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So the Hero Skill "Cull the Weak" in "Warfare" is for melee attacks only?
What are the good hero skills for a dark culture hero/lord then?
Weakness on your attacks is a powerful ability however, especially on a unit that attacks up to 3 times per round, which might make full health fights more in your favor, plus that regeneration stacks making you have longer staying power. It seems like the trade off is that you can't engage in battles with low health, but you are favored to win if you start with full.
The question is : do the lifesteals stack? They did in AoW III.
Goblin spearmen were a level 2 unit that had built in lifesteal. You could add lfiesteal from one of the magic groups to any unit made in that city. You could add lifesteal from being undead.
So that meant those tier 2 goblins were stealing 45 hp per hit on a pikeman unit.
Ranged evocation + fire evocation. You get a range 7 aoe burning+dmg blast that hits a 1 hex radius.
Melee spec in this game is pretty terrible for your lord.
lifesteal does NOT stack, i read it on the forum (steam or paradox i don't remember) a week ago being confirmed by a dev and several users on reddit confirmed that as well. thus making mana addicts and wightborn incompatible.
Melee spec in this game, especiall sword & board is quite good in this game. i prefer my necromancer lord to be a mage because thematically and because of the orb of necromancy being a good & fitting starting weapoin giving you raise undead.
but the warfare tree coupled with the shadow tome skills is a really strong build. especially with the item forge you can completely kit out your tank unit with tier 4 equipment with massive debuffs & DoT's on your weapon and find a decent shield which kills the enemies by them just attacking you or instastunning them. at one game i went over 15 (i think 16 or 17) physical defenses and making my tank almost unkillable.
couple that with the resurrection spells of your necromancer and especially the tier 5 necro tome trait "eternal one" which literally makes your hero immortal as long as your full army isn'T wiped:
ETERNAL ONE
When this Hero unit is killed in battle, after 2 Turns, it comes back to life with 35% of its total Hit Points.
Can be used any number of times.
Does not function if all other units are dead.
also nice additions are:
WEAKENING AURA
At the end of the turn inflict Weakened to adjacent enemies.
MASTER OF DISRUPTION
Physical Melee and Ranged attacks gain 60% chance of inflicting Disrupted.
"Disrupted" disables all the enchantment that unit has ... yes ...all those juicy enchantments the enemy casted on their unit is gone :-D
EDIT: also being the frontline fighter is definitely the best role for your leader if you want to min max because he literally cannot permanently die in this game (except you lose your throne city / capital). making him a no brainer meatshield :-D.
This "Eternal One" gets countered by a simple standard corpse eating ability or just units standing on the hero/leader, Final Banishment or Flame Burst Weapons coming from Tomes that are easier to research and some tiers lower than the flawed T5 Shadow Tome.
And guess what, if there is no corpse your hero is dead for good, and your leader respawns in 2-3 turns like any other non-eternal one lol
Its a noobfilter and so many fall for it, you imagine its great, but it clearly isn't and does not deliver that immortal fantasy.
The game currently has no power progression balance whatsoever keep that in mind, many T3 and T4 Tomes are better than several T5 tomes and are availible much sooner.
But the AI isn't smart enough to do this, and the vast majority don't play pvp, so for that majority, it's a perfectly valid choice.
edit: I should say, the AI isn't smart enough to do this DELIBERATELY. They might accidentally nuke the corpse while doing something else, but that's true of basically any corpse mechanics.
A script will never be smart and adapt anything, but it uses corpse eating abilities, when availible and the FBW enchant instantly destroys corpses on kill, which the A.I. can use without any dedication on the matter.
It affects SP absolutely from a power progression point of view as main motivation to play the game in SP, we have seen this on AoW4's release when so many players looked forward to unlock all the Tomes in 1 game session that has nothing to do with role play, but powermongering which is typical in war games and games with heavy rpg elements in them.
Shadow Affinity got very powerful T4 Shadow Tomes, both of them Tome of Oblivion and Tome of the Reaper no matter what game mode you play, these T4 Shadow Tomes should not disappoint, right?
Then you got Tome of the Eternal Lord as T5 Tome follow up and it adds absolutely nothing in SP of value to end the game and T5 Tomes are meant to be "game ending".
MP would not even go as far and bother researching it, when there is Astral T5, Marterium T5 and several unlocked T4 Tomes with more impact, but unfortunately this same rule of progression applies to SP games. This game is not fresh anymore and we cannot allow ourselves to act like there is no huge unbalance in the order of Tiers in Tomes. Have a look at the T4 Chaos Tomes, btw and how they got to T4 at all, there are T1 Tomes that do better.
Human behaviour does not change with a game modus operandi, i think everyone expect powerful stuff from higher Tier tomes, progressively, after a while. If you cast a D&D spell at Tier 9 you'd expect something like Power Word: Kill or Time Stop and not something quite like Burning Hands or Find Familiar, which are used by apprentices not archmages.
At best you can try use battlefield reanimation because of the A.I.s inability to actively seek ways to destroy corpses, but its not worth the research, since you should have a lot of necromancers, hero resurrect abilities and items at this point.
Meaning the lack of a practical game logic use is more felt than the actual power fantasy.
The rest of the Tome is quite underwhelming for its Tier and with your stack of enchants on units with high ranks, so much reanimation is not needed. Same could be said about heroes with their high levels and items and high stats in late game you seek ways to end the game and combat more quickly not delaying it artificially, so this entire tome of eternal lord might have an use, if its a T3 Tome, but not higher than that, since it clearly is not based on the end of a progression curve, when you want to conserve the little stuff you have in the mid game part.
That's not true at all as we have several games where the AI using a script cannot be beaten by human reflexes.
lol you have no clue ... last time i played hero corpses weren't able to be eaten or destroyed. same with final banishment which explicitly states "non-hero corpses". i also used raise undead on a corpse which was beneath an enemy unit, the zombie spawned on an adjacent hex to the original hex of the corpse.
what do you mean by "leader respawns in 2-3 turns like any other non-eternal one lol". it seems you fell into your own "noob trap". the skill eternal ones talks about combat turns, not world map turns. of course every leader respawns after 2-3 turns on the world map. this skill you can give to every warfare hero you have and they will indefinitely revive on their own during combat after 2 turns (of combat) as long as there is at least one of your troops on the field and the battle isn't declared as lost.
it is not a "noobfilter", the only "noobs" are so called "pro-players" which play and think in their so called "meta bubble" which think that a non-competitive singleplayer game with a multiplayer feature should be played like a moba. those are in my eyes the "noobs" because they fail to grasp the appeal of the game. the shadow tomes, including the tier 5 one has some strong spells and features in it. maybe not the biggest amount compared to other stuff but it carries that necromancer fantasy quite well and doesn't lack behind other tier 5 tomes.
i agree that the power curve of the higher tomes isn't always as expected. the tier 4 material tome with the golden golem is in my opinion much stronger than the tier 5 earth tome. especially their units (earth titan and golden golem) have the reverse ranking, i think golden golem with its gilding attacks and gilding passive for attackers, coupled with infinite retailiation is much stronger than the earth titan and a candidate for strongest unit in AoW4.
but again ... i don't live in a multiplayer bubble, try to cheese out a win ..following some wannabe pro youtubers which swear on their granny that "strat x is op dude mah broooooh". i don't care, there are different playstyles with different power fantasies which deliver it. it doesn't have to be completely balanced because its mainly a singleplayer experience. there won't be a AoW4 world championship ... nobody cares if you win in an online match or how fast you rushed your little brother in a 1v1 match.
i do agree that we need some more powerful stuff in the tier 5 tomes and that they aren't as powerful as we would hope. they have some pretty powerful stuff like battlefield reanimation or eternal one. this isn't about when you stomp an enemy but when its a risky / close fight, then this spell can shift the tide in your favor.
before your "but mah corpse destruction" comment comes again, your final banishment (and most other corpse skills) don't touch the hero corpses. final banishment says it in the description and i mainly play necro so i know that yesterday / day before yesterday when i last played the game i couldn't touch the corpse of a hero with the raise zombie spell or eat corpse spell of my reaper. in the current version it even shows the corpse that is lying there. maybe they changed it in one of the last patches, but your counter arguments don't hold (anymore).
also while age of wonders 4 has become more of a true 4x game, in its purist essence it is more of a fantasy war game.
EDIT: i looked at your point with the tier 5 astral tome, i don't see it being more worth than tier 5 shadow tome and tier 4 tome of oblivion. even the astral AoE stun spell time stop is on a simliar level as the tier 4 tome of oblivion ritual of somnia which stuns with a 90% chance all enemy units or the devouring void which makes for a great zoning tool.
What exactly is missing from the T5 shadow tome compared to the others?
Strictly talking about AoW scripts, but you can extend it to all turn based games. Fast reflexes are not part of it and its not impressive to make a script with faster inhuman reflexes in real time, it still cannot adapt to a dynamic situation.
You are wrong, right there. Leader and Hero corpes can be destroyed.
Do you know how many ways there are to destroy corpses? And the A.I. will use it, if its availible, but does not adapt to necromancer tactics in a game session as a human player would.
Whenever i browse the forums here, i have the very strong feeling, not too many players have tested the spells and hero abilities in T5 Tomes, there is absolutely zero balance to be found and the end result is players get bored, no matter how they play. Since you have plenty of time to play your turns and how many turns in SP its even more occuring problem than it would be in multiplayer.
Actually the issue with the T5 Shadow Tome is affecting role playing necromancers way more than a competitive, small scene ignoring any kind of immersive RP.
End game spells that complement an advanced Necromancer kit and an actual useful hero signature ability in this late game phase.
Make the T5 Shadow Tome more Void themed and less Necromancy themed, due to bloat of necromancy spells and abilities in lower Shadow Tomes.
If a Godir has so many ways to reanimate, you do not need more reanimation spells at the highest T5 or even low undead Tier summons that cost the same as a T5 Reaper.
True Death magic that cannot hit anyone - on its own- with its 30% check vs resistance is not very helpful either, i'd rather have a plain Desintegrate, which would not be much better than Sleep of Oblivion, but at least it works.
The spell design could be more exciting and should be more powerful than T4 Tomes, but since Shadow T4 tomes are very powerful and amongst the strongest Tomes in the game, especially Tome of Oblivion this seems a difficult thing to do.
While a dev said on discord the T5 Tomes are not supposed to bring something new, but are there to end the game, i expect more end game impact of them, which of course won't happen with reanimation/summon undead overload that you allready have at this point, if you rp'd as a necromancer with its necro themed tomes.
But to be fair, i would not feel good to rp a demonologist with Chaos Tomes either looking at both their T4 Tomes that needs more love, too.
Nature, Astral, Materium and Order feel complete in their progression paths to their higher Tier Tomes to complement them.
So basically you don't like the flavor of it. That's it. Why are you framing it as a balance and choice problem when your problems have nothing to do with any of that?
Destroying corpses is a non-issue. Flameburst weapons is a single mechanic from a single tome and shows up about as much as any other single thing from a single tome. Ritual cannibals is more likely to take away your corpses than flameburst weapons are. I don't know where you're getting the idea that corpse mechanics somehow are invalid just because counters exist. I've never seen the AI make any kind of concerted effort to remove corpses. Eternal Lord works just fine, I've never seen the AI counter it ever, and it lets you use your heroes in completely different ways.
Aside from that, Shadow T5 gets Withering Mist, one of the most brutal attack spells in the game. The only real dud in that list is the summon army spell, and even that has its uses, since it's very rare to be able to raise a whole stack turn after turn with no practical limit. Most of the stuff that creates whole stacks comes from Rites, and are inherently limited.
It does not matter at all, if the A.I. is making no concerted effort to prevent Eternal Lord, it just is not needed....come one dude, you never played necromancer in AoW4 i just see it now.
I even told you, that you have plenty of tomes that cover resurrection mechanics, so you could easily reanimate your heroes in combat or any other unit, before you get that useless hero skill in a T5 Tome.
I did not complain about WM and its not that great that it could carry the rest of the Tome, Sleep of Oblvion, Lava Burst and Tectonic Shatter are among the most brutal attack spells, WM is far from that, i would rank it below of these, yet its in a T5 Tome.
Lets be honest, did you look just at some data sheet or actually tested those spells in the late game where they are availible?
Like that other guy who said corpses of heroes cannot be destroyed?
I wonder why we are discussing anything.