How do Voice of El's seals work?

[Cal Gore]

I've been going through trying each faction out and the seals concept has a lot of mixed messaging as far as documentation goes. For example the most I could find on when the seals start giving negative effects mentioned not breaking seal 4 to avoid the apocalyptic riders, but there's only 3 seals broken in my current game and the turn after I broke the third, Plague spawned. Wasn't the fellow in the capital either, my ritual still lists as 'break the fourth seal'. Does anyone know exactly how they work?

[Draken]

Basically the more seals you break, the better and more stupid freespawn wander around, fighting for you.

But there are also "end-of-the-world" events starting to happen. Like the Four Rider of the Apocalypse showing up and start wrecking everyone's stuff. Your's included.

If the last seal breaks, the real Apocalypse starts, because god isn't nice in Elysium.

[Cal Gore]

I know those aspects, but what I'm looking for is concrete information on what seal = what possible effects. Essentially I want to know what seal is the breaking point for apocalypse riders and the like, because the only answer I could find between the manual, reddit and steam forums was wrong.

[joiss90]

The Apocalypse riders are not much of a penalty as they don't do very much as all you need is one leader in garrisons and move the garrison out before the Rider arrive and then just recapture it behind them. They are mostly just a minor annoyance that kills off some of your randomly spawned stuff though that also usually means you know about where they are. (though sometimes they are nowhere to be found because they ended up stuck on some island)

[Hand's Hermit Permit]

Originally posted by Cal Gore:

I know those aspects, but what I'm looking for is concrete information on what seal = what possible effects. Essentially I want to know what seal is the breaking point for apocalypse riders and the like, because the only answer I could find between the manual, reddit and steam forums was wrong.

Seal 3 summons Either plague (I believe.) He's usually the weakest but can either disease or wither a whole army to dust. He's just a big bomb best avoided. That's hard to do since he often overestimates his effectiveness and will suicide into large armies to their ruin.

Seal 4 summons war. He can either be relatively straightforward or a problem, but starts with units and the ability to charm large numbers of humans to join him. He often wont be able to take as many movement AP since he has slower units.

Seal 5 summons Famine (I think). He's another bomb that can destroy large portions of your army.

Seal 6 summons Death. By far the most OP horseman. Every turn he gets to run amok on the map he will generate more undead for his army. Definitely a large problem, and very destructive with his spells. He's so strong he often survives in the full apocalypse, just cutting down everything in his path.

Seal 7 causes the apocalypse proper. It doesn't matter how well you think you can survive random enemy spawns, they will eventually win. All regions get hotter and start turning into savannahs, and then deserts. This will swallow almost all tile types, including citadels! Ungarissoned citadels will be erased, starting with areas around the bottomless pit. You can attempt to control areas where the colder regions and coasts were for a while longer, but eventually you'll just have to stack units in your citadel and ride it out as long as you can while the AI or other players suffer demon attacks or lose their citadels.

Seal 6 is risky because certain things can happen that will push it into 7 if you're unlucky.

I don't think the seals have many secondary effects. I could be wrong, but the biggest consequences are the quality of your freespawn and the horsemen.

[Cal Gore]

So second seal is the last safe seal, and plague isn't too bad if citadel dodged. Thanks for the help.

[MCreeper]

Seal 6 can also break on it's own, though chance seems to be way lover.

[Underscorecow]

I'd recommend maxing out the one that boosts the chances of getting reinforcements before breaking the third or fourth seals, you do get much better freespawns and some of those later seal freespawns can armywipe by themselves , its just a question of if they'll spawn or when they do spawn if it'll be somewhere they matter.