Tome Tier List - Age of Wonders 4 - PotatoMcWhiskey
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- Опубликовано: 28 сен 2024
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Age of Wonders 4 is a new magic based 4x game that has some elements of civilization as well as Master of Magic.
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![[Brutal] What happens when the good guys are bad? A whole lot of Evil. - Ep.1](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/xpQpQDFDlyE/mqdefault.jpg)
Empire tree ranking - 2:03
Evocation - 3:12
Warding - 5:10
Horde - 7:35
Pyromancy - 10:09
Enchantment - 11:27
Rock - 13:11
Roots - 14:30
Beasts - 15:42
Faith - 18:12
Zeal - 20:13
Cryomancy - 21:37
Souls - 23:09
Amplification - 24:18
Scrying - 26:08
Revelry - 27:46
Mayhem 29:29
Artificing - 31:02
Winds - 33:03
Glades - 34:02
Fertility - 36:09
Inquisition - 37:15
Beacon - 38:36
Necromancy - 40:48
Doomherald - 42:13
Summoning - 42:57
Teleportation - 44:18
Pandemonium - 46:47
Devastation - 48:25
Vigor - 51:17
Cycles - 53:02
Sanctuary - 54:59
Subjugation - 56:42
Great Transformation - 58:00
Cold Dark - 59:43
Terramancy - 1:00:50
Transmutation - 1:02:11
Astral Mirror - 1:03:23
Astral Convergence - 1:05:17
Chaos Channeling - 1:06:48
Demon Gate - 1:08:17
Golden Realm - 1:09:39
Crucible - 1:11:05
Paradise - 1:12:33
Nature's Wrath - 1:14:43
Supremacy - 1:17:05
Exaltation - 1:17:51
Reaper - 1:19:58
Oblivion - 1:20:25
Arch Mage - 1:21:03
Chaos Lord - 1:22:26
Creator - 1:23:18
Goddess of Nature - 1:24:23
God Emperor - 1:25:08
Eternal Lord - 1:26:14
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I love how this game essentially went down the route of “literally almost every build is broken, therefore it is balanced”
Like every other sprawling 4x, because those can't be balanced without being utterly boring and pointless.
Too bad that also means none of them offer any challenge once you invest more than 2 braincells, no matter the buffs you give the AI, because you can outscale any fixed value.
Kinda like Heroes of Might and Magic. The challenge is picking the right OP build for the occasion. And having the micro skill to pull it off I guess.
Very much inline with original Master Of Magic (the Tomes idea comes right from there).
Can't be accused of being a cheater if everybody cheats
It's "Age of Wonders" not "Age of Totally Reasonable Things"
I think the idea with the Tome of the Archmage teleport hero spell is that you blink somewhere, conjure an army out of your ass, then sneak attack something. Since you can queue up ready spells to cast another turn, you can just blink, dump a ton of spells on something, then peace out.
Plus with spells like Astral Reflection you can basically spawn a very dangerous army behind enemy lines. It was pretty invaluable to me in a massive FFA map where I struggled from the start. Saved me when someone tried for magic victory before I could across a massive map. Sure ideally you avoid situations like these but it would've been an impossible recovery without it.
If your Hero is set up correctly they can even be a force to be reckoned with by themselves. I'm imagining summon ability shenanigans in particular. A hero with both summoning signature abilities and weaver can pump out 4 tier 3 units. And then you just need the spellcasting to back it up.
@@NorthernDruid Yeah, my first win was this. Lone casting hero with elemental summon and channel refresh. Turn 1 summon elemental, astral reflections, refresh, astral reflections. Turn 2 astral reflections. Turn 3 nuke an entire army of T1's with my 7 hero spell aoes. Turn 4, cleanup with op hero spell damage and self heal buffs. My main hero was kept well away from the fight just in case I needed more reflections.
@@8684LYFE Actually if you get a unit somewhere near a town you can completely destroy the town with astral shatterings in short order. It is a very questionable spell. You spawn a 1500 stack of units, kill a pop and destroy an improvement just for having vision, can easily cast it twice in the late game, and since every seed that gets built gets revealed to you with full vision of the province you can destroy each one instantly as they are built if you are at war. You can also easily reduce the cost of the astral damaging spells to wipe out sieging armies later which is just absurd. You can easily get about 20 casts of fulmination per turn so I actually dont know how you can lose.
IMO early and mid Astral is in a tier of their own. In addition to enabling teleportation which is a must have, a lot of the Imperium improvements also increase research speed. This then allows you to pick up other tomes for increased Imperium tree access. This is why the Arcane Halfling playthrough went so smoothly while other Brutal games were much more brutal.
Also, if you get Mana Addict in the meta progression first, Astral WILL carry you. I agree, that is why the spellcasting arcane playthrough didn't look like Brutal difficulty at times.
@@guidohywuler9916 Astral is very strong, though personally I don't like Mana Addict, there are better traits out there, and the Artisans one Potato took is pretty much a hardmode challenge trait, if he took smth like Adept Settlers and went into 4-5 fast cities this would have been so much easier.
@@MANoob100 Could you elaborate further into full build ?
@@NhatAnhPhamDr nothing super special and you could do a bunch of variations, but for example go Mystic culture with Gifted Casters and Adept Settlers, tomes Roots + Evocation, you have some of the best t1 spells for control and damage, can found up to 4 cities very quickly. Prioritise the first nature upgrade to get 3 pop in new cities from the get go (go Roots first with your tomes), kill neutrals with OP Vines you cast at -40% mana cost from Soother and Gifted Casters. Further tomes can include Amplification, Teleportation, Astral Mirror on the Astral side of things, Glades, Vigor, Nature's Wrath on the Nature side, you can go either way for t5.
If you made up your mind about t5 you can splash some Shadow for Shadow Binding and Death Magic by trading some Astral or Nature tomes, though it doesn't go well with this build (if you can find a Shadow Adept hero that would be best). Alternative is to start as the Dark culture which would also solve any Stability problems from overextension, you'll mostly be missing out on the Soother to make your spells cheaper in this case.
Go for all the obvious food, research and mana improvements in the empire development once you've founded your first 4 cities (if you really want to be greedy grab the 5th one but I'd at least take some cheaper improvements like better farms and reduced tech costs first). You'll have a pretty insane eco, though most of your output is food, research and mana, so you really want summoned mana upkeep units actually. Kind of a standard fast expansion build, nothing crazy.
Both Champion or Wizard king work, though if you go Dark, Champion is out of the picture (and if you don't go dark, becomes more attractive, actually). I'd still roll Wizard king, you'll have tons of mana and you'll need casting points.
There's a lot of variations you can do by trying to lean in more into different aspects of the game by swapping around culture traits etc.
Late Astral is nuts as well. Astral Reflections allows for Baldur's Gate-era Simulacrum levels of cheese, except double. Have your Wizard King sit in the back and just cast Astral Reflections on her every (other) round, letting the reflections use Overchannel, Spur to Action, Weaver, etc.
loving the AoW4 content Potato
SAME
Couldn’t agree more! Obsessed with this game and this content!
Me too
Worth mentioning, 4 spells per cycle and new tomes every other cycle means that a tome only needs 2 excellent spells in order to be "worth it". That's why it's much better to have even a single game-changing spell in a tome than 5 pretty good ones.
Materium is great, most affinities are if you guide your choices well. Materium have Iron Golems, they are very OP, like seriously. And most enchantments are for defense and resistance, it comes a time where only specialized units can really damage Materium.
I found an AI that had 19 defense and 7 resistance on their tier 3 shield units, and all they used was Materium and a bit of Holy magic. It was a nightmare to fight, clearly the best alone in terms of just boosting stats for your armies.
@@elihill4476 play chaos with crit stack and t1 spam and support them. you shred stat stackers. All with crit and moral + for you and - for the enemies if possible. Hero slams for 60+ like a god spawn and even the small t1 get up to 20+ a hit (and up to three hits with 3ap).
by the way there are so many spells and ways to take buffs away. i recommend take at least on of those for youre main damage type (phys or magic).
i for one think the materium is one of the weakest. tried them several times but find them lacking - like to splash in a tome here and there, like for the siege stuff or +30% crit weapon enchant. depnds on what build i am using.
@@2fat4airborne44 I mean can’t you just use Aoe spells/abilities. A lot of which are in materium.
Yeah, I went a stat buffing build, early game defensive stats are massive dmg reduction and by late game I ended up with 86% less dmg taken from all sources, put that in with some healing spells and your units just don't die.
The thing about materium is that its major power spike is tied to steelfury chant.
Strongly disagree about Doomherald 42:13, morale damage can be really devastating and all of tome's spells are greatly synergized. It also pairs really well with dark culture's cheap shock T1s. You basically wait for enemy to come at you, cast despair on enemy blobs and start picking off "soft" units to get maximum morale penalties and trigger mass routs. Combine this with tome of the horde for extra T1 damage and you get the idea. I've had a tough fight where enemy ruler was nigh invinsible for my melee troops (first strike, regen, several retaliations and so on so forth) but it didn't matter, since after seeing 5 or 6 allied units being killed nearby she... routed.
Yeah, I had a full stack of banshees in a fight once, and got the enemies to rout after matybe 1-2 kills. Stacking negative morale is insane once you hit enough of it
The thing is, it can also end up being completely worthless if you fight something that do not care about morale, like Undead or Golems. Or you fight something that have an equal(or better) way of boosting morale. Tome of the Bac.. erh, Beacon, pretty much counters it directly.
It is generally much harder to debuff something, because it has to go through resistance to work. A buff is always effective.
It can be dominating, if you use world spells and other effects to stack morale debuffs, if the opponent has no counter to it, but the opportunity cost is that you could have used that mana to simply deal direct damage instead.
If he hasnt played with banshees yet then he also propably doesn't realize that their blink always leaves them with 1 action and the wail is one action. So you can full distance move, blink about the full distance as well, then hit the wail. It's just so much mobility to get that aoe in the perfect spot.
but thats can be true for literally every tome though is it not?
like is debuff tomes worthless now if your enemy is status resistant and has cleanse? or elemental tomes are bad when theres an enemy that are resistant to it
and by your logic, buffs are now bad since there a mass cleanse spell in the game
its not like morale could be countered easily, you still need the proper spells/units to fight them off.
this kind of logic is a bit flawed, specially when the tome has nice general applications, like bashees and the unique building.
while also using a mechanic that is not as specialized as elemental themed tomes and could be used by most builds. morale.
@@Banksy_Collective Yeah, I wanted to mention them as well but forgot. Like seriously what's the point of saying something's bad without actually trying it?
So I'm going to defend the city domain enchantments, particularly the late game ones real quick.
2 of the 3 win conditions in the game involve building provinces that will spawn hostile marauder stacks in your empire that *must* be dealt with in order to progress your wincon. These marauder stacks are no joke, containing 12+ units each and often coming with some pretty strong enchantments. Because your beacons/seeds must be built in your empire, they are by necessity in range for your city buff spells but are notably *outside* the cities proper, so you don't get all the nice things you normally get when defending sieges. Given that 2 wincons involve spawning powerful stacks on units in your territory that *must* be dealt with in order to actually finish the game, some of these stronger lategame enchantments like Cycle of Seasons look a bit better.
That's my only real critique of this analysis though. The rest of it looks solid.
14:34 There is super cool combo with living vines. Living vines count as death/kill for a few skills and abilities so it works with shadow's ability that gives "+5 combat casting points for every death/kill". Also you can get past maximum combat points with it.
Bro, this is some protip right there. I completely missed the combo. I guess thats why tier rankings this early can get sometimes so inacurate, because there are some bonkers combo yet to be found.
It also works with Keepers Mark, meaning if something wants to get rid of a vine, it will have to spend 2 turns doing so. Keepers Mark works on most summons actually, meaning a complete trash tier 1 summon can hold up a chokepoint for at least 2 turns.
Do the vines grant souls?
Do the vines grant souls?
I know it's the cliche "how dare you have an opinion different than mine" but there is no way Tome of Cryomancy is that low. It enables you to cheese some unwinnable early game battles with frozen and slow cheese to split up the enemy army. Works very well with a scout in the army to bait the enemy to split up
It's down to playstyle. He prefers to disable targets by outright killing them, and always brings enough units to guarantee victory, and doesn't care if he loses chaff. Cryomancy is strong if you DON'T have enough units to guarantee victory, need to somehow win against disproportionately stronger forces, and can't afford to lose a single unit.
It's kinda like the quality vs quantity debate, but with a lot more nuance.
Once the multiplayer connection issues get sorted out, it would be a lot of fun to put these theories to the test.
One thing you might have missed with tome of warding is how powerful the phantomsal soliders are, they gain race transformations and enchantments while being ethereal meaning they are immune to most status effects in the game.
Some spells are useful in ways that are not obvious. "Earth Shatter" is one of the best spells in the game: Besides giving your cities more space to expand to ex-mountains it enables one super unique thing - You can place teleporters deep inside other factions territory. Normally at some point all provinces have been claimed. But now you can flatten a mountain, put down an encampment and construct a teleporter. This give you insane access to parts of the map that are otherwise only accessible with impossibly long walks.
i wanna see potato use all the D tier tomes. Please make more aow4 content
Doomherald is a phenomenal tome, for evil builds you get a 19 mana and 19 research income conduit improvement, you get an exceptionally powerful army spell that applies morale penalties, you get a racial improvement that increases damage against low morale units massively, you get the banshee - one of the best battlemages in the game.
I'm definitely feeling a really weird bias against mana based economies and far too much of an economic focus vs a focus on synergistic builds or actual, real quality. Remember that you can only bring 18 units to a combat, it doesn't matter how many tier 1 units you have if your opponent can clear your full stack without taking noticeable losses. I will very much agree that nature is probably the strongest selection of tomes in the game, however.
Also, shadow affinity is extremely powerful, even if many of its tomes are rather lackluster - with a shadow affinity focus you can easily hit magic victory by before 50 (casting the spell, after which you become effectively invincible and just count down your remaining 15 turns). The amount of research you get from shadow affinity is massive and will always keep you first in that regard even over economically focused players.
I also very much get the impression that this tier list is oriented towards playing vs AI rather than playing against someone capable of human intelligence, tactics and map awareness
I have only played against the ai, this is a vs ai tier list
I would say that all of the Tomes are balanced. Some are definitely better than others by I don't think any are just straight bad. A big thing I ran into while playing is while a tome may individually not seem that good it has great synergy with other tomes that made it extremely powerful. Really it seems to come down to what build you are making. If you are focusing summons, melee, physical ranged or magical ranged makes a big difference in perspectives of what is good. Same with the imperium abilities. Also I was really surprised that Cryomancy was ranked so low as Frozen was super strong in my recent campaign.
Every tome is good because they always give you something. That doesn't mean they're balanced perfectly, and I don't think they ever could be. Anyone can make anything work, but the point of the video is this: all else being equal, Potato with your cold build vs. Potato with his chaos/nature build, he can win the game much quicker with the latter.
I think a strength of the tome system is that the research is tiered(lower tier means cheaper). If you are technically around tier 4 or 5 tomes, but suddenly in need of frost damage, you can quickly go through a few researched of Cryomancy, and you are back on track in no time.
The system allows for a lot of adaptability in the late game.
Cosmic overdrive is pretty great for an astral summoner build. With the capstone astral empire tree skill, and mana channelers, your lightning elementals will instantly evolve to tier 3 when you summon them. At tier 3 they're a shock unit that normally have 32 movement and an amazing phase skill. But just try escaping from them when they have 48 movement plus an amazing phase skill. Not to mention 30% extra damage. Good for your watchers too, and on that note, I'd probably rate the tome of scrying higher for any battlemage centric builds, because guided projectiles are an essential enchantment for battlemages.
The good thing about Terramancy isn't extra quarries, but the extra space you get for not placing them instead of other province upgrades.
With Artisan Wonder, cities can can reach 400 or more production. That may seem like a waste, until you realize how much gold that churns out when NOT producing buildings.
@@haakoflo What's the conversion in 4? In previous it was something like 25% of production or actually scaled of gold income itself and not production.
@@Washeek Once built up, industrial cities get +10% to the conversion, making it 35%. Let's say you have city with 3 wonders, it gives +60% production to quarries, meaning the gold production yield of quarries is base*1.6*0.35 = 0.56.
Now assume you have a quarry that borders 2 special provinces that grant +5 production from nearby quarries (Builder's Quarters, Central Quarry, Golem Mine) , it end up receiving 5+10=15 yield of production. (Assuming you don't use the Worker's Guild. The best use of this yield is to build buildings, but even when you have all the buildings you want, it gets turned into 8 gold.
That's more than a basic mine, and close to a mine with a Merchant's Guild.
With a Worker's guild, such quarries generate 10 gold when not producing buildings.
Obviously, the main reason to have quarries is to build buildings more quickly. Getting this much gold when not producing is just a very nice bonus.
The great thing about AoW 4 is that you can watch 10 different guides on tomes / affinities / playstyles and are nearly certain to get 10 vastly different opinions. The only constant seems to be that Tome of the Horde is incredibly powerful. 😂
12:39 for maximum range thingy. If you increase maximum range it will increase your general accuracy of range unit. For example, If unit has 4 range and hit enemy in 4 hex away you will get X accuracy but if your unit has 5 range and hitting 4 hex away enemy you will get X+@ accuracy. So range is important
I have only played one full game but I did it with a summon build.
The tome of warding worked really well because it has one of the best tier 1 summon unit which can get a race bonus and I was playing the dark culture so a tank in the early game helped.
Stave of warding worked well with the Nymhs and their healing ability.
Also, fertility tome works really well if you have the summon tradition (50% discount on summoning) and play dark.
The animate flora only cost 10 mana to cast (because the tradition also works on combat summon spells) allowing you to create a tier 2 unit every turn.
Blossom of life works well with the regain you get from cull the weak and Nymfs add to that ensuring you get 5 stacks of regain fast.
Phantasm Warrior is such an underrated unit. It is affected by some many things. It is tier 1. It is of your race. It is of Magical Origin. And a shield unit. You can stack so many cost reductions and bonus to recruitment rank on it, buff its health and damage. It is just crazy.
Figured it was worth a mention, I've been watching Civ content for a long time and I almost always check out the other games you have series on. While I like the other series, and I've bought quite a few to play through after watching them, AOW4 might be the only one out of them that has really sucked me in wanting to see more content. I'm kind of hoping the videos on it do well so I can see more of it.
There's multiple ways to increase you ranged accuracy(at least +60% that i know of) and so the +1 range is amazing. You're also completely underestimating the Tome of Cryomancy. I don't think you understand that frozen prevents the enemy from acting, which immediately makes it more powerful than other status effects and makes it the best elemental book. Saying there's no way to reliably freeze the enemy when there's 2 things that allow you to reliably freeze the enemy is an interesting oversight.
A nice strategy for all ranged lovers. If you take unicorn mounts, the ranged barbarian tier 2 unit becomes a mounted archer that can teleport and it will be buffed by mount effecting transformations. They are really fun to play
Tier lists are great for trying to do like impossible challenges and stuff so you can figure out the meta choices you need to make to survive. But I'm gonna make my shadow-frost elves that will convert the entire world into a freezing hellscape in the name of the Winter Queen, and there's nothing anyone can do to stop me!
I recently started playing this game and still feel a little lost at times, so I’m all for more of this content.
You recently started playing this game? You know, this game came out Recently...
What worked for me, is to do a highly thematic run. I played a game where I could only use Spiders and spider mounted units.
Yes, that means in the early game I could only use scouts and my hero! Knowing that, I chose Industrious as my culture, as crossbow scouts are the best at flanking. My racial traits were Spider Mounts (duh) and EXP, since my hero would need to carry the scouts, and I assume the EXP bonus applies to heroes.
I rushed my city to tier II, built the Nature tome province improvement that let me build spiders.
Spiders are animals, fighters, and non magic origin. Every time I picked a tome, I specifically looked for tomes that buffed those three unit types. I ignored battlemages, supports, archers, everything that wasn't a spider. This narrowed my focus, and let me find some really cool synergies.
In the process, I learned a lot about how to buff fighters, the power of hero support skills, and how OP spiders are. I also learned how strong nature tome animal buffs are.
For my next run, I think I'll focus on only two unit types instead of just one.
ngl in my experience tome of the doomherald is amazing in battle, the enemies all start routing so easily even when they outnumber you by far
Grab the Tome of Subjugation for the spell that converts routing units or kills them if they resist it.
agreed Tome of the Doomherald is easily a A tier, he just doesn't play dark much I guess, the tier 5 tome is also probably the easiest S tier in the game, you can pretty much go full night king and bring back your entire army instantly. It fits so well also with the way a lot of Dark units like to charge in.
Rn I'm in a game combining tomb of the hoard with necromancy stuff, I've got heaps of skeletons that do a bunch of damage and inflict moral penalties stealing morale
Hey quick thing i noticed that might affect how you see tome of enchantment. Copper Golems can evolve into Iron Golems by leveling up since you spoke so highly about them. It is a very easy mechaninc to miss since you can see it only on unit level thingy.
Love the new content as someone who also fell in love with this game
If you have Experienced Leader you'd be able to consistently turn big stacks of Copper Golems into Iron Golems, yeah? That might be an interesting way to play.
The gamplay was way deeper than i expected. Really looking forward to what they do next with this game
Tome of the Astral Mirror is a must take for me just for the Combat Spell "Summon Astral Reflections". The spell works on your HEROES! Obliterate your enemies with several copies of your hero in combat. It will summon two copies of your hero each time you cast. Quite fun! :D
Damn, that's crazy
You get the summoning spells on heroes and that just lets your summons summon. Turn a hero into a clown car of tier 3 elementals, animals and undead. Especially if they have Weaver to do it twice
Or cast it on a wizard king with overchannel and weaver to get 7 combat spells off in one turn
Its especially hilarious with the Tome of the Eternal Lord. Taking a nigh-invincible melee monster who just comes back if you kill him and making him into SEVERAL nigh invincible melee monsters who ALSO COME BACK WHEN YOU KILL THEM is the most broken thing imaginable.
@@theessenceofawesome1 Except that Astral Reflections are explicitly stated to NOT be able to summon any units of their own. Your hero has "Summon Undead' and "Summon Elemental" signature skills? Their Astral Reflections won't be able to use them.
Overchannel also can't be used two times in the same turn, as any testing with Weaver will tell you. Admittedly Astral Reflections CAN also overchannel, so you will be able to spit out more spells, but over the course of turns, not "7 combat spells off in one turn"
@@jonasfree2 Ha! Got to try that combo. Thx :D
Astral Reflections has insane scaling most notably with the ability that refresh a units actions and Weaver (refresh once per combat abilities) allowing each cast of Astral Reflections give the best unit in range 4 more actions and if done on a Wizard Ruler you can throw out more spells while doing it (assuming you have the mana and casting points to do so)
Also it works great with the mage ability that gives magic +80% damage until the end of the next turn which is so much better when the hero gets to act multiple times before the buff expires (as the copies can refresh the original heros actions)
The thing about some of the tier 1 units from tomes that’s skimmed over in the video and not being taken into account is the fact that some of those tier 1 not so special units can evolve to be tier 2/3 units that are better … I took copper golems and evolved them early game which gave me powerful tier 3 units fast and I’m sure the same can be said with others here .. depending on your build and how aggressively your units are getting into fights and their survivability it’s definitely worth mentioning that you’re not just getting a tier 1 unit like your culture has it holds more value cause not only do they start out slightly better than your original tier 1s but they have the ability to evolve which is what I think sets them apart they couldn’t give you overly powerful stuff out of the gate but they give you the option to earn powerful units out of the gate …
I did not know this! I thought I had reached the cusp of omniscience in this game and you drop that bombshell on me, holy crap
@@ThatGuyFromJamesBond yeah I’m not sure of every one of them but I know the lesser elementals all evolve to tier 3s, the copper golem evolves to iron golem, the piglets to goretusk pigs etc … if you hover over their rank e.g ‘recruit’ it’ll show the rewards for ranking up that unit usually some medals but for ones that evolve usually the second last rank I think it’s called ‘champion’ will show that they evolve into another unit and that unit then starts at recruit to rank up from there :) hope that was helpful
Can't help but feel you're underselling Tome of the Arch Mage's Astral Travel here. Sure, it's a tier 5 so the Tome ranking is immaterial -- if you can pick it, you will -- but it is definitely a transformative ability that cannot be otherwise replicated. Specifically, far as I know it's the only spell in the game that lets you move your entire army stack across the map in a couple turns by letting you place an outpost with a teleporter anywhere you want.
Arguably this is a "win harder" ability since it doesn't make you fight better, however that's often what you want in a T5 tome. It's also potentially one of the only ways you can stop a distant AI from winning, if you're ever in a situation where they build all 3 victory improvements; no idea how relevant that concern actually is at this point.
tldr: for non-Barbarians Astral Travel's ability to pop over and put an outpost with a teleporter down wherever you want lets you project power across the map in a way that you otherwise can't.
You are addicted but so am I! Thanks for showing me a great game.
Dude thank you for getting this out so fast, my friends and I are obsessed with this game. I’m so glad you put me onto this one!
this video is a great showcase on how good the game is. So many things he says is bad or underpowered or even the op stuff i would have to say is not 100% accurate in my opinion and thats great! i like that there is actually good diversity in this game so far with what people thing is strong/weak.
The wasp interrupting you was showing how op nature tomes and affinity are lol
Scry Enemy can be pretty good late game as an acrane based civ because if your enemy is sets up a heart it gives you global vision of it. Then you can use astral shattering to pillage their heart, and the army that it spawns can be scried. Then as it runs around you can keep using astral shattering to pillage more provinces and create more armies for your opponent to have to deal with.
Lots of people seem to disagree on your takes on some of the other affinities, but I'm with you on Chaos affinity. It's very strong, and fun to play too. And really nothing is better than the Horde tome for spamming out quick wins to grind out the Pantheon points.
true, early game horde is for early game aggression, otherwise it kinda sucks
@@tuskular I'm not sure I agree. Spawnkin is great throughout the game. And you're probably going to fight lots of marauders and infestations early on even if you're not going to immediately go conquer someone. Sure, things like Summon Irregulars and Blaze of the Horde fall off later, but I think Horde has enough going for it to make it worth it as a starting book.
Gotta say, reducing enemy moral in this game is really strong. With the Doomherald book alone you can turn a battle that the auto-battle has you nearly fully wipe into a causality free win. If you use the army spell before a battle and the tactical spell on at least 4 units all you need to do is kill about 2 enemies and the whole stack routes. Doomherald is ez a or s tier and you are sleeping on it. Good vid tho.
This my first video of yours, and I just wanted to say I love how fast you talk even though it’s a hour long video, you really go through the information well!
Have you played industrious for their casters/supports and spammed frontline copper/iron golems? I believe undying from the tier 5 book effects your golems.
I just did that, I was clearing out 10 stacks of units with 2 stacks of 2 steel shapers, and a frontline of golems. No losses or only losing copper golems. Take a transmuter if you have a melee hero, take another golem if you have a ranged/support hero.
It's absolutely insane. At one point I had iron golems with 18 armor. Staves of warding is insanely good gets your strength of steel healing for 80. With 2 steel shapers, that's 80 healing back to back on practically invulnerable targets. The heal + bolster defense basic spell synergizes so insanely well with them too.
I've never felt so COMPLETELY invulnerable in this game before.
I think people think the materium affinity line is bad unless you actually play industrious and use that +2k gold to skyrocket your cities early game with prospecting scouts. The upkeep skill at the end and healing for spare move points are also insanely good. I took the upkeep reduction skill on all my heroes and had an absurdly sized army for the amount of towns I had control over.
Not sure if you know this trick but it might up the book of astral mirror to S tier in your list, you can cast the astral duplicates spell on heroes including your wizard king and the copies can use the overchannel ability, allowing you to cast the spell again to summon more copies with the overchannel ability, again and again for as long as you have casting points, which you'll have a lot of because of the astral affinity perks.
I managed to make 10 copies of my king in a single turn at the start of the battle, plus the original for 11 wizard king going around fighting total.
46:17 I did find a nice way to use emergency teleportation: it's kinda a weaker version of displacement, if a unit gets pinned and you want to get it out the engagement without losing a move or suffering another hit, and you get some of the hp life you likely lost when your unit got pinned. Obviously in a battle mages based army it works perfect, you get out of pin and you bring down a full volley or make a run for it.
It has its limits, but it's neat
I agree on most of those, the only thing that stook out for me was the Tome of Warding being that low, in my eyes it's a solid B to A tier tome because of the Phantasm Warrior.
Something you, in my eyes, kinda overlooked about it is that it's an incredibly cheap Rank I Ethereal Shield unit of Magic Origin of YOUR race which makes them scale incredibly well into the later parts of the game as a transportable meat shield that is a massive nuisance for the enemy compared to their cost and upkeep, even if you keep going Astral with a little bit of Materium, you'll get two minor race transformations that will given them +2 to both of their defensive stats among other things. They easily can outperform Iron Golems depending on your unlocked tomes with Astral's Magic Origin buffs especially if the enemy is heavily magic oriented but without massive lightning damage.
For a comparison, in my game, my Phantasm Warriors take a 2G 8M upkeep for them and their buffs, have 7DEF and 6RES (except lightning where it's at 0) deal 13Lightning 6Physical per strike, have astral blood, is immune to immobilisations and freeze, can phase through obstacles while having very fast movement speed in both maps.
Meanwhile my Iron Golems cost me 17G 3M upkeep for them and their buffs, have 7DEF, 2RES (8 against plague but -2 against lightning), deal 12Physical 4 lightning per strike and are immune to morale effects and alterations but start with ~10 more HP.
They won't change the tide of the battle but they make for an incredible meat shield and archer/support/mage blocking unit the later in the game you are for astral, incredible cost for the amount of time they will force the enemy to spend on them while your ranged units do their job given that as soon as you hit 300 world map cast, you can generate a full army of them per turn to protect your ranged armies.
I love how you are aware of your biases and talk about them before going on to the tier list. It shows a good deal of self-knowledge and a desire for fairness. I can't tell you how rare that is.
Major respect to you, PotatoMcWhiskey.
There's actually an insane way to use mass recall if the map is big.
1. Use the astral walk to teleport your ruler anywhere on the map and build an outpost with teleporter.
2. Mass recall your stacks to home base (assuming you made your teleporter close)
3. Teleport all your stack in wherever place you built said teleporter outpost.
This will effectively make your army cover all parts of the map and will let you clear opponents with ruthless efficiency.
Chaos eaters make super easy work of clearing Horned God wonders and units. Since there's usually poison every 3rd turn and health absorption on the chaos eaters, you can literally consistently damage one turn, heal from 20% to full the next, and sustain for dozens of rounds. I was very happy to have them when I did.
Coincidentally, despite seeing high value in flameburst weapons, they actually _never proc_ for me. I've never once had an explosion from flameburst weapons in several campaigns. It's good for the 20% crit on its own, but idk why my flameburst has never worked.
And lol at the fact that apparently we're polar opposites for these chaos books, but devastator spheres are super handy imo. So many times enemies defending will put their ranged units beside a turret and several palisades, meaning free damage, usually instakill turret, & destruction of 2-3 walls to allow your units a good flanking maneuver
I'm trying to learn a bit how to use each tree by using only one type of book per game. It's not effective, but you learn some the more hidden combos and also the hidden weaknesses.
I did a spider themed run. I only used spiders. Hero riding a spider, spider scouts, spiders recruited from nature tome province improvement, etc. I tried Industrious T3 mounted shields, but it turns out spiders don't need shield support, and T3 units are expensive.
I chose every tome purely based on how much it buffed spiders. I looked for the keywords Animal, Fighter, and Non Magic Origin.
Then I found out that with enough EXP, T2 Spiders evolve into T4 Spider Matriarchs. Those things are expensive... but so, so powerful. Especially with nature tome buffs, hero support skills, etc.
Spiders have AOE physical damage and CC with web. They have mobility with jump. They have multiattack. They have poison. They qualify for an insane number of unit enchantments. The matriarchs are single model units. I went into my playthrough expecting a challenge, but I literally didn't need any non spider units.
42:15 Also if you use manual combat and then use automatic combat, Banshee really likes commiting suicide. It always jumps in the middle of multiple units and then dies
I carefully tracked all of the scores you gave for your books. 5 for "S", down to 1 point for a "D". Nature (40), Order (34), Astral (32), Chaos (28), Shadow (26), Materium (23). Chaos, with one "D" and three "C"'s was rated MUCH lower than your initial rating, especially with just two S, and NO "A" tomes.
Yes, but taking that first tier I Chaos book at the beginning will almost level up your chaos tree on its own. -30% upkeep, nuff said ;)
@@dr.paulwilliam7447 -30% upkeep, for tier 1 units. The unit that already has the lowest upkeep.
Meanwhile, Materium gets -10% upkeep for each rank(soldier, veteran, elite, champion, legendary) that a unit has.
@@fendelphi thank you for the correction!
@@dr.paulwilliam7447 Dont get me wrong. -30% upkeep for tier 1 is still good. Especially if you focus on a rush playstyle with a lot of cheap units.
It is just that it only really benefit a small amount of units.
I love how Potato can get me to watch so many hours about a game I’ve never heard of and won’t ever play😂
I am going to argue that tome of pandemonium should take a higher place. If you combine Chaos Eater ability with the arsenal of weakening spells from tome of souls, that unit brings literal destruction at the battlefield. The Tier 1 AOE curse which bestows 3 negative effects from tome of souls and that demon's ability are just enough to cause a massive damage. Weakening spell is one thing, but if you have battle mages infused with a variety of weakening abilities, just one shot from them will make chaos eater ability work like a wonder.
In my 100% research game I ended up wiping entire armies with Devouring Void. If you can position it properly and then either tempt enemies to move through it or hold them within its radius, it will melt stacks. Especially if it's affected by the Heart of Shadow, which I didn't have. One cast gives you three rounds of damage, plus damage for every square moved within the darkness, in a radius 1, 2, 3. It's only maybe 20 damage per hit, but it adds up.
I went pretty magic heavy in one of my games and that tome with the Warbreeds was available and they inherited Mana Addicts, so got life steal when I'd cast a spell - that was quite silly.
This tierlist is on point. I definitely agree with most of these! I really want the Cryomancy tome to be good… hopefully they buff it.
It makes sense that it's harder to put frozen on enemies instead of burning. Frozen itself is obviously a lot more powerful than burning.
I wanna give a shoutout to the teir III Shadow tome that gives ice stuff. Specifically the Snow Elemental. Its a T3 Magical Summon Skirmisher unit that is absolutely awesome for its ability to very easily apply freezes to enemies as well as their teleport(which also had a chance to freeze nearby enemies too), just finished a game going for an Icy/Lich King theme with an emphasis on ice magic, and I must say they were quite valuable, expecially for seiges and they played quite nicely with Banshees, who have a useful morale debuff but have to get close and are quite squishy themselves. Freezing the enemies around the Banshees allowed me to keep them alive for longer. Even without Banshees they are just a good defensive/support unit with nice utility that can fit anywhere you might need it.
Materium I would assume may be for consiteration if you are getting attacked a lot, as a lot of their tome abilities as well as their tree abilities benifit defending and attacking cities.
You can also pick up a hero trait that allows you to ride spiders. I did it in the same game listed above. It gives every calvary (or hero riding one) the web abilities of a Spider. Of course you are sacrificing a racial trait for this, but it was very helpful to have Dark Knights that can apply a slow.
Main use I can think of for Emergency teleport is to disengage and heal up ranged units that have got enemies that have got next to them (Like teleporting enemy abilities that bypass your front line tanks to go for your archers / mages)
But equally, you could just use a damage spell to try and deal with the enemy instead.
You missed a critical feature of the copper golem. If you level them, they evolve into iron golems, a tier 3 unit. If you take it as your initial tome you auto-get copper golem as your initial spell which means that as soon as you have the mana, you can summon them. A stack of several tier 3 units very early in the game that you paid tier 1 unit costs for can be quite useful.
First spell isn't automatic
@@PotatoMcWhiskey I just tested this, and over the course of starting 10 games with the same faction that uses the tome of enchantment, I started with Bolstering chant and Summon Copper Golem all 10 times. seems pretty automatic to me.
Dark is good if you pick it at a certain point with order. The tome of doom herald with subjugation and other faith tomes make a cool and efficient combo to make a demoralizing army: Every unit in your army demoralize the enemy at every move (Attack demoralize, even standing around them demoralize) and then you make huge damage with cruel weapons enchantment.
After some turn everything that is still standing tries to run away from battle and you can crush them.
Not counting the Convent and the Tribunal combo: The first give bonus mana and knowledge for every stability level and the tribunal raise massively the stability in every city giving you a lot of mana.
One thing I did a few days ago with a major Chaos build was pick the Tome of the Archmage, then teleport my Ruler behind enemy lines, build an outpost with teleporter and then have my unlimited doomstack of Tier 1 swarms rush the enemy out of nowhere.
are u nuts? shadow affinity is a good or at least decent affinity.
it gives a couple of good empire skills:
- free cities with whispering stones give you vision and research. vision is sometimes nice but moreover 10 research per free city early to mid game is decent
- it also gives -20% upkeep for magic origin units
- death magic: +5 battle casting points per unit death (enemy or yours) is good for spamming more spells
- cryptblade is nice, decent damage und gives you the killed unit as a zombie
- +200 mana and knowledge for conquering a city
- give your whispering stone to other empire vassals to gain their tribute
- REALLY strong one: double xp gains of heroes
Remember, summons (my favourite are phantom warriors).
You can endlessly reinforce in one turn, you can summon them to destroy spell jammers instantly, you can get vision, they are solid fodder.
Early game they can swarm decently well, late game they are utility summons.
My astral run was just bonkers, and the most op tome? Astral Mirror imo. Why?
Because once your hero is level 20 and equipped, making copies makes them one man doomstacks. And as astral, you can cast this over and over and over.
Then you can make the copies take damage for the hero as they savagely destroy everything.
Each copy can also use the wizard king "double spellcasting" ability. So it gets more and more wacky.
My endgame was just having strong heroes which levelled super fast due to also taking shadow, equipping them well and then copying them. Nothing could beat it.
It is S tier, no doubt about it, it is absurd.
And remember, mimics (the T4 units) are also great, because just make em copy the enemies strongest units and they are suddenly worth way more than they should be.
Astral is imo the most insane one, you can one man take any city, defeat endless armies. That is not a joke, my ruler beat over 9 stacks of enemies solo without taking a scratch.
And when the AI had a sanctuary Astral's insane research had allowed me to already before turn 150 have EVERY TOME researched.
So I simply summoned hordes of Horned Gods and Reapers and then destroyed them
TLDR: Astral Mirror is absolutely broken
'you can summon them to destroy spell jammers instantly'
Do spell jammers not require 2 turns to plunder?
@@thetaomegatheta They stop working the moment you start the plundering
I normally stack defensive stats and go hard into matter with a side of undeath
I found a good use case for infectious insanity in my current game. If you target a unit that has a AOE damage ability the infectious insanity will proc on everyone who was caught in it. Especially good in the second or third turn when the enemy is doing their pregame huddle, doubly so if the unit you tagged has other statuses it can proc. I managed to get one of those big ogre looking units to chuck a big booze AOE into its own army causing both a few extra procs of infectious insanity and disease. The disease procs caused the enemy AI to waste a few turns curing their units which let my severely outnumbered forces chonk down their hero which had blinked to the middle of my one stack army. Inevitably my one stack got destroyed cause it was just a few t1 units versus a full three stack army but I managed to knock out their leader and kill a t4 unit which stopped them from being able to siege a city.
On another note in that same game my economy is so bad the only thing keeping me afloat is pillaging and razing cities. It’s quite a fun race against the clock, at one point I had a net income of -178 mana per turn with only 400 ish in the bank
1:04:26 It's true that Astral Reflections is a super good spell but if you're casting it on meatshields you're doing it wrong. Cast it on heroes and you can use their "once per battle" abilities (e.g. Spur to Action, Weaver) two extra times (assuming you didn't use them already). Cast it on your _Wizard King_ and you get two extra uses of Overchannel. Per cast. Which you can now do twice a round forever. Cast in on a Horned God and not only is that a huge stack of hitpoints to chew through but they can also summon damaging and obstructing vines 3 times a round instead of just once. (It says the reflections can't summon but I guess that attack doesn't count as a summon.)
I didagree on the Tome of Terraforming. It lets you create more usable tiles out of mountains and you can use other tomes to add more features to those now usable tiles.
One of the beautiful things about this game is the complexity. I will update as I watch but my initial thought is that I agree with you about tome of warding, but I think it is especially beneficial to dark origin in that it gives durability to an otherwise squishy bunch (maybe feudal too, haven't played with it yet) so C tier overall but maybe A tier for dark.
Edit 1: Materium, Runecrafting and tome of pyromancy into tome of enhancement is one of my favorite builds so far. You're absolutely right about it being similar but +1 range is sooo good.
Infectious Insanity is so good! I used it on a melee unit in the back row of the enemy right away and it is super disruptive and did great damage.
Astral Reflections has absurd scaling most notably heroes with Weaver (refresh) and Muster (refresh units actions) so if you use Astral Reflection on a hero with those abilities you can now get 4 more actions (also 4 more spells if used on a wizard king leader) which you could use to summon more Astral Reflections (of course you probably don't need to spend that much mana and you will run out of casting points)
Please consider making races and games where you focus on one single affinity. I did Zeus ruler that focused only on astral and I completed hardest mode in 60 turn making magic victory on medium sized map (6 other players). I believe this can give you great understanding on what the affinities are alcking and what they would benefit the most from
I finished a game with Arcane High Elves, and even if you're just using the base racials, you can stack bonuses to your battlemages and combat spells to pretty much destroy most things. Astral mixed with Chaos and Mataerium can let you just cast forever with a beefy frontline...sadly Iron Golems don't benefit from racials. Not that they need it.
Thank you for hyping this game! It’s been a blast learning and your videos have helped so much. It’s like learning CIV from you all over again.
17:17: Having just played a run where I used ONLY spiders and only units that could mount spiders, I can confirm that spiders are broken.
23:10: I want to disagree on Cryomancy, but I was also playing on easy difficulty. I consider ice elementals to be one of the better ones since it has both melee and ranged, and ice coffin tips the scales in your favor if a VIP target doesn't happen to have status resistance or frost immunity. As I write this, I realize that's a lot of ifs.
24:00: Souls has one redeeming feature: Soul Overflow is one of the few ways to AOE cleanse debuffs.
26:00 I'm sold. I'd completely overlooked this one.
52:33 The debate between Supergrowth and Spawnkin is centered around unit count. With Supergrowth, you have fewer unit models, or even just one, so you still do full damage even if you lost a lot of health. With Spawnkin, you deal more damage while at full health, but you lose damage as you lose units. I haven't done the math on it, so I don't know which is better. I suspect it depends largely on playstyle.
The reason you like Spawnkin is that your playstyles centers around archers, which shouldn't be getting hit in the first place, and protecting those archers with shield units and chaff, which don't need to do damage. Most chaff isn't of your race, either, so the racial transformation of spawnkin doesn't apply to them.
Closing Thoughts: It's a shame materium is bad, because I love it's capstone empirium ability. -10% upkeep per veterancy rank.
How do I recruit the T3 Spiders?
I played materium today and its so much fun
Also the last book spell is quite deceptive. With an heart of materium it deals a wooping 50 physical damage in every single ennemy units (with stuns)
Its an army wipe spell. You can engage 3 stacks with one random units and wipe them in 3 turns. This alone means the book is broken because it give you an instant win buttons.
The point of the earth engine in the t5 materium book is to break walls.
Its a +10 wallbreak that cost NOTHING. With the demolition sphere that add +8, the project that add +5 and everything else you can wallbreak a 35def city (important benchmark, its the defense of a normal city with stone walls) in one turn, which is completly incredible.
(Actually in my materium game I found a golden wonder that give a project which give +15 to siege and allowed me to instant siege a throne city lmao)
And as I play the game I think you undervalue ho moral is powerfull.
I've made a very high burst martial heroes army and by all-in and killing 3 to 4 units in one turn with moral debuff you can root the entire army, which means less death and damage from your side
Tome of Beasts is my absolute favourite. I love to send armies with one hero, one wildspeaker and a lot of different animals.
To be fair there is a lot of skills that makes tome of cryomancy to work, but with arcane affinity - arcane tomes and mystic cultures have a lot of skills which lowers enemy resistance, most of them need only one hit to lower enemy tier 1 or 2 unit resistance enough to have 100% chance of frizzing them with ice coffin.
Late to the party, but definitely have a few thoughts on a few underrated tomes.
In particular, the Tome of Teleportation is an easy S tier and can fit on just about any build imo.Starting with the more ho-hum bits of Teleportation, Astral Trade Relays are decent extra income, though probably skippable unless you're going super wide for an expansion victory (which this tome makes easier with the Chrono Gates). And the Emergency Teleportation can be used like the Phasing Enchantment (see below for my mini-essay on that utter madness), putting a vital unit exactly where you need it or sufficiently out of harm's way to survive. It's definitely skippable, but a nice tactical heal/movement option that doesn't require going out of the way for a different tome. (As an aside, the reverse of this is where Abducting Cyclone from the Tome of Winds can shine - pluck a unit out of formation and whale on it, move a dangerous unit out of the fight, or take advantage of the hole in the foe's lines to charge their vulnerable ranged units). Some minor notes on the already hyped up stuff as well. Don't have a ton to add to the Phase Beasts, but it's always worth noting they're affected by Keeper's Mark from the Tome of Sanctuary, letting you play absurdly recklessly with them. Using Salvation on them (from the same tome) can get them out of tricky situations if you do overextend. And one point worth noting with the Chrono Gates is that they don't require picking the teleporter empire skill, saving 200 Imperium if you don't need to stick teleporters on outposts (like, say, if you're opting for a more defensive victory condition and don't need to warp around the map). And pre-queueing mass recall along with the wizard tower teleportation spells lets you very easily retreat 3 armies to your territory at once, at will, without having to worry about hanging onto mana and casting points.
And now for the cream of the crop of Teleportation (in my personal opinion, at least), the phasing abilties. Honestly, the phasing enchantment is pretty underrated in the discussion, to the point where I'd consider putting Teleportation in A or B tier even without the chrono gates and phase beasts. It can be a bit of trouble in the auto-resolve if the AI teleports you into poor positions, but being able to get mage units in closer (or out of danger/zones of control) lets you use their full damage potential far more easily. This also lets you effectively fire stuff like the Warlocks' sundering defense spells or Watchers' stunning spells from 9 tiles away, making it far easier to focus fire threats and bring all your damage output to one area of the battlefield in general.
And that doesn't even get into quick phase on heroes. Same benefits as on the battlemages, but you can do absolutely disgusting stuff if you combine this with capstone abilities (blink, demon step, and assassinate in particular), sprint (effectively lets heroes walk an extra tile for free, while giving some other buffs), and killing momentum (gives an extra attack when you kill a unit) on an offense-oriented hero. Plus weaver for some extra madness, if your heroes are super high level. Blink + sprint + weaver lets you do full damage with mutli-hit weapons from 8 tiles further away than normal, if you're willing to expend that many abilities to pull it off. Charge striking heroes in particular can just pick and choose their targets across half the map with such a wide array of teleportation spells at their disposal, throwing in an assassination attempt or two along the way. Definitely a little biased given my tendency to manually fight, though, as the heroes in particular aren't nearly as effective when left to their own devices.
There's some other tomes that synergize extremely well with this sort of blitz focus-fire strategy too, particularly the Tomes of the Astral Mirror, Nature's Wrath, and Chaos Lord. Starting with hero interactions, the chaos lord hero ability Demonic Slaughter lets you turn the kills you're already making with your insane movement capabilities into free units (this doesn't apply to assassinations, though). As was pointed out with other free-unit spells, they both absorb hits and do free damage. And the unit spawn actually overwrites the keeper's mark effect, which kills a unit that wouldn't normally die that turn if you get the final hit in with the hero! Assassinate can kill steadfast units, so the combination of all these effects is actually a great counter to keeper's mark as a whole if you plan your fight right. And of course, astral reflection cast on your hero just lets you do all this times three (albeit a bit weaker in damage output, and I can't remember offhand if the demons get affected by the *no summons* debuff the reflections have. But you can definitely spread some assassinations around with two extra free units, plus whatever other abilities you tacked onto your heroes as the game progresses). For normal units, with the Demonic Onslaught spell cast, all of them can get a taste of what your heroes can do with extra movement and attacks. And if you opted to pick a Wizard King at the start of the game, you can overcharge for an extra spell; cast Awakened Instincts on the same turn and obliterate whatever's left. Don't have your ruler around for the overcharge? Just call forth an avatar of chaos on the first turn to get the ball rolling! Or if you know you'll be defending, build a Throne of Mirrors; have your governor magically appear as an astral reflection to free up a spell!
Would also like to go to bat for the Tome of Terramancy. It's extremely useful for sieges and opening up the map. Tremor Ritual is a very compact siege project, in that it does decent fortification damage while getting rid of towers and battlements. That lets you use other siege project spells on stuff like Incite Rebellion (another useful application of the Chaos Lord tome - especially fun with Sacrificial Slaughter from the Demon Gate tome if you happen to mind-control something like a Golden Golem), Wizard Bombardment for tons of fortification damage (from one of the gold tier Ancient Wonders), Harass Defenders, summoning War Hounds, and so on, without subjecting yourself to added battle complications from towers and battlements. That plus Siege Magic from the Tome of Artificing makes capturing high fortification cities far quicker, freeing up your armies sooner. And Earth Shatter is *far* better than it's given credit for. It can clear routes through mountains, allowing outposts to be built and cities to expand into those tiles - it also allows for faster travel, and reaching near-inaccessible areas on some maps (looking at you, Grexolis). Plus, it does its 10 damage to *every* enemy army in the province, potentially far outdamaging similar spells. It can also be queued up to use at the right moment as stored damage, firing it off on the same turn as five other damaging spells that were also ready to cast. The Leaden Blows hero ability is pretty nice too, allowing melee heroes to immobilize (and effectively stun) ranged units. Stone Spirits are a decent summon option (especially for going full Materium, being a summonable Elemental that doesn't require an otherwise superfluous tome to be taken), and Crushing Earth is a solid combat spell for when you get it. Seismic Shock isn't as good imo, but it could probably have some niche uses in disrupting formations and baiting out heals. It's not a perfect tome, but it definitely has its uses.
The Tome of Cryomancy is extremely good as well. Ice Coffin is an insane spell in the early game, and White Witches are just as potent. Freezing one unit matters so much more when there's less units on the field, and frost arrows let your other units deplete their health much faster when the time comes to get rid of them. Plus, the School of Cryomancy scales nicely if you go the Cold Dark route and spread snow provinces everywhere.
tl:dr I'd bump the Cryomancy, Chaos Lord, and Astral Mirror tomes up to A tier, Terramancy to B tier, and Teleportation to an easy S tier.
I have plates order, nature and shadow.
For now shadow is the one I snowballed the best.
As you said in your playthrough, invoking unit is good. With shadow you have hordes of cheap units and numerous summons to fill your army as you go. In battle you then force thé huge confrontation everywhere, all the time. In combat you don't have thé best rester but ... The number of zombies you can spawn as time passes is HUMONGOUS and you get resurection pretry soon. I win battle with 2 to 1 ratio all the time, enemies can't heal and you debuff them HARD.
You juste need to be able to take the blunt for 3 turns then you have the upper hand.
Super tactical, Super snowbally, very impressive.
hint for dealing with wasps: dish soap in water in a squirt bottle, get their wings wet and they can't fly because the soap binds to the protective coating on their wings. a grounded wasp isn't a scary wasp
I find Astral Attunement is best used when you don't use your racial units (with Astral, the most common method would be Magic Origin summons). Since you get Mana & Knowledge based on City pop instead of majorly benefitting your actual racial units, it's basically the most useful Major Race Transformation for that playstyle.
I think you missed mentioning potentially one of the best things about chaos affinity, although it isn't in a tome, so fine, but the balor with the permanent stacking stats seems busted as all hell
i picked this game up after watching your big archmagus game and I have to say, I personally think your selling necromancy really short. I made a ratkin, White Walker group, which was essentially, EVERYTHING you said was bad lol. Not to say your wrong, but personally i think turning the entire map into snow, and being undead is amazing, necromancers, solid units, skeletons cheap and effective, bone golem kinda sucks that it eats skeletons, but it is just a power house that makes a skeleton on the spot when it dies. So much regeneration and life steal stuff included in the undead army stuff. I totally understand if you don't like rolling shadow, but i did 100% shadowy was able to dip into lots of other tendrils on the imperium skill tree.
i hope you do more of this content, you are LITERALLY, the ONLY streamer/youtuber i watch. I have been following your channel for close to two years, now and I love the content. Keep it up bud.
Playing as Dwarf Fortress "strike the earth" max material dwarves is pretty fun. It's fun to have all your cities with pushing over 150 siege defense. Also you max on defense with rock + steel skin and all defense boosts from heroes. Nothing ever dies.
I've actually been having fun going order/chaos using revelry and subjugation tomes. The high morale let's my units get crit chances but the low morale makes the enemy more prone to fumbles. And as enemy units die, the more killer my units get and the weaker thr enemy gets.
I don't know if it gets harder or becomes impossible in games with difficulties higher then normal, but having an entire cities rout is pretty fun.
25:32 "Amplify Minds, not a great spell"
"AI of the game should be better"
@@hachijospaniard5643 Agreed 100%, the AI is in rough shape right now.
You can bypass unlocking summon balor by turning any two tier 4 units into a balor with fight for power
Remember that you cant get to tier 4 and 5 without taking the same type of the lower level.
not entirely true... you can get tier 4 (and then 5) just by culture/traits alone... so if you went full dark you would be able to get tier 4 shadow tome without any prior tomes
To clarify tier 4 require 6 affinity and tier 5 require 8. This is easily achieved using base traits and heroes as the level 5,10 etc hero abilities actually give an affinity point.
Doomherald is pretty great together with the Tyrant Knights from Order 3 (Subjugation). Unless the enemy is specifically building to counter it, you can easily drop their morale to the point where you rout most of their army rather than killing it, and then you can pick up some free conversions while they rout. It supports a very efficient playstyle.
Revelry works best with barbarians. Since barbarians get that big powerful alpha strike as a culture bonus, revelry lets you take advantage of that strong first punch to give you juice to keep pushing harder.
Emergency Teleportation gives your battle mages/supports/archers a second (after they phase) chance of leaving the zone of control without retaliation. In some battles it's useless but against highly mobile units it can save them and doesn't take their actions.
It also lets them position themselves for full action abilities, which is normally hard to pull off. Less useful against an AI stupid enough to walk into artillery range. I suspect it's VERY strong against players.
Ok maybe im biased but the coper golem in the tome of enchantment is realy usefull earlygame when you are also playing a materium kingdom. Mana is not really that important early on you will almost always have enought for your enchantments and the wizards tower so having a disposable tier 1 unit that doesnt cut into your gold reserves, which are extreamly important because you want to spam out buildings quickly, is extreamly helpfull
I feel you did the Tome of Enchantment deplorably dirty, my dude...
The Enchanted Tools spell + Sundering Blades & Seeker Arrows enchantments have massive early game potential, & that's not even mentioning the Runecarvers Camp (which is one of my most highly valued early SPI in the game) you acquire as an SPI (special provence improvement) for your cities .
Where I do agree with you about the Copper Golems being way too cost heavy on one's own upkeep in the early game, I wouldn't just disregard them as a unit that isn't worthwhile to invest one's resources into. Reason being, if you are careful enough to nurture & level them early on (especially with some really good support heroes who increase their XP gain from victories in battle), they'll eventually evolve into a Tier III Iron Golem (can't remember @ what rank of the dome rn 😅) who is just a superb unit to have in your army for one major reason: if you are able to get at least one stack of Iron Golems led by a support hero early enough, one's siege capabilities become incredibly more efficient & very reliably reduce the amount of turns it would normally take to break another city. Also, they do a 180 & switch from being an entity that require mana upkeep & instead switch to being among the units that require gold to upkeep 😊
I know you'd already said at the time of making this video that you only had, like, 2 hours into the game, so I'm sure I don't need to educate you about your oversights upon retrospect (your gameplay speaks volumes to this 😘🤌🏼 hands down the best player with AW4 content on RUclips that I've found) when it comes to the tomes you originally undervalued, but I just wanted to make a statement that the amount of momentum the Tome of Enchantment gives you in the early game is just insane if implemented correctly 🙃 I could posit more talking points as to why I feel this tome is egregiously under-loved, but I've already managed to write a damn novella & I'm well aware of the disdain the masses have for any comment exceeding one paragraph &/or 5 sentences max 😜, so I'll just leave it at that & hope the trolls won't lynch me for this comment's size.
From one native a *place that's seldom thought of without it being in conjunction with 🥔🥔🥔 to another 👉🏻👊🏿
*(the State or Idaho, USA)
Edit: didn't actually voice where I'd put the tome in my own rankings, so...
I'd likely place it somewhere at the top of A Tier (likely being @ #1), or somewhere on the ass-end of S Tier
I highly recommend deliberately trying out the tomes and spells you have seldom/never picked. Some of the ones you dismissed can be great with the right synergy.
Im not 100% certain about this, but there's something you missed about Spawnkin and Supergrowth. Since spawnkin increases your model count, it actually means that your units damage will start to drop off faster the more damage they take. Supergrowth does the complete opposite, meaning it will take longer for those units to start losing damage due to casualties. I think that some units like Warbreed for example is negatively affected by Spawnkin, as last I checked it increased the units model count to 2, meaning that it will lose half of its damage. Supergrowth is just a straight upgrade for it however.
POTATO WHAT HAVE YOU DONE I HAVE 24 HOURS PLAYED IN LIKE A 60 HOUR SPAN
Totem of the wild, IMO, strongest tactical spell ihn the game. I had a hero mage with a spider that could take on any 3 stack army the AI could throw at me. With the combat spell reset you can have 4 totems down at end of turn 2. I took on a gold wonder and there was no where to move on board because of all the summons.
Shadow start is rough but late game you can have a hero summoning 6 undead units per battle, plus a spell that revives all your units that died plus the enemy ones as zombies under your control. You can really make your PC suffer.
About Stoneskin, my berserking, bloodthirsty, recklessly raging Asgaera Spinesplitter with full kit, 90% crit chance, a Tier 4 Greatsword and killing momentum begs to disagree. Stoneskin negates the Reckless Rage debuff and gives you a bit extra. I just charge her into a stack, pop Berserk on her and she is insane. 100+ dmg per turn, sometimes 200+ with a good killing momentum.
Stoneskin is also awesome to stick on a Shield unit early game for making one unit incredibly hard to burst down, especially if the enemy lacks any Charge units and can't break their defensive mode. Gargoyles are the same, only natively, an extremely solid early game Shock unit.
I think your predisposition to a certain playstyle has blinded you to a lot here.
Still, fun video ;)
Played a full Materium game, was slow at the start but in the end with the double tectonic shatter per round plus leaders with Ancient of Earth I could destroy twice if not three times as big armies.
Need more tier list.
Need some initial combinations of your tombs and what you feel(like you said, so many combos are crazy)
Tier list of spells
Optimal growth strategies and things to look out for
Economy is what needs a guide the most. It doesn't matter what tactics you have if your economy can't support it. Even more relevant in PvP.