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Industrial unit weakness I agree with, compared to, say, the straightforward power of Feudal. I think it's to balance out the fact that Scout Prospecting is bananas in a builder setup, though. The kind of relative economic turn advantage you can crank out with something like Industrial/Adept Settlers/Wonder Architects/Tome of Beasts, snapping up powerful low-hanging Builder fruit in the Empire development tree while spreading Scouts and cities far and wide, is no joke.
So does the Houndmaster and a lot of other units. That is not unique to Nature.
This
I think they all seem fairly balanced except order which focuses on vassals but vassals are awful currently.
"Here is my extremely hard line bias: Chaos is the S Tier, Nature is the A Tier, Order and Astral are both B Tier, and Materium is C Tier ... Shadow is kinda meh."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6MlEUakdK8
YouTubers make content first and foremost for said content. I doubt that guy played every tome several times to be able to make a precise tier list in just a few days. And if it isn't meant to be precise, then there is no point in a tier list.
He and other content creators did have a pre-release copy, for about a month prior to release. So I'm guessing this has been in the works a while, waiting for the embargo to be lifted.
No, you cast it once on a city and it lasts until you cancel it. For the duration it sets the city's mana output to 0 and converts each 1 mana the city would have earned into 0.75 of each of the listed resources. It's a very strong spell, especially if you go heavy astral with mystic and just grab that materium tome. If you are heavy materium it's less useful as your mana output wont be that high and you probably can't afford removing the mana from one or more of your cities.
Nature is stupidly strong long term.
Adept settlers is probably the best starting trait if you end up being able to get the green affinity for -50% food required to grab tiles. The trait lowers food for growth by -25% for a -75% total when you get both.
Purple magic affinity to give you map hacks on all army positions is literally priceless (considering the AI always has this).
My favorite ability in blue is actually first turn casting which is only 80 affinity.
Mastor Masons and rite of Wealth are also really strong in yellow.
Red has a cool end tier ability but is worthless when there are spelljammers everywhere.
And there is nothing that makes me say "wow" in the order tree.
For the way I want to play I will always pick wonder architects and Adept settlers. I think AoW was always fun with "more wonders" so I always play with lots of wonders on the map.
https://youtu.be/dJJmT6F1MuQ
Materium, Shadow, and Nature are surprisingly good for if you're playing in the underground or a map with a lot of uninhabitable territory since they can convert uninhabitable provinces (including tunnels in bedrock or provinces in lava and underground lakes with even a single ground tile) into inhabitable regions. Nature is obviously the best for this if you aren't arctic adapted, but Materium's ability to make any region able to hold a quarry can be useful for either opening up a new route through to enemy territory or turn a city into an economic powerhouse.
Astral is more powerful for a tech build or pure magic due to one of the empire abilities reducing the cost of one research option every research cycle, while one of their special improvements increases casting points. More importantly, Astral is a pretty good anti-magic tree since one of the T1 tomes just gives you 2 resistance towards three different non-physical damage types. Materium, Astral, and the Industrial culture are probably immensely powerful for a defensive build since the Industrial culture's T3 shield unit can benefit from racial transformations that boost their durability (unlike Materium's iron golems) as well as unit enchantments provided by Materium and Astral.
While there's a Chaos/Order and Shadow/Nature dichotomy, I'd honestly argue that Chaos and Shadow are better counters for each other due to the fact that Chaos focuses fairly heavily on pyromancy while Shadow's damage type is frost. This is a big deal since their major transformations (demonkin and wightborn/wight form respectively) make races with that transformation more vulnerable to the opposing alignment's damage type.
Nature is laughably powerful for expansion if only because Adept Settlers on its own is enough to grab the first unlock early on, which means new cities start with three population (four if you build a work camp) as soon as you found them. Again, combine with light Materium and you can get quick outposts with palisades, quick city founding, and 2 free pops in every city you found.
Order is fairly weak due to the reliance on vassals for the abilities it unlocks, though the fact that it gives a spell jammer that blocks all other province improvements from being razed is pretty noteworthy.
Regarding large cities, though, Chaos and Astral do have the noteworthy quirk of allowing a single city to have up to three teleporters that are made better by an Astral empire unlock. This gives them a powerful synergy with the first point (terraforming the underground) since it allows a single city to spread into multiple chambers if placed properly and still be able to move armies through its domain without much difficulty.
Shadow isn't something I've played with at all, so I can't comment on it.
I think things are surprisingly balanced as long as you play in a way that makes use of most bonuses. Chaos for raiding and pillaging, Materium for large citis with good production, Nature for quick expansion, Order for a political match where your vassals give you GREAT units in large numbers via the Lieges mechanic, Shadow for subterfuge and huge debuffs (or undead armies if you go that path), mystic for full summon stacks and OP combat magic in general.
Nature is one of the strongest I think since it's just universally good, regardless of what you're trying to build. An affinity that can easily slot into any build and bring a lot of value is top tier in my books. Chaos is also strong, but only if you're playing aggresively so I feel it's not as universally appliable (razing cities and pillaging bonuses are not that useful if you're not going for a Domination victory) but it's very strong in the right build.