Story Realm 5 advice?

[templar0122]

Anyone have advice for this campaign? The one with all the angel factions. No matter what faction type I try to play with I get instant rushed against them while I still have tier 1s and a smattering of tier 2s and maybe one and a half armies while they are attacking with 3 armies and 2-3 heroes at level 7-8 while im still at level 2-3. I dont think I've managed to get past turn 30.

[Aranea]

hmm what worked for me was a very agressive early game faction so i had two cities fast, very close to each other so one army could theoretically defend both (don't worry too much about optimal space or anything in this one, you will have a better time just having more cities as soon as possible) and using the ritual cannibalists plus ruthless raiders society traits to feed my cities into a fast early game

i also picked the nimue spell since it gives you a lot of free units that you can use to protect the units you actually care about or if you get good sinergies with the races she's throwing at you you might actually to try and keep them alive (i didn't so i mostly just used them as meatshields)

i finished the game on the higher difficulty, and it was hard, the angel faction actually tried to trigger a magic victory, i managed to stop and pacify him while one of my allies trigerred a magic victory himself right after, but even if that didn't happen, if you manage to grind through the angel (and its gonna be a grind he's really powerful) you should be able to take everything else down later on

also i suggest picking racial transformations that give you status and holy and fire damage resistance, he had a lot of those tier 5 shrine units and those are just guarantee of pain for you

if i had to optimize it, i'd have picked dark or feudal with unicorn mounts so my cavalry could phase into the range of his awakeners so those units couldn't nuke anyone (since they can't do it in zone of control) and would have picked the ferocious body trait (extra damage on retaliation or opportunity attacks) to go with that and just spammed tier 3 units after the early game

i'd also go for shadow affinity just to get the sleep of oblivion spell at tier 4 and use that to nuke the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ tier 5 shrine units out of existence for a bit, and if you go with the ritual canniballs you can even eat their corpse before they come back up and just straight up eliminate their best units like that with the phasing unicorns

i didn't go for unicorns in my game but still think its a good idea here

also do make teleporters, if that's something you normally ignore, don't, it will be your downfall once you're close to his territory if you don't have a outpost teleporting more armies in

[Aranea]

also if you want any further advice you can add me on steam i'm happy to help

[Tessallated_Girl]

It's largely about the dice roll of random map generation and a little bit about making as many cities as fast as you can before your allies snap up all the room. My first play through was like you described, impossible due to the OP angelic AI and zero space to build (i had one decent city and one trapped in little stub of a place). Second attempt i set up 4 cities super fast and then ended up with an allied AI winning on magic victory without me doing anything. Which was massively dissappointing as its the end of the story. Basically that level is broken and complete rubbish.

[Anarchy Burger]

The ai isnt much of a threat except for the always annoying awakeners. Best counter for them is shock units. I took tome of the beasts and the hound masters worked really well to shut them down with their free hounds. Otherwise the map is lretty straightforward and honestly kinda easy sinxe the ai is so passive

[4kie]

Originally posted by Tessallated_Girl:

It's largely about the dice roll of random map generation and a little bit about making as many cities as fast as you can before your allies snap up all the room. My first play through was like you described, impossible due to the OP angelic AI and zero space to build (i had one decent city and one trapped in little stub of a place). Second attempt i set up 4 cities super fast and then ended up with an allied AI winning on magic victory without me doing anything. Which was massively dissappointing as its the end of the story. Basically that level is broken and complete rubbish.

This was my exact experience. This map is largely about getting lucky and ignoring everything you learned in the last 4 story realms.

[sisqo102]

Go for frost and blight damage. The angels are weak to that. Kill them from range before they can do much damage. Focus fire, and bait their charge so you can then wreck them with your ranged units. Frost wizards and archers. Working for me so far.

[Aranea]

It would be a much better map If Magic victory was disabled for sure

And yea i forgot but i also used tome of the horde tome of the root and tome of criomancy for extra elemental damage, summonable tiver 1 units for agressive tempo early game and houndmasters truly help catch the units too, basically Just saying what people already added

Having dark as a culture really helps since you end up killing so many heroes your research and mana gets crazy with their unique building (plus the research upgrade from killing heroes in the shadow affinity tree)

[Mithrals]

I beat this on hard, and i had to get a little lucky in the beginning to not get rushed. Grab the enhancement that gives reinforcements, and don't be afraid to loose them.
They gave me a lot of useless steelshapers tho, so I had to delete them to save some econ.

Only restarted once. Hard to say if I got superlucky second time or not, but second time they didn't rush me cause of map layout.

Went for phase beast charge rush tactical strat. You don't need that specific strat, but you need something able to deepdive into enemy territory to stop magic victories with minimal losses, so a strong midgame comp able to compete with end game order units is a must. Able to fight off 6k armies and live to fight off another 6k army the next turn.

And you cant expect to tech longer than tier 3 tomes before the threat of magic victories starts to come.

I recommend either rushing phase beasts like i did, or do the good'ol zephyr archer max range strat so you can take out the enemy before they can do dmg to you. Probably some heavy defence strat with good healing would work aswell.

In any case, i rushed phase beasts as barbarian, and buffed them with everything i could find, going for alpha strike strat to completly destroy the enemy army in 2 turns before they could even look at me funny. That way my army was always healthy even when i had to go past 3 large cities of enemies to stop a magic victory. Phase beasts can also be summoned anywhere you have sight so you can quickly build up a full army on the other side of the map to stop another opponent in a pinch.

Spread outposts with teleporters everywhere, use barb scouts? I dunno thats what i did and it worked, in any case mobility is key since they are spread in every corner of the map, the moment you get a break from playing whackamole with enemy magic victories pop down your own magic victory to block further attempts and turtle in base for 15 turns.

If you got a strong mid game comp to rely on for deepdiving into enemy territory then its all about surviving the early game.

This map was incredibly fun, and I felt on the edge until the very end. Really good game.

[yuzhonglu]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2978555890

Use spider mounts.
Mass spider scouts.
Use spider scouts to farm neutrals for Astral creatures (get the blessing for Astral Creatures upon killing units).
Trade items for mana for early game mana to maintain your Astral army.
Get the Shadow Affinity skill for 50 knowledge per level of hero kill.
Snowball and win by turn 77.

[Xyebane]

You need to push early aggression against Turiel to prevent him from over-expanding and snowballing out of control.

Nature is best to focus on as Turiel is weak to poison. Glade Runners with Poison arrows, projectiles of decay, and nature's wrath with get it done.

There is a lot of luck involved in map generation. Use code to reveal map when you first start and then reload you game-start auto-save to save you time until you get a map that is doable.