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Basically you dont cant die, whatever happen.
Not sure about that one, Mana Addicts doesn't stack with Wightborn (tested), the other 2 don't give lifesteal, but rather a different way of healing. Lifesteal doesn't stack unlike AoW3 in general, regen does. Undead don't need Cold Blooded cause they're immune to morale changes etc.
Thanks!
I did play a large variety of builds, can throw you some ideas:
Culture: Dark
Culture Traits:
Mana Channelers
Mana Addicts
(this gives +2 rank to a battlemage of a magic origin)
Tome 1: Pyromancy - grab fire elementals, they'll start at +2 rank
Tome 2: Evocation - good mana improvement, lightning focus, good combat spells
Tome 3: Amplification - Frenzied Focus, +dmg of tactical spells, Amplified Minds (good with Dark)
Tome 4: Mayhem - Mark of Misfortune, mostly. it's not so good yet but will be soon
Tome 5: Pandemonium - Havoc Magic, Vessels of Chaos, Chaos Eater
Tome 6: Teleportation - Phasing, Chrono Gates
Tome 7: I would go back and Take Scrying here for Mental Mark
You can go and finish the game with any high tier Astral or Chaos tomes you like, Astral Mirror is always the go to t4 though.
Ruler: Wizard King.
Explanation:
This is a battlemage rush build with a transition to Chaos Eater debuff build. You start out with level 3 fire elementals when you summon them for 50% cost and you should fairly quickly be able to evolve them to t3 where they become pretty terrifying. Starting as Dark will allow you to grab -20% magic unit upkeep quite early. You can have a stack of powerful t3s way before you would be able to field them normally but be mindful of upkeep. Chaos tree allows you to have -50% upkeep discount on t1 elementals together with Dark but not after they evolve. Generally a push with a bunch of fire and shock elems will be able to kill any immediate AI neighbors and can be scary in pvp as well if timed properly. If you want to execute a rush +1000 mana perk from astral affinity does help you stay afloat.
After you go into Pandemonium you get the next part of your plan - Chaos eater - which deals 12 damage for each debuff on a target as it eats them (multiple stacks count as multiple debuffs, e.g. eating 5 stacks of sundered resistance is 60 damage, before % modifiers). Dark warlocks with Mark of Misfortune will land at least 6 stacks of debuffs with their Sunder Curse, meaning a 72 + % damage follow up from the Chaos Eater. The % will at least be 30% with Vessels of Chaos, but can be higher with stacks of Frenzied from Frenzied Focus etc. In practice Chaos Eaters can casually oneshot t5s with this tactic, or even several of them if they clump up.
Tome of Teleportation gives your Chaos Eaters and other Battlemages unparalleled mobility; Tome of Scrying gives you a spell that inflicts 5 stacks of debuffs in aoe with no chance to resist and also destroys target's magic resistance, as WK you'll be able to cast 2 of them per turn. At this point your Chaos Eaters are eating everything alive and can move + teleport into groups of enemies from very long range.
Cannibals or Raiders? Growth and mana or draft and gold for more troops?
Also, in the damage buffing category everybody seems to miss out on tome of beasts. Pack Leader plus Mark of Prey is a massive and cheap damage boost. +25% damage in army and 3 Sundered Defense, for just 5 mana.
On a more practical note: What do you use as roadbumps to get off more archer rounds? Roots or some other ways to summon stuff into combat seems mandatory for that job.
I like Cannibals more because of the added combat utility (corpse eating is actually a very solid ability), plus I feel like with Draft there's a higher chance to waste it as it can go to a city where you don't want to be recruiting at the moment. But both are viable.
Tome of the Beasts is indeed very strong but I like it more with cav builds. Also you'll be more likely spamming the Awaken spell earlygame as you won't have enough supports to Awaken everyone until you can push out some Awakeners.
Roots is very good to block enemy units, but I usually give my heroes in this build shields while levelling them primarily into support tree, and have some copper/iron golems or even hounds to tank depending on what I have in a given stack. Since this is a high/materium/champion build heavy on enchantments you usually don't have a ton of free mana to cast combat spells. High Dawn Defenders actually make quite reasonable meatshields with corpse eating too and you can give them Aspect of the Roots if you go for Glade Runners making them even tankier (I prefer Zephyrs tho).
Quick Reflexes, Tenacious, Culture (not sure which one are best, probably Barbaric), Prolific Swarmers, Mana Channelers, Tome of the Horde, Wizard King.
Research Summon Irregulars as soon as possible, Spawnkin and Houndmaster are your secondary options.
Usually from turn 5 or 10 onward you have Irregular. From turn 10 you can upgrade your max world magic by 20 in the empire tree, and together with Wizard King level 2+ you will have 60+ world magic to summon one tier 1 unit for 30 mana every turn.
Quick Reflexes and Tenacious are there to offset the drawback of Spawnkin as much as possible.
Prolific Swarmers with Mana Addicts. Wizard King, Horde followed by Roots (for herbalists).
Spider mounts. Flankers.
With irregulars, this is the fastest snowball build. Spider scouts are the best tier 1 units in the game, and everything you kill provides mana and food for city growth and more summons.
At that point you don't need tank units at all, just take full 5-6 unit armies of Furies and just rely on the spider AoE immobilize to keep enemies at bay. Though I almost certainly would take Roots as my first or second Tome too, for Poison Arrows and Vine Prison, to double down on not needing melee/meat shields.
Alternatively wolf mounts and keep your Furies in formation at all times. At which point you may want to go Beasts instead of Roots (Animal Kinship, Call of the Wild, and Mark As Prey are all great for mounted archers, and will synergize well with the Pack Hunter ability you get from the wolf mounts.
Sadly no way to make this work with a Feudal culture, which would let you add Stand Together to Pack Hunter for more shenanigans. If we ever get a researchable archer that can get the base culture's mount, Feudal will rule the world.
I'd probably aim for both Tome of the Crucible and Tome of Paradise as "capstones" of the build. For Meteor Arrows, obviously, and Exhilarating Pollen, perhaps less obviously (Inflict Distracted on entire enemy army. All your attacks are now flanking. Profit!)
Barb is meh for archer builds imo. Spider nets are strong in the earlygame, but they do get outscaled and they're only 4 range. Compared to 7-9 range reach you get with buffed up archer shots this isn't much. If you don't get the immobilise off you will be charged by melee and range will pound you either way. Primal Strike does nothing for archers whereas Awakened gives a massive +4 damage. Finally, Furies are t2 so they don't benefit from Tome of The Horde buffs or the -30% upkeep for t1 units you can get in the Chaos affinity tree. They also don't get Mighty Meek. They do get Tome of Beasts/Pack leader synergies but it's not enough to break even imo.
Pack Hunter works on melee attacks only, so Wolf mounted Furies are pointless.
Generally, High is good not only for +1 range/+20% accuracy but +4 spirit damage on a repeated attack is massive and far outweighs Feudal Stand Together bonus.
Beast tome is pretty good for archer builds tho, you can just stand next to a mounted hero for the kinship bonus and Mark as Prey is a good spell. Mounted archers get the benefit of Pack Leader but as i said I don't think it adds up in case of Furies, they lose too much in other areas.
You can go with Spider Mounts in this build as well if you want to, use scouts for early support (also doing decent ranged damage with them because Awaken), and later spider mounted Awakeners imo work better than Spider Mounted archers, as they don't need to operate at such a high range and can Phase + Web after you get Tome of Teleportation.
Barb city eco is also gonna be a lot worse than the Neutral High build, probably you'd need to rethink the culture traits as they were picked specifically to enable a very strong eco boom with High/Neutral agenda.
I have a bunch more.
Here's a cheese Shadow strategy:
Culture: Dark
Traits:
Adept Settlers
Scions of Evil
(You can try Ancient Wise Ones for faster tech, maybe, but the build is also imperium hungry, Cannibals and Ruthless Raiders are also interesting options)
Body/Mind: whatever, you can go spider mounts cheese for an easier earlygame I guess. E.g. Spider Mounts + Overwhelm Tactics. Arctic Adaptation is an interesting gimmicky option to make your Schools of Cryomancy better, at least in the capital.
Tome 1: Souls
Tome 2: Cryo
Tome 3: Doomherald
Tome 4: Amplification
Tome 5: Great Transformation
Tome 6: Teleportation (or anything else you like e.g. Sanctuary, Cold Dark for sure fi you went Arctic Adaptation)
Tome 7: Oblivion
Tome 8: Reaper
Tome 9: Eternal Lord
Basically this is almost a pure Shadow build, which according to public opinion sucks. Here's how you play it:
Mostly, you want to rush Stolen Power in Shadow Affinity as early as possible, and win the game from there. as it requires 120 points, you need to go heavy on the shadow tomes early, you pick them for affinity points, not because they're the best tomes.
You should be thinking a bit like if you play Assembly/Xenoplague if you played Planetfall. You need to eat everything and farm up resources this way. Luckily there are some exploits to help you.
Don't use Soulfire or Soul Overflow in the earlygame unless you can't help it. If you autocombat AI will sometimes use them unfortunately if you have them researched, which may be a good argument going Cryo first and skipping teching them altogether.
Initially souls should only be used on building Skeleton stacks, which make up the bulk of your troops. They're disposable and you should treat them as such, they'll die and you'll get more. They're low maintenance base and with Shadow Binding they're basically at upkeep reduction cap making them cheap.
Declare war on your nearest free cities, if any, kill their heroes. Make sure to get Knowledge Extraction before that, lvl 3 hero is 150 research.
Research > Tomes > Affinity Points > Stolen Power > more Research
After you've dealt with the free cities you can create more cities to farm yourself by settling a city, immediately releasing it as a vassal and then attacking them. You get research + corpse in your crypt for the hero they spawn + Stolen Power bonus, then you can re-vassalize them and repeat the loop. You want to do this with the free cities you've conquered as well as settle a bunch of extra cities to farm.
Basically this gives you all the mana in the world + insane tech power.
Since you're already heavily invested in Shadow it makes sense to finish it off, but Tome of Amplification is good to take to get some Astral affinity going and it provides a ton of strong buffs in general.
With lots of heroes in your crypts you get a good amount of passive extra mana + souls income. Scions of Evil give you a ton of free Draft and Imperium.
Military wise you don't focus on anything specific, but you have skeletons as your fodder, warlocks & pursuers are still solid ranged options throughout the game, dark knights are good, banshees are good. Sticking 1 reaper per stack is pretty good for the passive buff. The filthiest trick that you have is the t4 Sleep of Oblivion spell, that allows you to remove up to 2 strongest enemy units per turn with Overchannel, and you can even immediately reanimate them as zombies or even as themselves with Greater Reanimation to fight on your side. This currently has no counter.
Your win con is basically going for super early Age of Shadow and winning the magic victory.
I wouldn't plan on going into Tome of the Horde at all (Although Spawnkin is still good regardless).
I'd start with either Vines or Beasts and roll with that. Use Scouts and Sunderers until I can start cranking out Furies.
The fact that they're Tier II isn't wholly a loss. You just don't worry about Chaos's Tier I unit reduction. Instead you're leveraging the fact that Furies are significantly tougher than T1 archers, hit harder to start with, and are mounted. Which is not just a matter of the Spider AoE being awesome. It means you can kite in battle (Surprisingly effective) and that you can have fully mounted armies which have very noticeably better strategic movement. Mounted Support hero + 5 Furies will have much better movement on the strategic map than anything that relies on infantry archers.
Add in the fact that you're aiming for Tome of Paradise for the "Distract the whole effin' enemy army" spell, and you're not racing for a Tier V, you have reasonably low opportunity cost grabbing Glades for Leafskin and now your whole army is invisible in the most common "obstacle" terrain, can move through it at speed, and oh hey, you also get Create Forest from this tome. Hmm.
The only thing you're potentially missing out on by taking Glades is Nymphs, and that's assuming you don't just take Glades and Fertility. But more importantly you don't want to be dragging non-mounted Supports with your armies anyway because they'd slow you down. Hence why you're going to spec all your heroes as Supports instead.
For my Culture traits, yes, I thought it sort of went without saying that you'd have to change them. I'm not a huge fan of going hard into economy traits anyway, and what I'd do is probably take Fabled Hunters, which lets my Furies and Sunderers start with +1 rank, and quite importantly should give me a Fury as a bonus starting unit, in addition to its economic value.
For the second Society Trait there are a few options:
1. Prolific Swarmers for the 20% upkeep reduction, which would apply to our Furies since it's for all non-magic origin units, and the reduction in food cost for population growth, which is arguably the best economic boost in the game)
2. Ruthless Raiders/Ritual Cannibals. Both do the same general thing, giving you resources for every fight you're in. One gives money and draft, the other gives mana and food, sort of depends on what you're after.
3. Runesmiths. This is just always good for everyone. Enchantment upkeep reduction is a HUGE benefit. We don't actually care about the shield/polearm unit bonuses, but they're there I guess. Still arguably the best choice for the second trait, and also gives us a little push towards eventually getting Meteor Arrows. We're not going for a magic victory, but this trait would mean that with 2 Materium Tomes and a Seed of Materium we can get the Tome of the Crucible, so it potentially saves us from taking 1 Materium Tome. Not a huge deal because we probably want both Enchantment and Artificing, and we have to take a Tier III to get the Seed anyway, but still, it opens the option to skip either Enchantment or Artificing if we want.
4. Adept Settlers. Never a bad pick except on Megacities maps. The additional nature affinity is frankly redundant though, as we're already at 4, and we are absolutely going to take either Glades or whichever T1 Nature Tome we didn't take at creation at some point, so reaching the Tome of Paradise is a given.
5. Devious Watchers. Dark horse pick, but hear me out here. You get an extra Scout, for your spider scout cheese. Free Wayfarer, so your Scouts can travel farther. Universal Camouflage for Scouts, so you can rush with invisible spider scout rush stacks.
6. Ancient Wise Ones. We're playing Barbarian and we're going to want a lot of research for our archer buff enchantments. Additionally this is an Astral affinity point that we might want, depending on how we choose to develop our Tome choices.
I'd tend to lean towards 1, 3, or 5, depending on how I wanted to play. But any of those would be a decent choice.
Most obvious Tome path would be:
1. Roots/Beasts
2. Enchantment
3. Glades
4. Artificing
5. Cycles/Vigor
6. Transmutation/Terramancy
7. Paradise/Crucible
8. Paradise/Crucible
Roots/Beasts just depends on whether you want Poison Arrows and Vine Prison, or you'd prefer Animal Kinship, Call of the Wild, and Mark as Prey. Realistically we eventually want both of these, but we want to get our Tier IVs first.
Enchantment is pretty much JUST for Seeker Arrows, although Awakened Tools can be useful, and having the option to summon Copper Golems gives you some flexibility.
Glades is because we want Leafskin and Create Forest here, and we don't care about Nymphs because they're not cavalry.
Artificing is obviously for Artisan Armaments. The rest is meh. Iron Golems are... there, I guess. The point of this faction design is to avoid having tanks at all though. Siege Magic doesn't apply to our archers, the only unit we care about. Golem Assistant does provide us with a meat shield that doesn't slow us down in Hero-led armies, at least? But Artisan Armaments is too big to skip. The only thing we'd get from Winds that would be of any use would be Zephyr Archers that we're not going to use, and Windborne Scouts, which would be useful.
Cycles/Vigor is a bit of a toss-up. Druid of the Cycle is an amazingly powerful Support... that we won't use at all because it's not cavalry. But, Projectiles of Decay is actually very nice for us. On the other hand, If we started with the Tome of Beasts, we might want Unleash Beast for the 5 stacks of Strengthened and Bolstered Defense it grants any cavalry unit. Except that Berserk condition. But the Tome also gives us the Animal Handler hero skill, which is Mind Control Immunity and +2 Resistance for your Furies, so that's worth considering.
Transmutation/Terramancy is another toss-up, but not in a good way. Basically they both suck for us, with nothing that improves our Archers. Terramancy gives you a tank you can summon, but we already have Iron Golems and Entwined Protectors, so we kind of don't care. It has a terraform that we would only use for destroying mountains (Which admittedly does synergize with Create Forest at least?), and a bunch of combat and siege spells that are OK. Transmutation at least provides us with Steel Skin--which is a reasonably useful minor transformation--and Transmute Resources if we need more gold. And Melt Armor which admittedly could be useful.
And after that we get our two capstones, and then we either grab the Tier V Nature Tome (For Force of Nature which is +20% crit chance and +4 blight damage for our Furies) or go back and start taking all the other Tomes with archer buffs. Pyromancy, Cryomancy, Scrying, Amplification, Inquisition, Mayhem.
If you took Runesmiths as your second Society Trait, you can build a Materium Seed and skip one of the T1-2 Materium Tomes (If only we could skip the T3 instead) and replace it with one of those archer buff tones, like Scrying, or Inquisition. Or Cycles, if you want to take both Cycles and Vigor.
Form Traits for this are obviously Spider Mounts, and then either Overwhelm Tactics or Sneaky. Both are viable.
Point is fast, highly mobile archers with AoE immobilize. Sure the Immobilize isn't a 100% chance, but when you have 5-6 Furies in every army, you're bound to land some. If you take Vines as your first tome on top of that, you're pretty much guaranteed to win every early game fight with no damage or very little damage taken to get you snowballing.