I think the Dev's need to consider doing something to make the players choice of culture more impactful. In age of Wonders: planetfall the Mods mechanic helped keep even lower tier units relevant into the late game. I think the Dev's should consider either adding a few more tier 3 units or even culture specific tier 4s. Giving players some more culture specific build around units would make cultures feel more distinct. That's just my opinion though.
I would love a 2nd cultural T3 or a cultural T4 or just some way to introduce more units at the top end. We really need another T3 racial support now that Necromancers have dropped to T2.
The community noticed, and there's at least 2 mods I know of that add more culture units to both pad out the roster, but make them feel more unique amongst against each other.
Hey walker! I just picked up aow4 again after taking a break since launch. Love your tier list content!! It's really helping me improve at the game even though I just do single player - I love using auto resolve as much as possible. I really liked how you made sure to read off all the traits this video. I listen to them like podcasts while I do chores and the overview really helps. Thanks for the content, keep it up!!
Great suggestion! WinSlaya has a giant file somewhere with like a 15 page document, but I should probably have a condensed Google Doc with the main bullet points.
This would be very relevant to me. I have a friend who plays this game single player CONSTANTLY and he wants to play 1v1. He doubtless has dozens of SP cheese tactics developed to crush me and toy with me. (like he did in Civ games in the past) Being able to have some ideas about MP rules would go a long way to balancing that out.
One thing I disagree with is mercenaries, they are almost as durable as a halberdier (but cheaper) but the drive back does a lot of damage and auto uses pretty well. In manual displace is amazing.
Autoresolve only is a massive upgrade for the game if you are looking for a real challenge out of it. Mercenaries do a lot of work initially, that is true, and their stats being effectively T2 but only having slightly higher gold upkeep isn't bad, but Mercs alone can't really make up a functional front line for Reavers, unfortunately, at least not after T20 or so.
@@wepg Exactly, the problem isn't that the mercs are bad, it's that they have no shields or fighters to back them up, and no matter how cool they are, T1 pikes can't hold the line against anything really.
@@funakfunak2740 Yup, basically. Mercs aren't bad but they are expensive and that comes with some downsides, and unfortunately the rest of the Reaver roster needs more support than it is currently getting.
@wepg I do personally think the Cannons are better than you make them out to be, their extended range with the line damage and them shutting down defense mode and retaliation makes them very potent. The rest of the roster does not really help, but I do like those cannons.
Great to hear! I think there's a lot of fun to be had playing around with some of the more questionable things too, to be clear, but I think having a pulse on what is generically powerful is pretty helpful.
There is stuff that are all getting low grades but if combined I think has a good synergy. Like Mystic with Experienced Seafarers and Devious Watchers, where you focus on scouts (Having 5-6) and using summonings like Copper Golems early on. Experienced Seafarers also makes river tiles really good and sea tiles worthwhile for Mystics as the bonus gives gold and draft which they lack. Unfortunately it does not guarantee you start next to any of those.
I’m curious to hear how significant you think Star Blades is for Mystic culture. I’ve been playing around with Mystic lately and I’ve found myself very impressed with their early game damage potential. With a Wizard King and allowing the AI to use spells you can expect basically a +6 to the base damage of your entire early. Combining that with lightning blades and lightning torrent from tome of evocation has kinda shocked me in terms of early military strength.
The issue is that the AI is not great at utilizing Star Blades in autoresolves, so the Mystic damage output can struggle in MP due to problems with not leveraging their strengths particularly well. If the game offered us a way to encourage the AI to cast spells more aggressively in autoresolve we might see Mystics get a boost, but right now there's just too many combats where the AI refuses to cast spells (even when enabled), and Mystics suffer as a result.
Granted this vid came out before it was available, but I’ve had a lot of fun with the Constrictors with the Reaver faction. They do such a good job at slowing down the enemies charge and controlling the board that I’ve kept using them in late game. They are also pretty nice at bringing enemy ranged units to your melee units.
Dragon Rulers are a lot of fun on smaller maps tbh, and as long as you respect the fact that Wizard Kings will dramatically outscale you in the late game (so maybe kill/ally them first), you should be fine.
I just went from easy to normal. A surprisingly big step up. The feudal kingdom went well. Few turns away from getting a good 4th city. Plus.. 1 free city ready for take over, and additional 2 free cities close to same point. But quit campaign. At turn 30 was nowhere near able to clear out bronse wonders.
I prefer manual combat (when it’s needed) and brutal difficulty with high world threat. But it’s nice to be able to choose between these two play styles. Both have different challenges. Auto resolve obviously becomes a lot harder in the mid to late game. I just feel like it nerfs too many builds and normal world threat makes leveling up heroes without proper army support too easy, early expansion as well. Thanks for your SP videos though! Very enjoyable to watch.
Brutal is a different experience for sure, with the world providing way more challenges but a lot more rewards as a result. The biggest problem I have with Brutal is that the AI empires cannot keep up. They die *all* the time and end up way behind on research on Brutal vs Major Advantage Normal/Normal. Just kinda depends on what sort of game experience you are looking for.
That has been an idea that floats around, just need to figure out *how* to record it as the encyclopedia isn't great there. That said, one of my SP AoW4 streams does start with a general item forge conversation, as well as breaking down Artifact Hoarders vs Reclaimers.
@@wepg oh yeah good point. Maybe load up a wide play through with lots of cities, all with the SPI from Tome of Transmutation so you can max out Magic Materials and unlock all the item properties?
For the Tribal culture i discoverd that leaving a single low level unit or scout will attract the enemy to send 1 or 2 troops, and i would spam summon the tribal summon and kill armys worth of troops as they would send more and more solo units to kill my one guy even if they sebt more in many cases i still won. Eventually in the late game (turn 80 or 90) it did get less effective due to the Ai sending like 3 stacks at once.
@wepg I agree, but it is still worth the time to manually summon them if your in a pinch or to stop reinforcements, kill armys in a siege, or just killing armys in the open field.
I think you're mostly on spot but you underrate some flavours of Primal (Primal can get a differen placement on the list based on the animal you go for). A big part of primal eco is their SPI and with some of the animals (e.g. Mammoth or Crow) it's easy to get pretty insane value out of it. Mammoth production overtakes high pretty handily once you get there as SPI alone can be worth like 30 or more prod, plus ice start means you can also get like extra 15 mana out of school of cryomancy. Crow monolith and outpost spam are also very strong for mana and for everything once you get to tome of transmutation. Animists aren't good in auto but ancestral wardens are brutal, they're absolutely up there as one of the best cultural auto units if not the best if you reach a critical mass of them. They destroy anything mounted, large, ranged, shock units and still go toe to toe with unmounted bastions just fine.
I'm thinking we might bring Primals into our next game based off of the poll, so we should have a good opportunity to see how big the econ bonus can get for Primal pretty soon. The issue is in their autoresolve and economy vs the better stuff, which Crow and Mammoth I agree can put in good work for us, but to what extent we'll have to see.
Some notes / comments I took while watching: **Cultures** > No surprises here, although I expected you to go in-depth on the Barbarian change. It meaningfully impacts their early combat clearing and also kind of bottlenecks them into needing Crit (like how dark needs weakened, reaver needs mark... yeah we love that!) > I think mystic is slightly undervalued and could be arguably be placed next to Primal. Their overlooked mana economy lets them be another map-clearing culture by being able to spam summons. It's really a shame they can't take Fabled Hunters. I enjoyed building them with Mana Channelers and the New Druidic Terraformers. > I seriously cannot find any reason for Reavers, Dark or Feudal to be above D. Even in single player they just feel noticeably weaker. I WANT to like them and find a way to make them work but I just can't. **Society Traits** > Glad you caught on the Evil Overlords trait being so powerful. It's so easy to blast it to max level and feels good paired with Zeal and Doom Herald SPIs. > Prolific Swarmers is slightly overlooked since it can bring value to any faction that struggles early game, but I also don't think it's higher than C. Could be useful for Reaver Mercenary spam? Nah... nvm. > I wasn't sold on Reclaimers after you said you'd be stuck with 10,000 tokens, but I could see the value. > Ritual Cannibals can be messy in auto combat when the AI decides bringing a ranged unit into melee range to eat a corpse makes sense. You can play around it by not bringing ranged but... eh. > I think Imperialists is a little stronger than ranked but I also play with fewer players in my games. **Body Traits** > Did not know that about the Elephant / Mammoth mounts... that just seems a tad too strong. > Mount Masters seemed like a fun idea but like you mentioned, can't justify the 2 point cost. > I've tried so hard to make Hideous Stench to work. It just doesn't seem as effective as I was expecting.
The Barbarian Change to Primal Strike -> Savage Strike I probably should have at least mentioned, but I did talk about it a bit in our Tomes rework. I think ultimately people overestimate how much you need to do crit stacking to make Barbarians operate fine. Getting crits on all your units is *good*, but generally your heroes are going to be able to put out way more damage on crits than any units you have laying around pretty quickly. Given that Barbarian heroes have an innate +20% on the skill tree, +20% from morale and +30% from Fortune 3, you can get frighteningly close to 100% without any investment at all in crits. Taking Revelry and Devastation is still very powerful for Barbarians and so juice the crits for you without having to warp your game plan much. Mystics have less of a production problem now in the early game than they used to and their unit roster isn't awful, but I think the Primal economy is *usually* better at scaling up than the Mystic economy, though it is true that Mystics get a ton of mana early and that can enable some really fast summoning starts. I think the bigger issue is just how fragile their early game units are and how long it can take you to get beefy units to chuck around, given their lack of food/industry/draft meaning their cities will grow meaningfully slower than basically everyone else's. Scions of Evil has always been good, but between the nerfs to other sources of Imperium and the "buff" that the Pure Evil bonus actually works now definitely boosts it meaningfully. Imperialists is definitely very good for rush-oriented strategies and shorter games where you can forgive yourself a lot more for making a suboptimal city simply to get the starting boost. +20 gold and +20 stability is a reasonable amount of stuff to get in a city just for founding it, so Imperialists want to cram their stuff closer together (or, at least, with connecting outposts/work camps), but that does result in problems scaling their cities late into a big FFA or whatever.
@@wepg for mystics specifically they can resolve these weaknesses with Tome of Rock or Zeal pretty easily. The heavy map clearing works similarly to Barbarian / Industrious albeit with a little less durability but more focus on mass reinforcements + high burst. Their whole economy is centered around mana so as long as you avoid too many draft units I think they should be pretty competitive until late late game.
What I found out so far. Ranged builds (magic or non magic) are extremely powerful. You can increase the range, get a spell that nullifies vision disadvantages. This makes ranged units somewhat first strike "able". Another very strong build revolves around summoning units (animals, elementals etc.) That way you can bring more units into the game. According to heroes: Magic ranged builds are suuuper strong. Another strong build is the leadership trait, making all your units stronger if led by a hero. If you combine ranged units, who are mounted, that can summon creatures and put a leader hero on top. You can basically have 35 active units at max on the battlefield. The AI highly underestimates the power of summoning spells and you can trick it into thinking that an army, even at tier II is a weak target, which it isn't and that can steamroll them. Also, you can increase that effect if you have units that are not on full health. If you have heroes and support units with healing/regeneration spells, you can top their health to max an give the AI a hard time. I also love to pick traits that make my tier I units stronger and cheap to upkeep. You can use guerilla warfare tactics that way and will have many disposable units at many places to spread like a mongolian cancer across the whole map. Even better if you pick tome of the horde to summon Tier I units each turn everywhere on the map. Another very strong build is one that gives you max whispering stones very fast. If you stay on max good affiliation, you can create vasalls all over the place.
Many thanks for this all your handy lists/guides. I am thinking of starting a industrious dwarven race (I think dwarves are just fitting). And I guess fabled hunters + artifact hoarders with a tough, resistant, hardy race should be one of the strongest combinations for auto battle, correct? And in addition this hsould swim in mana with all the artifacts prospecting can give
Yeah, that should work really well, just don't neglect your research in your tomes and you should be golden (so take at least one thing that can give you a research post SPI).
@@wepgI am thinking of the alchemy tome here The support ability for heroes is decent I guess, I can get a research SPI and an additional research city structure together with nature and materium affinity, which fit nicely with trying to get 2nd and 3rd city asap
@@kuwe4652 Alchemy as first has some issues with a lack of a summon, and for that matter a lack of anything to spend casting points on early. I think Industrious does great with Warding, Cryomancy, Enchantment or Evocation as a first tome, and Zeal can do work as well (though if you are going Zeal, you probably also want to move into Order later to ensure you're actually using the affinity).
Has anything changed with the rise of Eldritch Realms (apart from the new content)? Will there be an update of this at some point (I assume after 1.3 exits beta)?
Herbivores is one of those weird things where it's actually typically better for autoresolves than it is for big manual PvP fights, but extra healing that the AI "understands" how to do is really strong.
I'm sad about where you put hideous stench, though I think it's very build dependent. -2 resistance/status resistance is effectively around a 23% boost to your ability to apply status effects or do elemental damage with auras and melee range attacks. In early game that's not all that big a deal outside of specialized builds (I like how it combos with a shadow dragon ruler) since most elemental damage is ranged and auto resolve won't be smart enough to move a shield unit next to the target before blasting it with a spell, but it starts being significant once you have blade type enchantments and mixed damage type hero weapons.
It's a powerful effect, but it adds very little in terms of durability and costs 3 points. At 2 points I could see it being more like a B+/A- kinda trait, depending on your build, but right now it's just too expensive.
I've been trying to play this game and I really want all the pantheon stuff but the grind is real. Was wondering if you could come up with a streamline way to grind it really quickly , because the 1v1 small map is taking too long. I was thinking maybe if you can come up with a super faction idea with the perfect game mode idk I really need help
I think first, understand that it isn't a race. If you play 1000 hours you'll have everything unlocked no matter what you do, trust me (so long as you remember to collect pantheon points along the way). Have fun with the game and you'll get there. That said, I would actually encourage larger than 1v1s because you get more pantheon points from clearing ancient wonders and leveling heroes and doing research and stuff. A 4p FFA can net you a lot of pantheon points in relative short order if you play on autoresolve only, and it is a genuine blast in my opinion.
I'd be curious about the ranking now that Reaver has been buffed and Mystic got updated (alongside other balance changes of course). Because, imo, vs AI at least, a Magelock hero with Killing Momentum and some setup/support will just be overpowered and generally guarantee 2 kills per turn (or at least 1 and a half); I may be bad but Crossbows seem useless now.
Something needs to be done about prospecting for industrious. Its tedious and boring to be micromanaging 5 scouts to prospect. If the ai is good enough to auto explore and pick up loot, why cant there be an auto prospect button?
Yeah, part of why I was so slow at getting that part out is that we haven't really seen a big balance pass on them, so I wasn't sure what value we could add. But Primals do have some promise to them, and the Society and Form Traits definitely needed touching up.
@@Max_Cony Once you get to Ancestral Wardens they are really strong in autoresolves, that is true. The difficulty with Primals is in getting there, as their economies are noticably slower than High/Industrious/Barbarians.
Mr walker, you mention how some affinities are inherently stronger, I would like to know what would your ranking of the affinities be. I feel like materium is high ranking but I’m unsure about the rest, I’m not as well versed in this as you are so I’d just like to know your educated opinion on this. Thank you in advance!
Interestingly, Materium 1 got pretty meaningfully nerfed on the most recent patch, but I still think 1 turn outposts are worth going for. Astral and Shadow have both been very good on the empire tree basically on all patches. Nature still has the worst tree, but Order's Rally stuff has been getting astronomically better so is worth investigating if you are going that path. Chaos, unfortunately, has a good pick in chaos 1 and then basically nothing for a *loooong* time. tl;dr- SAM is best, then maybe your sonic the hedgehog OC, but say N(o) to the nature empire tree. Fortunately, Nature has really good tomes, but the affinity points are borderline wasted.
imo swap dark and fudal , and mystic and primal can go up a tier , i think primal tier 3 hard counters most other racial tier3s that have mounts and there engage rage is kinda op there support is over tuned in manual who would have thourt infinite summons would not be an issue sure auto resolve issues i get it , but have you been rushed by support build animists? i here the economy argument and i think were there economy feels good is when you combine it with other things for example the serpent and builders trait forces local quarys that gives +4 gold pur annex you have to get a bit more creative than just looking at the base race stats , dark are barely playable unless you take a summon able unit for mana upkeep like summon phantasm warrior tome of warding. i think people underestimate fast recoup , lord of war, tome of winds, fabled hunters every turn that stack is clearing multiple nodes, its comparable to barbarian clear speeds but the bonuses are only applying to one stack and when you want all the exp on the heros and lord in that one stack is still very effective and efficient farming and it just gets better at your 3rd tome spell winds you can even pair this with army heal and its so nice to clear with , however i will say that since heros are delayed there eco has taken a hit and i do think lord traits are better in team games when your allys can take advantage of your lords , one thing im not sure if you can considered in this tierlist is the culture tome you get fudal spells are very good even later in the game stedfast is op , same with the high research spi , its also the same for mystic with some small changes to research order and avoiding taking a spell you know you don't want auto to use , they will instead spam the best starting spell in the game for mystic but it drastically changes there auto resolve clearing early. side note some comments on reavers were not quite accurate, they are very bad anyway but yes very problematic auto on reavers ... also no there is no value in the declare war in ffa. last time i tryed it at least it removes the imperium penalty witch is huge however all players do get grievance's against you still so its a double edged sword coz others potentially gain imperium to declare on you
I think you could make a very well reasoned argument for Dark to move to D tier. I went back and forth on that myself. I think ultimately I decided not to push them into D because Dark is, at the very least, typically an okay faction to fight off an enemy rush (as weakened effects will be a lot stickier in the beginning of the game when base status resistance is lower), pretty good base affinity, a potentially useful base alignment and knowledge scaling. Their roster and economy are pretty bad though, and their military bonus does become deadweight by the midgame (more weakened 2+ effects please Triumph). I ultimately think they are a little better than Feudal and Reavers, though. Feudal does have some disgustingly good tools for manual PvP battles, that is true. As bad as the AI is with steadfast, it can be a decisive tool for some big battles. Exactly how much value steadfast provides to you does depend a lot on what kind of units you are packing, of course, and the problem I've often encountered with Feudal is that your economy and military are so slow in the early game that it is relatively easy for an enemy who wants to fight you to fight you before you get a ton of Single Model Entities running around (which is, of course, where Steadfast shines). Between that and the fact that the Feudal backbone- Heroes- got meaningfully nerfed on the recent patch, I felt comfortable putting them in D, though I will gladly admit that if you *can* survive with Feudal and somehow not be woefully behind economically and militarily on T40 or whatever you are likely way ahead for the remainder of the game, but I think that scenario is unrealistic. Reavers declaring without the Imperium penalty for not farming up grievances is pretty good, it just means you need to declare war crazy early. Like, I see a scout and an outpost being built on T11, Declare War immediately as first diplomacy kind of deal. The problem there, of course, is that you need a big and good starting army to make that productive. Fortunately you can lean into Mercenaries, unfortunately this line of play generally precludes attacking more than 1 Free City. You don't need to necessarily prosecute the war against the other player, especially if their capital is far away, but they might take the scout/outpost snipe as being more hostile and less opportunistic than it actually is.
I had a stack with 2 magelocks and with good golam defences and those magelocks.....killed EVERYTHING and with take aim you never have to move out of cover as they always have good to hit, but that is using manual I guess
Fortunately, Mystics and Reavers both seem meaningfully better on the current patch, but I think if you learn how to play Barbarians-High-Industrious well they are anything but boring.
There are some things that make it worse (warping wilds, regenerating infestations), but overall MP is a lot more stable than it was like six months ago. It's still not perfect or even really good, but it's gotten a good deal better since release.
I recall a certain Englishman with a serious fascination with tea using chosen destroyers to repeatedly cycle through making a city, turning it into a vassal, then going to war and destroying said vassal. I had 1 super city before turn 20. I wonder if you can still do that.
Nah, Profilic Swarmers saves you very little these days, especially in a world where the food requirements to grow a pop are lower (so the best bonus is way less impressive). Prolific Swarmers is probably closer to a C in that it doesn't actively hurt you, but it's very bad. Tier 1 units are just not the backbone of armies in Age of Wonders 4, getting a random T1 is actively worse than getting a known particular type of unit at game start.
@@Tirax13 It saves more mana and gold as the game scales up, which is good, but that's a very slow bonus compared to something like Fabled Hunters which gives you giant amounts of resources starting on T1. The initial upkeep reduction is pretty minimal, and while getting more mana and gold later on is good it isn't going to help you catch up to someone who had a much faster start due to stronger economic or military bonuses.
@@wepg but doesnt 20% less upkeep lets you maintain 20% more Army? So you can roam more of the map. You can still combine it with fabled Hunters. I mean jes, youre Initial upkeed in Turn 1 is minimal, like your whole economy and army. But you save 20% each Turn starting Turn 1.
@@Tirax13 The issue is that 20% of like 30 total upkeep is basically nothing, and given that it doesn't save you mana on your magic origins it doesn't really add as much as you'd expect. You need *tons* of draft or heavy utilization of Rally on gold upkeep units to get a meaningful savings, and by then any of the other economic picks will have accumulated a big advantage in resources you'll need to chew through to get back to parity. All that said, I think the difference between a D+ and a C- is mostly how you squint and Prolific is somewhere in there. It doesn't actively hurt you, it just doesn't do a lot for a pick.
Heh. I have a very different playstyle than you. It's interesting to see how different this game can be in different hands, and what you value versus me. Nothing is more hilarious than killing a full enemy army with judicious use of summoning when all that you have is a scout. Of course, you can't autoresolve that.
dude in like 10 years we'll be able to to buy some kind of AI product that will allow us to create our own games just by speaking to it.... i bet you could create a good 4x game
스2 인기 모드 중 하나인 nexus co-op에서 저 게슈탈트 제로가 플레이 할 수 있는 사령관으로 나오죠 ㅋㅋ 테란 이지만 프로토스 처럼 사이오닉 망이 깔리고 그 안에서 여러 기능이 풀리는 팩션 ㅋㅋ 아마 그 모드가 스2 세계관의 서로 다른 평행 우주에서 데려온 사령관들 이라던가 그런 설정 이었던거 같은데 왜 뜬금없이 게슈탈트 제로라는 듣보잡이 있나 했더니 이런 설정이 있었군요.
@@AndreLuis-gw5ox once you start to play the game and understand the rules, you'll learn that manual fighting the AI effectively breaks the game due to the tactical AI not understanding combat very well. If you want to play casually and enjoy the game and have fun, do so! If you want a challenge that encourages you to actually learn the game's mechanics, though, you need to play on autoresolve mostly or autoresolve only to get a good balanced game right now.
I think the Dev's need to consider doing something to make the players choice of culture more impactful. In age of Wonders: planetfall the Mods mechanic helped keep even lower tier units relevant into the late game. I think the Dev's should consider either adding a few more tier 3 units or even culture specific tier 4s. Giving players some more culture specific build around units would make cultures feel more distinct. That's just my opinion though.
I would love a 2nd cultural T3 or a cultural T4 or just some way to introduce more units at the top end. We really need another T3 racial support now that Necromancers have dropped to T2.
The community noticed, and there's at least 2 mods I know of that add more culture units to both pad out the roster, but make them feel more unique amongst against each other.
Hey walker! I just picked up aow4 again after taking a break since launch. Love your tier list content!! It's really helping me improve at the game even though I just do single player - I love using auto resolve as much as possible. I really liked how you made sure to read off all the traits this video. I listen to them like podcasts while I do chores and the overview really helps.
Thanks for the content, keep it up!!
No problem! Glad it is helpful.
Im glad im not the only one that listens to them like podcasts haha
Unless there is one that I just missed, would you consider making a video going through all the rules you use for your MP sessions?
Great suggestion! WinSlaya has a giant file somewhere with like a 15 page document, but I should probably have a condensed Google Doc with the main bullet points.
Wanted to posit the same request as well
Explain the ruleset and realm settings pleaaase
This would be very relevant to me. I have a friend who plays this game single player CONSTANTLY and he wants to play 1v1. He doubtless has dozens of SP cheese tactics developed to crush me and toy with me. (like he did in Civ games in the past) Being able to have some ideas about MP rules would go a long way to balancing that out.
walker content is peak content
-Good, good, the psychic brain worms are taking control of the humans as we speak.-
Thank You!
OVERDUE MR WALKER (but I'll accept it because your content is top tier)
It's still Wednesday in... some... uhhhhhh
Ooo exciting. You made me switch to auto resolve only. I miss the fights but I never lost anything and would win still with T1 units even on brutal.
One thing I disagree with is mercenaries, they are almost as durable as a halberdier (but cheaper) but the drive back does a lot of damage and auto uses pretty well. In manual displace is amazing.
Autoresolve only is a massive upgrade for the game if you are looking for a real challenge out of it. Mercenaries do a lot of work initially, that is true, and their stats being effectively T2 but only having slightly higher gold upkeep isn't bad, but Mercs alone can't really make up a functional front line for Reavers, unfortunately, at least not after T20 or so.
@@wepg Exactly, the problem isn't that the mercs are bad, it's that they have no shields or fighters to back them up, and no matter how cool they are, T1 pikes can't hold the line against anything really.
@@funakfunak2740 Yup, basically. Mercs aren't bad but they are expensive and that comes with some downsides, and unfortunately the rest of the Reaver roster needs more support than it is currently getting.
@wepg I do personally think the Cannons are better than you make them out to be, their extended range with the line damage and them shutting down defense mode and retaliation makes them very potent.
The rest of the roster does not really help, but I do like those cannons.
I have not played since dragons and all these are very helpful to my min max OCD needs,
Great to hear! I think there's a lot of fun to be had playing around with some of the more questionable things too, to be clear, but I think having a pulse on what is generically powerful is pretty helpful.
There is stuff that are all getting low grades but if combined I think has a good synergy. Like Mystic with Experienced Seafarers and Devious Watchers, where you focus on scouts (Having 5-6) and using summonings like Copper Golems early on. Experienced Seafarers also makes river tiles really good and sea tiles worthwhile for Mystics as the bonus gives gold and draft which they lack. Unfortunately it does not guarantee you start next to any of those.
You certainly can go in that direction, but such builds struggle immensely in MP or autoresolves unfortunately.
I’m curious to hear how significant you think Star Blades is for Mystic culture.
I’ve been playing around with Mystic lately and I’ve found myself very impressed with their early game damage potential. With a Wizard King and allowing the AI to use spells you can expect basically a +6 to the base damage of your entire early. Combining that with lightning blades and lightning torrent from tome of evocation has kinda shocked me in terms of early military strength.
The issue is that the AI is not great at utilizing Star Blades in autoresolves, so the Mystic damage output can struggle in MP due to problems with not leveraging their strengths particularly well. If the game offered us a way to encourage the AI to cast spells more aggressively in autoresolve we might see Mystics get a boost, but right now there's just too many combats where the AI refuses to cast spells (even when enabled), and Mystics suffer as a result.
Granted this vid came out before it was available, but I’ve had a lot of fun with the Constrictors with the Reaver faction. They do such a good job at slowing down the enemies charge and controlling the board that I’ve kept using them in late game. They are also pretty nice at bringing enemy ranged units to your melee units.
Thank you for the comprehensive guide. Was overwhelmed with the options offered, this helped A LOT.
Glad it was helpful!
I'm a noob who only plays on normal atm and always picks the dragon lord leader but I love these vids :D
Dragon Rulers are a lot of fun on smaller maps tbh, and as long as you respect the fact that Wizard Kings will dramatically outscale you in the late game (so maybe kill/ally them first), you should be fine.
I just went from easy to normal. A surprisingly big step up. The feudal kingdom went well. Few turns away from getting a good 4th city. Plus.. 1 free city ready for take over, and additional 2 free cities close to same point. But quit campaign. At turn 30 was nowhere near able to clear out bronse wonders.
Keep it up! The more you play and the more you learn the better you'll get.
I prefer manual combat (when it’s needed) and brutal difficulty with high world threat.
But it’s nice to be able to choose between these two play styles.
Both have different challenges. Auto resolve obviously becomes a lot harder in the mid to late game.
I just feel like it nerfs too many builds and normal world threat makes leveling up heroes without proper army support too easy, early expansion as well.
Thanks for your SP videos though! Very enjoyable to watch.
Brutal is a different experience for sure, with the world providing way more challenges but a lot more rewards as a result. The biggest problem I have with Brutal is that the AI empires cannot keep up. They die *all* the time and end up way behind on research on Brutal vs Major Advantage Normal/Normal. Just kinda depends on what sort of game experience you are looking for.
Thanks a lot for updating the guide it's really helpful.
No problem!
I’m so glad I found this channel and your fantastic AOW4 guides! Please do an Item Forge tier list video!
That has been an idea that floats around, just need to figure out *how* to record it as the encyclopedia isn't great there. That said, one of my SP AoW4 streams does start with a general item forge conversation, as well as breaking down Artifact Hoarders vs Reclaimers.
@@wepg oh yeah good point. Maybe load up a wide play through with lots of cities, all with the SPI from Tome of Transmutation so you can max out Magic Materials and unlock all the item properties?
For the Tribal culture i discoverd that leaving a single low level unit or scout will attract the enemy to send 1 or 2 troops, and i would spam summon the tribal summon and kill armys worth of troops as they would send more and more solo units to kill my one guy even if they sebt more in many cases i still won. Eventually in the late game (turn 80 or 90) it did get less effective due to the Ai sending like 3 stacks at once.
Unfortunately this strategy only works on manual battles vs the AI; the Primal AI is pretty bad at actually using the summons when you watch it.
@wepg I agree, but it is still worth the time to manually summon them if your in a pinch or to stop reinforcements, kill armys in a siege, or just killing armys in the open field.
I think you're mostly on spot but you underrate some flavours of Primal (Primal can get a differen placement on the list based on the animal you go for). A big part of primal eco is their SPI and with some of the animals (e.g. Mammoth or Crow) it's easy to get pretty insane value out of it. Mammoth production overtakes high pretty handily once you get there as SPI alone can be worth like 30 or more prod, plus ice start means you can also get like extra 15 mana out of school of cryomancy. Crow monolith and outpost spam are also very strong for mana and for everything once you get to tome of transmutation.
Animists aren't good in auto but ancestral wardens are brutal, they're absolutely up there as one of the best cultural auto units if not the best if you reach a critical mass of them. They destroy anything mounted, large, ranged, shock units and still go toe to toe with unmounted bastions just fine.
I'm thinking we might bring Primals into our next game based off of the poll, so we should have a good opportunity to see how big the econ bonus can get for Primal pretty soon. The issue is in their autoresolve and economy vs the better stuff, which Crow and Mammoth I agree can put in good work for us, but to what extent we'll have to see.
Some notes / comments I took while watching:
**Cultures**
> No surprises here, although I expected you to go in-depth on the Barbarian change. It meaningfully impacts their early combat clearing and also kind of bottlenecks them into needing Crit (like how dark needs weakened, reaver needs mark... yeah we love that!)
> I think mystic is slightly undervalued and could be arguably be placed next to Primal. Their overlooked mana economy lets them be another map-clearing culture by being able to spam summons. It's really a shame they can't take Fabled Hunters. I enjoyed building them with Mana Channelers and the New Druidic Terraformers.
> I seriously cannot find any reason for Reavers, Dark or Feudal to be above D. Even in single player they just feel noticeably weaker. I WANT to like them and find a way to make them work but I just can't.
**Society Traits**
> Glad you caught on the Evil Overlords trait being so powerful. It's so easy to blast it to max level and feels good paired with Zeal and Doom Herald SPIs.
> Prolific Swarmers is slightly overlooked since it can bring value to any faction that struggles early game, but I also don't think it's higher than C. Could be useful for Reaver Mercenary spam? Nah... nvm.
> I wasn't sold on Reclaimers after you said you'd be stuck with 10,000 tokens, but I could see the value.
> Ritual Cannibals can be messy in auto combat when the AI decides bringing a ranged unit into melee range to eat a corpse makes sense. You can play around it by not bringing ranged but... eh.
> I think Imperialists is a little stronger than ranked but I also play with fewer players in my games.
**Body Traits**
> Did not know that about the Elephant / Mammoth mounts... that just seems a tad too strong.
> Mount Masters seemed like a fun idea but like you mentioned, can't justify the 2 point cost.
> I've tried so hard to make Hideous Stench to work. It just doesn't seem as effective as I was expecting.
The Barbarian Change to Primal Strike -> Savage Strike I probably should have at least mentioned, but I did talk about it a bit in our Tomes rework. I think ultimately people overestimate how much you need to do crit stacking to make Barbarians operate fine. Getting crits on all your units is *good*, but generally your heroes are going to be able to put out way more damage on crits than any units you have laying around pretty quickly. Given that Barbarian heroes have an innate +20% on the skill tree, +20% from morale and +30% from Fortune 3, you can get frighteningly close to 100% without any investment at all in crits. Taking Revelry and Devastation is still very powerful for Barbarians and so juice the crits for you without having to warp your game plan much.
Mystics have less of a production problem now in the early game than they used to and their unit roster isn't awful, but I think the Primal economy is *usually* better at scaling up than the Mystic economy, though it is true that Mystics get a ton of mana early and that can enable some really fast summoning starts. I think the bigger issue is just how fragile their early game units are and how long it can take you to get beefy units to chuck around, given their lack of food/industry/draft meaning their cities will grow meaningfully slower than basically everyone else's.
Scions of Evil has always been good, but between the nerfs to other sources of Imperium and the "buff" that the Pure Evil bonus actually works now definitely boosts it meaningfully. Imperialists is definitely very good for rush-oriented strategies and shorter games where you can forgive yourself a lot more for making a suboptimal city simply to get the starting boost. +20 gold and +20 stability is a reasonable amount of stuff to get in a city just for founding it, so Imperialists want to cram their stuff closer together (or, at least, with connecting outposts/work camps), but that does result in problems scaling their cities late into a big FFA or whatever.
@@wepg for mystics specifically they can resolve these weaknesses with Tome of Rock or Zeal pretty easily. The heavy map clearing works similarly to Barbarian / Industrious albeit with a little less durability but more focus on mass reinforcements + high burst.
Their whole economy is centered around mana so as long as you avoid too many draft units I think they should be pretty competitive until late late game.
What I found out so far.
Ranged builds (magic or non magic) are extremely powerful.
You can increase the range, get a spell that nullifies vision disadvantages.
This makes ranged units somewhat first strike "able".
Another very strong build revolves around summoning units (animals, elementals etc.)
That way you can bring more units into the game.
According to heroes:
Magic ranged builds are suuuper strong.
Another strong build is the leadership trait, making all your units stronger if led by a hero.
If you combine ranged units, who are mounted, that can summon creatures and put a leader hero on top. You can basically have 35 active units at max on the battlefield.
The AI highly underestimates the power of summoning spells and you can trick it into thinking that an army, even at tier II is a weak target, which it isn't and that can steamroll them.
Also, you can increase that effect if you have units that are not on full health.
If you have heroes and support units with healing/regeneration spells, you can top their health to max an give the AI a hard time.
I also love to pick traits that make my tier I units stronger and cheap to upkeep.
You can use guerilla warfare tactics that way and will have many disposable units at many places to spread like a mongolian cancer across the whole map.
Even better if you pick tome of the horde to summon Tier I units each turn everywhere on the map.
Another very strong build is one that gives you max whispering stones very fast.
If you stay on max good affiliation, you can create vasalls all over the place.
Many thanks for this all your handy lists/guides.
I am thinking of starting a industrious dwarven race (I think dwarves are just fitting). And I guess fabled hunters + artifact hoarders with a tough, resistant, hardy race should be one of the strongest combinations for auto battle, correct? And in addition this hsould swim in mana with all the artifacts prospecting can give
Yeah, that should work really well, just don't neglect your research in your tomes and you should be golden (so take at least one thing that can give you a research post SPI).
@@wepgI am thinking of the alchemy tome here
The support ability for heroes is decent I guess, I can get a research SPI and an additional research city structure together with nature and materium affinity, which fit nicely with trying to get 2nd and 3rd city asap
@@kuwe4652 Yeah, Alchemy is a great option especially as your 2nd Tier 1 tome.
@@wepgAs the second? What would you suggest as the first? I was thinking of Alchemy as first
@@kuwe4652 Alchemy as first has some issues with a lack of a summon, and for that matter a lack of anything to spend casting points on early. I think Industrious does great with Warding, Cryomancy, Enchantment or Evocation as a first tome, and Zeal can do work as well (though if you are going Zeal, you probably also want to move into Order later to ensure you're actually using the affinity).
exciting, good stuff to watch later.
Has anything changed with the rise of Eldritch Realms (apart from the new content)? Will there be an update of this at some point (I assume after 1.3 exits beta)?
Herbivore Cannibals are AMAZING!
Herbivores is one of those weird things where it's actually typically better for autoresolves than it is for big manual PvP fights, but extra healing that the AI "understands" how to do is really strong.
I'm sad about where you put hideous stench, though I think it's very build dependent. -2 resistance/status resistance is effectively around a 23% boost to your ability to apply status effects or do elemental damage with auras and melee range attacks. In early game that's not all that big a deal outside of specialized builds (I like how it combos with a shadow dragon ruler) since most elemental damage is ranged and auto resolve won't be smart enough to move a shield unit next to the target before blasting it with a spell, but it starts being significant once you have blade type enchantments and mixed damage type hero weapons.
It's a powerful effect, but it adds very little in terms of durability and costs 3 points. At 2 points I could see it being more like a B+/A- kinda trait, depending on your build, but right now it's just too expensive.
@@wepg Yeah, I'm not sure you're wrong. Just sad. It's probably overall comparable to Strong (worse early game, better late game), but costs 3.
@@01pantagruel Yeah, basically.
Yes. Yes! YES!
Good stuff. :)
Glad you enjoyed!
Primal makes me wish we can pick tactical spells auto battle AI uses like back in Planetfall.
Yeah, that would be a *huge* upgrade both for Primals as well as the game generally.
It would be awesome if you presented cultures units in new physical forms- Lupine and goatkin.
Great idea! I'll keep an eye out for that for the next DLC, assuming we get another form added.
I've been trying to play this game and I really want all the pantheon stuff but the grind is real. Was wondering if you could come up with a streamline way to grind it really quickly , because the 1v1 small map is taking too long. I was thinking maybe if you can come up with a super faction idea with the perfect game mode idk I really need help
I think first, understand that it isn't a race. If you play 1000 hours you'll have everything unlocked no matter what you do, trust me (so long as you remember to collect pantheon points along the way). Have fun with the game and you'll get there.
That said, I would actually encourage larger than 1v1s because you get more pantheon points from clearing ancient wonders and leveling heroes and doing research and stuff. A 4p FFA can net you a lot of pantheon points in relative short order if you play on autoresolve only, and it is a genuine blast in my opinion.
I'd be curious about the ranking now that Reaver has been buffed and Mystic got updated (alongside other balance changes of course). Because, imo, vs AI at least, a Magelock hero with Killing Momentum and some setup/support will just be overpowered and generally guarantee 2 kills per turn (or at least 1 and a half); I may be bad but Crossbows seem useless now.
Something needs to be done about prospecting for industrious. Its tedious and boring to be micromanaging 5 scouts to prospect. If the ai is good enough to auto explore and pick up loot, why cant there be an auto prospect button?
They need to full rebalance cultures. Buff everything up to industrious and barb in some way.
I mean, tierlist basically didnt change from the start
Yeah, part of why I was so slow at getting that part out is that we haven't really seen a big balance pass on them, so I wasn't sure what value we could add. But Primals do have some promise to them, and the Society and Form Traits definitely needed touching up.
@@wepgim positive primals just because of how good it flanks in autobattle with t3 spearmen, should be higher.
@@Max_Cony Once you get to Ancestral Wardens they are really strong in autoresolves, that is true. The difficulty with Primals is in getting there, as their economies are noticably slower than High/Industrious/Barbarians.
Mr walker, you mention how some affinities are inherently stronger, I would like to know what would your ranking of the affinities be.
I feel like materium is high ranking but I’m unsure about the rest, I’m not as well versed in this as you are so I’d just like to know your educated opinion on this. Thank you in advance!
Interestingly, Materium 1 got pretty meaningfully nerfed on the most recent patch, but I still think 1 turn outposts are worth going for. Astral and Shadow have both been very good on the empire tree basically on all patches. Nature still has the worst tree, but Order's Rally stuff has been getting astronomically better so is worth investigating if you are going that path. Chaos, unfortunately, has a good pick in chaos 1 and then basically nothing for a *loooong* time.
tl;dr- SAM is best, then maybe your sonic the hedgehog OC, but say N(o) to the nature empire tree. Fortunately, Nature has really good tomes, but the affinity points are borderline wasted.
imo swap dark and fudal , and mystic and primal can go up a tier , i think primal tier 3 hard counters most other racial tier3s that have mounts and there engage rage is kinda op there support is over tuned in manual who would have thourt infinite summons would not be an issue sure auto resolve issues i get it , but have you been rushed by support build animists? i here the economy argument and i think were there economy feels good is when you combine it with other things for example the serpent and builders trait forces local quarys that gives +4 gold pur annex you have to get a bit more creative than just looking at the base race stats , dark are barely playable unless you take a summon able unit for mana upkeep like summon phantasm warrior tome of warding.
i think people underestimate fast recoup , lord of war, tome of winds, fabled hunters every turn that stack is clearing multiple nodes, its comparable to barbarian clear speeds but the bonuses are only applying to one stack and when you want all the exp on the heros and lord in that one stack is still very effective and efficient farming and it just gets better at your 3rd tome spell winds you can even pair this with army heal and its so nice to clear with , however i will say that since heros are delayed there eco has taken a hit and i do think lord traits are better in team games when your allys can take advantage of your lords , one thing im not sure if you can considered in this tierlist is the culture tome you get fudal spells are very good even later in the game stedfast is op , same with the high research spi , its also the same for mystic with some small changes to research order and avoiding taking a spell you know you don't want auto to use , they will instead spam the best starting spell in the game for mystic but it drastically changes there auto resolve clearing early.
side note some comments on reavers were not quite accurate, they are very bad anyway but yes very problematic auto on reavers ... also no there is no value in the declare war in ffa. last time i tryed it at least it removes the imperium penalty witch is huge however all players do get grievance's against you still so its a double edged sword coz others potentially gain imperium to declare on you
I think you could make a very well reasoned argument for Dark to move to D tier. I went back and forth on that myself. I think ultimately I decided not to push them into D because Dark is, at the very least, typically an okay faction to fight off an enemy rush (as weakened effects will be a lot stickier in the beginning of the game when base status resistance is lower), pretty good base affinity, a potentially useful base alignment and knowledge scaling. Their roster and economy are pretty bad though, and their military bonus does become deadweight by the midgame (more weakened 2+ effects please Triumph). I ultimately think they are a little better than Feudal and Reavers, though.
Feudal does have some disgustingly good tools for manual PvP battles, that is true. As bad as the AI is with steadfast, it can be a decisive tool for some big battles. Exactly how much value steadfast provides to you does depend a lot on what kind of units you are packing, of course, and the problem I've often encountered with Feudal is that your economy and military are so slow in the early game that it is relatively easy for an enemy who wants to fight you to fight you before you get a ton of Single Model Entities running around (which is, of course, where Steadfast shines). Between that and the fact that the Feudal backbone- Heroes- got meaningfully nerfed on the recent patch, I felt comfortable putting them in D, though I will gladly admit that if you *can* survive with Feudal and somehow not be woefully behind economically and militarily on T40 or whatever you are likely way ahead for the remainder of the game, but I think that scenario is unrealistic.
Reavers declaring without the Imperium penalty for not farming up grievances is pretty good, it just means you need to declare war crazy early. Like, I see a scout and an outpost being built on T11, Declare War immediately as first diplomacy kind of deal. The problem there, of course, is that you need a big and good starting army to make that productive. Fortunately you can lean into Mercenaries, unfortunately this line of play generally precludes attacking more than 1 Free City. You don't need to necessarily prosecute the war against the other player, especially if their capital is far away, but they might take the scout/outpost snipe as being more hostile and less opportunistic than it actually is.
I had a stack with 2 magelocks and with good golam defences and those magelocks.....killed EVERYTHING and with take aim you never have to move out of cover as they always have good to hit, but that is using manual I guess
Most definitely, but Reavers appear to be a lot better on the new patch, so we're gonna try them out!
The best 3 fractions are the ones I find the most boring and difficult to play nice
Fortunately, Mystics and Reavers both seem meaningfully better on the current patch, but I think if you learn how to play Barbarians-High-Industrious well they are anything but boring.
Man, has someone ever tried to mod the auto-resolve to fix it or something?
Unfortunately it is not moldable, to my understanding.
is MP not broken anymore? i havent even tried to start a game cause i heard about so many out of sync issues
There are some things that make it worse (warping wilds, regenerating infestations), but overall MP is a lot more stable than it was like six months ago. It's still not perfect or even really good, but it's gotten a good deal better since release.
I recall a certain Englishman with a serious fascination with tea using chosen destroyers to repeatedly cycle through making a city, turning it into a vassal, then going to war and destroying said vassal. I had 1 super city before turn 20. I wonder if you can still do that.
Chosen destroyers cannot found cities anymore
How the hell is prolific swarmers D? A flat 20 discount on unit upkeep, 1 extra unit and cities grow faster. Should be A for sure
Nah, Profilic Swarmers saves you very little these days, especially in a world where the food requirements to grow a pop are lower (so the best bonus is way less impressive). Prolific Swarmers is probably closer to a C in that it doesn't actively hurt you, but it's very bad. Tier 1 units are just not the backbone of armies in Age of Wonders 4, getting a random T1 is actively worse than getting a known particular type of unit at game start.
@@wepg -20% upkeep for all non Magic Units saves tons of gold and mana. It counts also for t3-4 units. If the sources are correct.
@@Tirax13 It saves more mana and gold as the game scales up, which is good, but that's a very slow bonus compared to something like Fabled Hunters which gives you giant amounts of resources starting on T1. The initial upkeep reduction is pretty minimal, and while getting more mana and gold later on is good it isn't going to help you catch up to someone who had a much faster start due to stronger economic or military bonuses.
@@wepg but doesnt 20% less upkeep lets you maintain 20% more Army? So you can roam more of the map. You can still combine it with fabled Hunters. I mean jes, youre Initial upkeed in Turn 1 is minimal, like your whole economy and army. But you save 20% each Turn starting Turn 1.
@@Tirax13 The issue is that 20% of like 30 total upkeep is basically nothing, and given that it doesn't save you mana on your magic origins it doesn't really add as much as you'd expect. You need *tons* of draft or heavy utilization of Rally on gold upkeep units to get a meaningful savings, and by then any of the other economic picks will have accumulated a big advantage in resources you'll need to chew through to get back to parity.
All that said, I think the difference between a D+ and a C- is mostly how you squint and Prolific is somewhere in there. It doesn't actively hurt you, it just doesn't do a lot for a pick.
Heh. I have a very different playstyle than you. It's interesting to see how different this game can be in different hands, and what you value versus me.
Nothing is more hilarious than killing a full enemy army with judicious use of summoning when all that you have is a scout. Of course, you can't autoresolve that.
Nice vids, but please, stop saying REALLY REALLY REALLY and VERY VERY VERY.
I'll give it a shot.
@@wepgBut the third "very" meaningfully adds to the sentence in a productive way!
Prolific swarmers on D tier? You gonna be kiding, right? Close&Dis.
dude in like 10 years we'll be able to to buy some kind of AI product that will allow us to create our own games just by speaking to it.... i bet you could create a good 4x game
Could be! I think I'd work better in a team working on something like that, but I suppose an AI could be considered a coworker in a certain sense.
스2 인기 모드 중 하나인 nexus co-op에서 저 게슈탈트 제로가 플레이 할 수 있는 사령관으로 나오죠 ㅋㅋ
테란 이지만 프로토스 처럼 사이오닉 망이 깔리고 그 안에서 여러 기능이 풀리는 팩션 ㅋㅋ
아마 그 모드가 스2 세계관의 서로 다른 평행 우주에서 데려온 사령관들 이라던가 그런 설정 이었던거 같은데
왜 뜬금없이 게슈탈트 제로라는 듣보잡이 있나 했더니 이런 설정이 있었군요.
Stopped watching when you yapped about auto-resolve. I want to play the game, not let it play itself
@@AndreLuis-gw5ox once you start to play the game and understand the rules, you'll learn that manual fighting the AI effectively breaks the game due to the tactical AI not understanding combat very well. If you want to play casually and enjoy the game and have fun, do so! If you want a challenge that encourages you to actually learn the game's mechanics, though, you need to play on autoresolve mostly or autoresolve only to get a good balanced game right now.