Achievements: 6 new, 114 already there
The expansion adds 6 achievements. The base game has 114 tracked on Steam; its rarest sits at 1.1% of players and its most common at 71.7%.
The Silver Seas adds six achievements. Age of Wonders 4 itself has 114 tracked on Steam, and those 114 have global completion percentages attached, which makes them one of the few honest sources of difficulty data in the game: they tell you what players actually finish, not what the designers intended.
Steam's global percentages are not a skill measure: they count every owner, including everyone who played two hours and never returned.
The new ones, and what can be said about them
Six is the number Triumph published, and it is the number that appears in the expansion's feature list. The names and conditions are not part of the release material, so this page counts them rather than listing them. What can be said with confidence is where they sit: they are tied to the expansion's systems, which means the culture, the tomes, the captains and the ocean content.
If you are hunting them, the efficient route is to play one Mercantile run to completion with a Cartel or Barony subculture, take all four tomes across the campaign, and spend time with the Free Captains. That covers the most likely clusters without repeating content.
114 base-game achievements, by the numbers
| Band | How many achievements | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 50% or more | 6 | The opening hours: finish the tutorial, found a city, win a fight |
| 20% to 49% | 25 | A normal first campaign |
| 10% to 19% | 26 | Needs a deliberate run or a second campaign |
| 5% to 9% | 30 | Specialist play: specific tomes, specific victories |
| Under 5% | 27 | The long tail: hardest difficulties and obscure conditions |
The spread is wide and the bottom is deep. The most common achievement sits at 71.7% of players, the median is around 11%, and the rarest is 1.1%. That last figure is not unusual for a strategy game with a long campaign and multiple victory conditions: most players never finish a run on the hardest settings, and the achievements that require it are held by a fraction of a fraction.
Why the completion curve looks like this
Age of Wonders 4 has three things that push completion down. It has long campaigns, so a single achievement can require twenty hours. It has many mutually exclusive choices — culture, tomes, ruler type, so one run cannot cover everything. And it has difficulty settings that gate the hardest achievements behind a mode most players never touch.
The result is a game where the "average" achievement is completed by about one player in nine, and where the top 6 achievements are essentially a tutorial completion list. If you have finished one campaign, you are already in a minority.
How to hunt efficiently
- Play the tutorial and one full campaign first. Six achievements are effectively free, and another twenty-five come from normal play.
- Pick a victory condition and commit. Most of the 10–19% band is "win with X" or "build Y", and spreading across three partial runs gets you none of them.
- Use the expansion's systems for the new six. A Mercantile run with all four tomes touches most of the new content in one campaign.
- Do not chase the sub-5% band until you have a build you can win with. Those achievements assume you can already beat the game on a hard setting.
Reading the numbers
They do not tell you how hard an achievement is, only how many people have it. A 1.1% achievement might be genuinely difficult or simply obscure, a condition nobody notices. A 30% achievement might be easy but tied to a culture most players never pick.
They also do not update in real time. Steam's percentages lag, and a new expansion's achievements will show inflated numbers in the first weeks because the only people who own it are the ones who bought it on day one.
The Manta update page covers the free changes that affect existing achievements, and the Mercantile culture is the run that covers the new six most efficiently.
The realistic completion plan
If you want the base game's 114 and the expansion's six without turning the game into a job, the efficient sequence is:
- One tutorial-complete campaign on normal difficulty, which clears the six easiest achievements and most of the 20–49% band.
- One Mercantile campaign with all four tomes, which touches the expansion's systems and most of its six.
- One dedicated difficulty run with a build you already know works, for the achievements gated behind hard settings.
- Cleanup runs for the specific-victory conditions, using the shortest map settings available.
Trying to do all of it in one run does not work, because several achievements are mutually exclusive by design — you cannot win with two different cultures in the same campaign.
Reading the percentages honestly
A 1.1% achievement is not proof of difficulty. It is proof that few people meet the condition, which can mean hard, obscure, or simply tied to a mode most players never open. The useful signal is the shape of the curve: a game where the median achievement is around 11% is a game most people do not finish, and that is normal for a long 4X campaign.
The percentages also shift after a free weekend, because a flood of new owners who play for two hours dilutes every completion rate. If the numbers look lower than you remember, that is why.
