Guide for each race - base game

[rgp151]

This is a relatively quick guide for strong custom wizard approaches for each race. I've recently played through each race and have tested out all of these. All of these assume 11 starting picks. I'll start with just the Arcanian Races.

This is just using Through the Myrror, not Rise of the Soultrapped.

Barbarians
1) Cav Rush
Warlord
Stonemason
5 White
3 Blue
Heroism, Just Cause, Healing, Holy Weapon
Wandering Island, Word of Recall

Can use Spearman+Shamen rush if its warranted, but main focus is Cavalry rush. Use Cavalry to take lairs and neutral towns, and possibly to take out an early wizard. Build Stables after Forester's Guild, then make 3 Cavs. After that make the Miner's Guild and build the Alchemist's Guild and Fighter's Guild for a few more Cavs, then go for Berserkers. Once you have Berserkers then focus on the use of Wandering Island with Shamen and Berserkers. If you've got other units from acquired races, such as Catapults or Slingers, those can be good to throw in as well.

2) Spearman Rush
Warlord
Stonemason
3 White
3 Green
2 Blue
Heroism, Just Cause
Giant Strength, Stone Skin
Wandering Island

Plan on rushing Spearman. Start building Spearmen and Shamen after the Farmer's Market and Shrine. Nice to go with the starting Swordman and early built Spearman, along with another Spearman and 1 or 2 Shamen, leaving two new Spearmen on defense. Put all this on a Wandering Island with Endurance early to take what you can with it. Heroism on the "youngest" Spearman, with Giant Strength and Stone Skin, and maybe Giant Strength on others as well. See if you can get a node to provide power. Definitely try to takeout a wizard capital early. You may be adding in Cavalry by the time you take the capital. Also add in Magic Spirits when you attack capitals to soak up tower shots.

Gnolls
1) Wolf Rider Medics
Warlord
Stonemason
Lifebringer
4 White
3 Blue
Heroism, Just Cause, Holy Weapon
Resist Magic, Confusion

Build a Stables after the Forester's Guild, then pump out 3 Wolf Riders. Hopefully you'll have a hero as well. Then make your Miner's Guild and continue pumping out Wolf Riders. Gnolls have low resistance, so they pretty much require Resist Magic to guard against Death and Sorcery. Confusion can help in taking towns and fighting wizards. Absolutely try to take out wizard capitals ASAP with as few as 4 Wolf Riders if the conditions allow. Do not build Gnoll settlers at all. The focus is on acquiring other races, Gnoll towns are basically no good.

Halflings
1) Slinger Tanks
Warlord
Stonemason
5 White
3 Blue
Heroism, Just Cause, Healing, Holy Weapon
Wandering Island, Word of Recall

Make a couple Shamen after the Farmer's Market (Granary > Marketplace > Farmer's Market > Shrine > Shamen). Send the Shamen out with the starting Swordsman to take lairs and possibly an easy town or two. Then build the Forester's Guild and Armory and make a couple Slingers to add to the stack. Then build Miner's Guild and Alchemist's Guild and make a whole new stack to put on a Wandering Island, consisting of 2 Shamen and 6 Slingers. Of course put Settlers on any Mithril you find, but other than that, don't bother spamming Settlers.

Keep producing Wandering Island stacks with 2 Shamen and 6 Slingers (or whatever heroes or other good units you may get from other races) as your food will allow. Both planes will soon be fully conquered.

2) Deathlings
Conjurer
Fantastic Warlord
Necromancer

Halflings make a good race for Death magic since they have good relations, can make all the magic buildings, and benefit strongly from Wall of Darkness. All power to mana to start of course. Do lots of scouting with Magic Spirits and identify neutral towns and Sorcery nodes to take. Use between 1 and 2 Ghouls, along with the very cheap Skeletons.

Use Ghouls use take normal units and a few key fantastic units, like Nagas, which are a very good target for them, since their First Strike keeps undead Nagas alive pretty well. Fire Elementals make decent undead as well, and of course Fire Giants and Guardian Spirits are also good targets. Try to acquire a Sorcery node ASAP to give you power to support your undead stacks. Don't waste too much on taking typical lairs. But throw waves of Skeletons at Sorcery Nodes if needed.

Of course Shadow Demons are the ultimate unit for taking capitals and you'll want them ASAP, but don't miss out on Lycanthropy, which can also be a great tool for taking capitals as well. Of course Zombie Mastery is the key spell here, but that's just typical Death stuff.

Use your Halfling units and whatever else you can find in normal stacks to take lairs that weren't worth burning your early undead on. Once you get the regenerating Werewolves and Shadow Demons you'll typically do little fighting with normal units. Watchout for early undead attacks of your towns since there is no way to turn off Darkness. So you need to plan for stronger early town defense than typical with this setup. Make sure to have Shamen in every town ASAP.

High Elves
1) Longbow Rush
Warlord
Stonemason
5 White
3 Blue
Heroism, Just Cause, Healing, Holy Weapon
Wandering Island, Word of Recall

Similar to the Halfling strategy. Open with the starting Swordsman and 3 Longbowmen on a Wandering Island. Then build the Miner's Guild and the Alchemist's Guild and fill out the Island with magic weapon Longbows. Then go all the way to the Armorers' Guild and Alchemist's Guild to make Elven Lords. Have an Island with 1 or 2 Elven Lords/heroes and Longbowmen. If you can find a Shamen to add to the mix, that's good. Then go for the Mechanician's Guild and make Catapults.

Of course put Settlers on Mithril, and if you don't have much else going you can fill in with additional High Elf Settlers if desired. Flight is of course highly desired here for the Elven Lords.

2) Chaos Lords
Conjurer
Chaos Mastery
Fantastic Warlord
8 Red

High Elves are arguably the best summoning race in the game, and Chaos is their best school IMO. Their units pair well with many Chaos spells. Put all power to mana of course, and start summoning Hell Hounds as soon as you get to around 75+ mana. You'll eventually go for a full stack of Hell Hounds, or Hounds + Heroes, but you can start taking lairs and towns with as little as 3 units of hounds.

But before you even worry about the Hounds, be sure to send out at least 2 Magic Spirits, if not 3 or 4. Do lots of scouting. Use Magic Spirits to take any town you can. Your Fire Elementals will be able to take most neutral towns in the early game.

Use full stacks of Hell Hounds to take capitals. Your main weapon will be Chimera, which you want to dig for in your spell book. Just research whatever is cheapest until you get Chimera. Chimera and Doom Bats are a good combo, and if you get Doom Bats first, then make those as soon as you can too. Focus on taking Chaos Nodes, but Sorcery nodes are typically easy to crack as well. Throw waves of Hell Hounds at good nodes if needed.

Once your town gets going, you may want to make a stack of Longbowmen & Elven Lords accompanied by 1 or 2 Fire Giants for Pathfinding. Depending on the situation you may not want to Chaos Channel your units, as Metal Fires / Leadership, etc. may be more valuable for a normal unit stack.

Flame Strike and Warp Reality and key spells for your Chaos units, along with Metal Fires and Flame Blade for your normal units.

You can win either by conquest or eventually turtling up and going for Spell of Mastery while casting stuff like Meteor Storm, Armageddon, etc.

3) Nature Lords
Nature Summoner
Nature Mastery
Stonemason
8 Green

Fantastic Warlord doesn't benefit Nature so much, so I skip it for Stonemason instead. Nature lacks any kind of buff for resistance, so the High Elves' naturally high resistance is very good for Nature. All power to mana of course. Lots of scouting to identify good targets. Nature is tricky to open with. If you find a good Nature Node, then decide what it will take to crack it. It may be better to start with just War Bears and Sprites even though you have access to Basilisks, depending on what you are up against. But if there are good lairs and towns you can take with just Bears and Sprites, then go for that.

Of course make Basilisks when you get the chance and have good targets for it. Basilisk+Sprite+Hero stacks can be effective, esp. with Water Walking. Once you get Elven Lords, then you can work those along with heroes. They benefit well from Resist Elements and Iron Skin. The nice thing about Nature Summoner is quickly getting to the late game spells, like Earth Gate, Call Lightning, Iron Skin, and of course Earth Elemental and Gorgon.

But don't sleep on Stone Giants, with their Boulders they are quite effective as well. Colossus is possibly better than Great Worm now, though it really doesn't matter much at that point.

4) Artificer + Runemage
Artificer
Runemaster
Famous
2 White
2 Red
3 Blue

Not going to go into too much detail here, as this is a well understood strategy. The extra mana early helps to get this going faster. In Classic you had to take 5 blue and no Famous, because Magic Immunity was essential, but as of now in this game, you can get by without Magic Immunity, so you can take Famous instead to get more heroes faster.

But in addition to heroes, take Hell Hounds for your Red spell and summon Hell Hounds to open with and accompany your first hero. Figuring out what to spend time casting, and when, can be a challenge, but it works. Main artifacts will simply be Flaming weapons, high armor and Flight charms.

5) Speed Mastery
Artificer
Runemaster
Node Mastery
Sage Master
Stonemason
2 Blue
2 Red
2 Green

This is may look a bit strange, but the idea is that you quickly get through researching your spells and get to the Spell of Mastery ASAP. In the meantime, use Artificer + Runemaster to generate mana and summon Hell Hounds. Make Water Walking charms for heroes. Take Web or Earth Lore as the starting Green spell. Word of Recall for Blue and Hell Hounds for Red.

[Narf the Mouse]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Xeth Nyrrow:

Oprindeligt skrevet af Narf the Mouse:

Stonemason would IMO be better/more balanced if, instead of +10 production to your capital, it was a +10% production bonus to all cities.

Yeah that's pretty good. In Mythical Realms I changed it to +25% so it rewards building tall without making it OP at the start of the game.

+25% production to the capital would also work much better, and keep within the existing theme/focus.

[Dorian Gray]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Xeth Nyrrow:

Oprindeligt skrevet af Narf the Mouse:

Stonemason would IMO be better/more balanced if, instead of +10 production to your capital, it was a +10% production bonus to all cities.

Yeah that's pretty good. In Mythical Realms I changed it to +25% so it rewards building tall without making it OP at the start of the game.

+25% feels like a big nerf to me.

The Elves (which I know most about) only start with a production of 5 (assuming 2 workers/2 farmers).

With SM that would be 15.

5->15 is a 300% increase. Whereas a 25% increase would be 5 * 1.25 = 6.25. Hardly seems worth taking now.

Another benefit, which is not readily obvious, is as you start building units, you have to divert workers to farmers.

As the Elves, building 1 Spearmen is usually enough to require:
3 Farmers, (leaving only) 1 Worker, resulting in production of

3 * 0.5 + 1 * 2 = 3.5 (with SM it would be 13.5) still not bad.

After 2 Spearmen are built, (basic starting garrison) will require all Farmers.

4 Farmers, resulting in a production of:

4 * 0.5 = 2 (with SM it would be 12)

So, production with SM for starting Elven City producing Spearmen is as follows:

T1 : 15 (2 w, 2 f)
T2 : 13.5 (1 w, 3 f)
T4 : 12 (0 w, 4 f)

15->12 does not hurt that bad

But without SM

T1 : 5 (2 w, 2 f)
Tx : 3.5 (1 w, 3 f) (not sure the turns because it will take a lot longer to build Spearmen)
Tx2 : 2.0 (0 w, 4 f)

5->2 (Ouch!)

With the modified SM (at 25% bonus)

T1 : 6.25 (2 w, 2 f)
Tx : 4.375 (1 w, 3 f)
Tx2 : 2.5 (0 w, 4 f)

6.25->2.5 (Still Ouch!)

SM is hardly worth taking now.

In first scenario above, an Elven city can crank out 2 Spearmen (as a basic city garrison) in a couple of turns without it crippling the starting city production. The other two, not so much at all.

[Thewizardlord]

Yeah changing SM to % bonus is clearly a nerf nobody is saying otherwise.

But frankly in MoM he moment you nerf something from Rush to support tall it's a nerf ,theres no way to avoid it because rush is just so strong in this game.

As pointed out unlike most space 4x, there's just so much gain to exploring and beating nodes, lairs, conquering neutral cities etc.

On a side note that's why I think MoM is hard for noobs. They typically not good enough to exploit the rush style because they lack to judgement to know which lairs and to some extent neutrals can be taken (or taken easily) ...given their spells and army . So they default to a tall, typically I'm going for Paladins! Which is less effecfive

Or they do colony rush...which Is a little more effective but still not optimal (particularly in remake where some setting make it hard to find a spot to settle)

[Thewizardlord]

Oprindeligt skrevet af rgp151:

Oprindeligt skrevet af Thewizardlord:

Reading this thread is basically.. 90%

Life heroism stonewarden and wandering island wins!

Lol the race barely matters because life buff gives a power burst at start with stonewarden, wandering Island, word of recall gives mobility

Yeah. In my experience, Stonemason is the big game changer because it allows you to start producing units from your capital so much faster, making many Life/Warlord strategies much more viable. In the classic game I found Conjuration strategies to be faster and give better starts, although Life/Warlord could make up ground in the mid game.

I agree with your post mostly except I'm not sure in classic without stonemason Conjurer summon based strategies are better than life warlord.

I do think life warlord strategies are easier to pull off for less skilled players then summon based strategies. You just keep producing your rush unit, keep buffing them.

With summon based strategies particularly ones around combat summons of phantom warriors and taking nodes there is some skill in node selection. There's also a bit more flexibility in terms of how much you summon and what.

I only played 1 31 not the unofficial patches though so the AI rarely counters a one dimensional unit rush

[Xeth Nyrrow]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Dorian Gray:

Oprindeligt skrevet af Xeth Nyrrow:

Yeah that's pretty good. In Mythical Realms I changed it to +25% so it rewards building tall without making it OP at the start of the game.

+25% feels like a big nerf to me.

That's because it is.... when viewed from the starting position.At the start of the game it's too good as a trait so I balanced it to help a little in the short term but a lot more as the game progresses.

Now run the numbers on a city with a population of 10, 20, and 30. Include the other production buildings like sawmills and miners' guilds. Know that these buildings' bonuses are not additive like the original but are multiplicative and this +25% is on top of that. If you do this at various steps you'll find it it can amount to a good deal more than 10 production.

[Dorian Gray]

I am sure that the +25% offers some benefit after turn 100 or so.

But I don't need it by then as I have other cities producing as well.

The critical time you need the production boost is in the first 25 turns.

[rgp151]

+5 Production in the capital would still be better than +25%. Often at the start your production is 1 or even 0, since its kinda weird with the unrest and food requirements. The starting setup is pretty bad. You have 4 citizens, without a starting Settler one is rebelling already, leaving you 3 workers, each of which needs to be a farmer sometimes, or maybe you are left with one worker. Then if you make a Spearman you need more farmers. Its often not until you grow to 5 citizens that you can really get any work done if you don't start with Wild Game.

This is another reason why Stonemason is so good, because even with 0 workers you still get stuff done.

[Narf the Mouse]

Hmm... +50%?

[Thewizardlord]

Oprindeligt skrevet af rgp151:

+5 Often at the start your production is 1 or even 0, since its kinda weird with the unrest and food requirements. The starting setup is pretty bad. You have 4 citizens, without a starting Settler one is rebelling already, leaving you 3 workers, each of which needs to be a farmer sometimes, or maybe you are left with one worker. Then if you make a Spearman you need more farmers. Its often not until you grow to 5 citizens that you can really get any work done if you don't start with Wild Game.

This is another reason why Stonemason is so good, because even with 0 workers you still get stuff done.

Sigh that's why the game is so hard for noobs.

They also tend to overbuild buildings not knowing in MoM it's often a error

[GeorgeJJR]

Its funny, until I read some threads a few months ago I didn't think Stonemason was particularly good for the way I play (tall, hardest difficulty everything, few neutral towns, soultrapped event at 100), at least not compared to warlord and grabbing 9 Life spellbooks. I still wasn't totally convinced after the threads, but gave it a try.

Now (like for many others) its my favorite trait (even above Warlord). Its especially good for tall civs, or one-city challenge. If it got nerfed I'd probably just mod it right back in. Which means its probably overpowered (or should cost 2 traits), but as I said, I'd just mod it right back if that happened.

Replacing it with 10% bonus would for me make it not worth taking. With a 25% bonus it'd be borderline worth taking -- far less initial effect, but a bit more long term usage.

[Xeth Nyrrow]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Dorian Gray:

I am sure that the +25% offers some benefit after turn 100 or so.

But I don't need it by then as I have other cities producing as well.

The critical time you need the production boost is in the first 25 turns.

Again, that's the point. +10 is too strong of a benefit early on to the point of being imbalanced as has been agreed upon by pretty much everyone in this thread. Maybe +5 early on would be better? I'm open to solutions. I picked +25% as a starting point to enable flexibility of play styles gaining a benefit from it.

Oprindeligt skrevet af Narf the Mouse:

Hmm... +50%?

I thought about this. it becomes insane in the mid to late game being this high. If it maybe started high and went down as population increased that would be ideal balance wise but weird.

[rgp151]

I kinda think there are two problems.

#1 The starting conditions are bad. Something is not right with the start, because in Classic it isn't so bad. If you don't start with a Settler then immediately you have a rebel and everyone on farming, so you're stuck with 0 production. If you start with a Settler then you can keep him in the town until you make a Spearman and then send him out, but you often start with just 1 or 2 production, given the farming demands.

If a normal start was under conditions where you had 3 to 5 hammers without a rebel and enough food, then adding 10 wouldn't be such a huge deal, but to go from 0 or 1 or 2 to 10 is a huge deal. So especially if you start without the Settler then you can just build your Granary no problem even with 0 workers, whereas if you don't have Stonemason it will start you out saying like 40 turns to make the granary lol, whereas with SM its like 3 (I forget exactly). Of course when you gain a pop it improves, but still.

#2 The game is really all about production so something like Stonemason just becomes a required default. Traits like that aren't good really. Honestly Stonemason should be removed and something done to make the starting conditions better. In Classic I think you always started with a Sword and Spear, and I thought 5 pop.

It would probably be okay to nerf it down to +5 instead of +10. I don't think it should go to 2 picks even at +10. I'd rather it be +5 and one pick than +10 and 2.

[Mr. Frosty L]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Xeth Nyrrow:

Maybe +5 early on would be better? I'm open to solutions. I picked +25% as a starting point to enable flexibility of play styles gaining a benefit from it.

Can it be a combination, for ex, if n is the normal production, then with Stonemason it would be max{n + 5, 0.25 x n}?

[Xeth Nyrrow]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Mr. Frosty L:

Oprindeligt skrevet af Xeth Nyrrow:

Maybe +5 early on would be better? I'm open to solutions. I picked +25% as a starting point to enable flexibility of play styles gaining a benefit from it.

Can it be a combination, for ex, if n is the normal production, then with Stonemason it would be max{n + 5, 0.25 x n}?

Ok I like this idea, maybe 4 + 25%? I'll change something for my patch after this DLC releaes. Either way seems like +10 is too much.

[Dorian Gray]

The +10 doesn't scale very well and is really only relevant in the early game.

Not sure I agree that the +10 is OP. However, I tend to think that:

1. +10 Starting city production.
+
2. Every racial unit is an Engineer
+
3. Every racial city gets free City Walls

... taken as a whole may be OP.

If I was going to tone something down, it would probably be number 2.

Something more like the following instead:
1. SM allows the Race to build Engineers if they don't already have the ability.
2. If the Race can already build Engineers, now they can do it more efficiently requiring only 50% of the production.