Industrious advice ?

[Crixus]

I have tried all the other culture types multiple times and had no issues winning my games but now im finally trying industrious and i'm getting destroyed by the ai.

I'm just not sure what units to use. I lost my first game and this time I tried using bastions backed up with zephyr archers with all the passive research to make them tanky, or at least that's what I had hoped.

But my archers spend 90% of the time either doing 0 dmg or just hitting my own units and despite the crazy high resistances of the bastion units they are dying very easily. It just seems like I have no super units like the other cultures have.

[Blanch Warren]

Nope, try youtube. Never got anywhere with them.

[mk11]

Heroes.

You get a wealth of items from your scouts so can fit all your heroes out with high tier item sets.

The arbalest is a crossbow so you should be able to get clear shots, often flanking, and bastions are an okay shield unit once they get some levels. Otherwise, look to tome units.

A dragon lord is nice because the piles of items turn into a lot of gold income.

[Pantagruel]

I feel that the tier 1 and 2 units for industrious are more impressive (for their tier) than the tier 3, and as someone about commented, scout prospecting can be amazing (map-dependent, there's a lot of variance in how much mountains maps have). You may well want to invest in things that boost base damage (strong, books that give damage enchantments), a lot of their units have low damage.

[CrUsHeR]

The Industrious culture kind of suggests going full Materium. But i think that is a poor choice, at least until you get to the heavy war machines. And the Reavers are arguably better at using constructs, as they get their own cannon.


Try taking tomes which immediately add a lot of damage, especially damaging units. Like the Tome of Evocation gives you an evolving shock unit, a battlemage, a spammable combat AOE and a two good weapon enchants. You also get a strong Conduit SPI and a world map spell with great combat synergy.

Chaos builds can also be really strong. Basically you mix the debuffing and the damage potential with the sturdiness of Industrious.


And yes the prospecting is a massive advantage. Build a couple of scouts, and you'll have resources and items to boot.

[Goblin]

I like their tier 2 support unit. I grab tome of warding and pick up the unit enhancement that gives all support abilities +2 resistance to target. Then i grab either tome of alchemy or tome of faith to take another unit enhancement that gives your supports a new support ability.

That will allow your supports to give lots of res and def to your units which will in turn let you heal them as well as increase their damage up to 50% and crit chance up to 30%.

I like running 2 supports and 1 bastion in my armies. The rest of the units can be whatever you want though i do prefer using melee units to fill the rest of the slots.

That build will give you a lot of sustain and a lot of damage.

[DesiredPotato]

Try this: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3370531222

The general combat strategy is to surround a steelshaper with my hero and guards in front and the crossbows behind them, giving all my units +3 def + 4 res + 3 status resistance, then I just wait for the enemy to engage, use taunts when they threaten to walk around to flank my crossbows, but otherwise I hold formation and use the overdraw from the crossbows to make them actually useful. The sundered defense amps the damage from all units, so it doesn't really matter how strong my opponent is once they get in range of my front line.
the anvil guards together with a steelshaper are the beating heart of your armies, let them protect your artillery and dare the enemy to come closes, if they're AI they will no matter what. Then once they've been properly sundered you swap the anvil guard's defense for offense and take the kills. The industrious way.

On the world map prospecting mountains is a must since it gives mountains of resource (ha) and snowballs your cities and heroes much faster than any other culture can. If you build a solid research income behind all the free stuff and growth from propsecting you can tech into powerful late game units much earlier than other civs, then use those to conquer the world. At some point you just forget about your base units for the most part and just conquer the world with units spawned from your powerful cities.
The screenshot at the top is the base I use so my early game armies just never die and then go from there. The tome of alchemy is also very good, I didn't get it this game, but shedding negative effects and the aoe weaken for enemies can be very strong in delaying enemies and giving you time to mow them down.

Tome of enchantment is a must have, all your units are purely physical, sundered defense is too good to ignore. Spell tempered shield is a must for obvious reasons and you can not go wrong with purging arrows.
Getting some type of elemental damage amplification for another affinity is also recommended, it gives everything a bit of oompf that they'd normally miss. I went with zeal because of umbral dudes this game.
Since the best tactic is to stack units I've found purifying flame to be incredibly useful, it doesn't matter what the enemy throws at me when they don't deal much damage and I can just heal and cleanse all negative status effect easily because of their preferred positioning.

When it comes to the type of leader I'd rank it
1- Wizard king
2- Mortal champion
3- Eldritch sovereign
4- Dragon lord

I like baing able to cast lots of spells and multiple per turn when it's convenient. The extra mana and casting points is something not easily attained by industrious since they don't scale with astral well.
Mortal champion has a lot of good buffs for armies, but the economy and bonusses they provide is already provided by the industrious civ, too much of anythng isn't great.
Eldritch soveriegn is honestly tied with mortal champion. They can bring a good deal of damage for being what they are and what industrious misses, but I don't feel that just having a strong hero is better than the bonusses a wizard king would provide.
The dragon lord is a hyper carry why does not fight well together with defenders, it also sucks up economy that is supposed to be used for your cities and armies.

When it comes to set up I really like fabled hunters so the cities grow ever faster and I went talented collector for the second time so far, it does not disappoint, im pretty damn rich.

Let me know if this helps or if you have any questions.

[Moon Horse]

Materium/Industrial culture is really strong, but you need to maximize your scout usage. Build a lot of Prospectors early on, and prospect every mountain you find. If you are on a map without mountains then GG, your whole gimmick is unusable.

Here's a simple build. that should perform pretty well in auto resolve.

For society traits I like to go Fabled Hunters + Runesmiths. You get bonus rewards from clearing nodes in the early game, and it makes it cheaper to hold up enchantments the whole game, and you will want enchantments.

Alternatively you can take Artifact Hoarders because you're going to find tons of artifacts with prospecting and they'll provide you a nice economy boost.

For racial traits it largely doesn't matter but you can always choose the boring old reliable of Hardy + Tough + Resistant which is incredibly bland but also incredibly strong.

Alternatively, go with Elephant Mounts (good extra HP), or Eagle Mounts (extra mobility for your scouts)

Shadow Dragon (Warrior) + Tome of Warding. Materium Dragon works too but I'm less experienced with that.

Research Staves of Warding, Magical Wards and Mark of Invulnerability, optionally also Phantasmal Warrior (they're pretty good). Make sure to also get Steelfury Chant

Magical Wards boosts your resistances and helps you not die to combat magic. Your defense is already great so it doesn't need any boosting.

Dragon lord can clear most nodes solo or with a steelshaper assist if go full materium + charge/defense mode build, or full shadow with zombie summons from corpses. You can also go order to get control loss immunity.

Steelfury chant consumes bolstered defense and bolstered resistance stacks so you want to apply as many of those as possible. It'll grant your units tons of +Strengthened stacks which offsets their mediocre damage. Bring 2 steelshapers + 4 melee or 3/3, crossbows can be largely ignored for auto resolve but it's nice to have them in mid/late game.

Second tome - there are many good picks. I personally like Cryomancy. Bonus elemental damage for your polearms and bastions is always nice, blizzard and ice coffin remain useful for the whole game. You can ignore the lesser snow spirit if you took phantasm warrior.

Tier 2 tome picks.
I would recommend Tome of Mists + Tome of Construct, it has really good synergy with your supports and industrial in general. Mists makes your already beefy units much harder to hit so they barely take damage and random buffs from Fey Embrace help them regenerate, move around and hit harder. Tome of Construct turns your entire race into golems with Linked Minds, making them immune to flanking and allowing you to chain haste your entire army with the Command: Reposition so they will be zipping around like crazy and hitting like trucks.

Tome of Revelry is also good if you choose to take it instead of the Tome of the Construct as Skalds will buff your stacks to the gills, but they will be more fragile than your industrial steelshapers with Linked Minds/Magical Wards.

Tier 3 tomes:

Tome of Corruption is currently overpowered so you can pick that. Gloom Strider is very strong with its floating movement and auto cleanse, and Corrupted Boon is busted if you run against a buff heavy army.

But if you don't want to just take the busted overpowered tome, I suggest transmutation. Transmuter is not a combat mage, it's more of a support mage that will give your guys even more bolstered defense to consume with steelfury chant, and also adaptive armor/steel skin are nice to make your dudes even beefier.

Tome of Cold Dark will synergize nicely with your earlier Cryomancy pick, you can pick up minor Frostling transform and marching winter so you'll have huge home advantage when fighting in cold and everything will be cold with marching winter. Flash Freeze is also great. Snow spirits are ok but ignorable.

For your last tomes I recommend Golden Realm because Golden Golems will synergize nicely with linked mind units and will be hasted allowing them to zip around and deliver high amounts of pain. Gold touched is also nice to further boost your resistances.

Tome of the Crucible or Tome of Severing are your final pick before the tier 5 so choose which one suits better depending on what you're facing. Severing is generally more useful if you're facing armies with a lot of enchantments and buffs and Crucible is still solid because of Lava Burst spam and Meteor Arrows that will make your arbalests shine.

Your final pick will be Creator which doesn't synergize particularly well with anything but if you took snow spirits you can now buff them with Eternal Earth. Other spells in that tome are nothing special but Earthshatter Engines are nice if you need to roll over the last couple opponent cities.

If you don't like to go ham with Materium, try an Order build instead, I found that it works great.

Order Dragon with Tome of Warding
Tome of Zeal as second tome.
From there on the build is almost the same:
Fey Mists, Construct, Transmutation, Sanctuary, Exaltation, Golden Realm, God Emperor

[Gundalf]

A bit outdated and MP focused but still very good:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLXP1o5KUIg&ab_channel=w%28%26%29eplaygames

[Astronimo]

I like messing with materium+nature and something from astral/chaos for damage. Materium and industrial in general are very hardy and tough, give them Regen and killing them will be a pain

[Aeon]

Bastions are one of the best T3, you could build armies just using them.

[Humble]

It's petty good for tier 1 shield and croosbow unit, key is 3 shield units, 2 croosbow, and one support, along leadership, just forced on enchant lot of on that units, it's most cost efficient and make sure you had 3 army together,

[MrButtermancer]

Given the way people are talking about it, it sounds like everybody's problem is army composition.

Bastions are T3 units with T3 upkeep and an AoE defend. They're best employed providing front line support to mixed T1-T2s. You can afford multiple T1s for the upkeep of one Bastion. It can be the difference between having a 3-stack and not, or having a 3-stack on one side of an enemy's empire and having ANOTHER 3-stack elsewhere. You really should have mixed unit tiers favoring low for most stacks for most of the game (though in Brutal, ANY Ancient Wonder clearing stack needs to be stacked af, its seriously overtuned right now).

A contributor is that archers mostly suck in this game now, and you cannot really rely on them entirely for damage without doing some annoying mid game things. Your first tome should be a way to enhance the melee damage of your T1 melee line. Don't neglect resistances, and put a support unit in every stack.

Industrious does super well with Perfectionist Artisans now if you pump Production.

[Crixus]

Thanks for the replies everyone :) lot's of good advice.

I did a lot of prospecting in these games and felt like my economy was really good, at least compared to most of my other games since industry get's so much.

I had strong heroes with lots of crafted items but I normally only build the higher tier units instead of still building the lower ones so I had no steelshapers or any other supports in my army and I usually only stick with the tomes of my culture instead of mixing it up but reading these replies these are clearly big mistakes.

I will try out some of the strategies here and try to win this time ^^ thanks again

[J.C. Denton]

After hero rewamp they feel surprisely weak. Bastions still doing ok, but until you get like and get sigil of broken shield, they do literally no damage compare to other t3 units.
Good option is to make them mounted on bears - this way they get faster, do charge damage and a bit more hp.

Arbalests are still ok, and mounted works for them too. Unlike all other archers in game (but feudal) keep them in swarms, and stick right after back of your frontline units. So the first turn enemy reach them, you can shoot Overdraw without penality and chances to hit your own units. Overdraw also removes retallation attack, which is cool.

Beside that, I find High, Feudal and Indostrious most boring cultures, and I find a little use of cultural units there at all. Last few times I played them I used tome units instead.