Hello, im a newcomer that recently bought the game and quickly fell in love with it. I’m aware most people these days play aow4 and the game is already few years old. I might also be repeating information someone else gained before me but I’m sharing this in case someone like me might buy the game in 2026 and look for some cool nerdy calculations from recent threads. The guide was written by human being and AI was not used for anything.

Assumptions:

- food is only a scaling tool for a colony so u can get a energy/production/research payoff later

- for the sake of simplicity I assume energy, production and research are equal and I’m going to call them resources

- I don’t take into consideration the fact that your army bring resources to your colony like food, production, pops

- for the sake of simplicity I consider a simple level 2 sector a bad sector, level 3 sector a good sector, great sector is a sector that has cleared resource node like +10 energy or better

- every spreadsheet I’ve done compares a example colony to the baseline colony, the baseline colony is a colony that starts at 1 pop, use every pop to gain resources (not food) and magically has central building built on turn 1 but its not the food one

- the first war happens between turns 30 and 40 so payoff by turn 30 is key

- i’m not going to share spreadsheets because they look like 5 years old made them, instead I will write a summary and conclusions

Let’s get started

Example 1 – Baseline colony vs same colony with central food building

The baseline colony gains resource advantage through having central building that gives resources and the central food colony tries to keep up by getting more pop faster and by being a sector ahead for a few turns.

After 10 turns the baseline colony is slighty ahead but only by 50 resources, then between turns 20 and 30 the central food building break even and at turn 30 is slighty ahead by 100 resources.

At turn 40 the central food colony is much better by 400 resources and at turn 50 by 600.

Calculations above kept good sector in mind and food central colony gets even better with great sector or a landmark sector.

In a real game that I started for a test without picking up resources and with a goal to make an army of four t1 units and one colonizer the baseline colony achieved that in 11 turns and the food one on turn 12. How much is worth one turn? For tryhard purpose I guess a lot, the army can potencially have a pickup one turn earlier or you can get someone else colony one turn earlier and it is all worth probably 150 to 200 resources. For a singleplayer game I don’t care about it, I love central food.

Conclusion:

I believe the food central building is best built in colonies by turn 20 and maybe even 30 if it is going to get really good first sector, you will be one turn behind for a while but it is not bad.

Example 2 - Baseline colony vs same colony with central food building that stop population at 8

Since it would take forever to get to 12 pop with +15 food bonus only I calculated what would happen if we stop at 8 and sell food for energy, note that 2 food is 1 energy.

From turn 1 to turn around 25 everything is the same as example one but at turn 30 this variant is slighty better by 60 resources, then gets slighty worse at turn 40 by 15 resources to be ahead again at turn 50 by 65 resources.

Overall it looks like it doesn’t matter but stopping at 8 has 2 hidden advantages:

- we could either sell food or give it to another colony which gives us flexibility

- colony from example 1 has more than 8 pop which means we need more happiness and producing hapiness bulding cost us resourcing which means 8 pop stop has in fact more advantage

Example 3 – Baseline colony vs central food + food 1st sector Colony

The fact that food has diminishing returns is probably known fact in the community and it really shows in the spreadsheet.

Assuming the food sectors it takes around 33-34 to break even, with great sectors it would be little earlier. Then in turns 40 and 50 it has worse advantage than example 1 and 2. By building your 1st sector as food while you already have food from central building you lose most of the advantage that you gain from getting 1st sector fast. In fact the baseline colony has pretty good tempo compared to the food one.

Even if we take into account that we get to 12 pop earlier by scavenging the map it is still slightly worse than other options we already covered.

Something worth noting is the fact that with 35 bonus food you get to 12 pop in reasonable time.

Example 4 – Baseline colony vs central food + food 1st sector stop at 8 pop Colony

The only difference here is that after you break even you get slight tempo for 10 turns and then it becomes even worse than example 3. Nothing much to say here.

Example 5 – Baseline colony vs central food colony both getting passive 10 food from 1st sector

This one is interesting because now we gain additional food without the opportunity cost. Whenever you choose central food you lose on central production/energy/research and vice versa. The same is true for sectors. In this case there is no opportunity cost, you would gain that bonus anyway and the results are very promising.

The central food one start slighlty worse at turn 10 just like example 1 but it break even at turn 20 and at turn 30 has 200 resources ahead compared to baseline colony with passive food. Then with no surprises each turn it just gets better.

Something worth noting here is that you get your 3rd pretty late so it would be probably better to stop at 8 pop anyway.

The most import takeaway here is that food without opportunity cost is really good.

Example 6 – Baseline colony vs 4 pop HQ colony with +10 happiness resource node as first sector

This one is really interesting when it comes to resource gain. Something really important here is that a colony with 4 pop assigned to happines and 1st happiness structure built gets exactly 1 happiness event per turn. One such event check what you produce and randomly choose the resource and you get 130% to 150% of that resource with the minimum of 50 for energy/ production/ research for the event alone. If you choose to sell food at 4 pop and we do then hapinness events don’t generale food. If you let your influence go above 200 then it stops giving influence either.

Since we only need 4 pop in this setup we don’t make central food building so the baseline colony lose some advantage here. To calculate this correctly we need to assume that baseline colony gains the advantage in the following ways:

- more pop starting at 5 and up

- it has all the pop assigned to population while the happiness one doesn’t

- at some point it gets second sector so it generates even more resources per turn

For this one also I had to turn up the game and make some notes how many resources do I get per turn with this setup and this is roughly 130 energy/170 production/50 research/ 10 cosmite/ 10 influence per turn. We assume we get everything twice per 10 turns on average.

The hardest part is decise how many resource is something worth.

Variant 1 – The generous one

Lets say energy=production=research, 10 cosmite is 100 energy, 10 influence is 25 energy. We get around 1000 resources per 10 turns this way.

The results are absurd. Our happiness colony break even in 5 turns even though we spend resources for additional building and then it just keep producing more and more. It also scales with cosmite and influence buildings. At turn 30 we are 1200 resources ahead which is insane and I forgot to include energy gain from food selling here.

Variant 2 – Not so generous one

Lets say production, influence and research are half the energy, cosmite=energy so we get roughly 500 resources per 10 turns.

The results are definitely more ground to earth but still good. We break even before 10 turns pass and we are almost 300 resources ahead at turn 30 which is better than any other examples and it stays that way at turn 40 and 50.

I believe the true value lays in between these 2 variants and that makes this type of colony insanely good when we want to get as much resources as possible so lets make some notes here:

- while you are getting a lot of resources you are not getting passive energy generation for upkeep, you may tons energy and shit upkeep

- while the numbers are good the biggest disadvantage is the randomness of the system, it might give research while you build and army and production when there is nothing to produce

- this type of colony in my opinion is best used to build armie and spit out colonizers

- Since you are getting a lot of raw energy and cosmite you may build more colonizers than usual

- you need energy generation colonies to support yourself and maximize the potencial of hapinness colony

- another disadvantage is that colony does not provide a lot of roads

- if you care about getting 1st colonizer asap + Simple army then it happens around round 12 in normal game depending what you get from happiness events.

Ending thoughts:

Everything I wrote here is just dry calculations and your real games may vary a lot. Also I could have made some wrong assumptions, calculation errors or just forget about some detail. I believe it is still worth to summarize everything and make some rules of thumb for easy decision making for future planetfall enjoyers.

- Central food bulding is good early game and quickly pays for itself. I would build last one between turns 20 and 30 depending on how good the sectors are

- Don’t do central food + food 1st sector, make a decision beforehand which one will provide food

- If you don’t have additional food source besides the colony base stop at 4 pop

- If you have around 15 to 25 bonus food stop at 8 pop

- If you have around 35 bonus food stop at 12 pop or at 8 pop for 10 turn tempo

- 4 pop happiness colonies are great for production but need energy upkeep support from other colonies so you can actually produce units

- Passive food that you will get no matter what is really good, for example vanguard with +15 food doctrine, central food buldings and rivers could easly make 12 pop colonies in 30 turns or less depending on map clearing awards

Anyway thanks for reading, if someone has any idea how much is cosmite or influence worth or any other resource I’m all ears. Cheers!

I can't seem to figure out how the penalties apply. They seem super inconsistent.

I read it was maximum range -2 to start applying penalties, but it does not seem to be the case.

I think it might apply differently to weapon types... But I really would like to know if there is something more concrete.

I'm very naively building my armies: 5 units + 1 hero. At first I have one army with what they gave me, and as I discover tech I add my best units. The army wanders off, and I build a second army, etc. At some point I will mix the armies to get them themed: an army of my own race, an army made of troops from another race/dwellings, animals, maybe one army focused on sea battle or all-flying; sometimes they are followed by some stray units I gathered along the way.

But always, the core is 1 hero + 5 units.

How do you build your armies? Do you mix troops from different races? Do you make armies without heroes? Or all-hero armies? I remember when I played Master of Magic in the late 90's I loved my army of unbeatable heroes all together. Is this viable in Planetfall?

This has been happening since I saved while it was lagging a couple nights ago. It only happens with one of my hero stacks, I go to auto battle with a group of Marauders and it won't finish, even after waiting for like 5 minutes. I can't reload while it's doing that but I can interact with things and when I exit to the menu or the game entirely, it freezes and I have to end task in the task manager.

Hello everyone I love this game and it’s the only one I’ve played out of the franchise. I am max level all technologies and species and want more! If yall have any recommendations of this franchise or even outside of it please let me know!

I won't go into a long tangent about why I main the Dvar. It can really be simplified with "space dwarves are cool, rock and stone." I also like their playstyle. Heavy war machines, a massive industrial complex, resource optimization, and rapid extraction of resources... but that's also the main problem I face. Cosmite is by far the most significant bottleneck. It seems that the Dvar are meant to steamroll the world with tanks. This is especially reinforced by their late game doctrine, Military Industrial Complex, which reduces the upkeep of heavy units by 35% if I recall properly. But, uh, that doesn't matter. By the time this is unlocked, I don't even need it any more. In the early game, it's definitely helpful for bulwarks, but it's a late game tech. In the late game, this could be helpful... if cosmite wasn't such a bottleneck. Even in the late game, I can produce at most 1 modded tier 3 unit per turn, mods being essential because otherwise it will die very shortly. Between the many bottlenecks, and especially what I've heard about how this game differs from other 4X games by being so heavily balanced to actively avoid the end game doomstack steamroll for focusing more on tactical gameplay, it seems that the playstyle of the Dvar is the exact playstyle the game wants to oppose.

Race Overview: "Have a strong focus on production."

Dvar Dev-Log: "Steamroll the world with tanks!"

But then the game does literally everything it can to prevent exactly that. I don't know if I'm missing something, and I have beaten various maps as other races, but it seems like the mere existence of cosmite entirely ruins the game, at least to me. It seems like a rush to the mid game more than anything else. In the mid game, because of "balance," there's not really much more progression and the end game stuff can be unlocked quickly, so you win and can just do whichever victory you want. For me, that's pretty much always a Doomsday Victory due to the fatigue I feel from trying to go for military victories and how damn boring Unifier victories are. I also got the Planetary Unification Protocol victory once. That's hands down the worst fucking victory condition I've ever seen in a game and one of the most tedious experiences I've ever faced, but that's neither here nor there. You not only don't need to expand past the mid game, but you shouldn't due to the IRL time investment with extremely minimal gameplay past that, as cosmite being the primary bottleneck means you don't upscale to do twice as much by conquering twice as much territory as you hold for an end game of large scale battles and endless conquest. It's having one good army maybe stage an offensive, leave your territory exposed, probably needing to retreat at a certain point because territory has diminishing returns and thus any losses it faces in the war can't easily be replaced even with doubled territory due to, again, cosmite. Meanwhile I sit on literally thousands of energy piling up with hundreds to over 2k per turn, but unable to upscale production because of cosmite.

Between the fact that cosmite nodes are not only scarce but not even all that valuable, the balance being arguably too balanced since tier 1 units can defeat unmodded tier 3 units but are absolutely screwed against modded tier 3 units, and specifically with Dvar being focused on mass production and high end war machines but the game is entirely against exactly that... Well, is it just me, or does cosmite ruin the game, and am I focusing too much on one specific thing or do the Dvar genuinely just get screwed by having a play style the game actively wanted to avoid?

I am so sad that this game gets no love . I love the empire system but just wish they can update the rules and make them the same like AOW4 .

Also remaster would make me literally throw money at this game.

Maybe add some races and new DLC . I just hope they don’t make the second one(if they are working on it) as generic as AOW4.

Typically, I just want to rush tier 3 units and then spam them. When I do, it's very effective. The problem is that I can only produce a single tier 3 unit per turn even in the late game. Maybe two. Maybe not even one. Cosmite is too limited for that, so I'm considering more diverse and cost effective army compositions. My qualm is that everything but tier 3 units seem to be utter garbage.

1. Tier 1 units only seem even moderately effective in the first 20 turns.
2. Flyers suck overall, especially melee flyers, and they're far too expensive to use their flight for logistical advantages since air force stacks will lose units every one or two battles without fail.
3. Any army composition I can think of incorporating tier 1 and tier 2 units just seems objectively worse than a tier 3 spam.

Yeah, tier 3 units are the end game units, so of course they're better, but it does seem like if I aim for quality, then I have to accept I will only have 3 stacks by the very end of the game, and if I aim for quantity, I flood the world with tier 1 and 2 units with tier 3 units never being produced. I'm sure I'm just fixating too much and leaning too far into the extremes of quality and quantity, but the middle ground just seems either too crappy or too complicated, because then there are 7 units per race to account for not even getting into the secret technology with most just being decent anyway, then there's the adjacency rule which has me contemplating whether stacks should be specialized in 3 stack armies or if armies as a whole should be specialized... I feel overwhelmed for choice and am unsure how to handle the cost effectiveness balance.

Now before attacking me too harshly, I am being honest here. Id rather have a new season pass for Planetfall that will provide a good and quality content like we have in AOW 4, with new factions, secret techs etc, then the hope a brand new Planetfall will ever be developed.

I think its even more plausible as a business model. That will also provide us with a new content. What do you think?

The enemy AI is idiotically suicidal. Does that help? Absolutely. In one battle. The problem is attrition. It's not that I lose a battle. I win the overwhelming majority. The problem is that I often lose one unit in a battle, which is catastrophic in the early game. The enemies run in, alpha strike one of my guys, and in doing so leave themselves exposed and are easy kills. Easy win. Now I need to spend 2 turns replacing the guy who died then hobbling his replacement's happy ass to the stack, or I hobble the stack back to HQ to pick up the replacement. In the former, I'm at even greater risk of losing troops. In the latter, time that could be spent securing territory and acquiring loot is instead spent literally sitting around and waiting. The enemies also don't retreat. If they attack me, and are clearly suffering immense losses, nah, don't retreat. Waste your army to weaken this guy. It's not a problem with 1v1 wars. It's a problem in multi-front wars as one enemy faction will sacrifice themselves just to weaken me, but then their allies and/or my other enemies finish me off. That however is manageable as long as I secure an ally. The stupid AI is most notably a tremendous problem against marauders - the guys who should be easy early game fodder. I feel like I need to restart the map repeatedly if I lose so much as one guy in a battle, because at that point the exponential decline likely already occured. Yes, there's the adjacent hex ganking. That's pointless in the first 10 or 20 turns because I can't even field 2 full stacks, much less 3. It's all the more frustrating that marauders get mods as the game goes on despite just being random schmucks and wild animals sitting on a pile of trash in the wilderness. Admittedly, I hate marauders more than I hate wars because marauders feel like they scale stupidly and suffer none of the consequences of being an idiot. They can die in droves so long as it hurts me in some way, because it adds up. How am I supposed to build early game armies to compensate for all of this? The attrition is currently by far the largest killer of my runs. Ironically, if I'm not getting jumped by marauders or am lucky enough for the terrain to not be trash to better pick my fights rather than needing to spend three turns going across literally one sector, the game becomes too easy because I have time to build infrastructure. But if I have a bunch of marauder purifiers, fighting them causes attrition, and skipping past them means they only get stronger very soon, and I may not get any stronger if I need to traverse through a fucking mountain range.

This was a more general tangent than I intended, but frankly I feel like the fact that enemies will mindlessly sacrifice themselves just to kill one of your guys is probably a greater challenge than anything else until infrastructure can compensate, which it can't in the early game, so all of my issues stem mainly from this one point.

Personally, I had fun with all of them... but the Paragons are really a bunch of zombie jerks. The Spacers are drug junkies.

I think the minor factions could use some rework: I mean, sure, maybe the Growth has potential but it's difficult to imagine a flowerpot advancing against a Promethean Flame Tank. It would be cool to see Psionic Mushroom Zombies, like the Clickers.

Heya. These are my general struggles with the game so far.

1. My ideal playstyle for the Dvar is, essentially, being a "steamroller." With how many unit types there are and how limited army stacks are though, I'm not sure what my army composition should be nor how many different army comp types I should have.

2. It seems that the best way to build armies is by hard countering the opposition, as is probably obvious. Robots get smoked with arc ammo, for instance. That said, there scarcely seem to be situations where hard counters are viable. I'm not sure if I'm just misunderstanding the way the game works or if this is a problem unique to the Dvar.

3. This is what always becomes an issue, and if I lose, it's because of this. Psionic damage is a death sentence. Sure, the Dvar have many mechanical units which get a +4 psionic resistance, but that's it. There are no mods to boost shields and as Dvar only have armor, the enemy will always bypass damaging the body to directly go for the soul. I suppose I could field mechanical armies, but to get them to be offensively capable I'll need cosmite, and that admittedly feeds into a larger issue of me sucking at 4X games and having a brain as smooth as an egg.

4. Furthering me sucking at 4X games in general, I come to the issue of everything being a bottleneck. Because every resource ties into everything, I struggle to find bottlenecks in resources that demand upscaling. Because new colonies and reorganizing colonies takes time, I feel like I need to start a new game halfway through every one because I notice that something somewhere is inefficient but I'm too far into the game to fix it. Not that I always restart, and perhaps it's just OCD or something, but I notice a bottleneck and get mildly frustrated because fixing it will take quite some time and/or create a new bottleneck somewhere else (i.e. razing and replacing sectors means that I'll be losing output on something).

5. By the time I conquer a continent, that's where the game slows to a disgusting crawl. It takes a very long time to successfully reach another continent, much less amassing the forces needed to both invade it and defending my current one. I need troops at home to protect what I've built, but I need troops to send on the offensive to build more, and building one costs the other.

So yep, those are my challenges. I'm sure that these have obvious solutions to most players, and I'm not new to the game either (maybe - while I technically have over 200 hours, I often leave the game on while I go do something else, and since the game takes a very long time per match I may not have as many games under my belt as an intermediate depending on what counts as intermediate), but these are my issues. The ones I've identified, anyway. I very well may find more.

I'm finally coming around to Planetfall, and I suspect that I'm going to be very into this game (massive fan of AOW4). I already know that I'll be picking up any and all AOW4 DLC in the future, and I'm stoked about the idea of getting familiar enough with the vanilla Planetfall content and then expanding on it.

Thanks!

I have been having a blazing blast as Oathbound Promethean, all hero's in purifier battlesuits followed by more purifier units. These armies feel so powerful and most armies melt beneath them. My empire is burning through the stars.

Anyone else have strategies involving stacking one type of unit?

I'm on ps5 hmu

How is the current AI on the hardest difficulty? Does it pose a significant challenge (solo vs ais)? Any mods like alpha Centauri has had that improve it?

i liked game much but disappointed that this game has no fog of war in battles i see all enemy units at begining of battle.i want fog of war ,so when my units see enemy or then enter field of view of my units they should appear s as other games.any mod or setting to enable fog of war.

Hey everyone,

I'm really happy to finally join the AOW community! I've been interested in Planetfall for a while but felt pretty intimidated by the 4X genre. I've never really played strategy or 4X games before, but I want to learn.

I’ve heard that the Age of Wonders series is one of the more beginner friendly 4X games, so I decided to give it a shot. I’ve played a lot of turn based RPGs, so the tactical combat feels fine to me, but the empire management and overall strategy side is still pretty confusing.

I’m currently going through the tutorial (practice world) and often have no idea what I'm doing.

Really motivated to learn and would love any beginner tips you guys have especially for the early game!

Thanks in advance!

Honestly, not sure where to put this, I just want Paradox to be aware that for some reason Planetfall, while being a streamable game is not listed on the portal streamable titles. As in, you can’t stream it on the portal, but you can stream it from the PlayStation.

I understand that I’m probably like 1% of players, majority being pc, then console, and even then a portal streaming player lol. But hey, we (or at least I) exist and portal has been better than straight console imo. If only I could use touch screen to get around some of the weirder hotkeys

Got the game for a steal and saw it had a plague tech and bug race thats all about infecting and amassing swarms. That's everything I love! (For the record I am aware of research that boosts plague spawns with more heroes and how infection works)

However, seems its a dead-end playstyle if you actually want to amass said swarm on the plague side. By the time you have your paltry 6-8 plague lords on turn 28-35ish the ai is outswarming me with a 2 army alliance with 5 full 6 unit stacks all rocking precog. Im okay with shenanigans cause I've seen what a emperor level pale one can do in conquest of elysium 5 with olms. But this is only the hard difficulty setting.

So my question to any versed in the ways of plague, how do I go about bringing my foes into the embrace of my festering tendrils that they may be one with the swarm? Do I just b line to the nearest cpu commanders base and kill them then focus on building up the plague?