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Every city inAge of Wonders 4comes with a pile of statistics. There are local figures like food, production, and draft,and global figures like gold, mana, and research. Most of these stats appear as numbers in the city’s menu when players select it, but there’s one essential stat that shows up as an image instead: city stability.
Stability is a number between 100 and -100, and players can check where a city’s at by hovering over the mask to the right of the city’s race and fortification health. The mask is white when it’s neutral, green and happy when it’s good, and red and angry when it’s bad. Keeping each city’s population happy is essential if players ofAge of Wonders 4want to avoid production penalties or even the loss of their provinces.
80 to 100
+15 percent Food, Production, and Draft income
40 to 79
+10 percent Food, Production, and Draft income
10 to 39
+5 percent Food Production, and Draft income
-9 to 9
-10 to -39
-10 percent to all city income
-40 to -79
-20 percent to all city income
Rioting
-80 to -100
-50 percent to all city income, each turn carries a chance that a province will defect
Something else stability does is produce random events. A positive stability will generate good random events where players can choose from several rewards, while a negative stability will generate bad random events where players must choose between several penalties. However, one penalty is often to punish riots and unrest and become more evil, which is something that an evil empire should have no problem doing.
Gaining and Losing Stability
Every city starts with +10 stability thanks to the starting Town Hall 1 structure, butevery basic province improvement (and most special province improvements)adds -5 stability. This means cities will gradually become more unstable the more they expand. Fortunately, there are ways to address this problem.
Most government types offer access to buildings that boost city stability.The Tavern adds +20 stability to a city, and it unlocks after players build the Town Hall 2. The Bathhouse adds +40 stability, and players get access to it as soon as they finish building the Tavern. Most government types also have special buildings that can boost stability, and Town Hall 3 gives +2 stability for each population. That alone goes a long way to reducing the impact of expansion.
Another way to change stability (both up and down) is with empire skills and spells. For instance, the Consolidated Industry skill on the Materium tree gives every province improvement +1 stability for every adjacent province improvement of the same type. This means a farm surrounded by 5 other farms will add a total of +10 stability: 5 for itself, and 5 among all the neighboring farms. The Nature tree also has a stability skill, anda basic Astral spell will reduce a city’s stabilityby 10 but add 10 research.
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Stability and Dark Cultures
There’s one faction type that doesn’t have to worry about the stability mechanic the same way as the others: Dark.A race with the Dark governmentdoesn’t get access to the Tavern or Bathhouse structures, but it does get access to buildings that negate all the normal penalties for having negative stability. It also gets several structures that will lower stability even further.
The first one is almost automatic: as a special Town Hall 2 bonus, Dark cities don’t take any penalties for low stability. After that, players can build the special Overlord’s Tower structure. This adds +10 draft, +10 mana, and it prevents provinces from breaking away from the city’s control. Players will still see low-stability random events, but then players who use the Dark government will likely beplaying an evil ruler anyway.
Age of Wonders 4is available now on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.
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