This is a build guide designed to help you play on autoresolve only/autoresolve mostly/MP in the style advocated by Vivisection. I imagine most of you have already watched this, but in case you haven't- ua-cam.com/video/d_j8dY4QW8Q/v-deo.html
Great video. Hope to see more for other cultures. Especially Reavers. I love thier vibe but struggle making them work unless i get really lucky early on and can snowball. But even then i kinda struggle with army composition.
@@e-rankluck2594 Good news is that I've already got a Reaver build that I'm pretty satisfied with - it's very weird and will challenge people's perceptions of what a "Reaver" build looks like, but I think it expresses the values of the faction in interesting ways. Gonna need to figure out how to contextualize everything in the faction first, though, as they do also have a lot going on (including some issues with bugged AI behaviors that we're gonna have to highlight and encourage people to dodge for the time being). Should be out sometime next week, just need to encourage Eileen to spend some time on her staycation doing social things so I can have the apartment to myself for recording. She loves to putter which isn't a problem by itself but it gets the cats excited and then it's just "Welcome back to We Play Games, I'm Walker and *cat jumps on desk and knocks over mic and demands attention*."
I've enjoyed pairing them with tentacle tome because Constricters seem to mesh well with them. Fey mist hit and run I've enjoyed but never been able to make work long term. I need to learn ways to play them that aren't just magelock go bang. So I'm really looking forward to seeing what you cook.
@@Xezarious42 Planning on getting at least another handful for all of the fun and weird things I wanna try to make work on some level. I've already got a build for Reavers that I'm pretty satisfied with, but now I need to figure out what I wanna talk about when it comes to contextualizing the Reavers themselves.
Guaranteed forest would be nice, they might need an Ashlands forest of giant sequoias that thrive in forest fires irl. Fun faction to play, and I like the "reclaim my ancestral land" vibes. Probably I'd buff the dens toward that gameplay, by giving you a free grievance against empires who have your primal den in their domain, and let your Animists start battles with 1 rising fury per den you own to help speed them toward summoning.
@@nash6520 Yeah, I like the idea also of a forced Mangrove x2 spawning nearby as another way to help Ashlands out, but maybe they are supposed to be "balanced" by the pressure they create on other terraformers? I dunno, they are the worst of the bunch by a big margin to me.
@@okonkwojones Yeah, grievances early keep the Primals alive and grievances mid help them attack when they should. Very good idea, hopefully Triumph agrees!
@@wepg I do think a forester fix for Sabertooth is especially needed, because you're sitting there thinking "terraforming to my favored terrain is bad for me" and that's not how it should be.
@nash6520 Yeah, you can *kinda* help get around it by forcing great builders (both for starting with workshop as well as easier setup cost on Forester SPIs), but yeah, it's pretty bad how their mapgen works. Really sets them back.
Great video, really like your take on AOW4. Very well worded. Just wish Triumph would start taking autoresolve into account when nerfing manual combat exploits.
@@Nebelkorona TBH I think manual combat exploits should not be "nerfed" mechanically but rather nerfed behaviorally by making the AI better. People will always find ways to exploit the tactical AI though, so attempting to "balance" around people's exploits just makes no sense to me. Balance manuals around fun, balance mechanically around autoresolves (as this will empower more PvP manuals), and the whole game should improve.
This almost feels like it should have been 2 different videos. Love your takes and analysis, but can you separate affinity discussions with the culture builds? It'd be more digestible and also easier to come back to for a rewatch.
I considered doing that, but I think that putting the empire tree in a video where we explicitly attempted to buck the generally correct consensus of "Shadow and Astral are best" allows us to reinforce that you *can* do wild things in AoW4, but you need to have a good plan to execute with the "weaker" affinities (especially Nature). Other build guides might not need such secret videos depending on how weird they get; they might need like a first 5-10 turns dry run or something to show off how they operate in practice. We will see.
I appreciate the secret videos, lol. Was thinking of migrating some of the original characters I made over to Primal because I honestly have to many barbarians. You're not really selling me on Primal though. Guess I'll just have to play with it to see how I feel.
Primals you have to be *very* careful with your early game - you need to be as aggressive as you can while also accepting that your early game units really are bad. You can try to get around this with creative things like Wonder Architects to give you better units to buy through Rally, but yeah - the headliner for all remaining builds on weaker cultures is that as a culture gets worse, you have to be more careful doing your homework to survive given how important early fights are on snowballing. I also hope I did not somehow undersell Ancestral Wardens, they are really great. Just use them before the opponent has the opportunity to obsolete your biggest advantage and Primals can do well, they are just complex.
This video was amazing, I love the vivisection style dives into aspects of the game. Do you have plans to do this for other builds? I'd love to see one for mystic or reavers.
@@PresidentJimmyDean Yup, Reavers *should* be out sometime next week at a minimum, and I'm planning on doing some more weird/marginal things like Dark too, whatever the folks vote on in the community tab.
@@znail4675 This is true but does not do enough to offset their early game and natural scaling issues. When it comes to getting good value out of Primals in autoresolve only or mostly (i.e. MP standard rules), you can't generally afford to worry about what is strongest on T45 as you will typically die.
@wepg But one advantage with having a good plan for later in the game is that you can focus on way to improve the early game as you got the later already solved.
@znail4675 Yeah, it can help but unfortunately a decent amount of the later snow stuff is city economy and doesn't really require you to have been in snow on T1 to get good value. Marching Winter doesn't care what terrain you started on, just what terrain you *are* on, so while there is nominal synergy it isn't as much as you'd think. The *really* big problem for mammoths is that a 50% chance to freeze is just not enough in the later stages of the game. It isn't 0% the same way 30% chances are, but I promise that mammoth is definitely an underwhelming primal. Honestly the best application of Mammoths is to enable Tome of Beasts as the snow table for summon animal is really good, but Beasts really asks you to be aggressive early which is just generally not what Primals are up to.
Very interesting build! I still need to find what build to do with primal. Btw, you don't need to be plants with force of nature, fey animals and dragons are all included. In fact I prefer to get dragon transformation when going in force nature
@@francescosolinas9670 Oh snap, looks like T5 Nature got a *lot* stronger on the new patch. It used to force you into Gaia's but now you can do Mistling stuff? Alrighty Triumph. We're still plants here because reasons.
Thanks. Whilst the spiders have brilliant capital economy found that underground logistics usually bad needing mobility so was trying the cavalry spider mounts + summons. Kept wondering why manual combat so much better than auto!...
@@andrewcole4843 Yeah, Spiders you *can* kinda make function but Underground Starts have too much baggage (hard access to pasture fights, difficulty finding first bronze ancient wonder vs surface dwellers, ability to get "trapped" via our inability to terraform the tunnels) that I really can't recommend them unless you are simply looking for something novel. They are waaay more playable than Ash Sabertooth, but I just can't imagine attempting to play spiders in MP for the mapgen alone.
@@wepg Thanks. I see that there is a mitigation of clairvoyance skill on the Eldrich sovereign for finding nearest wonder (so not nearest bronze) or infestation and she can take athletics & I see Warriors cannot take lance on this.
Im a new player, and your videos have been super helpful!!! Thank you so much. May I ask if you have any videos on how to build in the first 10-20 levels? I never know if I need farm or quarry first for example. Or Merchant or Tavern. I understand that it can depend, but I have no idea what the factors are.
Have you watched "Let's Vivisect Age of Wonders 4" yet? Chapter 2, "scale your knowledge into outerspace," should point you in the right direction as to what to prioritize building by and large, but I also think that video is just very important for newer players to watch generally.
Any links to good videos for Manual combat guides vs AI? I know that you are all about autoing, but I am just starting and want every advantage I can get.
@@Alorand I think you'll learn the game a *lot* faster if you limit yourself on manuals - rather than attempting to maximize yourself by doing a *bunch* of manual fights, do something like the combat card system in Planetfall and say "I'm only allowed one manual fight every 10 turns, so I gotta make it count" tends to help newer players "learn" the game a lot faster than manualing everything.
@@_DaemonCleaner it's not literally a spell, but in practice it's sorta a spell in that it is a *massive* one-off heal for everyone + rank up. In practice it gives Order an immense power spike before one big fight in MP, but in SP you can still leverage it the same way or even use it as a big burst of military strength a little less carefully (though I still tend to like jamming it prior to a big fight in SP as well so long as you aren't on simultaneous as the AI is rude and uncivilized when it comes to engagements).
@@coderaccoon6061 it's very challenging to get Primals to function once you start giving yourself over to autoresolves, but I've found that as long as you focus on the strengths (and dodge the early game autoresolve problem) they can do alright.
Hey, following your build I wasnt offered the tome of shades when I was supposed to be on any of my games. Was wondering if you would know why thats happening for me?
@@opallua6020 Do you have the most recent DLC? If not then you do need it for Shades, but you don't *need* Shades for this build to function. That was kinda the point of the video- Ancestral Wardens are the main strength of Primals, so you need a path to survive to them and then a plan to dump them out and leverage their power while you can.
@@wepg Oh yeah thats it! Thanks, the build has still been working super well for me without it and its been super fun, I got lobby teamed in my last MP game with it XD(It was a pretty casual lobby of a normally civ 5 MP discord). Excited for more build videos and to see how you make the other cultures work. Love your content.
Pretty valuable; it's similar to all other quests where if you can do them without derailing your pathing for clearing you should do them. You can "flash" a province type whenever you need to and then bring the tiles back to whatever you actually wanted them to be.
I always like the Chaos Balor. Sure it's ptobably not good for sweaty MP, but when playing with my friends, getting it around Turn 50-60, then getting it up to 50 stacks of powerup and legendary is hilarious.
Chaos Balor is so spooky - unless they've changed the trigger, spending a bunch of imperium on something the opponent can auto-kill with Sleep of Oblivion is a very, very high risk/reward play. Not untenable, mind you, but verrrry risky.
@wolffrdu6463 Yes. Even in Single Player you can do autoresolve only; it's genuinely a lot of fun once you understand what you are doing. In MP especially you do auto only vs the AI and manuals vs other players.
@@wepg personally i when i make a multi player gzame i allow to make manual battle against the ia, but i suppose it take a lots of time when they are more than 2, but well, im use to total war warhammer 3 battle time taking so, im verry patient
@wolffrdu6463 Manual battles against the AI get really out of control if you allow them and folks know how to play. Using a combat card system - "I can only do one manual every 10 or 15 turns" - is pretty fair, as is AI takeover, but unlimited manuals break the game's balance in pretty serious ways.
@@wepg "unlimited manuals break the game's balance in pretty serious ways" -> How do you mean that? I certainly agree that it changes the balance, and it makes your position stronger early and you can take tougher fights sooner, but I am struggling on examples of broken game balance that would justify the statement. There are so many creative maneuvers in the game that I don't know that broken game balance seems fair.
This is a build guide designed to help you play on autoresolve only/autoresolve mostly/MP in the style advocated by Vivisection. I imagine most of you have already watched this, but in case you haven't- ua-cam.com/video/d_j8dY4QW8Q/v-deo.html
Great video. Hope to see more for other cultures. Especially Reavers. I love thier vibe but struggle making them work unless i get really lucky early on and can snowball. But even then i kinda struggle with army composition.
@@e-rankluck2594 Good news is that I've already got a Reaver build that I'm pretty satisfied with - it's very weird and will challenge people's perceptions of what a "Reaver" build looks like, but I think it expresses the values of the faction in interesting ways. Gonna need to figure out how to contextualize everything in the faction first, though, as they do also have a lot going on (including some issues with bugged AI behaviors that we're gonna have to highlight and encourage people to dodge for the time being).
Should be out sometime next week, just need to encourage Eileen to spend some time on her staycation doing social things so I can have the apartment to myself for recording. She loves to putter which isn't a problem by itself but it gets the cats excited and then it's just "Welcome back to We Play Games, I'm Walker and *cat jumps on desk and knocks over mic and demands attention*."
I've enjoyed pairing them with tentacle tome because Constricters seem to mesh well with them. Fey mist hit and run I've enjoyed but never been able to make work long term. I need to learn ways to play them that aren't just magelock go bang. So I'm really looking forward to seeing what you cook.
@@e-rankluck2594 Two "words" - Anime Superfriends
Love videos like this, thank you! It was super informative. Hoping for more of these.
@@Xezarious42 Planning on getting at least another handful for all of the fun and weird things I wanna try to make work on some level. I've already got a build for Reavers that I'm pretty satisfied with, but now I need to figure out what I wanna talk about when it comes to contextualizing the Reavers themselves.
Guaranteed forest would be nice, they might need an Ashlands forest of giant sequoias that thrive in forest fires irl.
Fun faction to play, and I like the "reclaim my ancestral land" vibes. Probably I'd buff the dens toward that gameplay, by giving you a free grievance against empires who have your primal den in their domain, and let your Animists start battles with 1 rising fury per den you own to help speed them toward summoning.
@@nash6520 Yeah, I like the idea also of a forced Mangrove x2 spawning nearby as another way to help Ashlands out, but maybe they are supposed to be "balanced" by the pressure they create on other terraformers? I dunno, they are the worst of the bunch by a big margin to me.
Grievance for occupied dens is a really good call.
@@okonkwojones Yeah, grievances early keep the Primals alive and grievances mid help them attack when they should. Very good idea, hopefully Triumph agrees!
@@wepg I do think a forester fix for Sabertooth is especially needed, because you're sitting there thinking "terraforming to my favored terrain is bad for me" and that's not how it should be.
@nash6520 Yeah, you can *kinda* help get around it by forcing great builders (both for starting with workshop as well as easier setup cost on Forester SPIs), but yeah, it's pretty bad how their mapgen works. Really sets them back.
Great video! This taught me a lot and has greatly encouraged some online play!
Great video, really like your take on AOW4. Very well worded. Just wish Triumph would start taking autoresolve into account when nerfing manual combat exploits.
@@Nebelkorona TBH I think manual combat exploits should not be "nerfed" mechanically but rather nerfed behaviorally by making the AI better. People will always find ways to exploit the tactical AI though, so attempting to "balance" around people's exploits just makes no sense to me. Balance manuals around fun, balance mechanically around autoresolves (as this will empower more PvP manuals), and the whole game should improve.
This almost feels like it should have been 2 different videos. Love your takes and analysis, but can you separate affinity discussions with the culture builds? It'd be more digestible and also easier to come back to for a rewatch.
I considered doing that, but I think that putting the empire tree in a video where we explicitly attempted to buck the generally correct consensus of "Shadow and Astral are best" allows us to reinforce that you *can* do wild things in AoW4, but you need to have a good plan to execute with the "weaker" affinities (especially Nature).
Other build guides might not need such secret videos depending on how weird they get; they might need like a first 5-10 turns dry run or something to show off how they operate in practice. We will see.
I appreciate the secret videos, lol.
Was thinking of migrating some of the original characters I made over to Primal because I honestly have to many barbarians. You're not really selling me on Primal though. Guess I'll just have to play with it to see how I feel.
Primals you have to be *very* careful with your early game - you need to be as aggressive as you can while also accepting that your early game units really are bad. You can try to get around this with creative things like Wonder Architects to give you better units to buy through Rally, but yeah - the headliner for all remaining builds on weaker cultures is that as a culture gets worse, you have to be more careful doing your homework to survive given how important early fights are on snowballing.
I also hope I did not somehow undersell Ancestral Wardens, they are really great. Just use them before the opponent has the opportunity to obsolete your biggest advantage and Primals can do well, they are just complex.
This video was amazing, I love the vivisection style dives into aspects of the game. Do you have plans to do this for other builds? I'd love to see one for mystic or reavers.
@@PresidentJimmyDean Yup, Reavers *should* be out sometime next week at a minimum, and I'm planning on doing some more weird/marginal things like Dark too, whatever the folks vote on in the community tab.
Glacial Mammoth have a huge advantage in that there are tomes that support creating snow making the benefits greater.
@@znail4675 This is true but does not do enough to offset their early game and natural scaling issues. When it comes to getting good value out of Primals in autoresolve only or mostly (i.e. MP standard rules), you can't generally afford to worry about what is strongest on T45 as you will typically die.
@wepg But one advantage with having a good plan for later in the game is that you can focus on way to improve the early game as you got the later already solved.
@znail4675 Yeah, it can help but unfortunately a decent amount of the later snow stuff is city economy and doesn't really require you to have been in snow on T1 to get good value. Marching Winter doesn't care what terrain you started on, just what terrain you *are* on, so while there is nominal synergy it isn't as much as you'd think.
The *really* big problem for mammoths is that a 50% chance to freeze is just not enough in the later stages of the game. It isn't 0% the same way 30% chances are, but I promise that mammoth is definitely an underwhelming primal. Honestly the best application of Mammoths is to enable Tome of Beasts as the snow table for summon animal is really good, but Beasts really asks you to be aggressive early which is just generally not what Primals are up to.
Very interesting build! I still need to find what build to do with primal. Btw, you don't need to be plants with force of nature, fey animals and dragons are all included. In fact I prefer to get dragon transformation when going in force nature
@@francescosolinas9670 Oh snap, looks like T5 Nature got a *lot* stronger on the new patch. It used to force you into Gaia's but now you can do Mistling stuff? Alrighty Triumph.
We're still plants here because reasons.
Thanks. Whilst the spiders have brilliant capital economy found that underground logistics usually bad needing mobility so was trying the cavalry spider mounts + summons. Kept wondering why manual combat so much better than auto!...
@@andrewcole4843 Yeah, Spiders you *can* kinda make function but Underground Starts have too much baggage (hard access to pasture fights, difficulty finding first bronze ancient wonder vs surface dwellers, ability to get "trapped" via our inability to terraform the tunnels) that I really can't recommend them unless you are simply looking for something novel. They are waaay more playable than Ash Sabertooth, but I just can't imagine attempting to play spiders in MP for the mapgen alone.
@@wepg Thanks. I see that there is a mitigation of clairvoyance skill on the Eldrich sovereign for finding nearest wonder (so not nearest bronze) or infestation and she can take athletics & I see Warriors cannot take lance on this.
Im a new player, and your videos have been super helpful!!! Thank you so much. May I ask if you have any videos on how to build in the first 10-20 levels? I never know if I need farm or quarry first for example. Or Merchant or Tavern. I understand that it can depend, but I have no idea what the factors are.
Have you watched "Let's Vivisect Age of Wonders 4" yet? Chapter 2, "scale your knowledge into outerspace," should point you in the right direction as to what to prioritize building by and large, but I also think that video is just very important for newer players to watch generally.
@@wepg thank you!!
Something ive been confused on is if theres a benefit or not to pairing primal with your chosen terrain affinity trait
@@e-rankluck2594 IIRC you shouldn't be able to even take affinity traits with Primal, but regardless no, save the point.
Any links to good videos for Manual combat guides vs AI? I know that you are all about autoing, but I am just starting and want every advantage I can get.
@@Alorand I think you'll learn the game a *lot* faster if you limit yourself on manuals - rather than attempting to maximize yourself by doing a *bunch* of manual fights, do something like the combat card system in Planetfall and say "I'm only allowed one manual fight every 10 turns, so I gotta make it count" tends to help newer players "learn" the game a lot faster than manualing everything.
Wait - Rite of enduring duty is a spell?! I never picked it because it seemed so limited, but if it's a spell its fricking awesome.
@@_DaemonCleaner it's not literally a spell, but in practice it's sorta a spell in that it is a *massive* one-off heal for everyone + rank up. In practice it gives Order an immense power spike before one big fight in MP, but in SP you can still leverage it the same way or even use it as a big burst of military strength a little less carefully (though I still tend to like jamming it prior to a big fight in SP as well so long as you aren't on simultaneous as the AI is rude and uncivilized when it comes to engagements).
Ah, good. One of the cultures I like bit for the life of me can never get to work.
@@coderaccoon6061 it's very challenging to get Primals to function once you start giving yourself over to autoresolves, but I've found that as long as you focus on the strengths (and dodge the early game autoresolve problem) they can do alright.
Hey, following your build I wasnt offered the tome of shades when I was supposed to be on any of my games. Was wondering if you would know why thats happening for me?
@@opallua6020 Do you have the most recent DLC? If not then you do need it for Shades, but you don't *need* Shades for this build to function. That was kinda the point of the video- Ancestral Wardens are the main strength of Primals, so you need a path to survive to them and then a plan to dump them out and leverage their power while you can.
@@wepg Oh yeah thats it! Thanks, the build has still been working super well for me without it and its been super fun, I got lobby teamed in my last MP game with it XD(It was a pretty casual lobby of a normally civ 5 MP discord). Excited for more build videos and to see how you make the other cultures work. Love your content.
How valuable is pursuing the primal quests for their rewards?
Pretty valuable; it's similar to all other quests where if you can do them without derailing your pathing for clearing you should do them. You can "flash" a province type whenever you need to and then bring the tiles back to whatever you actually wanted them to be.
I always like the Chaos Balor. Sure it's ptobably not good for sweaty MP, but when playing with my friends, getting it around Turn 50-60, then getting it up to 50 stacks of powerup and legendary is hilarious.
Chaos Balor is so spooky - unless they've changed the trigger, spending a bunch of imperium on something the opponent can auto-kill with Sleep of Oblivion is a very, very high risk/reward play. Not untenable, mind you, but verrrry risky.
who make auto combat in the begginning of game ? even in multiplayer ?
@wolffrdu6463 Yes. Even in Single Player you can do autoresolve only; it's genuinely a lot of fun once you understand what you are doing.
In MP especially you do auto only vs the AI and manuals vs other players.
@@wepg personally i when i make a multi player gzame i allow to make manual battle against the ia, but i suppose it take a lots of time when they are more than 2, but well, im use to total war warhammer 3 battle time taking so, im verry patient
@wolffrdu6463 Manual battles against the AI get really out of control if you allow them and folks know how to play. Using a combat card system - "I can only do one manual every 10 or 15 turns" - is pretty fair, as is AI takeover, but unlimited manuals break the game's balance in pretty serious ways.
@@wepg "unlimited manuals break the game's balance in pretty serious ways" -> How do you mean that? I certainly agree that it changes the balance, and it makes your position stronger early and you can take tougher fights sooner, but I am struggling on examples of broken game balance that would justify the statement. There are so many creative maneuvers in the game that I don't know that broken game balance seems fair.
@@wepg i see