Then in AoW2, most spellcasting was restricted to the Wizard, a completely fucktarded decision.

They could've made units able to use the Spellcasting ability but they just didn't. In AoW1 you can have heroes running around completely alone anywhere on the map casting spells independently. In Master of Magic even some units had spellcasting. It's things like the shitbad garbage restrictions on spellcasting that are unfixable by modders (unless?). No repulsion of incline, merely a more polished form of decline. But this attitude suggests the game as a whole is creatively bankrupt, and will be nothing more than an upgraded AoW3. Modders will unironically fix race design since that's just assigning traits to units. Imagine reducing 'races' to arbitrarily recombined pairs of of Civ-esque bonuses. Is it really the case that the frogmen don't even have an immutable advantage on water? I don't know how one might best describe this approach to design. Race doesn't even exist as a mechanic if there's nothing immutable to it. Thought that maybe AoW4 would be good enough, albeit more of the same, to make up for the weak points. I was kind of hype about this game, never played aow3/planetfall because the gameplay mechanics weren't good enough to make up for utterly shitbad artstyle. Honourable mention to pre-patch AoW2's draconian heroes with their flying. So, the game in the series with most racial diversity is still the very first entry, with its Lizardmen ruling the waves. Sure not all of the combinations are effective or synergistic, but when you're playing single player against dumb bots, trying weird shit is more fun than using effective shit. Playing vanguard celestian would feel quite different from playing assembly celestian, but also playing vanguard celestian would differ from a vanguard promethean or voidtech because you'd use unique upgrades from those tech trees to modify your units. In PF there were a lot more differences between different races, but also non-trivial differences between the same race picking a different starting tech. But there was a lot of difference between a dreadnought and a sorcerer or a druid or a warlord.

In AoW3 there was next to 0 difference between picking, for example, human dreadnought or elf dreadnought or goblin dreadnought - past the initial part of the game all 3 would start spamming the dreadnought-specific units anyway and the only differences between these units would be the racial modifiers on the infantry units of the class.

Age of wonders 3 dreadnought units