Chaos and Materium vs the rest

[Vegetable Vampire]

Does anyone else feel like Chaos and Materium are the best overall affinities? I don't mean the culture (although Barbarian and Industrious are insanely good) but the tomes and specialities you gain from empire skills. Materium just lets you build your cities so quickly and also make tons of gold doing it. While Chaos lets you play very agressively, even early on and snowball. Meanwhile Order seems to be the worst, because Order strongly focusses on free cities and vassals. Vassals are good, but Order doesn't do much else than boost vassals and vassal-related mechanics. Meanwhile Materium the last Materium skill reduces unit upkeep by up to 50%, basically allowing for double the amount of armies.

Mythic and Shadow are a extremely powerful in the lategame aswell but take a while to get good syngergy. Nature is good if you know which biomes the map features, I guess. If there is no water, barely any provinces for farms and such then it is useless.

What are your thoughts?

[yuzhonglu]

On the affinities tree, Chaos and Astral are the best. Hands down. Chaos in the early game. Astral in the mid-late game. Astral pumps out research, which allows you to grab more powerful tomes.

Materium is good because of transmute metal, which doesn't require the tree. It's not a bad affinity, but not nearly as strong as astral.

[アンジェル]

I think every affinity is viable, depending on your playstyle.

I can easily agree that Chaos can feel superior if you play aggressively. Nature is very strong in defense on the other hand. And shadow can be exquisitely mean.

[Vegetable Vampire]

Originally posted by yuzhonglu:

On the affinities tree, Chaos and Astral are the best. Hands down. Chaos in the early game. Astral in the mid-late game.

Materium is good because of transmute metal, which doesn't require the tree. It's not a bad affinity, but not nearly as strong as astral.

I'd say Astral is the most powerful late game tree, but lacks the economic support one needs in the early stages of the game.

Which affinities do you think have the best tomes? Artisan Weapons with 30+% crit chance are so powerful that this tome is a must. Also the tome of teleportation is very strong. In conjunction with actual teleporters armies are never in danger of being overwhelmed due to bad positioning.

[Antsan]

I started out trying to play Chaos, followed by Materium, and given that I was still learning I didn't have a good time with them.

Since then I've played Arcane, Nature, and Order in that order. Kind of also wanna get “pure” runs done first.

Of those I found Arcane to be the easiest to grasp. Mana is the only resource I ever had real lasting issues with, and concentrating on Arcane tech deals with that problem quite well. Arcane kind of seemed to be able to just dominate a battlefield with a diverse range of spells and upgrades for all kinds of different things. I'm not really sure what the downsides are supposed to be.

Nature Is very consistent in the beginning, then suddenly gets extremely strong when you unlock spawning animal units on newly acquired provinces, then dips sharply when you suddenly run out of mana because you've got too many animals running around, and finally becomes strong when you get the boons that make animal units cheaper (or whatever that was, I may be misremembering). Nature lets you grow really fast, which is thematically extremely appropriate, and it can be exhilarating to just gobble up the world, but it comes with some serious resource management issues. It's certainly interesting.

Order felt… weird to play. Can't really put my finger on it. I feel like where Nature builds wide, Order builds tall. I had tons of gold. Ran out of mana pretty often, but it never became a problem since I could mostly just buy my way out by building mana-producing buildings. Also vassals are surprisingly good to have.

For the other three I have less experience, but…
Darkness seemed the hardest so far. Being able to scout the map unharassed is pretty nice, but everyone hating you isn't.
Materium costs lots of mana, given that it's basically “upgrade units”, but it doesn't have that many options to generate mana, it seems, so… there's probably a way to play pure Materium, but I haven't figured out what it is.
Chaos seems cool. I think I'm gonna try that next.

[yuzhonglu]

Originally posted by Vegetable Vampire:

Originally posted by yuzhonglu:

On the affinities tree, Chaos and Astral are the best. Hands down. Chaos in the early game. Astral in the mid-late game.

Materium is good because of transmute metal, which doesn't require the tree. It's not a bad affinity, but not nearly as strong as astral.

I'd say Astral is the most powerful late game tree, but lacks the economic support one needs in the early stages of the game.

Which affinities do you think have the best tomes? Artisan Weapons with 30+% crit chance are so powerful that this tome is a must. Also the tome of teleportation is very strong. In conjunction with actual teleporters armies are never in danger of being overwhelmed due to bad positioning.

Transmute metal is a must have. Once you get a bunch of mana generators, mana becomes the most efficient source of economy.

Best all around tomes? Nature. Good summons from the get go and still relevant late game.

[Astasia]

All of them seem pretty strong, except for Order. Nature is great for terraforming and playing tall, it's able to make the most powerful and expansive cities in the game by far, which at the same time also feels a bit like the antithesis of what Nature should be doing. I'm not sure anything competes with Gaia's Chosen and Force of Nature late game.

Order might feel better if they fix vassals.

[CrUsHeR]

Nature is pretty absurd in the early to mid game.


Tome of Roots, cast that living vine spell - the enemy T1-3 units are gonna spend the next one or two turns killing the vines. Your ranged units don't even get attacked, so basically no need for melee/tank units.

This is also partially due to the "pinned" mechanics, as their units cannot ignore the vines even if they wanted. Even killed a T4 demon unit today with a couple of basic units and 2x vine cast, just hilarious. Everyone walked out with >95% hp.

Then the tome of beasts, get summons as free cannon fodder. Get the materium capstone skill for T3 elemental summon, too. For some reason the AI always prioritizes killing the combat summons first.

Affinity upgrades are just so strong. +5 food from farms, double your food output? And food = population = everything else. But if you also play e.g. Barbarian and get the nature tomes, you additionally get tons of food and massive draft from province improvements. And build T2 spiders in your city.



Then compare that to playing e.g. Mystic with Astral. Everything costs mana, and yes you get buildings for some little bit of extra mana, but you get very little of everything else instead.

Horrible province improvements, like anything adding +3 mana for adjacent conduits? Compared to something giving +3 mana and +3 food for adjacent forest tiles.


Balance is totally FUBAR right now. Much of the game feels like an early beta version.

[The Former]

I think they're all pretty strong depending on your playstyle. Chaos works for my current playstyle, but I can't see it being quite as strong when I go for a more peaceful run, for instance.

[Kref]

Probably there should be ranked matches. It would help to understant the balance drawbacks. Otherwise it's mostly guessings.

[Nihonsean]

Nature/Life takes awhile to get rolling, but once it does it's pretty unstoppable. Mass Rejuvenation might be the best combat spell in the game, especially on really big fights.

[yuzhonglu]

Originally posted by CrUsHeR:

Nature is pretty absurd in the early to mid game.


Tome of Roots, cast that living vine spell - the enemy T1-3 units are gonna spend the next one or two turns killing the vines. Your ranged units don't even get attacked, so basically no need for melee/tank units.

This is also partially due to the "pinned" mechanics, as their units cannot ignore the vines even if they wanted. Even killed a T4 demon unit today with a couple of basic units and 2x vine cast, just hilarious. Everyone walked out with >95% hp.

Then the tome of beasts, get summons as free cannon fodder. Get the materium capstone skill for T3 elemental summon, too. For some reason the AI always prioritizes killing the combat summons first.

Affinity upgrades are just so strong. +5 food from farms, double your food output? And food = population = everything else. But if you also play e.g. Barbarian and get the nature tomes, you get a ton of food and massive draft. And build T2 spiders in your city.



Then compare that to playing e.g. Mystic with Astral. Everything costs mana, and yes you get buildings for some little bit of extra mana, but you get very little of everything else instead.

Horrible province improvements, like anything adding +3 mana for adjacent conduits? Compared to something giving +3 mana and +3 food for adjacent forest tiles.


Balance is totally FUBAR right now. Much of the game feels like an early beta version.

Thanks to transmute metal you can turn all that mana into gold food and production. 1 Mana = .75 gold, food AND production. It becomes the most cost efficient resource to mass.

Of course that's tier 3 tome.

[CrabNicholson]

Chaos is insanely good for rushes

[CrUsHeR]

Originally posted by Lockfågel, Paradoxriddaren:

I think they're all pretty strong depending on your playstyle.

Doesn't really feel so. Just thinking about how limited the city expansion is - take Adept Settlers:

+1 city equals 33% more cities before even buying any affinity upgrades

+1 starting population equals around 7 turns of growth, but since you also save 1 turn worth of Imperium on founding cities and can immediately annex the first province, it is even much better


Then you take the two affinity perks for +5 food and reduced settle time with another +1 population:

Well now you have 4+ cities by turn 20, and they're gonna be at least twice as big as other empire's cities after X turns.



Chaos also seems pretty strong if you combine the Horde tome (Spawnkin) with the Chaos affinity upgrades. Then you have really strong T1 armies which cost close to zero upkeep. Combined with the strong Draft from Barbarian buildings, you can also build those twice as fast.

But since migrating cities costs a ton of imperium, i'm not quite sure how this path translates into a similar power creep as nature does. You can get vassals for free but they're not going to like you.

[KellyR]

Originally posted by yuzhonglu:

Originally posted by CrUsHeR:

Nature is pretty absurd in the early to mid game.


Tome of Roots, cast that living vine spell - the enemy T1-3 units are gonna spend the next one or two turns killing the vines. Your ranged units don't even get attacked, so basically no need for melee/tank units.

This is also partially due to the "pinned" mechanics, as their units cannot ignore the vines even if they wanted. Even killed a T4 demon unit today with a couple of basic units and 2x vine cast, just hilarious. Everyone walked out with >95% hp.

Then the tome of beasts, get summons as free cannon fodder. Get the materium capstone skill for T3 elemental summon, too. For some reason the AI always prioritizes killing the combat summons first.

Affinity upgrades are just so strong. +5 food from farms, double your food output? And food = population = everything else. But if you also play e.g. Barbarian and get the nature tomes, you get a ton of food and massive draft. And build T2 spiders in your city.



Then compare that to playing e.g. Mystic with Astral. Everything costs mana, and yes you get buildings for some little bit of extra mana, but you get very little of everything else instead.

Horrible province improvements, like anything adding +3 mana for adjacent conduits? Compared to something giving +3 mana and +3 food for adjacent forest tiles.


Balance is totally FUBAR right now. Much of the game feels like an early beta version.

Thanks to transmute metal you can turn all that mana into gold food and production. 1 Mana = .75 gold, food AND production. It becomes the most cost efficient resource to mass.

Of course that's tier 3 tome.

Downside to that though, is if you wanted to go summon/enchantment heavy, losing all that mana isn't something you want.

[Safir]

Just for sheer hilarity, I'd say astral is the most powerful at the end-game; dropping roaming stacks of hostile units onto your enemies cities is great fun. Otherwise, Chaos and Materium are overall the best IMO; trucking over enemies with a full stack of Golden Golems and the Balor is pretty fun, plus the terraforming abilities can really cripple stubborn enemies.