margin: it's a secondary weapon that, once per battle, deals 20 psi damage to every enemy unit on the field. Stack enough damage bonuses and it's possible to One-Hit Kill entire armies. It has been nerfed since the patch that came with the Revelations DLC however, as it no longer hits all enemy units, just a large area-of-effect of a 4-hex radius.
  • Edge. Dear Sweet Lord Cthulhu, Edge. It's a melee weapon that can be found with some luck as soon as you can field a stack of around 1200 power to tackle the sites it can drop from. It's also completely and utterly overpowered in a lot of ways all at once:
    1.) Being a psi weapon, it ignores all armor. Being a melee weapon it ignores all shields. The only protection that works against it is psi resistance and it applies a stacking debuff that lowers psi resist.
    2.) Other psi weapons tend to have reduced base damage to compensate for their better penetration. Edge actually hits a fair bit harder than the average melee weapon.
    3.) Edge has lifedrain. Most life-draining weapons or traits in Planetfall heal a fairly low flat amount per hit. Edge heals the wielder 1:1 for every point of damage inflicted which is usually enough to heal a hero back to full from near death if all three attacks land.
    4.) It grants immunity to psionic status effects, which are among the things one might otherwise turn to in order to stop a killing machine like an Edge wielder.
    5.) Speaking of psionic status effects, it can be used to deliver these if you have access to either the psi research tree or a friendly Psi-Fish dwelling.
    It looks like a glowing purple blade of crystal or Hard Light, but it's so cheesy it would be better represented as a block of sharp cheddar. About the only thing it isn't an I-Win button against is flying targets.
  • While a tech instead of a weapon, Orbital Relays. At first glance, it's a little counter-intuitive, as you're giving up what could be a valuable sector for something that has no income at all. Give it an Orbital Logistics Base, however, and you'll get a massive boost to your colony's income from all of its other sectors: have a Production, Knowledge and Energy sector in a colony besides the relay, and the relay becomes all three at once. It's also invaluable for Domination-inclined players: build an orbital relay in a freshly-conquered colony, and put the other end near a Production-focused colony, and it will save all the hassle of running fresh recruits across the map to replace casualties of war, letting you continue your rampage.
  • The Vanguard has two cheap and reliable methods of bringing out artillery: a 3-point Strategic Operation and a mod for their Engineers that changes their turrets from machine guns to missiles. Add a P.U.G into the mix to reset their cooldowns and once-per-battle abilities and you'll have four or five missile batteries on your second turn, softening up foes when playing offense and trivializing defensive battles.
    • It gets even better if you're playing as Voidtech, as equipping your Engineers with Void Augments and Stasis Pocket Inducers ensures that not even stagger immune enemies are safe from being stripped of all their action points unless they are Ethereal or have been temporarily buffed with status effect immunity by a Synthesis Network Link.
    • The rest of the Vanguard's infantry (and ever since the "Triceratops" patch, their Walkers too) can join in on the artillery fun as well by equipping Miniaturized Missile Arrays, which grant them a massive impact missile attack of their own while rendering themselves immune to stagger as well. Three stacks of Launcher Turret Engineers and MMA Walkers, though much more expensive than just Engineers, can bring forth a Macross Missile Massacre that would render even a Dvar player spamming Rocket Artillery jealous.
  • Fatalism... just... Fatalism. Fatalism is one of the signature Luck Manipulation Mechanic debuffs of the Oathbound which makes an affected unit 100% easier to hit and guarantees even the lowest status effect checks on it. Due to how absurd such an effect is, you'd think it was a late game ability with a not-too-high chance of successfully applying- haha no. Oathbound can easily get it within the first few strategic urns of a game via their T2 Augur unit which only requires a specialist barracks to build, and it can apply it to a single target at range 9 (basically sniper/artillery range) for two combat turns without having to pass a resistance check, and later their T3 support unit the Diviner can apply it in a 1-hex AoE, but luckily, only for one turn. Either way, depending on what else the Oathbound are bringing along with their Fatalism Seers, anyone on the receiving end of their curses is inevitably going to have their precious T3/T4 units and heroes stunned, mind controlled, hacked, panicked, driven to insanity, or worst of all: instantly killed, and the Oathbound don't even need to delve into Voidtech or research Syndicate operations to perform the latter, as they have not one, but two operations from their racial and Entropy weapon techs respectively, one which kills a single target, and another which applies it in a freaking 2-hex radius.
    • Fortunately (or unfortunately if you are the one playing Oathbound), Fatalism underwent a nerf which exempts instant kill checks from its effect, and one of the two instant kill operations exclusive to Oathbound only affects Tier 1-3 units now. Though facing an Oathbound army with access to powerful crowd control and mind control effects such as those from Psynumbra and Celestian can still be a terrifying prospect.
  • Prior to recent nerfs, the Heritor's Drained unit used to be so powerful that it wasn't even worth it to use their possession ability that they gain at prime rank, as they used to gain +2 flat Entropy damage per rank which applied not only to their main attack, but any extra attacks they gained through mods, such as Psynumbra's Consuming Gaze (which would end up dealing both psionic and entropy damage that all ignored armour). Adding to this is the Empowered Drained mod, a mod that allowed Prime rank Drained to mind control T3 units but was used more for its secondary bonus instead which made it gain 20% instead of 10% damage per essence charge, further boosting the insane damage it gained from medals. Fortunately this was nerfed in the patch and hotfixes that came with and after Star Kings, as the Drained no longer gain bonus damage on ranks and Empowered Drained grants Resurgence (bringing the unit back to life after combat if its owner won) instead of damage.
  • Conquering more planets in the singleplayer-only Galactic Empire mode can allow you to get incredibly powerful starting commanders, start with late tier technologies, and mix and match particularly busted combos using more than one secret tech and/or units that are normally not buildable in regular gameplay, easily trivializing certain maps. But on harsher worlds with particularly nasty modifier combos, such as "no cosmite" plus "all spawners replaced with Voidbringers", your sheer advantages might be necessary for even letting you survive on them.
  • Basic T1 or T2 infantry from the Syndicate or Assembly with arc damage weapons and mods allowing their attacks to both jump between multiple enemies and stun them in the process are incredibly strong, being able to stunlock and cost-effectively demolish almost any opposition. The Syndicate can even ensure their otherwise squishy Indentured foot soldiers can get in at least two rounds of attacks by giving them a turn of invulnerability via their Overseer units.
• Goddamned Bats: Marauders can be this on Normal or Hardcore settings, as the removal of their accuracy penalty against players and the fact that they start spawning stronger units with mods sooner means that the standard militia infrastructure is no longer sufficient to deal with most of them in the mid-late game, forcing the player to invest more in patrolling stacks or more advanced militia.
  • Units with armour or shield melt can force most players into playing more conservatively and forcing their tougher units further back to conserve their protection. In sufficient numbers, they can easily become Demonic Spiders. The Kir'ko Engulfer is perhaps the most notorious example of this, as their secondary ability lets them project a Caustic Smoke cloud that strips armour in an AoE and further removes the armour of any unit walking through each tile in the cloud unless they have tactical hazard immunity.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • The Forgotten are terrifying ancient cyborgs that devour corpses like ghouls, and are an offshoot of a Scary Amoral Religion that is built around the practice of Vampiric Draining. One of their sidequests is a request to hunt down and destroy a party of Sex Bots, which they consider not only abhorrent to their faith, but a mockery of the very concept of love. When the quest is completed, the Forgotten have this to say:
    Some mock, saying it matters not. In such a declaration, they prove our point. It should matter. Cherish your biological bonds. You have proven that you are a friend to life.
• Low-Tier Scrappy:
  • Marine units of any stripe: while they are powerful for their research and production costs, unlike in other 4X games like Civilization, marine unites in Planetfall have no way of engaging units on land for powerful ranged strikes and likewise cannot attack cities. Their only claims to fame, therefore, are attacking (or defending) aquatic exploitation sectors and intercepting enemy units trying to cross the ocean...enemy units that could quite easily destroy the ships as unlike in Civilization embarked units can fight almost as well on water as land (with a few exceptions regarding certain abilities). Water-heavy planets do allow ships to shine a bit more, but that's specialized and still it's not nearly enough bang for your buck to make them truly viable over other things your cities could be producing. This is further exacerbated when playing as the Shakarn, as every single land unit in their racial roster and even their own variant of Secret Tech infantry units (such as the Promethean Purifier or Psynumbra Malictor) are all amphibious, practically killing all reason for the Shakarn to even build their one dedicated ship unit.
  • Xenoplague with either Vanguard or Dvar as your core race. Xenoplague is a class built around biological units and melee combat, while Vanguard and Dvar emphasize mechanical units and fighting at range (particularly Vanguard, which entirely lacks native melee fighters beyond summons). Most of Xenoplague's unit mods have since been patched to no longer be exclusive to biological units, but the bulk of Vanguard and Dvar mods remain incompatible with Xenoplague units due to being animals rather than infantry/cyborgs/mechanicals.
• That One Level:
  • Xenoplague Labs, a silver-rank landmark, is very well defended, featuring an army with two Plague Lords (a powerful long-ranged unit that is neither slow nor weak in melee) and a field effect that makes your army take high amount of biochemical damage every few turns and rigs their corpses to violently explode. It's very difficult to clear it without losses, even compared to some gold landmarks, and the reward for controlling it for non-Xenoplague commanders not being particularly good (a minor health bonus for biological units), means quite a few players choose to not bother.
  • The second mission of the Dvar campaign forces Xenoplague as the choice of secret tech. Xenoplague offers strong bonuses to biological units — unfortunately, the Dvar faction is almost entirely mechanical (meaning they benefit little from Xenoplague until you unlock bio-spore mods), and its few biological units are not particularly melee-capable, meaning they are a poor fit to spread the plague. This is exacerbated by the planet itself being poor in resources, while two other factions are already at war with you.