0:00 Introduction 1:50 Soul Harvest 2:47 Tome of Necromancy 14:12 Tome of Cryomancy 21:40 Tome of the Tentacle 31:39 Tome of Shades 39:42 Tome of the Doomherald 47:01 Tome of Souls 55:49 Tome of Corruption 1:05:05 Tome of the Great Transformation 1:13:02 Tome of the Cold Dark 1:16:37 Tome of Oblivion 1:21:44 Tome of Severing 1:28:23 Tome of Calamity 1:40:16 Tome of the Reaper 1:46:25 Tome of the Eternal Lord 1:54:32 Overall ranking
A few things. Necrotize actually scales extremely well. 50 base damage for 10 mana + Regenblock is extremely powerful. Particularly in the current state of the game where Ritualist heroes have access to rapid fire Regen application. Removing their regen and forcing another cast of Restore to clear Infected is a great use of 10 mana. Infected also lasts all battle until cleansed, allowing Necrotize to be a cheap way of applying Infected to targets. Spending 10 mana to force out a cleanse is very efficient in terms of resources, particularly with the threat of up to 50 damage. Necrotize deals a lot of damage for its point in the game, and zombies it spawns get your relevant enchantments to boot. Zealed up zombies can get some pretty explosive damage, making it a serious threat. Skeletons are amazing, and I have absolutely zero idea how you came to the conclusion you did. While they are *objectively* lower stats than other units, they inherently possess Low Maintenance, and can get further reduction early into the Shadow affinity tree. They are also only 15 souls per unit. Using JUST Soul Collection, that places each skeleton at 45 gold, which is even cheaper than a Peasant Pikeman. 45 gold and zero draft with an upkeep cost of 6 mana, or 4 with Shadow's affinity tree upgrade. Except it's even cheaper than that because we are getting Souls from combat too. Yeah, they're weak, squishy chaff, but you are producing more units than anyone else, and they're cheaper than any other unit, even scouts. AND they don't cut into your gold income unless you use Soul Collection. Quantity is a quality all its own, and skeletons can get you additional armies, immediate reinforcements to your armies, and save you large quantities of gold.
Skeletons are objectively worse than any other T1 summoned unit. Their stats, as noted, are far lower than normal units. Then there's the fact that they get none of your faction benefits, as they inherit the race of the unit you killed to raise them. Low Maintenance means nothing on a unit with 8 upkeep, it becomes 6. It's easy to overcome this with proper economy. It is also not easy to get 15 Souls every turn to summon a Skeleton, but it is easy to spend 30 Mana (Mana Channelers). Snow Spirits specifically are amazing and blow Skeletons out of the water, nevermind how overloaded Cyromancy is. 40 movement + Floating, Freeze with Slow on failure, 3 models, strong T3 evolution, Blizzard and a Knowledge SPI. Then there's the enchantments that are universally good unless you are playing with Battle Mage units for some reason. Finally, being weak chaff they are absolutely useless as reinforcements beyond the first couple of turns in the game. Any competent army is going to just crush the Skeletons without losses and move on, gaining free XP and resources.
@@codyksp you can kill so many high quality units with skeletons because of the decay mechanic so, so many you just split the stack apart and force the enemy units to chase you while applying decay. the enemy will just die of poison while desperately attempting to kill your skeletons before it's too late it only gets worse when you have blizzard + coffin reminds me very much of creating foul vapors traps in dominions
It's also possible to raise skeletons and tier 1 combat summons at Legend rank, complete with your unit enchantments by combining Mana Channelers, Wizard tower Apex and the astral tree upgrade. Tier 2s will spawn at Champion rank and Tier 3-5s at Elite rank. Mighty Meek can be quite formidable when used on Tier 1 units as well. Buff them even more by playing as Mystic Summoning and Ascension: Summoner. Mass heal them with Tome Of Summoning and/or taking Ascension:Restorer with Swift Restore from Ritualist. You'll easily apply 5 stacks of Regeneration to your entire army.
@@codyksp "It is also not easy to get 15 Souls every turn to summon a Skeleton," have you tried fighting npcs, genuinely? a single fight past Turn 10 nets you atleast 10 souls, you get the Soul Collection for passive Soul Income(which is great, you don't need to spawn one skeleton every turn, you spawn some at first, and then after a big fight you raise dead to recoup losses and raise a new army as well), each soul well is 5souls per turn so you'll get atleast 15 souls per turn from those alone, and most maps will have multiple instances of the wonder that gives +1 soul per each hero in crypt. Literally Soul Collection + One Soul Well(which also gives Research) is 15 Souls per turn, which you can bank until they're actually needed. So, unlike summoning a Phantasm Warrior every Turn which costs the 60 mana AND drains your mana via upkeep every turn, you can bank up 90 souls at a "static" cost and start paying the upkeep for Skeletons only when they're actually needed. As for being weak chaff, yeah, if you send in three stacks of 6 skellies vs an enemy they'll get destroyed, but that's not what they're for. They're for supporting your Main stacks. In Autocombat they're great, because enemies will focus on the skeletons so your main stack does not lose HP and can continue to rampage with the high hp/freshly raised skeletons, while the low hp ones can be sent to pillage and scout in one stacks. One skeleton will not give much exp to the enemy, and they WILL have to send some actual troops to deal with them. As for fights vs other non-ai Players, they either ignore the skeletons(which means you can flank them for morale damage or tie up their rangeds to deny Full Action Abilities, or stab them with the pikemen, or they focus the skeletons, which means that they are open for an attack from your main force. If you're lazy, you can also just first send in a three stack at negligible cost to yourself, soften the enemy, and then mop them up with your main force(and raise a new army). Sure, when you get to the point where everyone is up in Tier 5 tomes and spamming World Map Damaging Spells, or is spamming Tectonic Shatter, they'll get obliterated, but except for Phantasm Warriors and maybe Honour Blades no Tier 1 unit will be useful at that point anyway. (btw, fun fact, Zeal+Mighty Meek+ways of applying Condemnation makes for some really busted Skeletons and Zombies which you can dump en masse on the enemy, even during the fight if you land the Dark Rituals well)
I believe Tendril Labyrinths actually give +10 or +15 gold and some stability as well. It’s not listed on the Tome, but I do remember building them for my frontier cities and they were actually pretty neat. Cheap to build, actually pretty good defensive building and some economy.
A piece of feedback: your own video in the left bottom corner clips a lot of useful information when you are reading the research. Having it on the bottom right side would be better.
As for tome of shadows, oddly enough it's very easy to get blind for mage class heroes: you take any evocation spell and aethermancy, and you have a chance to blind on any magic attack of the hero. And if you pick a mage, you need evocation anyway as a good AOE, and you want to pick aethermancy because it's the only way to get a op fast phase ability. So there is some synergies outside of shadow tomes after all.
Hey just wanted to say thanks! I'm a little overwhelmed by 4x games, and this series on tomes really helped me get back into AOW 4. Playing a nature summoning faction rn, and your nature vid helped me plan a really fun build too. Thanks for your work in the community!
One thing that you did get wrong about the Accursed Trickster that makes it far more annoying to deal with then you mentioned. Duplicity that made a clone, if the clone dies it dies. But if the real one dies, the clone takes its place and becomes real. Making it far tankier then it seems.
Conjure vines - "It's the best spell in the game!" Conjure tentacle - "Oh noes, conjure vines is better!" Man, of course best spell in the game is better than any other. It's literally definition of "best")
As a new player, these tome reviews are great. I end up rewatching your order review all the time in my current playthrough when trying to figure out how to build out my tech tree.
This video is so excellent so far, thank you so much @shinshin. This really means a lot to me. Don't worry if we disagree or if you change valuations while you play, this was very well-researched and shows your infectious passion for the game. Thank you so much.
The Calamity tome is pretty nuts in Astral builds (I know that's not the focus of today's video), as it can provide both good Magic Origin units and a nutty spell. Oh and the Dragon's Ghostfire Storm feels ok alongside the Cascading Mana or whatever that thing is called. But I agree that the Dragon is overall not that crazy.
I could see you make some videos later for certain early to mid game compositions or build ideas cause as you said most tomes are hard to judge on their own, some like the tome of shadows can be easily enabled by certain hero types (mage access to blind enemies relative reliable), Builds could be for either efficiency or simply certain themes, just as a thought
Great video, I very much enjoyed watching like the rest of these. Going to be real, I actually came into this video really hoping you'd dunk on the Shadow tomes and am disappointed you weren't way harsher on the overall design of Shadow. I am frustrated with the Shadow tech tree (if you want to call it that) for being such a schizophrenic, one-dimensional mess, and this is more systematic problem than the individual tomes in a vacuum. This has only gotten worse as more DLC tomes have been added, too. It's like Triumph just can't decide what they want Shadow to be. There are just a lot of problems with Shadow, in my opinion, and I really wish Triumph would consider a huge design pass on them. 1) Shadow tomes, particularly going undead, is way too all-or-nothing. There are a whopping five undead tomes-Necromancy, Souls, Great Transformation, Reaper, and Eternal Lord (Doomherald is somewhat of an undead tome, so make that five a half). This means that you have largely the same build every game, which makes each playthrough repetitive, as well as makes you extremely predictable. And just picking only one undead tome (besides maybe Great Transformation, I guess, but at that point you may as well go Corruption) feels completely pointless. No other playstyle requires this much investment. If you ever want to dip into another affinity, you either have to sacrifice an undead tome, which makes necromancy as a playstyle feel like it has a gaping hole somewhere, or you sacrifice picking any of the non-undead Shadow tomes and sacrifice cryomancy. More so than any other affinity, it feels way too restrictive in forcing you to stack only Shadow tomes and being cursed to have no other empire affinity-especially insulting since Shadow tomes pair so nicely with the 2x Shadow affinity Dark culture. The one-dimensional Shadow affinity issue is made even worse with the Tiger update now that governors and ruler signature skills can't give you free affinity anymore. 2) The game is mechanically hostile to necromancy for a whole host of reasons. Wow, thanks, I love being countered by an enemy just existing on a square where a corpse is. Oh, yay, I get to have a huge quantity of trash units-this would be really cool if not for the fact that I can only ever bring 18 units into a fight. Why wouldn't I want a smaller number of good units instead? Quantity doesn't mean shit if I'm hardcapped at 18, and in-battle reviving just isn't a reliable enough replacement for this. Moreover, you can't siege cities down without a hero, so a triple stack of skeletons can't act as independently of your main force as I'd like. And god forbid I ever put a hero into an army of five skeletons. This leads to one of the most damning points... 3) To play to necromancy's strengths, the player must manual everything. There are a lot of cool things you can do like summon trash zombies just to use Rotting explosion on them that the autoresolve AI will just never do. Most importantly, necromancy being such a non-healing and low-tier unit-heavy playstyle combined with the 18v18 unit cap means inherently that the player must do all sorts of crafty reviving and combat summoning that the autoresolve Ai will also never effectively. Since autoresolve is so important in especially multiplayer, why not just go with a braindead build that has really tanky units instead? 4) Skeleton spam really wants you to pick legitimately the worst tome in the game-Tome of the Beacon-to really make it shine, and it's only for one unlock: Mighty Meek. It's a gigantic trap that feels bad, because either your skeletons feel like a shadow of their potential, or you waste an entire tome unlock for one meme usage. Admittedly this is largely a balance problem with Beacon being such garbage outside of this one meme usage, but it bears mentioning. 5) Doomherald is weirdly way better as an off-affinity dip pick than as a coherent pick for a Shadow build. It's way better as a dip with Order for a Tyrant Knight-heavy build, which feels weird thematically since it has a banshee in it. Conversely, it also feels like Cryomancy is the only non-hybrid Shadow tome that's just generally good and can be used cleverly in non-Shadow builds that don't require a massive commitment. Other affinities have way more tomes in them that feel useful as off-affinity picks. 6) If you don't go undead (i.e., you go Corruption and become Umbral Demons), Tome of the Eternal Lord is worthless. All the non-undead Shadow tomes make an excellent example of why Triumph needs to add more tier 5 tomes. I'd also consider adding an extra cryomancy-related tech in Eternal Lord. I'd love a tier 5 Umbral Demon tome. 7) Touching on this, but it is a shame there isn't a tier 4 cryomancy-themed tome. As it is, Shadow is weirdly unfocused about whether it wants to be cryomancy or undead (or now Umbral Demons). God forbid you pick you pick both, lest you have like 14 Shadow affinity and nothing else. Cryomancy is also just cool and I'd love a Chaos Channeling equivalent like fire has. 8) You did remark on this, but the undead unit type is arguably shit now. There are way too many sources of fire and spirit damage with the new DLCs, between Oathsworn culture and Tome of the Cleansing Flame. Probably the two worst possible elemental weaknesses to have. Have fun having -4 weakness to probably 60% of the builds in the game. Lifesteal just doesn't make up for this, especially with how strong an Order and/or Nature build centered around healing is by comparison. Then you have Banshees, Corrupt Souls, and Reapers that are even weak to lighting on top of that! My god. 9) This is trivial, but it has been a pet peeve of mine for a long time: it really is just dumb that the Arctic Blizzards realm trait affects Snow Spirits because they technically don't have Frostling transformation. Snow spirits shouldn't be damaged by blizzards! I also want to disagree with you about Spellwards from Severing being so great. They can only be cast on neutral territory, which by the time you get this tome is basically nowhere. What is the point of them? It's a worthless spell because 90% of the time you'd ever want it, there's nowhere useful for you to put one down. Am I the only one who thinks this? I also like Tome of Shades more than you do-shades feel like a hybrid between a shock and skirmishers, and the tome overall feels like a really nice counter to bastion spamming (or high defense formations generally). It also pairs really nicely with Mage heroes since they can be specced to inflict blind.
constrict has this very specific downside where sometimes ai will want to leave and trigger attack of opportunity and die, I find this happening most often with pikemen and cavalry, I think cavalry doesn't completely calculate the damage pikemen do to it and the various bonuses (plus crit chance), and so sometimes constricting in melee can be a bad thing, since the enemy just dies for free Super niche, kinda like the tome
Thank you for the video! Here is another suggestion, if you don't mind. What was missing in your video for me were examples of when to use a certain tome/spell and when not. This game is (in many ways) about min-maxing and countering, finding synergies and builds. Seventy percent of this two-hour video is just reading descriptions of spells or units. I watched it with 1.5x playback, and I don't feel I missed much. I also get the feeling that sometimes you were making up your mind about some spells right at that moment. That there was no prep in advance. Having a smaller video dedicated to a single tome with some ideas of when to use it best would be very much welcomed. Take, for example, the Tome of Cryomancy. Would you take it if the realm has the Frostling Influence trait? Or Domain of The Frost Queen? Probably no. But Demonic Realm? Sure. Which cultures doing better or worse with this Tome? Which racial traits? How about White Witch on a Unicorn who can phase and then freeze? Is there a good combo with particular Society Traits? (Mana Addicts) Think why random people on UA-cam would like to watch (and re-watch) your video and I guarantee that the quality of your content will increase.
Tentacle is a good tempo spell. U will probably never use it in primal which for some reason has absurdly good cultural summon thar can force to play around it on it's own (trust me you have probably never seen mire croc literally munchin down t4 angelized units in one turn, but uve seen sylvan wolfs slaughtering undead). It is mainly early game summon which can allow to go into 2 best tech trees being astral and shadow. Also shinshin, what I don't like is that you do not mention tech trees and they are pretty important. Order tech tree is not the best and can be outright bad on some maps which compensates strong tomes.
Shadow affinity is the affinity of subterfuge and dirty or unfair fighting. Nothing shadow has is really all that good in a straight up fight. It mostly relies on alternate currencies like souls or crippling debuffs like low moral, slow, constricted and insanity. Necromancy is a very good tome for Aggressive early games. Using souls takes the burden of draft and gold generation off of your cities. I just want to say that the point of shadow affinity is not to kill people immediately. Its to bully, steal and slowly suck the life out of a target. Your goal with shadow affinity is not to target cities, but armies and pillage provinces. Every hero slain can net you more research and mana. Every province pillaged can net you more gold for your economy. Skeletons are cheap throw away units They have a number of uses. The first is acting as a wall for your main army. The fact that skeleton production does not block city unit production allows you to build stronger cultural units, like dark cultures warlocks, to act as a back line that is well defended by skeletons. You have said it yourself Action economy wins fights and the chief strength of the skeleton is in its numbers. Having a 9 to 4 unit advantage is not something to be scoffed at. Shadow affinity thrives in creating those lopsided engagements where your most likely to win Skeletons also give you map control and can be used to grind enemy armies down before moving your main army in for the kill. By the mid to late game losing an army or two of skeletons to kill a high value enemy hero or a strong enemy army is a good trade. Skeletons also make great raiders. The ability to pillage enemy provinces for gold is how you make war profitable in AoW4. Pillaging a province nets you 50 or so gold. Thats five times what a vendor building brings in. Lets say you have 4 pillages finish, thats 200 gold. Since skeletons cost no gold to make its a net positive. There is also the added benefit of any army trying to kill said raiders moving out of position and getting killed by your army to make more research and skeletons. War for shadow affinity builds should focus not on taking cities but on killing armies and pillaging lands for resources. Your enemies become farms you can harvest every few turns for nice boosts. Shadow is all about taking things from the enemy, be it units, strengths, land, terrain advantage, hp, gold, mana, research ect. However if your not smart or devious about things and try to strong arm some one stronger than you like chaos can then your going to have a bad time. Shadow heavy builds need to butter up the strong while bullying those weaker than you. And always be looking out for back stab opportunities
@@SteveMorris-c2r It's great if you enjoy playing like that, but I (and I assume many others) don't want to spend 30 hours micro-ing stacks of skellies while the game ticks up to150 turns. I'd rather siege down the city, erase its army, and move on in four turns or less.
Tentacle into Corruption really is just stupid broken. There is so much CC flying out there, that nothing can deal with it. Toss in an Eldrich hero for even more CC, and you just punch way above your weight. Broken? Maybe. Fun? Absolutely lol. Cryo into Cold Dark is fun as well. The special buildings can get massive
True Death Magic works pretty well with Skeleton Reanimation. You reanimate as many mages (they are cheap) as bodies allow and spam Curse of the Reaper. If skeleton mages die, you can raise them again with Battlefield Reanimation and so on. And CotR is not "once per battle", which is also a plus. Withering Mist works nicely with Shadow Blades (Tome of Shades) as it provides a free (but random) way to blind enemy units. PS. Please put timestamps for Tomes in your videos (or description / pinned comment).
Not sure if you did say it. i do like tome of cryomancy. but the fighting on sea they get bad matchups aswell. cause most sea creatures do have frot resist (also kinda counts for pyromancy but you haven't gotten there yet). this makes shadow always lagg abit behind for me personally. and from the tome of evolution from the previous video i do think the shepherd abilty no longer being there (or at least not tied to it) makes it way less usefull. that 20% exp + chaos that could give i think 15% more exp does make your low tier units tier 3 quickly. the no building on some tomes used to be upset with an abilty for the lord. strange that the last DLC removed all of those yet thoe tomes got nothing back in return (not even more value on some of their buildings or stronger spells)
my dude, CEASE. I just finished watching the nature tome analysis and then you just bring out another video where you will probably say just how muc better the ice tomes are compared to nature 😭 (I will watch the video obviously, but holy hell they are long. not a complaint though, My autistic ahh prefers long analysis videos much more over vids without any content)
You made a huge mistake with Bone Horror. You cannot summon them as easily as you are describing in the video. Bone Horror Reanimation requires you to kill T3-T4 non-racial units, making them incredibly hard to reliably obtain. This is the same issue Bone Dragon Reanimation suffers from, requiring you to kill non-racial T5 units on the map. Compare this to other T3/T4 units that you can just straight up summon on-demand with no hoops to jump through.
What are you going to do after you're done with all the tome schools? How about racial/faction creation perks? Personally I was wondering for a while how worth it to get alternative mount perks for your race and what synergies it brings, considering the higher cost. Also the different Lord types, maybe? Though you might wanna wait on this one possibly bc one of the announced expansions in season pass 2 was the Giant Lords.
Tome of Oblivion does not feel like it belongs there at all. It should be t3 instead of t4 and it feels like an eldritch entity swapped it out for the frost tome that should have been there instead.
Umbral mistriss "questionably balanced"... are the kids saying this instead of "stupidly broken and wildly not balanced at all", because I can change how I say it. I just want to stay up to date. Buddy went ultra op with mystic summoners and this among others... it was pretty dumb. We don't allow this unit anymore.
Which tear 1 tome has tear 3 unit? I don't think there is any so this is not a tome of necromancy weakness. Thank you for the video. The only bad thing about them is that there are only 2 affinities left :D
0:00 Introduction
1:50 Soul Harvest
2:47 Tome of Necromancy
14:12 Tome of Cryomancy
21:40 Tome of the Tentacle
31:39 Tome of Shades
39:42 Tome of the Doomherald
47:01 Tome of Souls
55:49 Tome of Corruption
1:05:05 Tome of the Great Transformation
1:13:02 Tome of the Cold Dark
1:16:37 Tome of Oblivion
1:21:44 Tome of Severing
1:28:23 Tome of Calamity
1:40:16 Tome of the Reaper
1:46:25 Tome of the Eternal Lord
1:54:32 Overall ranking
A few things.
Necrotize actually scales extremely well. 50 base damage for 10 mana + Regenblock is extremely powerful. Particularly in the current state of the game where Ritualist heroes have access to rapid fire Regen application. Removing their regen and forcing another cast of Restore to clear Infected is a great use of 10 mana. Infected also lasts all battle until cleansed, allowing Necrotize to be a cheap way of applying Infected to targets. Spending 10 mana to force out a cleanse is very efficient in terms of resources, particularly with the threat of up to 50 damage. Necrotize deals a lot of damage for its point in the game, and zombies it spawns get your relevant enchantments to boot. Zealed up zombies can get some pretty explosive damage, making it a serious threat.
Skeletons are amazing, and I have absolutely zero idea how you came to the conclusion you did. While they are *objectively* lower stats than other units, they inherently possess Low Maintenance, and can get further reduction early into the Shadow affinity tree. They are also only 15 souls per unit. Using JUST Soul Collection, that places each skeleton at 45 gold, which is even cheaper than a Peasant Pikeman. 45 gold and zero draft with an upkeep cost of 6 mana, or 4 with Shadow's affinity tree upgrade. Except it's even cheaper than that because we are getting Souls from combat too. Yeah, they're weak, squishy chaff, but you are producing more units than anyone else, and they're cheaper than any other unit, even scouts. AND they don't cut into your gold income unless you use Soul Collection. Quantity is a quality all its own, and skeletons can get you additional armies, immediate reinforcements to your armies, and save you large quantities of gold.
Skeletons are objectively worse than any other T1 summoned unit. Their stats, as noted, are far lower than normal units.
Then there's the fact that they get none of your faction benefits, as they inherit the race of the unit you killed to raise them.
Low Maintenance means nothing on a unit with 8 upkeep, it becomes 6. It's easy to overcome this with proper economy.
It is also not easy to get 15 Souls every turn to summon a Skeleton, but it is easy to spend 30 Mana (Mana Channelers).
Snow Spirits specifically are amazing and blow Skeletons out of the water, nevermind how overloaded Cyromancy is.
40 movement + Floating, Freeze with Slow on failure, 3 models, strong T3 evolution, Blizzard and a Knowledge SPI.
Then there's the enchantments that are universally good unless you are playing with Battle Mage units for some reason.
Finally, being weak chaff they are absolutely useless as reinforcements beyond the first couple of turns in the game.
Any competent army is going to just crush the Skeletons without losses and move on, gaining free XP and resources.
@@codyksp you can kill so many high quality units with skeletons because of the decay mechanic
so, so many
you just split the stack apart and force the enemy units to chase you while applying decay. the enemy will just die of poison while desperately attempting to kill your skeletons before it's too late
it only gets worse when you have blizzard + coffin
reminds me very much of creating foul vapors traps in dominions
It's also possible to raise skeletons and tier 1 combat summons at Legend rank, complete with your unit enchantments by combining Mana Channelers, Wizard tower Apex and the astral tree upgrade. Tier 2s will spawn at Champion rank and Tier 3-5s at Elite rank. Mighty Meek can be quite formidable when used on Tier 1 units as well. Buff them even more by playing as Mystic Summoning and Ascension: Summoner. Mass heal them with Tome Of Summoning and/or taking Ascension:Restorer with Swift Restore from Ritualist. You'll easily apply 5 stacks of Regeneration to your entire army.
@@Tigereye085 By that point in the game any other player will just be summoning Reapers instead. Entire armies of them, with how cheap they are.
@@codyksp "It is also not easy to get 15 Souls every turn to summon a Skeleton," have you tried fighting npcs, genuinely? a single fight past Turn 10 nets you atleast 10 souls, you get the Soul Collection for passive Soul Income(which is great, you don't need to spawn one skeleton every turn, you spawn some at first, and then after a big fight you raise dead to recoup losses and raise a new army as well), each soul well is 5souls per turn so you'll get atleast 15 souls per turn from those alone, and most maps will have multiple instances of the wonder that gives +1 soul per each hero in crypt.
Literally Soul Collection + One Soul Well(which also gives Research) is 15 Souls per turn, which you can bank until they're actually needed. So, unlike summoning a Phantasm Warrior every Turn which costs the 60 mana AND drains your mana via upkeep every turn, you can bank up 90 souls at a "static" cost and start paying the upkeep for Skeletons only when they're actually needed.
As for being weak chaff, yeah, if you send in three stacks of 6 skellies vs an enemy they'll get destroyed, but that's not what they're for. They're for supporting your Main stacks. In Autocombat they're great, because enemies will focus on the skeletons so your main stack does not lose HP and can continue to rampage with the high hp/freshly raised skeletons, while the low hp ones can be sent to pillage and scout in one stacks. One skeleton will not give much exp to the enemy, and they WILL have to send some actual troops to deal with them.
As for fights vs other non-ai Players, they either ignore the skeletons(which means you can flank them for morale damage or tie up their rangeds to deny Full Action Abilities, or stab them with the pikemen, or they focus the skeletons, which means that they are open for an attack from your main force.
If you're lazy, you can also just first send in a three stack at negligible cost to yourself, soften the enemy, and then mop them up with your main force(and raise a new army).
Sure, when you get to the point where everyone is up in Tier 5 tomes and spamming World Map Damaging Spells, or is spamming Tectonic Shatter, they'll get obliterated, but except for Phantasm Warriors and maybe Honour Blades no Tier 1 unit will be useful at that point anyway.
(btw, fun fact, Zeal+Mighty Meek+ways of applying Condemnation makes for some really busted Skeletons and Zombies which you can dump en masse on the enemy, even during the fight if you land the Dark Rituals well)
I believe Tendril Labyrinths actually give +10 or +15 gold and some stability as well. It’s not listed on the Tome, but I do remember building them for my frontier cities and they were actually pretty neat. Cheap to build, actually pretty good defensive building and some economy.
You called Constrictors Polearm units. I think they would be more correctly classified as Pull-arm units.
A piece of feedback: your own video in the left bottom corner clips a lot of useful information when you are reading the research. Having it on the bottom right side would be better.
yeah I realized that right after watching it back, but I can't exactly record 2 hours again
@@Shinshinvarietyaye, he's telling it to you for the future
i cant believe the living fog is just a black balor
the second I noticed it, I was like wtf?
As for tome of shadows, oddly enough it's very easy to get blind for mage class heroes: you take any evocation spell and aethermancy, and you have a chance to blind on any magic attack of the hero. And if you pick a mage, you need evocation anyway as a good AOE, and you want to pick aethermancy because it's the only way to get a op fast phase ability. So there is some synergies outside of shadow tomes after all.
There’s also tome of wind
Hey just wanted to say thanks! I'm a little overwhelmed by 4x games, and this series on tomes really helped me get back into AOW 4. Playing a nature summoning faction rn, and your nature vid helped me plan a really fun build too. Thanks for your work in the community!
One thing that you did get wrong about the Accursed Trickster that makes it far more annoying to deal with then you mentioned. Duplicity that made a clone, if the clone dies it dies. But if the real one dies, the clone takes its place and becomes real. Making it far tankier then it seems.
That’s really good wtf I’ve never seen that
Conjure vines - "It's the best spell in the game!"
Conjure tentacle - "Oh noes, conjure vines is better!"
Man, of course best spell in the game is better than any other. It's literally definition of "best")
As a new player, these tome reviews are great. I end up rewatching your order review all the time in my current playthrough when trying to figure out how to build out my tech tree.
This video is so excellent so far, thank you so much @shinshin. This really means a lot to me. Don't worry if we disagree or if you change valuations while you play, this was very well-researched and shows your infectious passion for the game. Thank you so much.
The Calamity tome is pretty nuts in Astral builds (I know that's not the focus of today's video), as it can provide both good Magic Origin units and a nutty spell. Oh and the Dragon's Ghostfire Storm feels ok alongside the Cascading Mana or whatever that thing is called. But I agree that the Dragon is overall not that crazy.
I could see you make some videos later for certain early to mid game compositions or build ideas cause as you said most tomes are hard to judge on their own, some like the tome of shadows can be easily enabled by certain hero types (mage access to blind enemies relative reliable), Builds could be for either efficiency or simply certain themes, just as a thought
Wondering if Shades has some play with Dune Serpent on Primal cultures. I wanna try that.
love your drawn out content on aow4 and the time you take in your "podcast". enjoing the game while listening to to
Great video, I very much enjoyed watching like the rest of these. Going to be real, I actually came into this video really hoping you'd dunk on the Shadow tomes and am disappointed you weren't way harsher on the overall design of Shadow. I am frustrated with the Shadow tech tree (if you want to call it that) for being such a schizophrenic, one-dimensional mess, and this is more systematic problem than the individual tomes in a vacuum. This has only gotten worse as more DLC tomes have been added, too. It's like Triumph just can't decide what they want Shadow to be. There are just a lot of problems with Shadow, in my opinion, and I really wish Triumph would consider a huge design pass on them.
1) Shadow tomes, particularly going undead, is way too all-or-nothing. There are a whopping five undead tomes-Necromancy, Souls, Great Transformation, Reaper, and Eternal Lord (Doomherald is somewhat of an undead tome, so make that five a half). This means that you have largely the same build every game, which makes each playthrough repetitive, as well as makes you extremely predictable. And just picking only one undead tome (besides maybe Great Transformation, I guess, but at that point you may as well go Corruption) feels completely pointless. No other playstyle requires this much investment. If you ever want to dip into another affinity, you either have to sacrifice an undead tome, which makes necromancy as a playstyle feel like it has a gaping hole somewhere, or you sacrifice picking any of the non-undead Shadow tomes and sacrifice cryomancy. More so than any other affinity, it feels way too restrictive in forcing you to stack only Shadow tomes and being cursed to have no other empire affinity-especially insulting since Shadow tomes pair so nicely with the 2x Shadow affinity Dark culture. The one-dimensional Shadow affinity issue is made even worse with the Tiger update now that governors and ruler signature skills can't give you free affinity anymore.
2) The game is mechanically hostile to necromancy for a whole host of reasons. Wow, thanks, I love being countered by an enemy just existing on a square where a corpse is. Oh, yay, I get to have a huge quantity of trash units-this would be really cool if not for the fact that I can only ever bring 18 units into a fight. Why wouldn't I want a smaller number of good units instead? Quantity doesn't mean shit if I'm hardcapped at 18, and in-battle reviving just isn't a reliable enough replacement for this. Moreover, you can't siege cities down without a hero, so a triple stack of skeletons can't act as independently of your main force as I'd like. And god forbid I ever put a hero into an army of five skeletons. This leads to one of the most damning points...
3) To play to necromancy's strengths, the player must manual everything. There are a lot of cool things you can do like summon trash zombies just to use Rotting explosion on them that the autoresolve AI will just never do. Most importantly, necromancy being such a non-healing and low-tier unit-heavy playstyle combined with the 18v18 unit cap means inherently that the player must do all sorts of crafty reviving and combat summoning that the autoresolve Ai will also never effectively. Since autoresolve is so important in especially multiplayer, why not just go with a braindead build that has really tanky units instead?
4) Skeleton spam really wants you to pick legitimately the worst tome in the game-Tome of the Beacon-to really make it shine, and it's only for one unlock: Mighty Meek. It's a gigantic trap that feels bad, because either your skeletons feel like a shadow of their potential, or you waste an entire tome unlock for one meme usage. Admittedly this is largely a balance problem with Beacon being such garbage outside of this one meme usage, but it bears mentioning.
5) Doomherald is weirdly way better as an off-affinity dip pick than as a coherent pick for a Shadow build. It's way better as a dip with Order for a Tyrant Knight-heavy build, which feels weird thematically since it has a banshee in it. Conversely, it also feels like Cryomancy is the only non-hybrid Shadow tome that's just generally good and can be used cleverly in non-Shadow builds that don't require a massive commitment. Other affinities have way more tomes in them that feel useful as off-affinity picks.
6) If you don't go undead (i.e., you go Corruption and become Umbral Demons), Tome of the Eternal Lord is worthless. All the non-undead Shadow tomes make an excellent example of why Triumph needs to add more tier 5 tomes. I'd also consider adding an extra cryomancy-related tech in Eternal Lord. I'd love a tier 5 Umbral Demon tome.
7) Touching on this, but it is a shame there isn't a tier 4 cryomancy-themed tome. As it is, Shadow is weirdly unfocused about whether it wants to be cryomancy or undead (or now Umbral Demons). God forbid you pick you pick both, lest you have like 14 Shadow affinity and nothing else. Cryomancy is also just cool and I'd love a Chaos Channeling equivalent like fire has.
8) You did remark on this, but the undead unit type is arguably shit now. There are way too many sources of fire and spirit damage with the new DLCs, between Oathsworn culture and Tome of the Cleansing Flame. Probably the two worst possible elemental weaknesses to have. Have fun having -4 weakness to probably 60% of the builds in the game. Lifesteal just doesn't make up for this, especially with how strong an Order and/or Nature build centered around healing is by comparison. Then you have Banshees, Corrupt Souls, and Reapers that are even weak to lighting on top of that! My god.
9) This is trivial, but it has been a pet peeve of mine for a long time: it really is just dumb that the Arctic Blizzards realm trait affects Snow Spirits because they technically don't have Frostling transformation. Snow spirits shouldn't be damaged by blizzards!
I also want to disagree with you about Spellwards from Severing being so great. They can only be cast on neutral territory, which by the time you get this tome is basically nowhere. What is the point of them? It's a worthless spell because 90% of the time you'd ever want it, there's nowhere useful for you to put one down. Am I the only one who thinks this?
I also like Tome of Shades more than you do-shades feel like a hybrid between a shock and skirmishers, and the tome overall feels like a really nice counter to bastion spamming (or high defense formations generally). It also pairs really nicely with Mage heroes since they can be specced to inflict blind.
constrict has this very specific downside where sometimes ai will want to leave and trigger attack of opportunity and die, I find this happening most often with pikemen and cavalry, I think cavalry doesn't completely calculate the damage pikemen do to it and the various bonuses (plus crit chance), and so sometimes constricting in melee can be a bad thing, since the enemy just dies for free
Super niche, kinda like the tome
Thank you for the video! Here is another suggestion, if you don't mind.
What was missing in your video for me were examples of when to use a certain tome/spell and when not. This game is (in many ways) about min-maxing and countering, finding synergies and builds. Seventy percent of this two-hour video is just reading descriptions of spells or units. I watched it with 1.5x playback, and I don't feel I missed much. I also get the feeling that sometimes you were making up your mind about some spells right at that moment. That there was no prep in advance.
Having a smaller video dedicated to a single tome with some ideas of when to use it best would be very much welcomed.
Take, for example, the Tome of Cryomancy. Would you take it if the realm has the Frostling Influence trait? Or Domain of The Frost Queen? Probably no. But Demonic Realm? Sure. Which cultures doing better or worse with this Tome? Which racial traits? How about White Witch on a Unicorn who can phase and then freeze? Is there a good combo with particular Society Traits? (Mana Addicts)
Think why random people on UA-cam would like to watch (and re-watch) your video and I guarantee that the quality of your content will increase.
Tentacle is a good tempo spell. U will probably never use it in primal which for some reason has absurdly good cultural summon thar can force to play around it on it's own (trust me you have probably never seen mire croc literally munchin down t4 angelized units in one turn, but uve seen sylvan wolfs slaughtering undead). It is mainly early game summon which can allow to go into 2 best tech trees being astral and shadow. Also shinshin, what I don't like is that you do not mention tech trees and they are pretty important. Order tech tree is not the best and can be outright bad on some maps which compensates strong tomes.
I didn't hear you mention but Tomb of Tentecal is very useful on any map with the umbal turned on as it makes your units immune to malady.
Shadow affinity is the affinity of subterfuge and dirty or unfair fighting. Nothing shadow has is really all that good in a straight up fight. It mostly relies on alternate currencies like souls or crippling debuffs like low moral, slow, constricted and insanity. Necromancy is a very good tome for Aggressive early games. Using souls takes the burden of draft and gold generation off of your cities. I just want to say that the point of shadow affinity is not to kill people immediately. Its to bully, steal and slowly suck the life out of a target. Your goal with shadow affinity is not to target cities, but armies and pillage provinces. Every hero slain can net you more research and mana. Every province pillaged can net you more gold for your economy.
Skeletons are cheap throw away units They have a number of uses. The first is acting as a wall for your main army. The fact that skeleton production does not block city unit production allows you to build stronger cultural units, like dark cultures warlocks, to act as a back line that is well defended by skeletons. You have said it yourself Action economy wins fights and the chief strength of the skeleton is in its numbers. Having a 9 to 4 unit advantage is not something to be scoffed at. Shadow affinity thrives in creating those lopsided engagements where your most likely to win Skeletons also give you map control and can be used to grind enemy armies down before moving your main army in for the kill. By the mid to late game losing an army or two of skeletons to kill a high value enemy hero or a strong enemy army is a good trade. Skeletons also make great raiders. The ability to pillage enemy provinces for gold is how you make war profitable in AoW4. Pillaging a province nets you 50 or so gold. Thats five times what a vendor building brings in. Lets say you have 4 pillages finish, thats 200 gold. Since skeletons cost no gold to make its a net positive. There is also the added benefit of any army trying to kill said raiders moving out of position and getting killed by your army to make more research and skeletons.
War for shadow affinity builds should focus not on taking cities but on killing armies and pillaging lands for resources. Your enemies become farms you can harvest every few turns for nice boosts. Shadow is all about taking things from the enemy, be it units, strengths, land, terrain advantage, hp, gold, mana, research ect. However if your not smart or devious about things and try to strong arm some one stronger than you like chaos can then your going to have a bad time. Shadow heavy builds need to butter up the strong while bullying those weaker than you. And always be looking out for back stab opportunities
@@SteveMorris-c2r It's great if you enjoy playing like that, but I (and I assume many others) don't want to spend 30 hours micro-ing stacks of skellies while the game ticks up to150 turns.
I'd rather siege down the city, erase its army, and move on in four turns or less.
Tentacle into Corruption really is just stupid broken. There is so much CC flying out there, that nothing can deal with it. Toss in an Eldrich hero for even more CC, and you just punch way above your weight. Broken? Maybe. Fun? Absolutely lol. Cryo into Cold Dark is fun as well. The special buildings can get massive
True Death Magic works pretty well with Skeleton Reanimation. You reanimate as many mages (they are cheap) as bodies allow and spam Curse of the Reaper. If skeleton mages die, you can raise them again with Battlefield Reanimation and so on. And CotR is not "once per battle", which is also a plus.
Withering Mist works nicely with Shadow Blades (Tome of Shades) as it provides a free (but random) way to blind enemy units.
PS. Please put timestamps for Tomes in your videos (or description / pinned comment).
skeletons are creatures of magical origin, therefore they can be complemented well with mystic summonig
So much powercreep. They need to balance it
My poor Nightmare Mount Industrious boys...Triumph pls
Not sure if you did say it.
i do like tome of cryomancy. but the fighting on sea they get bad matchups aswell. cause most sea creatures do have frot resist (also kinda counts for pyromancy but you haven't gotten there yet).
this makes shadow always lagg abit behind for me personally.
and from the tome of evolution from the previous video i do think the shepherd abilty no longer being there (or at least not tied to it) makes it way less usefull. that 20% exp + chaos that could give i think 15% more exp does make your low tier units tier 3 quickly.
the no building on some tomes used to be upset with an abilty for the lord. strange that the last DLC removed all of those yet thoe tomes got nothing back in return (not even more value on some of their buildings or stronger spells)
my dude, CEASE. I just finished watching the nature tome analysis and then you just bring out another video where you will probably say just how muc better the ice tomes are compared to nature 😭
(I will watch the video obviously, but holy hell they are long. not a complaint though, My autistic ahh prefers long analysis videos much more over vids without any content)
You made a huge mistake with Bone Horror. You cannot summon them as easily as you are describing in the video.
Bone Horror Reanimation requires you to kill T3-T4 non-racial units, making them incredibly hard to reliably obtain.
This is the same issue Bone Dragon Reanimation suffers from, requiring you to kill non-racial T5 units on the map.
Compare this to other T3/T4 units that you can just straight up summon on-demand with no hoops to jump through.
I Wish Ash Primals were actually good because they sound fun with Tome of Calamity.
The R in 'PROC' means random. If it's not random, it's not a proc.
How many base rank shield skeletons with no enchants does it take to take down an 18 stack of legendary balors with cosmic overdrive?
Off the top of my head I'll guess 10
What are you going to do after you're done with all the tome schools?
How about racial/faction creation perks? Personally I was wondering for a while how worth it to get alternative mount perks for your race and what synergies it brings, considering the higher cost.
Also the different Lord types, maybe? Though you might wanna wait on this one possibly bc one of the announced expansions in season pass 2 was the Giant Lords.
Yes the shadows endure!
Your picture obscures the unit and spell details.
1:22:03 Defensive Gnome
Tome of Oblivion does not feel like it belongs there at all. It should be t3 instead of t4 and it feels like an eldritch entity swapped it out for the frost tome that should have been there instead.
Umbral mistriss "questionably balanced"... are the kids saying this instead of "stupidly broken and wildly not balanced at all", because I can change how I say it. I just want to stay up to date. Buddy went ultra op with mystic summoners and this among others... it was pretty dumb. We don't allow this unit anymore.
hasheensheen
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Which tear 1 tome has tear 3 unit? I don't think there is any so this is not a tome of necromancy weakness. Thank you for the video. The only bad thing about them is that there are only 2 affinities left :D
1st