Brutal Difficulty Guide for New Players (Ogre Update)

This guide aims to teach players on how to beat Brutal Difficulty by providing a lot general advice and few easy to follow sample build orders that can beat Brutal Difficulty while also explaining in great detail why they work.

Introduction

This guide will teach you how to beat Brutal Difficulty by giving you a handful of easy to follow sample builds with detailed in depth explanations on why they work. If you follow this guide once then you should have all the tools and skills you need to make your own builds that can beat Brutal Difficulty so follow this guide once and have fun.

The guide is separated into two parts. The first part gives general advice on how to play the game well and the second part gives advice specific to the provided build orders.

All of my non-Chosen Destroyer builds utilize only 3 cities, employ a turtle strategy, forgoes diplomacy, and goes Military victory because

• 3 cities are enough to beat Brutal Difficulty so what's the point in spending considerable amount of more effort for a 4th city when 3 is enough?
  
• this guide is for new players and nothing is easier than turtling.
  
• diplomacy is not necessary and is decently complicated to utilize effectively so it might not be a good idea for new players to play around with it while they're learning the game.
  
• Military victory requires you to get strong enough to kill multiple stacks of 18 enemies back to back, sometimes 2-3 times on the same turn. If you can do that then you can do anything you want which is why this guide teaches you how to do that.

The guide mainly uses the Barbarian culture because Barbarians are simple, easy, has a T3 Shock unit, and gives the biggest damage boost to basically every unit in the game making them the default go to Culture for maximum damage strategies. The only units that don't benefit from the Barbarians' various damage increasing buffs are non-physical or summoned Mythic, Ranged, Battle Mage, or Support units. Their simplicity makes it easy to learn the basic fundamentals of combat and once you do you should be able to figure out the other cultures easily on your own. They're not that different from each other.

Having said that, there are a few Feudal:Monarachy and Mystic:Attunement builds in the guide as well. It is unlikely I will make builds for any other culture.

The Chosen Destroyers build I've provided is not for beginners. I recommend you beat Brutal Difficulty at least once using my 3 city build orders before attempting it. I've included it in case some of you don't want to turtle and want to be hyper aggressive right from the get go, or at least, that was the reason before the Ogre Update. Now I think it's the 2nd strongest Society Trait in the game that blows all other Society Traits except Cult of Personality out of the water by a considerable margin so anyone looking to roflstomp really, really hard should take a look at it. 3 cities research caps out at like 300 per turn while Chosen Destroyers hits 1000 research by mid game and just continues to skyrocket.

If you have any questions or comments about this guide, post here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1669000/discussions/0/597391133706847176/

Please note that every update changes everything signficantly and as a result I might miss something when I update this guide. So if you see any kind of inconsistency, it's because of this.

Note: Brutal difficulty got SIGNIFICANTLY easier in the Ogre update. Sieges take only 2-4 turns instead of 6-10 turns and the defender immediately loses all of their fortification if they attack your sieging units resulting in a LOT less combat.

World Generation Settings

Map Size

I think this is the most impactful setting for world generation.

Small Maps

• Multiple AIs, usually 2-3, will bear their full armies down on you simultaneously very early in the game.
  
• 1 or 2 infestations will pester you on top of this and the AI will take care of most of them without you needing to do anything.
  
• You will be boxed in very badly. Hermit Kingdom Society Trait is not viable on this size.
  
• Not many neutral encampments to level your heroes with.
  
• The end result is you fight the AI early with a weak army and low level heroes. This is VERY difficult.

Medium Maps

• No real fighting with other AIs until late in the game because it takes too long for them to reach your Throne City and they got other problems.
  
• 5-ish infestations will relentlessly attack you nonstop right from the get go. This is extremely ragequit inducing for new players as not only do you need to fend off stacks and stacks of multiple T4-T5 units ceaselessly right from the very start of the game preventing you from exploring or doing anything for a significant portion of the game because you need a full 18 unit army guarding your cities at all times, but also because the Infestations are so far away from your Throne City that there is literally nothing you can do to stop or alleviate the attack waves. You stop the infestations when you get your full T3 army with high level heroes and the Advanced Logistics empire skill.
  
• Won't be boxed in until later. I don't think Hermit Kingdom is viable on this size either.
  
• Lots of neutral encampments to level your heroes with.
  
• The end result is the game becomes Player versus Environment and once you defeat the infestations you can start fighting the AI with your maxed out army and high level heroes.

I'd say medium maps are easier for non-Chosen Destroyer builds because Infestations are much easier than the AI and you get to fight the AI with strong units and high level heroes.

For Chosen Destroyers however, I'd say small maps are easier for them but only if you know what you're doing. On medium maps cities are so far apart there is no way you can raze a city before a wave of infestations take your throne city so you're forced to turtle and stay at 1 city raze for like 60 turns. On small maps however you can raze 3-4 cities in that same span of time and start snowballing. The only caveat however is that combat is going to be brutal so you really need to know what you're doing and do manual combat almost exclusively until you get your endgame setup.

I don't play anything bigger than medium because medium is too big for me already. It takes forever to traverse your army on a medium sized map.

AI Count

Default is 6 but that's too much for a medium map in my opinion. 3 on the other hand is too few. I'd say... 4-5 is a good number? Even if a few AIs get killed you'll still have like 2-3 full strength AIs to kill. For me at least, having to kill 4-5 AI myself feels like a drag. It's not like more AI makes the game harder. In fact it might make the game easier because there's only so many AIs that can be your neighbors and the additional AIs will most likely occupy your neighbors' attention.

On small maps 6 is fine. Unlike medium sized maps a lot of the AIs will kill each other very early.

OGRE UPDATE: Default is now 4 AI players.

Score Victory

For your first Brutal game I definitely recommend you disable it. You're still figuring things out, trying new things, taking your time, and if enabled your game will end abruptly before you get the full experience.

For subsequent games, up to you. On one hand it encourages you to get better. On the other hand, you need to rush rush rush and snipe Throne Cities exclusively.

My vote is, after you get like 1-3 wins with Score Victory on with the full 6 AI count, disable it every game after so you can relax and have fun instead of rush rush rush. Since you already know you're good enough to beat it, why keep it on and stress yourself out?

OGRE UPDATE: Default is now 4 AI players which you should not have any trouble taking out within 150 turns even if you're new to the game. Still, disable it for your first Brutal difficulty game.

Classic Turns v.s. Simultaneous Turns

In Simultaneous turns when you move 1 stack away from your other 2 stacks the AI will immediately dogpile on it causing you to do a 6v18 fight and get wiped. Then your other 2 stacks get dogpiled and fight a 12v18 fight and get wiped.

So why would you play Simultaneous turns then? Well, if you wait until every AI finishes all of their moves, then the above scenario is avoided and you can play like normal just like Classic Turns. So basically Simultaneous Turns just means you go last every turn. Click next turn, wait, then at last you get to do your turn.

That's basically the same as Classic Turns right? Once you click next turn you need to wait until all the others AIs do their stuff. And then you get to go. So what's the point of Simultaneous Turns then if it's the same as Classic Turns?

The difference is you get to do menu stuff while you wait for the AI to do their turn. Instead of twiddling your thumbs you can do all your citiy management stuff at which point the AI is finished and you won't get ganked when you move your army.

So because of this Simultaneous Turns are faster than Classic Turns. Because the AI's turn and your menu stuff overlap, making every turn shorter.

Which is why I recommend Simultaneous Turns. But it's really not a big deal. At all. Like I said they're bascially the same so do whatever.

City Building Strategy - Provinces

Lets talk about Province Improvements. Simply put, the yields of your farms, quarries, and forester province improvements don't matter. You get those provinces solely to boost your buildings.

For those of you who don't know, virtually every building in the game can have its production cost reduced by 30% just by having a certain number of province improvements. For example, having a single farm reduces the production cost of a workshop by 30%. Reducing every building's production cost by 30% will have a bigger impact than the farm, quarry, and forester province improvement's yield will ever have so we build those province improvements solely to boost buildings and not for their yield.

My strategy for provinces is

• 2 Farms to boost Workshop, Stonemason, Vendor, and Market
  
• 2 Quarries to boost Shrine, Mana Obelisk, and Blacksmith, and enable Masonic Hall
  
• 1 Forester to boost Library, Arcane Institute, and enable Blacksmith

And then it depends on the situation. On my throne city I usually get a 3rd Farm to boost Masonic Hall but not on my non-throne cities as they don't seem to be able to get enough provinces in time.

Lets talk about swapping Province Improvements. It takes 3 turns to change a Province Improvement. There is no downside to this as it costs nothing and you get the full benefit of the Province Improvement right until the last moment. But it's important to note that if you no longer meet the boost requirements of a building, the boost will be undone. So if you have 3 turns left on Stonemason and you set one of your farms to change into something else in 3 turns, the farm will be swapped out first, undoing the boost, and lengthen your Stonemason by an additional turn. So if you're going to swap out a farm in this situation, begin swapping it out when Stonemason only has 2 turns left until completion. And you should most definitely swap out your farm in this situation.

So needless to say, grab provinces that can have a variety of province improvements first. And build Special Province Improvements like the Alchemy Lab or School of Cryomancy on provinces that can only build farms or huts. Huts are truly worthless and must be avoided at all costs.

When acquiring new Provinces, get the ones that can build Mines, Conduits, and Research Posts first. Build a farm/quarry/forester in that province to get the building boosts and once you've finished building all the important buildings swap out every farm/quarry/forester you have into Mines, Conduits, and Research Posts. Don't leave them for later because the AI will forward settle and snipe it from you.

Once you built all your structures and grabbed all the Mines, Conduits, and Research Posts, personally, I'd spam farms because with the Soiltenders Empire Skill they give a decent amount of food which means a faster City growth rate which means more provinces which means you can grab the Mines, Conduits, and Research Posts that are further away from your city.

If you're building every single Special Province Improvement you have access to you probably won't have any spare Provinces for farms, which is more than fine. Special Province Improvements always give way more than farms even with Soiltenders.

Alternatively, if you want to spend a lot more effort, you should maximize your Special Province Improvements by surrounding a Special Province Improvement with its adjacency bonuses. For example Ritual Pyre surrounded by Foresters.

City Building Strategy - Buildings

We have a lot of resources. Production, Research, Gold, Mana, Draft, Food, and Town Halls. So which ones do we build first?

In my experience Food buildings are completely inconsequential. I grow fast enough without it, I get all the provinces I need by the end without it, on a small map I am completely boxed in by the AI by mid game so extra food doesn't really do anything, and if I really want food I can get Farm provinces boosted by the Soiltender Empire Skill instead of spending precious structure building time on Food buildings. Therefore we will be completely disregarding Food buildings in its entirety.

In my opinion Town Halls are the most important because you really, really, really need to produce high tier units as soon as possible otherwise infestations alone will kill you.

But Production is very important too. Without them your Town Hall is gonna take forever to build. And you can't afford your high tier units without building all your gold buildings. And you need draft buildings to be able to build your army of high tier units in time. And you need mana buildings afford all of your Unit Enchantments. There are just so many things to build that in my opinion production is more important than getting Town Halls up as quickly as possible.

But at the same time, +production buildings take a lot of turns to turn a profit. Stonemason takes 17 turns to turn a profit and Masonic Hall takes 23 turns. Chances are you'll be dead before those 23 turns because you spent all your money on production instead of gold or Town Halls.

When they're boosted however Stonemason takes 12 turns to turn a profit and Masonic Hall takes 16 turns which is considerably better. Which is why in my opinion boosted production buildings are worth building before everything but unboosted production buildings are not worth it until after all your critical infrastructure is built. Which is why I always start with 2 Farms and get Workshop and Stonemason up as soon as possible.

And don't forget about Research. If you want to hit the T5 Tomes in a reasonable time you need to max out your research early. But at the same time, the Knowledge Extraction Empire Skill gives you an obscene amount of research throughout the game so research is not THAT important. I'd say mass producing T3 units is more important.

So after consdering everything, I've settled on this:

• All cities build Workshop and Stonemason first.
  
• Then all cities build the cheap research buildings: Library and Arcane Institute.
  
• Throne City rushes Town Hall III and builds the two draft buildings (Blacksmith, Armory) a.s.a.p. to start mass producing your T3 Culture unit a.s.a.p. to not die to infestations.
  
• Non-Throne cities build the cheap mana buildings (Shrine, Obelisk) to quickly pay for Unit Enchantments and then the cheap gold buildings (Shipyard, Vendor, Market) to quickly pay for the increasingly expensive higher tier army.
  
• Then they switch. Throne City builds the cheap resource buildings and non-Throne cities build Town Hall III and Armory so they can start producing T3 units as well
  
• Once all that is done, everyone starts building the expensive buildings like Academy.

The more detailed build order is located in the Barbarian Early Game section.

My choice of guild is Mage's Guild for more mana for Unit Enchantments. You get guilds way too late so research is not worth it and I have much more gold than mana so I choose mana. I don't need draft or increased unit rank on recruitment at the point in the game where I am able to build guilds.

Empire Skills

I recommend getting these Empire skills if your build unlocks them.
General

• 1: (100) Seafaring - Cross oceans
  
• 3:(125) Road Builders - Activate this and your entire army will be treated as if it's traveling on road terrain letting you traverse the map faster at the cost of some gold.
  
• 4:(150) Diplomatic Focus - +1 whispering stone
  
• 5:(150) Advanced Sensing - +2 vision range and +3 sensing range for all units
  
• 7:(175) Siege Specialization - +1 Siege Project slot
  
• 8:(175) Advanced Logistics - Roads cost 3 movement to move letting you traverse your own domain MUCH more easily.

Materium Affinity

• 2:(125) Master Masons - Saves you over 2000 gold.
  
• 3:(150) Arcane Artisans - +10 mana from mines
  
• 4a:(175) Metropolitan Society - Throne and touching cities gain +10% all yield
  
• 5:(200) Special Districts - +5 gold from special province improvements
  
• 6b:(250) Rite of Wealth - +2000 gold, You're gonna always be short of gold until the endgame.
  
• 7:(300) Siege Masters - +1 Siege Project slot
  
• 8:(350) Rite of the Dreadnought - All units you have right now get +1 def and res. Only grab when you have your full endgame setup.
  
• 9:(400) Resourceful Vigor - Unused movement to hp every turn. This is like the only real way you can heal your units outside your domain.
  
• 10:(500) Martial Ancestry - -10% upkeep PER rank, includes mana upkeep. High rank units will hit the -50% upkeep reduction cap just from this one development.

Chaos Affinity

• 2:(125) Impressment - T1 units gain xp 50% faster. Only get if you're using T1 Evolution units like Lesser Storm Spirits and Copper Golems
  
• 3: (150) Battlefield Looting - +3 gold per unit tier of enemy killed.
  
• 5:(200) Skilled Raiders - Pillaging takes 1 turn. Mandatory if you plan on using spells because of Spell Jammers
  
• 6:(250) Rite of Chosen Warriors - all cities get 500 draft. Very useful as an emergency army recruitment.
  
• 8:(300) Spoils of Destruction - Razing a city gives permanent +20 gold income
  
• 9:(400) Destined Conquerers - +50 gold and mana for every war you're in. This one isn't mandatory and is fully skip-able because you should be swimming in resources by the time you can take this. But at the same time, how can you say no to more resources?
  
• 10a:(500) Reign of Destruction - Raze takes -2 turns, 50 gold per pop

Shadow Affinity

• 1:(100) Knowledge Extraction - 150 research per hero kill. In my opinion this is the best Empire Skill in the game by far and it's the first one you get. Never clear Brigand Camps and Pirate Cove infestations for this reason and declare war with every Free City you can.
  
• 3:(150) Shadow Binding - -20% Magic Origin unit upkeep
  
• 6:(250) Death magic - restore 10 casting points on kill. Only if you use a lot of spells in combat.
  
• 7:(300) Dark Vigor - +10 hp regen per turn in hostile domain
  
• 9:(400) Exalted by Shadows - +200% hero xp
  
• 10:(500) Spying Shadows - Reveal world map, infinite sensing range

Stolen Power is left out because when you're at the phase of conquering cities you don't need 200 knowledge or mana.
Rite of Forbidden Knowledge is left out because Imperium is more valuable than knowledge and 750 is nothing once you are capable of grabbing this Empire Skill.
Rite of the Exalted is left out because Imperium is more important than 1 hero rank.

Astral Affinity

• 1:(100) Surge Spellcasting - Spells are 25% cheaper for 2 turns
  
• 3:(150) Casting Reserves - +20 casting points
  
• 4a:(175) Astral Inspiration - after every research -25% research on random research
  
• 4b:(175) Rite of Astral Abundance - +1000 mana. If your mana income is KO'd by unit upkeep you need this to pay for mana expensive buildings and Racial Transformations.
  
• 5:(200) Astral Binding - Magic Origin units are obtained with +1 rank
  
• 6: (250) Philosopher Soldiers - +knowledge per rank up. Only get if you are using T1 Evolution units that you can summon at Champion Rank. Otherwise not worth it.
  
• 8:(350) Astral Rite - Spawns 1 Magic Material in your domain.
  
• 7:(300) Focused Studies - +5 mana/research from provinces. I get it for the mana.
  
• 10:(500) Quickening - Cast spells turn 1.

Ingredient Experimentation is left out because it only gives a pitiful amount of knowledge especially at the stage in the game you get it. Not worth it.

Order Affinity

• 2:(125) Diplomatic Channels - +1 Whispering Stone
  
• 4:(175) Career Soldiers - Shock, Shield, and Polearm units gain xp +30% faster. Only get if you're going Storm Spirits or Copper Golems and the like.
  
• 6:(250) Rite of Enduring Duty - Full hp and +1 rank to all non-Hero units. Good for emergencies and getting that final Legend rank on your units.
  
• 10:(500) Knightly Orders - Legend Rank units gain special abilities.

Nature Affinity

• 2:(125) Soiltenders - Farms give +5 food
  
• 3:(150) Natural Recovery - regain +15 hp per turn in friendly territory
  
• 4:(175) Expert Sailors - Rivers become roads.
  
• 5:(200) Expansive Reach - +2 province range for cities
  
• 8:(350) Druidic Care - +3 mana from every resource node
  
• 9:(400) Rangers - Movement cost reduction for traversing your own domain

Rite of Awakening and Druidic Empire are left out because when you unlock these the resources they give you don't matter.

Unit Overview (Type, Tier, etc.) part 1

Melee v.s. Ranged

Melee units (Shield, Shock, Fighter, Polearm, Skirmishers) are superior to ranged units in every aspect by a considerable margin to the point that I say never use ranged units.

Unit Enchantments for melee units give double the bonuses than their ranged counterpart. Melee Unit Enchantments give +2 damage so if you get 5 of them, your melee units will do +10 damage, doubling their damage output.

Ranged units on the other hand, they only get +1 damage so if you get 5 of them, your ranged units will get +5 damage.

It's important to note that single shot weapons get double this bonus. So single shot melee units will get +20 damage in this case and single shot ranged weapons will get +10 damage.

Also, Ranged Units have to deal with accuracy. If your target is standing behind another unit or is standing inside tall grass or something then your ranged units get a 40% loss in accuracy. So what was 90% is now 50% and what was 65% is now 25%. Also, long range reduces accuracy further so their range stat doesn't matter because you're always gonna move them up close to avoid the accuracy penalty.

In addition Melee units have Unit Enchantments that give them +50% crit chance letting them easily hit 100% crit chance where as Ranged Units don't. The highest they can reach is 80% and that involves getting Tome of Supremacy, a tier 4 Order Tome, which is rarely gotten because Order Tomes are possibly the weakest Tomes you can get.

To understand just how bad ranged units are, you need to understand that ranged Mythic Units do more damage than any ranged unit with every +damage unit enchantment. And Mythic units have significant bulk and powerful abilities on top of this so if the choice is between grabbing all the ranged unit enchantments or grabbing a ranged Mythic Unit, the choice is clear. Get the Mythic Unit. Ironclads will outperform every maxed out ranged unit in the game and ironclads only need the 1 Tome, Tome of the Dreadnought, giving you the space you need to go Tome of Supremacy.

Ranged units are only good at the very start of the game when nobody has Unit Enchantments. Then they become completely worthless after that.

Battle Mages scale worse than ranged units. Like Melee units, each Unit Enchantment gives +2 damage but unlike Melee units whose +damage Unit Enchantments reside in tier 1 Tomes, Battle Mage +damage Unit Enchantments reside in tier 4 Tomes. There is no way you're getting all of the +damage Unit Enchantments for Battle Mages in a single game. But Battle Mages make it up by having powerful abilities. Those abilities don't scale either but if you stack AoE abilities then even if their damage is lackluster, 5 AoEs is army wiping.

So Melee units are best, specific Battle Mages might work, but never go Ranged.

Unit Tiers

In this game, the damage output difference between lower tier units and higher tier units is negligible. In other words, in this game, lower tier units deal just as much damage as higher tier units. So a T1 unit is gonna deal basically just as much damage as a T4 unit.

In fact, T1 units will do more damage than T5 units. All T5 units are Mythic Units and Mythic Units benefit from virtually 0 Unit Enchantments so they don't scale at all so in the end, T1 units will do more damage than Mythic Units.

So then why go higher tier units at all then if T5 units do less damage than T1 untis? The answer is 3 things: Model Count, Bulk, and Powerful Abilities.

Model Count

If a unit has 6 Model count, that means when it loses 1/6th of its hp, it will deal 1/6th less damage because a model "died". Therefore a 1hp 6 model unit will deal 16.7% damage, a 1 hp 3 model unit will deal 33% damage, and a 1hp single model unit will deal 100% damage. So in a fight between a single model unit and a high model unit, assuming all other stats are identical, the single model unit will always win because after 1 hit the high model unit's damage output is gonna capsize.

Higher Tier units have lower model count.

Bulk

1 defense or resistance in this game is 10% damage reduction, stacked multiplicatively. So if a unit has 1 defense it will receive only 90% damage and if a unit has 10 defense it will receive 0.9^10 = 35% damage.

So if we look at a T1 Legend Rank Arcane Guard who has 3 defense and 123hp, he essentially has 169hp.

If we look at a T5 Legend Rank Reaper who has 10 defense and 200 hp on the other hand, he essentially has 574hp. That's more than 3 times more effective hp.

So if we pit an Arcane Guard and a Reaper against each other, even though the Arcane Guard will deal more damage, because it takes more than 3 times the effort to kill 1 Reaper and because of the Arcane Guard's 6 Model count, the Reaper will win.

Powerful Abilities

Some, not all, T5 Mythic Units have powerful abilities. Reapers have a 60% chance instant kill attack that they can use after a full movement that also spawns zombies on success. So in a 15 vs 15 fight, after the Reaper's alpha strike, the battle becomes a 24 vs 6 fight. That's a really one-sided fight.

Balors have massive, massive AoE. 44 damage. So in their alpha strike they'll wipe out an entire army just from their AoE.

So if you pit Arcane Guards v.s. Reapers, yeah, it's not even worth calculating. Reapers win.

Unit Overview (Type, Tier, etc.) part 2

Instead of Arcane Guards, lets pit Reapers against Storm Spirits because I consider Storm Spirits to be the most powerful non-mythic unit in the game. I also consider Reapers to be a contender for most powerful unit in the game. Balors might be better I don't know.

• Storm Spirits
  
  • With all the +damage T1 Tomes (Evocation, Cryomancy, Pyromancy, Zeal, Roots), and Brutal Strike from Barbarians, Storm Spirits have a base attack damage of 55.
    
  • With +50% from 5x Strengthen, +30% from Cosmic Overdrive, +20% from Legend Rank, +50% from crit, +20% from Lightning Blades because Storm Spirits' teleport electrifies everyone next to them, and +60% from charge bonus Storm Spirits get a total of +230% damage
    
  • 55 * 3.3 = 181 damage.
    
  • Legend Rank Storm Spirits have 5 def, 6 res, and 135 hp.
• Reapers
  
  • Reapers have a base attack of 22 damage: 11 physical, 11 frost, and their base attacks ignore 50% of the enemy's def and res.
    
  • With +50% from 5x Strengthen, +30% from Cosmic overdrive, and +20% from Legend Rank, they have +100% damage. They technically can get 50% crit rate super late in the game but that's just impractical so I'm leaving it out.
    
  • 22 * 2 = 44 damage. They will do 44, 88, or 132 damage depending on how far they have to move to attack.
    
  • Legend Rank Reapers have 10 def 8 res and 200hp

So if we pit 15 Reapers and 15 Storm Spirits together, both with 3x Army Leader heroes, Ignore 6 Status Resistance for Reapers and +30% crit chance for Storm Spirits...

• Storm Spirits will get the first hit off because teleport gives them the longest engagement distance in the game. 181 * 15 = 2715. 100% of this damage is non-physical so with 8 resistance Reapers will be only taking 43% of that. 2715 * 0.43 = 1167. 5 Reapers are killed and 1 is almost dead.
  
• The surviving 10 Reapers retaliate with Finger of Death. With a 60% success chance 6 Storm Spirits die and 6 Zombies are spawned. Fight is now 16 vs 9 but lets ignore the zombies for now in exchange for ignoring the Storm Spirits' retaliation attacks because that's what's the zombies were gonna be used for, to eat retaliation attacks. So the fight is now 10 vs 9. 4 of the Storm Spirits take 45 frost damage that ignores resistance and with their -6 frost resistance they take 47% more damage for 66 damage. 4 Storm Spirits only have 69 hp.
  
• Storm Spirits retaliate, I will assume they get their +60% charge bonus though in reality they probably won't. 181 * 9 * 0.43 = 700. 4 Reapers die. Fight is now 6 vs 9
  
• All 6 Reapers probably get 3x attacks off since Storm Spirits are melee units too. Of the Reaper's 44 damage base attack, 22 is reduced by 3 def and 22 is boosted by 27% because the Storm Spirits' halved resistance is 3 and their frost weakness is 6. 16 + 28 = 44 damage a hit, 132 damage total. The 4 Storm Spirits with 69hp all die and one more full hp Storm Spirit dies. Fight is now 6 vs 4.
  
• 181 * 4 * 0.43 = 300. One Reaper dies. Fight is now 5v4.
  
• It takes 2 Reapers to kill 1 Storm Spirit so the fight becomes 5v2. And we'll stop here. It's obvious Reapers will win.

So as you can see, despite Storm Spirits dealing a ton more damage (more than 4x after a full move, more than 2x after 2x attacks, about 50% more than triple attacks), Reapers win because of their massive, massive bulk and super powerful abilities. So that's why Mythic Units are the best. Bulk and Abilities, not damage.

But the main thing that brings T5 Mythic Units down is their Imperium Upkeep. You start with 40, get 20 more from Mage Tower, and that's it. There is no structure you can build that increases it and no -upkeep hero skill or empire skill reduces it so you're stuck with at most 8 Mythic Units. That's only half of the 15 we used in the above example.

Getting the 3 plant magic materials gives +15. Scions of Evil gives +15, and every Wonder gives +5 which is a huge hassle.

And if you declare an unjust war, your Imperium income is gonna take a nosedive.

So that's the downside of using T5 units. Imperium becomes a pain.

With the Feudal rework however, with Feudal Monarchs, every unit in your Ruler's stack has 0 upkeep including Imperium. This is literally the only thing in the entire game capable of reducing Imperium upkeep and with it, you get 5 T5 units essentially for free bringing your total up to 13 up from 8 so if you want to use T5 Mythic Units, you should seriously consider going Feudal Monarch as your culture.

Not all Mythic Units are equal

Reapers and Balors are contenders for most powerful units in the game because Finger of Death and Sundering Strike are that good.

Other Mythic Units on the other hand, are probably worse than Storm Spirits.

Calamity Dragons for example, they require 3 action points to do a 44 damage ranged attack. It has colossal range (8 tiles) and ignores line of sight (so no -40% from obscured), but even if we max out its damage with Strengthen, Cosmic Overdrive, and crits it's only 110 damage, reduced by resistances, and you can't use it if an enemy is in melee range. Storm Spirits are going to run circles around this mythic unit. Don't get me wrong, Calamity Dragons are strong enough to win Brutal Difficulty with, but they're just not as good as T3 units.

Golden Golem is one of the worst Mythic Units in the game.

• It does only a measily 29 damage. His main gimmick is Gilding enemies he attacks and melee enemies that attack him so you need a pure astral hero at the helm giving him ignore 6 status resistance otherwise nothing is gonna get gilded.
  
• His main strength is Golden Retaliation. In defense mode, he gets infinite retaliations. But that just means if nobody attacks him, he does absolutely nothing. And ranged units can attack him with impunity.
  
• This also necessitates that he takes damage which is terrible for attrition which is mandatory for Brutal Difficulty. The new reworked Shaper's Touch is NOT a solution because it doesn't heal past your starting hp so if you start a new fight with half hp, it ain'tn healing you past half hp.
  
• And enemies that are gilded because they attacked your golems do NOT lose a turn. They are ungilded on their very next turn.
  
• So comparing to Reapers and Balors who just wipe out the majority of the enemy army in their alpha strike, and Calamity Dragons who can focus fire enemies down from tremendous range and high accuracy, Golden Golems, they either do pitiful damage or get ignored all to gild enemies 60% of the time and fights take forever and they will fall to attrition.

So don't assume that a unit is good just because it's a T5 unit.

Shock Units

I think it's important to note that Shock Units are the most powerful units in the game.

Lets consider a battle where there are no shock units.

Shields, Polearms, and Fighters up front with Ranged Units and Battle Mages right behind them.

One army stands still and one army approaches.

The army that approaches will get the first hit off but they only get 1 attack. Furthermore the army that stands still has overlapping defense modes so the army that approaches' attacks do much less than they should.

The army that stands still on the other hand gets to attack 3 times with EACH of their units on their turn and unlike them the army that approaches will not have any enhanced defenses so they get wiped.

So from this we can learn that without Shock units the approaching army always loses. Always. So if you're not using Shock units then never I mean EVER approach the enemy and always have the enemy approach you.

Lets talk about Shock Units now. Whether they're standing still or do a full movement they only get 1 attack. But for every tile they move they gain a 20% damage bonus (max 60%) which means they should always move at least 3 tiles every turn before attacking. My Shock units attack each other's enemy units instead of the one in front of them for this exact reason. And with this 60% damage bonus they do more damage than 2 hits from a triple attack unit. Emphasis on MORE. In addition, they cancel defense modes.

So now the situation is reversed. The army that approaches, instead of doing a pathetic gimped attack, will now deal their full maximum damage and annihilate the entire frontline of the army that stands still with their alpha strike. They will wipe out half of their opposing entire army with their alpha strike. Now this does leave the shock units vulnerable to the triple attacks of the ranged units but still, half of their enemies' units are annihilated before they got to do anything.

And if the army that approaches adds in flying and teleporting units to disrupt their enemies' backline ranged units, forcing them to move and therefore robbing them of one of their attacks, then... ladies and gentleman, we have ourselves a roflstomp.

Polearm units do not counter Shock units. They rob some of the Shock Units' advantages but they don't bestow any disadvantages meaning they just bring them down to normal. They don't counter them. And Shock units will still mow them down like any other unit.

And that's why Shock Units is the best unit type in the game. They get to hit hard, hit first, and doesn't require you to lure the enemy to you.

You need to actually play a no Shock Unit build and then a Shock Unit only build to really understand the difference. In the former you try your best to lure and bait the enemy to your ranged units and get frustrated when the opponent is mostly ranged, and in the latter you just win everything on auto resolve with minimal losses.

Just in case you're curious, the Storm Spirit is the strongest Shock Unit in the game bar none by a considerable margin for a myriad of reasons such as being single model, able to teleport, able to electrify enemies before attacking, wind wall, etc.

If using only Shock Units and the enemy is stronger than you, move all your units to one side of the battlefield. If you do, 1/3 of the enemy will approach you directly while 2/3 of the enemy will approach you diagonally, letting 2/3 of your shock units pile on and kill 1/3 of the enemy before 2/3 of your enemy reach you. This is how you punch way above your weight with shock units.

Hero Class: Introduction & Ruler

Introduction

The Hero rework divided all the Heroes into different classes and each class has their own skill tree and weapon restrictions.

In this guide we'll be only looking at 2 Classes: The Ritualist and the Ranger. We look at the Ritualist because in my opinion it's the most powerful hero class in the game and we look at the Ranger because in my opinion it is the most powerful lategame hero class in the game.

I probably will not be covering the other classes even in the future just out of sheer disinterest/lack of motivation. But if you beat Brutal once by following this guide then I'm sure you'll be able to change my build orders/strategies to revolve around the other Hero classes and make them work.

Just in case you're curious, I have no interest in other heroes because I don't think they can survive a single battle let alone multiple battles back to back without extensive and I mean EXTENSIVE amount of stacked defensive gear and racial transformations and crafting 2 pieces of gear for each hero is enough for me to call it quits so outfitting each and every hero with every +def and +res equipment I can craft makes me just wanna quit. It's just too much effort and stress. And all those defensive gear is mandatory for those heroes because on Brutal Difficulty you're going to have to not only win 3 full 18vs18 fights back to back on the same turn, but also continue to fight 18vs18 fights deep in enemy territory without time to heal your army which is why I'm not interested in heroes that take heavy damage in every fight. Because attrition will wear them down.

By contrast Ritualists stay alive by summoning endless hordes of powerful units which means they never get hit and can fight an infinite number of battles back to back forever without needing to heal meaning they don't need defensive gear and only want the two summoning wands (Summon Spider Monarch, Summon Spider). And Rangers stay alive simply by killing anything and everything before any of your enemies get to do anything which also means they never get hit and can fight an infinite number of battles back to back forever without needing to heal meaning they don't need any defensive gear either and only need the 2 offensive gears (weapon, helm).

I have personally confirmed that 6 Ritualists and Rangers can take out multiple Brutal Endgame armies back to back on the same turn virtually unscathed.

Ruler

Ruler Type

Champion - In my opinion the Champion is the best Ruler to learn the game with because
1. they are virtually identical to regular heroes meaning your Ruler and Heroes will have the same exact build, simplifying everything, and
2. They are in my opinion the best Ruler type in the game because they have

• Signature skills that give army wide bonuses. +30% crit rate to all units lets you achieve 100% crit rate with every unit in your army. Ignore 6 status resistance is mandatory for any status effect strategies like Finger of Death (instant kill) as without it the success chance drops to like 20% down from 60%.
  
• +20% experience gain rate
  
• Decisive Command ability (restores all of a non-hero unit's action points as a FREE action). Great synergy with the Ritualist's Conjure Greaater Spirit skill.
  
• +10hp heal per turn for your army
  
• +10hp for your army
  
• +10% damage for your army
  
• -20% unit upkeep for your army
  
• +2 xp per turn for your army. Doesn't seem like much but it can evolve freshly summoned Champion Rank T1 units in 8 turns.
  
• Ability to use Magelocks.
  
• No additional upkeep

which is, in my opinion, much better than anything other Rulers have to offer. Eldritch Sovereigns are stronger combat units than Champions but they can't give +30% crit rate to all units or let your units ignore 6 status resistance which is game winning so in my opinion Champions are overall better. I'd rather have a 100% crit chance or 60% chance to instant kill on all my units than a somewhat stronger combat unit.

Having said that, you can go any ruler type you want in this guide so if you really want to go Wizard King, Dragon Ruler, or Eldritch Sovereign then by all means go ahead. This guide will teach you how to win with Ritualist + Army and since all 4 Rulers can go Ritualist you can go any Ruler you want.

Champions are also the simplest in my opinion.

Wizard King requires you to spam spells to get the most out of it and managing mana for both combat spellcasting and unit enchantment upkeep is no joke especially if you have to fight multiple battles per turn. You're gonna be so severely mana starved that you have to forgo Unit Enchantments altogether early on. Not to mention they have an achilles heel called Spell Jammer which forces you to fight outside enemy territory AND hunt down the aforementioned Spell Jammer and spend 2 turns razing it before sieging every city. In my opinion, Wizard Kings are not for beginners which this guide is written for.

Eldritch Sovereign and Dragon Rulers have their own innate upkeep and they can't use Magelocks. In addition they have their own unique signature skills and gimmicks, and Eldritch Sovereign has to engage in Thrall management so for a guide teaching new players on how to beat Brutal Difficulty I think we should just stick to the super simple Champion which again in my opinion is the best Ruler type.

I recommend experimenting with other Ruler types on your own after you master this guide in full first.

If you are interested in the Eldritch Sovereign, I go into great detail with them in the Cult of Personality: Deathcaller section so check that section out if you're interested in Eldritch Sovereigns.

One last note about Champion Rulers before we move on is that Decisive Command is always superior to Coordinating Command. If you build your Ranger or Ritualist right then your Ruler will be doing much, much more than any other unit could possibly do which is why they can't afford to waste a turn casting Coordinating Command. That's why Decisive Command is always better. Because it's a free action.

Ruler Ambition

Heroes that kill things themselves like Ranger should grab Gloryseeker to deal +10-50% damage depending on the target's rank, which is a significant boost in damage.

If you're using my Storm Spirit build, Shepherd is amazing. Its Major Ambition is trivially accomplished by beating a weak encampment with just your Ritualist + 1 Lesser Snow Spirit (you can use more if you want) and the +20hp it gives makes your Elite Rank Lesser Storm Spirits stronger than most T3 units in the game which is amazing because of just how cheap and spammable they are.

Conquerer is great for Deathcaller users because you can kill the summoned Devastator Sphere yourself on your first turn and summon a Skeleton from its corpse turn 1.

General purpose is Raider for the increased healing per turn because trying to heal your units outside of your domain is one of the most excruciating experiences in this game. However if you care about the bonuses from higher Renown levels I suggest you take a different ambition because in Brutal Difficulty your Ruler does NOT have the luxury of wasting 24 turns pillaging provinces.

Instructor is also a great general purpose ambition. it gives +50%xp to all non-hero units in your stack.

Challenger, Defender, Fearmonger, etc. are easy to max renown levels with but I don't really care for their Major Ambition bonuses.

Crusader is great for Mythic units because there's no real way to get Zeal on them but I wouldn't call completing the Major Ambition exactly "reliable". If there are no undead/fiend infestations or AI near you then you're screwed.

There are a lot more and most of them are good so take a look at them yourself and make your own decision.

Hero Class: Ritualist part 1

In my opinion the Ritualist is the most powerful hero class in the game because

• They are the strongest hero in the early game because Bone Wyvern + Raise Dead is really just that strong
  
• 6 level 12 ritualists can fight 6v18 against most endgame stacks and win unscathed
  
• As summoners they take no damage in combat letting them fight nonstop start to finish both in the early game and late game resulting in tremendous momentum
  
• Gear is not mandatory. Therefore they are not bottlenecked by Tome of Transmutation. They only need level 12 and 6 Materium to roll over endgame stacks by themselves.
  
• They are fully independent of Racial Traits, Culture, and Tomes making them splashable into any and every build in the game.
  
• The only thing they absolutely need is 6 Materium Affinity

Put all this together and you got a hero that fits in anywhere, super strong all game long, starts fighting right from the start, never stops fighting, and can win games all on their own.

This is what Ritualists do in combat at various points in the game

Pre-level 12
Turn 1: Get into Position + Conjure Astral ward
Turn 2: Spawn Hatchling
Turn 3: Conjure Greater Spirit + Astral Bond + Weaver
Turn 4: Conjure Greater Spirit + Astral Bond + Conjure Astral Ward
Turn 5: Spawn Hatchling

Level 12+
Turn 1: Awaken Earth
Turn 2: Get into Position + Conjure Astral ward
Turn 3: Spawn Hatchling
Turn 4: Awaken Earth
Turn 5: Conjure Greater Spirit + Astral Bond + Weaver
Turn 6: Awaken Earth
Turn 7: Conjure Greater Spirit + Astral Bond + Conjure Astral Ward
Turn 8: Spawn Hatchling
Turn 9: Awaken Earth

Tome of Transmutation
Turn 1: Awaken Earth
Turn 2: Get into position + Conjure Astral Ward
Turn 3: Conjure Greater Spirit + Astral Bond
Turn 4: Awaken Earth
Turn 5: Summon Spider Monarch
Turn 6: Summon Spider
Turn 7: Awaken Earth
Turn 8: Conjure Greater Spirit + Astral Bond + Weaver
Turn 9: Awaken Earth
Turn 10: Conjure Greater Spirit + Astral Bond + Conjure Astral Ward
Turn 11: Summon Spider Monarch
Turn 12: Awaken Earth.
Turn 13: Summon Spider
Turn 14: Conjure Greater Spirit + Astral Bond
Turn 15: Awaken Earth

Pre-level 12 they have 2 T3 Elementals, 2 T1 Spider Hatchlings, 1 Bone Wyvern, and Raise Dead to make a dent in the enemy army but then due to the very high cooldowns of the summons, the once per battle limit of the Spawn Hatchling wands, the 3 turn timer for combat summons, and the less than desirable performance of Conjure Greater Spirit the Ritualists become vulnerable. So Ritualists need an army to finish the job, but still, the above army will make a huge dent in the enemy army.

Post level 12 Awaken Earth carries the game. It's on a very short Cooldown, Earth Elementals are great, they are spawned with full action points, and it has a 100% uptime on your turn. Emphasis on YOUR turn because due to the way the combat summon timers work, the Earth Elemental will only be present 2 out of 3 enemy turns. Anyways, because of the Awaken Earth's short cooldown your Ritualists are never vulnerable even after turn 7. They should always have 1-2 Elementals/Zombies up at all times to finish the stragglers off.

I would like to emphasize that Awaken Earth is the game winning signature skill of Ritualists and without it this whole summon strategy FAILS. If you want your Ritualists to win the game for you then you HAVE to get 6 Materium Affinity for Awaken Earth

After Tome of Transmutation your Ritualists can summon a unit for 14 consecutive turns. And combat does not last 14 turns. And if your build gets Unit Enchantments for melee units then you're not summoning 14 fodder units but instead 14 game winning units and this is how Ritualists win 6v18 against endgame stacks back to back unscathed.

My recommended starting weapon for Ritualists is Necromancer's Staff. You might think it's redundant with the Ritualist's own Raise Dead but it's not. You will have more corpses than you have Raise Deads and zombies are fantastic because they're infinite duration and only costs 1 action point to create letting your Ruler reposition without pausing their stream of summons.

Hero Class: Ritualist part 2

1st, 2nd, and 3rd Ritualist Skill Build

• 2:Raise Dead - Creates Zombie with full action points from corpse. Cannot raise enemy undead units nor turn them into zombies so it's worthless against undead enemies which is why Ritualists struggle against Undead infestations.
  
• 3:Zombie Keeper - Start with a Zombie
  
• 4:Wyvern Keeper - Start with a Bone Wyvern, replaces Zombie Keeper
  
  
• 4:Conjure Astral Ward - Protects a unit
  
• 5:Fortified Summons - +10hp to summons
  
• 6:Conjure Lesser Spirit - Summons a T3 Elemental but it cannot move on the turn it is summoned and has only 1 action point. Partially makes up for it by leaving you with 1 action point.
  
• 7:Conjure Greater Spirit - Replaces Conjure Lesser Spirit and summons a Greater Elemental instead.
  
• 8:Astral Bond - +1 Retaliation, +30 Accuracy, and Frenzy to Magic Origin unit.
  
• 8:Weaver - Refreshes every ability you have, including once per battle abilities.
  
  
• 9:Experienced Leader - Evolves your Champion Rank Lesser Storm Spirits into Storm Spirits in 8 turns.
  
• 10:Logistics Training - -20% unit upkeep in your army.
  
• 11:Foraging Training - +10 hp heal per turn. Trying to heal your army outside of your domain is one of the most painful experiences in this game.
  
  
• 12:Master of Materium:Awaken Earth - Best summoning skill in the game.
  
• 12:Obscuring Flora: To always be able to use Awaken Earth
  
  
• 13:Endurance Training - +10hp for army
  
• 14:Offensive Formation - +10% damage for army
  
  
• 18:Restore - Prerequisite
  
• 16:Bolstering Support - Prerequisite
  
• 16:Swift Restoration - Prerequisite
  
• 17:Master of Healing - Heals army 15hp per turn
  
  
• 18: Infested Summons - Summons may inflict disease to adjacent enemies which reduces their resistance by 4. That's -40%, and with Unit Enchantments capsizing your units' physical damage, most of your units' damage is going to be non-physical.
  
  
  
• 19: Hostile Wildgrowth - Why not.
  
• 20: Enveloping Wildgrowth - Why not.

Champion Rulers should grab Decisive Command at level 9.

4th+ Ritualist Skill Build

• 2:Raise Dead - Creates Zombie with full action points from corpse. Cannot raise enemy undead units nor turn them into zombies so it's worthless against undead enemies which is why Ritualists struggle against Undead infestations.
  
• 3:Zombie Keeper - Start with a Zombie
  
• 4:Wyvern Keeper - Start with a Bone Wyvern, replaces Zombie Keeper
  
  
• 4:Conjure Astral Ward - Protects Ritualist
  
• 5:Fortified Summons - +10hp to summons
  
• 6:Conjure Lesser Spirit - Summons a T3 Elemental but it cannot move on the turn it is summoned and has only 1 action point. Partially makes up for it by leaving you with 1 action point.
  
• 7:Conjure Greater Spirit - Replaces Conjure Lesser Spirit and summons a Greater Elemental instead.
  
• 8:Astral Bond - +1 Retaliation, +30 Accuracy, and Frenzy to Magic Origin unit.
  
• 8:Weaver - Refreshes every ability you have, including once per battle abilities.
  
  
• 9:Restore - Prerequisite
  
• 10:Healing Support - Prerequisite
  
• 11:Empowered Restoration - Prerequisite
  
  
• 12:Master of Materium:Awaken Earth - Best summoning skill in the game.
  
• 12:Obscuring Flora: To always be able to use Awaken Earth
  
  
• 13:Resurrecting Restoration - Resurrects a unit
  
• 14: Infested Summons - Summons may inflict disease to adjacent enemies which reduces their resistance by 4. That's -40% and with Unit Enchantments your units' damage is going to be mostly non-physical.
  
  
• 15:Support Resistance I - Prerequisite
  
• 16:Support Resistance II - Prerequisite
  
• 16:Support Resistance III - Prerequisite
  
• 17:Battlefield Restoration - 2 Regeneration and Haste on all allied units in combat
  
  
• 18: Hostile Wildgrowth - Why not.
  
• 19: Enveloping Wildgrowth - Why not.
  
• 20: Living Wildgrowth - Why not.

Only the army leader's army wide stuff like Signature Skill passives and Logistics Training affect your units so there's no point in going Logistics Training and the like with your non-army leader heroes.

If you noticed we use the free skill point obtained from Signature Skills on non-signature skills. That's because pretty much all of the signature skills are worthless for summons.

Lets talk about the Ritualist's skills in depth.

Bone Wyverns are absolutely fantastic units. Early game they're a powerhouse that will just murder enemies letting you clear camps without sustaining much damage. Lategame it's bait and a backline disruptor. What you do is place the Bone Wyvern at the edge of the enemy's movement so the enemy has to travel max distance to hit the Bone Wyvern, luring them into the attack range of your units and protecting your units from the enemy's alpha strike. Then if your Bone Wyvern survives you send it over to the enemy's backline to prevent the enemy's archers and battle mages from attacking 3 times on their turn because they now have to move in order to attack. And because they're single model units they'll deal their full damage no matter how little hp they have left.

Raise Dead is very strong too. You summon an infinite duration zombie with full action points which lets it ram into enemies immediately and keep up your momentum. Raise dead is what wins you the early and mid game. I often find myself with my entire Berserker army dead and still winning the fight by creating an army of zombies from their remains to finish the enemy off.

If I have to choose between using Raise Dead to raise fresh zombies or resurrect my Bone Wyvern I always choose fresh zombies because I can use them immediately where as the resurrected Bone Wyvern has to wait until next turn to be useful.

Raise Dead cannot create fresh zombies from enemy undead corpses nor resurrect them under your control so Ritualists struggle against undead Infestations so keep that in mind. Against them I use Raise Dead primarily to resurrect my Bone Wyverns.

Lets talk about Conjure Greater Spirit. It's not that great. Every combat summon spawns with full action points which means they can move in, attack, and tank on their first turn but not Conjure Greater Spirit. Conjure Greater Spirit is the only combat summon that is summoned with only 1 action point meaning it can't move that turn. It can only do a single attack. And because it costs 3 action points to use you can't move your Ritualist into melee range and then cast Conjure Greater Spirit. And because the range of Conjure Greater Spirit is 1 hex, unless your Ritualist is in melee range of an enemy your Conjured Greater Spirit is gonna spend its first turn doing absolutely nothing. Meaning your Conjured Greater Spirit will actually only do 2 turns of attacks and 1 turn of tanking instead of the usualy 3 turns of attacks and 2 turns of tanking. And because of its high cooldown you need to suffer 2 full turns of no Conjured Greater Spirit tanking anything before you can summon a new one.

Hero Class: Ritualist part 3

So in the 4 turn cooldown cycle, first turn it's worthless, one turn it tanks, and then for 2 turns it's missing. Fights only 2/4 turns, tanks for only 1/4 turns. Yeah, it's not that good.

Unfortunately, because Conjure Greater Spirit is the Ritualist's only strength increase between levels 5-11, we have to use it and try to squeeze as much value out of it as we can. And the only way to do that is to get enemies into melee range of your Ritualists so that your Conjured Greater Spirit can at least get one attack off and maybe tank for 2 turns instead of 1. Fortunately, unlike all other summon skills, Conjure Greater Spirit can be cast while your Ritualist is in melee.

Astral Ward is how you do this. You get your Ritualist within striking distance of your enemies' melee units and then cast Conjure Astral Ward to protect your Ritualist. Then next turn, after the enemy rams into your Ritualist, you cast Conjure Greater Spirit to get 1 attack off. There's 20% chance you get a Magma Spirit so all of this could be for nought.

If using Astral Ward in the above way, summon it behind your Ritualist so the enemy rams into your Ritualist. If you're not using Astral Ward in the above way, summon it in front of your Ritualist because the AI loves to prioritize them.

Of all the elementals Conjure Greater Spirit can summon, the Snow Spirit is probably best because it can use its 1 action point the turn it's summoned to do a ranged attack with a 90% chance to freeze.

Astral Bond is completely free if you only have 1 action point so always use it on your Conjured Greater Spirit to get it a few stacks of strengthen via Frenzy.

Weaver only costs 1 action point so if you use it immediately after Conjure Greater Spirit you can summon 2 T3 Elementals back to back, SIGNFICANTLY improving its performance. Being able to use Weaver on the same turn as Conjure Greater Spirit is Conjure Greater Spirit's sole advantage over other summon skills.

With Weaver, Conjure Greater Spirit is now better than a normal summon because not only does it now attack for 3 turns and tanks for 2 turns just like normal, but for 2 of those turns you got 2 Elementals attacking instead of just one. And that's why we rush Weaver a.s.a.p.

Champion Rulers have a workaround for Conjure Greater Spirit and it's called Command. It fully restores all the action points of a non-hero unit so if you cast Conjure Greater Spirit and then Command on the summoned elemental afterwards, the elemental can dive into the enemy and attack immediately letting you get full value out of it like a normal combat summon. This also lets your Conjured Greater Spirit get stacks of strengthen earlier and quicker from Astral Bond. Command has a shorter cooldown than Conjure Greater Spirit so you can use it on every Conjured Greater Spirit except when you use Weaver. Command is refresh locked so Weaver won't refresh it so keep that in mind.

Running out of obstacles to cast Awaken Earth from is a very real possibility especially on maps with barely any obstacles like that bridge map so I recommend you ration obstacles when casting Awaken Earth and have every Ritualist you own grab Conjure Wildgrowth so they can generate more Obstacles right next to where the fighting is taking place. That's why I grab the offensive Conjure Wildgrowth skills. Because casting it on top of enemies ensures I can cast Awaken Earth on top of enemies too.

I don't really care for the other Signature Skills that summon monster which are Call of the Wild and Exhume Corpse. They're both once per battle only. With Weaver you can get 2 uses out of them but Awaken Earth is just so much better than all of them and getting 6 affinity is a challenge so I don't really care for them.

Lets talk about the other Ritualist skills. Restore heals an absolutely pitiful amount of hp but it cures all status ailments and you can build it so that it either resurrects a unit or it heals your army (on the world map) by 15 every turn which stacks with Foraging Training.

10 (Foraging Training) + 15 (Master of Healing) = 25hp heal per turn on enemy territory which is really good but at the same time being able to resurrect your units (hero) is also good. Personally, because trying to heal your army outside your domain is one of the most painful experiences in this game and because unlike Foraging Training or the Raider's Resourcefulness skill, Master of Healing DOES increase your Hero's healing per turn, I always get Master of Healing over Resurrection Restoration.

Having said that, like with everything else in this game, non-army leader's army wide skills don't do anything so 4th hero onward should get Resurrecting Support instead.

We go Bolstering Support over Regenerating Support because Bolstering leads to Swift Restoration which is better than Overflowing Restoration because Restore is not worth spending a turn to cast. Your Ritualists are gonna be too busy summoning things nonstop.

Undying Loyalty is a free action steadfast. Might save a unit from dying but I don't think I ever actually used it in a game because my units are usually far away from my Ritualists who cannot move because all of their abilities require 3 action points to use. And you want your summoned units to die instead of going poof because summoned units leave raise-able corpses when they die but not when they go poof.

Battlefield Restoration hastes all of your units in combat which is amazing and with multiple Ritualists casting Battlefield Restoration we can get some serious healing on all our units but for Ritualists who stay still and summon stuff and an army that hangs back until something breaks through, Haste and healing doesn't really do anything so we don't prioritize it and only get it on our doubled up heroes.

Hero Class: Ritualist part 4

Racial Traits

Any. Unlike Rangers, there is no mandatory Racial Trait that Ritualists need which lets you recruit Ritualists of any race instead of just your own making hero recruitment a LOT easier as you need a LOT less shuffles to fill up your ranks with only Ritualists.

If I had to choose Racial Traits then I'd choose Racial Traits that is best for my culture units instead of my Ritualists, because there is none.

With the Tough and Resistant nerfs from the Ogre update, I honestly do not know which Racial Traits are best.

Hardy gives +8 hp and is the best 1 point racial trait in my opinion.

Tenacious halves damage loss from casualties which makes a HUGE impact. For example, with a 12 unit model count, at 1 hp, instead of doing 8.3% damage, this unit will do 54% damage. Tenacious is just too good in my opinion so you should always get it unless you don't plan on winning with racial units. Then you should only get Racial Traits that are good for your Ritualist and only your Ritualist.

Fast Recuperation heals +10 heal per turn. Virtually no Hero skill that increases healing per turn works on heroes so your Heroes are stuck with 0 hp healing per turn in enemy domain for a really, really long while and that's why this Racial Trait is so good.

Overwhelm Tactics gives +20% crit rate if standing next to another unit with this trait. This trait is mandatory for 100% crit hero builds.

Strong gives +2 damage, +4 with single shot attacks. It's actually a pretty decent bonus.

Quick Reflexes gives +25% evasion against ranged attacks and when combined with obscured will make range units not viable against your units. But is worthless against melee.

Defensive Tactics + Tough gives +2 def and res against melee attackers when your units are standing together. Probably the closest way to emulate pre-nerf Tough + Resistant.

Arcane Focus and Pack Tactics gives +% damage bonuses which I'm not a fan of. All % damage bonuses stack additively so in the end, these racial traits will end up giving only like +1 damage.

Personally at this time I always go Hardy, Tenacious, and Fast Recuperation because heroes are what wins my games not units, I only use non-racial units (Storm Spirits, Ironclads), and Tenacious is there because my Ritualists doesn't need any offensive or defensive traits so I got the trait that helps my summoned Phantasm Warriors from Ascension:Summoner or Skeletons from Deathcaller the most.

Culture

Any. If I HAD to choose I'd go Barbarians because I like to go 100% crit chance builds and Barbarians increases their critical damage more than any other culture. +4 flat damage gives way more damage than +20% damage because % damage in this game stacks additively and you're gonna get a LOT of +% damage throughout your run.

Please note that the army wide +30% crit boost from Chaos Signature skills do NOT benefit combat summons at this time. So you probably can only get 50% crit rate on your freshly summoned elementals, effectively making Brutal Strike a +2 damage bonus, which is still better than all the other racial bonuses from other cultures for combat summons.

Equipment

Wand of Summon Spider Monarch - summons a T4 Spider Monarch. Requires 3 Silvertongue Fruits to craft. Once you get Weaver this wand exponentially enhances the strength of your Ritualists. Always make these wands as soon as you can.

Wand of Summon Spider - summons a T2 Spider. Thanks to Unit Enchantments these guys hit just as hard as your T3+ summons therefore definitely worth grabbing. They're just not as tanky as them which is not necessarily bad as they'll generate corpses for Raise Dead.

Wand of Spawn Hatchling - summons a T1 Spider. In this game the difference in damage output between low tier and high tier units are small but the difference in their defensive stats are huge. As such even spider hatchlings can pack a serious punch. They're just one hit wonders because either they die in one hit or they lose too many models especially from a retaliation attack and basically do no damage. Even so, they generate nice corpses for raise dead so they're definitely worth grabbing early game considering how dirt cheap they are to produce and have no requirements to build.

Trinket Army Trainer - +10% xp for entire army. More xp = quicker level 12. Requires 1 Silvertongue Fruit

Trinket Army Recuperation - +5hp heal per turn. Trying to heal your army outside of your domain is one of the most painful experiences in this game. Requires 1 Rainbow Clover.

Hero Class: Ranger part 1

My recommended starting weapon for Rangers is Crowmaster's Bow because free fodder to tank the enemy's Alpha Strike is better than all the other Ruler starting weapons.

The reason the Ranger is the strongest lategame unit in the game is because the Magelock weapon is the strongest weapon in the game by a considerable margin. It ignores 50% of the target's def and res, does about 40% more damage than the next strongest single shot weapon (two handed melee), does more damage than 2 hits from a mutli-strike weapons, you can move and shoot on the same turn, and it's also a ranged weapon. And let me tell you, weapons that let you move and shoot on the same turn are infinitely superior to weapons that don't. It's one of the major reasons Shock units are the best unit type in the game.

So if you have a full stack of these guys then you can charge into the enemy ranks and annihilate the entire enemy stack in your alpha strike, leaving your Rangers completely unharmed.

And if the Magelocks they are using have the Infecting infusion then your Rangers will also create an army of zombies with full action points in their place which will then ram into your enemies' reinforcements and act as a meat wall between your Rangers and your enemies which ensures your Rangers will continue to remain completely unscathed until their next turn as well.

And if you cast Demonic Onslaught to give all your Rangers Killing Momentum, they can fight 6 vs 18 T5 units all by themselves and win. So needless to say the Ranger is the strongest lategame unit in the game.

The downside of rangers however is that they suck really, really badly early game. They're literally no better than a T2 archer unit unless they start with a net at which point they're literally no better than a T1 skirmisher unit. They also get royally ****ed by Wind Barrier, Obscured, Quick Reflexes, etc., and there is 0 flexibility in your build. You HAVE to go Keen-sighted, and Overwhelm Tactics as your Racial Traits. You HAVE to go Tome of the Chaos Lord. You HAVE to get 8 Materium Affinity. And you HAVE to go Barbarians. Put all of this together and you got 0 wiggle room or flexibility. You either go this exact build OR you go play a different class.

So first lets crunch some numbers.
You can easily achieve 100% crit chance with your heroes

• Overwhelm Tactics: +20%
  
• Champion of War: +20%
  
• Keen Edge: +20%
  
• Chaos Empowerment: +20%
  
• Fortune x3: +30%
  
• Total: 110% crit chance.

Now for the damage numbers.

• Initiate of Chaos gives Searing Strikes which gives +2 fire damage to your attacks. Magelocks, as single shot weapons, receive double the bonus for a total of +4 damage.
  
• Adept of Materium gives Meteor Strikes which gives +4 fire damage to your attacks. Magelocks, as single shot weapons, receive double the bonus for a total of +12 damage.
  
• Adept of Chaos gives Chaos Empowerment which gives +3 fire damage to your critical attacks. Magelocks, as single shot weapons, receive double the bonus for +18 damage.
  
• Barbarians' racial trait Savage Strikes adds +4 blight damage to your critical attacks. Magelocks, as single shot weapons, receive double the bonus for +26 damage.
  
• Big Game Hunter adds +1 damage per unit tier of target. Magelocks, as single shot weapons, receive double the bonus for +28-36 damage.

Now lets talk about +% damage increases. Please note that in this game all +% damage stacks additively. So if one thing gives +100% damage and another thing gives +100% damage then you'll be doing 300% damage and not 400% damage.

• Crits increase your damage by +50%.
  
• We'll be adding the +20% Critical Hit Damage infusion to our Magelocks for a total of +70% damage.
  
• We can trivially get 5 stacks of Strengthen on all your heroes for another +50% for a total of +120% damage.
  
• Ranger I, Ranger II, and Martial Expertise all give +10% damage each for a total of +150% damage.
  
• Paragon of Materium gives Ancient of Earth which increases damage by +30% for a total of +180% damage.

Total damage:

• Snapshot Heavy Magelock: (29 + 28-36) * 2.8 = 159-182 damage
  
• Fire Heavy Magelock: (44 + 28-36) * 2.8 = 201-224 damage.
  
• Snapshot: (16 + 14-18) * 2.8 = 84-95 damage.

Lets talk about Snapshot. Snapshot is a free action attack that does 16 damage and its cooldown gets refreshed when you kill a unit. As of Ogre patch it is affected by every +damage you have; however, it's treated as a multi shot weapon at this time so it only gets half as much +damage.

So if we combine Snapshot and Snapshot Heavy Magelock, you'll be moving and dealing 243-277 damage. How many units do you know have 243-277 hp? None right? Exactly. Rangers will one shot any and every unit in the game except those with really, really high defense. And with the Demonic Onslaught spell giving them Killing Momentum they'll be killing 2 units every turn. With a full stack of Rangers you're going to be killing 12 units a turn and creating 12 zombies a turn! And there's only 18 units in a battle! So you see just how hard Rangers roflstomp right? That's why I consider them the strongest lategame unit in the game by a considerable margin.

Other sources of +damage:

Go for the Kill adds +50%
Mastered Focus gives +20% only to Fire Heavy Magelock
The Gloryseeker Ambition gives +10% damage per rank of the target.

Hero Class: Ranger part 2

Skill build

• 2:Experienced Leader - Prerequisite
  
• 3:Logistics Training - -20% unit upkeep. Your Rangers are nothing to write home about until you get Tome of Transmutation AND craft all your gear so we get this first to get a bigger army and be able to afford our buildings and hero shuffles while we wait for Tome of Transmutation to be researched.
  
• 4:Foraging Training - +10 hp heal per turn. Trying to heal your army outside of your domain is one of the most painful experiences in this game.
  
• 4:EnduranceTraining - +10 hp for army
  
• 5:Offensive Formation - +10% damage to adjacent units
  
• 6:Champion of War - +20% crit chance. Barbarians can get 3x Fortune very, very early in the game so might as well max out crit rate first.
  
• 7:Keen Edge - +20% crit chance.
  
• 8:Initiate of Chaos:Searing Strikes - +4 Fire damage
  
• 8:Adept of Chaos: Chaos Empowerment - +20% crit chance and +6 Fire damage on crit. Chosen over Adept of Materium for the army wide +10% crit.
  
• 9:Snapshot - 16 damage as a free action
  
• 10: Disruptive Snapshot - cancels defense mode
  
• 11: Big Game Hunter - +2 damage per unit tier of target
  
• 12: Adept of Materium: Meteor Strikes - +8 Fire damage
  
• 12: Ranger I - +10% damage
  
• 13: Ranger II - +10% damage
  
• 14: Kill Shot - refresh Snapshot on kill
  
• 15: Defense - Prerequisite
  
• 16: Defense - Prerequisite
  
• 16: Paragon of Materium:Ancient of Earth - +30% damage
  
• 17: Marital Expertise - +10% damage
  
• 18: Slip Away - Prerequisite
  
• 19: Go for the Kill - +50% damage once per battle

Ranger Rulers will want to get Decisive Command.

Racial Traits

• Hardy - +8 hp. Best 1 point trait
  
• Keen-Sighted - +20% accuracy. You need it for quick reflexes, obscured, and Wind Barrier
  
• Overwhelm Tactics - +20% crit chance when next to another unit with this trait. Mandatory for 100% crit chance.

Culture

Barbarians - solely for their racial trait Savage Strike which increases the base damage of your Magelocks' critical hits by +8 blight damage which is more than any other damage increase from any other culture.

Equipment

• Weapon: Magelock - Infecting, +20% Crit Damage
  
• Head: +30% Accuracy, Hyper Awareness, (+5 hp/+1 def/+1 res)
  
• Trinket: Undying
  
• Ring: Status Immunity
  
• Wand: Summon Spider Monarch
  
• Trinket: Army Recuperation
  
• Legs: Very Fast Movement, Slip Away, (+5 hp/+1 def/+1 res)

Only the Weapon and Helm are mandatory. Everything else is just a bonus. I usually don't bother making anything else.

You can fit an additional +5 hp/1 def/1 res on the head but I intentionally don't just to reduce crafting time by 1 turn. Item Forge crafting time is the bottleneck to your strength and skipping the extra +5 hp/1 def/1 res saves you 6 whole turns.

The other slots don't matter. Game usually ends before I get Status Immunity on everyone. Torso does nothing for us so pick the defensive infusions of your choice be it hp, armor, resistance, or bolstering regeneration.

The following is how I setup my 3 Transmutation Circles and the order I build my items

None

• Weapon: Magelock - +10% Crit Chance, Inflict Bleeding

I make 4 of these before my Transmutation Circles come online. Can't make anything stronger due to lack of Binding Fragments and Magic Materials.

1 Archon Blood + 1 Fireforge Stone

• Weapon: Magelock - Infecting, +20% Crit Damage

2 Focus Crystals

• Head: +30% Accuracy, Hyper Awareness, (+5 hp)

2 Archon Blood + 1 Rainbow Clover

• Trinket: Undying
  
• Trinket: Army Recuperation (only 3. Multiples of this trinket do not stack)

3 Tranquility Pool

• Ring: Status Immunity

3 Silvertongue Fruit

• Wand: Summon Spider Monarch

2 Haste Berries + 1 Astral Dew

• Legs: Very Fast Movement, Slip Away

Ascended Rulers & Pantheon Heroes

Ascended Rulers

Once you win a game your Ruler can ascend. This means they get to permanently keep all racial transformations they have for their next game AND get an Ascension Trait. What Ascension Trait is available to you depends on what Tomes you've gotten. Look up online what Tome gives what Ascension Trait.

My default go to Ascension Trait is Dungeon Keeper from the new Giant Kings DLC. it spawns an infinite duration T3 Clay unit at the start of combat. It doesn't deal that much damage but it has nice defensive stats, reinforced, and undying. A free expendable T3 unit that you don't have to heal, keep alive, or replace is always useful.

My favorite Ascension Trait is Deathcaller because it's a free action and on a 1 turn cooldown. The free action lets me summon something on the same turn I move into position and cast Astral Ward, and the 1 turn cooldown ensures I win any prolonged battles. The two bad things about Deathcaller is that you need a corpse which seriously hurts its early game power, and you summon melee, archer, and battle mage skeletons. These three unit types benefit from VERY different Tomes and Unit Enchantments so Deathcaller has a serious issue with scaling and as T1 units you really need Tenacious on them. Unless of course you're only summoning skeletons as meatshields. Then it doesn't matter.

Summoner in my opinion is power crept by Dungeon Keeper for non-magic origin builds. Before the Giant Kings DLC, Summoner was worth it because it summoned Phantasm Warriors, one of the best scaling units in the game, with only 1 action point letting your Ruler do a full move and summon Phantasm Warriors on the same turn who can then triple attack or do a full move. But now, the Clay Unit is superior to Phantasm Warriors in every way because it is infinite duration, is T3, has Undying, and doesn't require an action point to summon. For Magic Origin builds however, it's important to note that Summoner bestows +10 hp and +10% damage to ALL of your magic origin units in the current battle and not just your Ruler's stack so for magic origin builds Summoner is still better.

Archmage is another really good one. It lets you cast 2 spells per turn. 2 Necrotizes per turn = 2 zombies per turn turning the tide in your favor VERY quickly. And 2 Explosive Manifestations on the same turn is a guaranteed immediate Ruler snipe.

It's important to note that Dragon Rulers and Eldritch Sovereigns get to keep some of their signature skills upon ascension. For example if an Eldritch Sovereign ascends with Fleshweaver, then they'll have Fleshweaver at level 1 in their next game.

Pantheon Heroes

Instead of recruiting a regular hero you can, instead, for an exorbitant amount of Imperium, recruit one of your ascended Rulers. They cost 100 + 100 Imperium per level. Cheapest one is 400 Imperium at level 3 at turn 11.

I recommend you spend your first 400 Imperium after you setup your 3 cities recruiting a Pantheon Hero every single game. 2 Rulers is such a crazy powerhouse it's well worth the Imperium cost.

Cult of Personality

This is a crazy good Society Trait for experienced players. It increases your Hero cap by 1 and your Pantheon Hero cap by 3!

Meaning you can have a total of 5 Ascended Ruler Heroes by turn 50!

Check out the OP strategies I came up with in the Cult of Personality section.

Just for reference, 5 Eldritch Sovereigns can solo ALL endgame Brutal stacks back to back on the same turn on auto-resolve. That's how strong this Society Trait is.

Quickest way of Setting up your Pantheon Heroes

Make a new Custom Realm

• Small Map
  
• 2 AI
  
• Relaxed
  
• Then go to the Faction tab and give yourself a Major Advantage and give your opponent a Major Handicap
  
• If the Ascension Trait you want is from a high level tome then set research speed to very fast and disable Happenings. Otherwise Mistwatchers might spawn.

As soon as the game starts press Ctrl+Alt+C to bring up the cheat menu and type Barentz to reveal map. Make a note of where the enemy is.

Reload game because cheats disable ascension and just send your starting army to the other AI's Throne City and kill it and win while auto-resolving all your battles. You should win by turn 7.

If the ascension trait you want is not obtainable from a T1 tome then just keep sieging the enemy Throne City but don't attack it until you research the Tome you want.

IMPORTANT: Make sure all your heroes have different names. If they all have the same name only 1 will be recruitable.

General Build Designing Strategy

1. Select your Game Winning Strategy

The first thing you should decide is how you plan on winning.
Do you plan on winning with Heroes? Army? Both?
Do you plan on winning with Elementals? Undead? Culture Units?
Do you plan on winning with Shock Units? Ranged Units? Battle Mages? Mythic Units?

Then make a huge list of all the Unit Enchantments that buff the units you plan on winning with and which Tomes give those Unit Enchantments.

2. Select your Culture

Mystic:Attunement is probably the best culture in the game. All non-mythic and non-hero units get +3 flat damage in combat and basically has infinite casting points during important battles. Get an amazing spell like Necrotize or Explosive Manifestation, maybe even the Ascension Trait:Archmage and hands down no contest, this is the best culture in the game.

Mystic:Summoner, NOT a fan. They can spend Mystic Echoes to rank up Magic Origin units but I'd rather max out my damage than have an easier time ranking up units. Mystic:Summoner however holds one of the sickest combos in the game. With True Death Magic from Tome of the Eternal Lord your Summoners can move in and summon Lesser Magma Spirits who can then immediately use their instant death attack. Then next turn your Summoners can then use their instant kill attack too. Ridiculously powerful however, this build is not covered in the guide because it comes online after 9 Tomes and I'm not completely sure what to do in the mean time.

Barbarians increases recruited units' damage by 2 and crit damage by 4. Doubled for single shot units. Best Culture for just pure damage especially melee units with 100% crit chance because its damage bonuses have no strings attached. No physical damage units and non-crit builds do not benefit from this Culture.

Feudal:Monarchy - Best Culture for T5 Mythic Units. Increases all units' damage by 10% and gives +1 def and res, including Mythic Untis but these increases are not really noticeable. The true value of Feudal:Monarchy is that units in your Ruler's stack have 0 upkeep, including Imperium. So if you want to mass T5 Mythic units, go this Culture.

Also, Call Militia is stupidly powerful. Just obliterates the entire early game by itself. You don't need to get a gold upkeep summon tome as your starting tome with it.

Feudal:Aristocracy - I haven't really played around with this but it seems really powerful lategame. +40 hp to all units, +20 morale to all units, -40% unit upkeep to all units. You just gotta deal with the Liege Lord stuff which requires maxing out your renown. Combat Summons do NOT benefit from any of this however.

Oathsworn NOT a fan. Righteousness gives +5 spirit damage to all your units but you gotta be maximum good which SEVERELY restricts your gameplay. This culture solely exists to give players a reason to be good because being good is really bad in this game. Strife's damage bonus is lost if you outnumber your enemy which will ALWAYS happen since when you kill 1 enemy you now outnumber them. Harmony is essentially +30hp which is meh.

Primal NOT a fan. You need to attack 5 times to start benefiting from them gimmicks and battles are won and lost way before that.

High NOT a fan. +3 spirit damage to units but mandates the use of supports in your army. I rather go pure damage than add in supports. And Shock Units and Skirmishers are left out.

Not a fan of Reavers, Industrious, and Dark as well.

3. Starting Tome

Next you should decide on your starting Tome. It should always have a summon. Preferably with a gold upkeep instead of mana upkeep.

Tome of Enchantment in my opinion is the uncontested champion because of Summon Copper Golem (gold upkeep), Sundering Blades (-1 def on hit, up to -5), and Awaken Tools (+20 production).

Tome of the Horde can also summon units with a gold upkeep. They also gives you access to Houndmasters. I heard that Houndmasters are the meta unit for multiplayer. I wouldn't know anything about that though, I'm a single player only guy.

Tome of Zeal can summon units with a gold upkeep and has a unit enchantment that gives +2 spirit damage to melee AND ranged units.

Tome of Warding has Phantasm Warriors which is one of the best scaling summoned units in the game. I've beaten Brutal Difficulty using only them before. But as a mana upkeep unit your early game is gonna be weaker.

Tome of Necromancy is for Undead players but like Tome of Warding, mana upkeep is gonna hurt your early game. The Necrotize spell you start with with this tome in my opinion is one of the best spells in the game and the real reason you start with this tome. It does 20 damage, applies decaying for 3 turns which does 10 damage a turn for a total of 50 damage, and any unit hit by this spell will turn into zombies after they die. Both the status effect and the zombie are infinite duration. And the spell is dirt cheap. Spamming this spell every turn results in 1 zombie every turn which lets you punch seriously above your weight.

4. Shadow Affinity for Knowledge Extraction

Knowledge Extraction is the best Empire Skill in the entire game so it is absolutely mandatory you get it. Always. No exceptions. You always need a minimum of 1 Shadow Affinity. No exceptions. If you got a Shadow Affinity from your Society Traits, Culture, or Starting Tome, then great! If not you HAVE to grab a Shadow Tome as your 2nd Tome. NO EXCEPTIONS.

5. Tome of Transmutation

Hero equipment is game changing. With good equipment your heroes' strength skyrockets into the stratosphere. A fight between an army with fully equipped heroes v.s. an army without fully equipped heroes is so one sided that it's not even funny. You have to craft gear in 100% of your games no exceptions.

But these Hero equipment require multiple Magic Materials to craft which is why you have to go Tome of Transmutation in every game. Because that Tome grants you access to all the Magical Materials you need.

So unless you're intentionally going no heroes, always grab Tome of Transmutation.

6. Hero Signature Skill Affinity Requirements

The passive effects of Hero Signature Skills are very powerful. You can get army wide +30% crit rate, +3 def, +3 res, etc. and some active Hero Signature Skills are game winning like Awaken Earth.

So naturally you need to select Tomes in a way that meets the affinity requirements of all of the Signature Skills you plan on grabbing.

Naturally these Tomes should also have Unit Enchantments that buff the units you plan on winning the game with.

7. Organize your Tomes by Tiers and Fill in the Blanks

Organize all the Tomes you've selected in steps 2, 3, 4, and 5 into tiers and line them all up. There might be some blanks. Like you might have two Tier 1 Tomes and two Tier 3 Tomes but only one Tier 2 Tome.

Fill those blanks in with the Tomes you've selected in step 1.

When filling in the blanks, do not put much stake in the Tier of the Tome. As in just because you have access to Tier 2 Tomes does NOT mean you should be grabbing only Tier 2 Tomes. It's perfectly ok to grab 3 or 4 Tier 1 Tomes even as high up as Tier 3, 4, or 5. I'm not joking. Check out the builds I've provided for some examples and the reasons I chose them.

8. Reconsider the order of the Tomes

Hero Signature Skill acquisition should be at the forefront of your mind in this step. Lets say you need an Adept Chaos Signature Skill at level 8 but you don't get your 4th Chaos Affinity until Tier 4. That's a problem. So shuffle things around so you get your 4th Chaos Affinity in Tier 2.

And that might cause the summon unit you want or the Unit Enchantment you want to be gotten at Tier 4 instead which is too late.

So this is the headache of planning out your Tome Selection. Use your judgement to figure out what's more important.

And that should be it.

Unit Enchantments

Shield, Polearm, Shock, Fighter, Skirmisher, Ranged, Battle Mage, Support

• T2 (M) Tome of the Dungeon Depths
  Raiders of the Deep - above ground +10% damage, underground +1 def and res

Shields Only

• T1 (M) Tome of Enchantment
  Spell-Tempered Shields - +1 resistance, +1 AoE resistance on defense mode
  
• T3 (M)(C) Tome of the Dreadnought
  Warding Metals (and Constructs) - +3 resistance
  
• T4 (M)(S) Tome of Severing
  Null Shield - Defense mode gives +5 status resistance AoE

Shield and Polearm Only

• T2 (M)(O) Tome of the Construct
  Compounding Defense - +1 def and res next to another Compounding Defense unit
  
• T2 (N) Tome of the Glade
  Aspect of the Root - 30hp heal on defense mode

Shield, Polearm, Fighter, Skirmisher

• T1 (M)(O) Tome of Discipline
  Empowered Strikes - +1 phys, 60% stun every 3rd attack

Polearm, Shock, Fighter, Skirmisher

• T3 (O)(C) Tome of the Cleansing Flames
  Flameblessed Champions - 60% burning, cleansing flames against 5+ burning targets
  
• T4 (M)(S) Tome of Severing
  Disrupting Blades - 60% disrupted

Shield, Polearm, Shock, Fighter, Skirmisher

• T1 (M) Tome of Enchantment
  Sundering Blades - 90% chance of sundered defense, Demolisher
  
• T1 (A) Tome of Evocation
  Lightning Blades - +4 lightning, -2 phys, +20% against electrified
  
• T1 (N) Tome of Roots
  Blight Blades - +4 blight, -2 phys, +20% against poisoned or decaying
  
• T1 (C) Tome of Pyromancy
  Searing Blades - +4 fire, -2 phys, +20% damage against burning
  
• T1 (S) Tome of Cryomancy
  Frost Blades - +4 frost, -2 phys, +20% against frozen or slowed
  
• T2 (C) Tome of Revelry
  Bloodfury Weapons - +2 phys, +5 morale, +1 strengthen on kill
  
• T2 (M) Tome of Artificing
  Artisan Armaments - +30% Crit Chance
  
• T2 (S) Tome of Souls
  Cruel Weaponry - +30% damage against low morale
  
• T2 (M)(S) Tome of Shades
  Shadow Blades - Ignore 50% of def and res against blind enemies
  
• T3 (M) Tome of Transmutation
  Adaptive Armor - Bolstered Resistance and Status Protection when hit by non-phys attack
  
• T3 (S) Tome of the Great Transformation
  Fetid legion - +10 hp, Weakened
  
• T3 (C) Tome of Devastation
  Flameburst Weapons - +20% crit, 20 fire explosion on kill
  
• T3 (O) Tome of Subjugation
  Intimidation Aura - 90% -5 morale against all adjacent units at end of each turn
  
• T3 (O) Tome of Sanctuary
  Keeper's Mark - Steadfast upon "death"
  
• T3 (M)(A) Tome of Geomancy
  Resonant Blades - Melee attacks inflict negative status effect depending on terrain
  
• T4 (A) Tome of the Astral Mirror
  Mirror Veil - reflect 50% non-phys damage back to attacker
  
• T4 (C)(S) Tome of Calamity
  Accursed Projectiles - +2 fire, +2 frost, 60% ghostfire
  
• T4 (O)(N) Tome of Prosperity
  Accursed Armors - +2 def, 30% Ghostfire and Misfortune against melee attackers

Shield, Polearm, Shock, Fighter, Skirmisher, Ranged

• T1 (M) Tome of Rock
  Obsidian Weapons - +1 Phys, 60% bleed
  
• T1 (O) Tome of Zeal
  Legion of Zeal - Zeal (+2 spirit damage)

Ranged & Skirmisher's Ranged

• T1 (M) Tome of Enchantment
  Purging Arrows - +10% damage against magic origin, 60% chance of removing 1 positive effect
  
• T1 (N) Tome of Roots
  Poison Arrows - +2 blight, -1 phys, 60% poisoned
  
• T1 (C) Tome of Pyromancy
  Fiery Arrows - +2 fire, -1 phys, 60% burning
  
• T1 (S) Tome of Cryomancy
  Frost Arrows - +2 frost, -1 phys, 60% slowed
  
• T2 (O) Tome of the Inquisition
  Inquisitor's Mark - 30% Condemned until end of combat, 30% weakened, 30% slowed
  
• T2 (M) Tome of Winds
  Seeker Arrows - +1 range
  
• T3 (A) Tome of Amplification
  Amplified Arrows - +3 lightning, -1 phys, 3 lightning to 2 other targets, 30% sundered resistance
  
• T4 (M) Tome of the Crucible
  Meteor Arrows - +3 fire damage AoE, Demolisher

Ranged & Skirmisher's Ranged & Battle Mage & Supports

• T2 (A) Tome of Scrying
  Guided Projectiles - Ignores obscured
  
• T2 (C) Tome of Mayhem
  Mark of Misfortune - Misfortune
  
• T3 (N) Tome of Cycles
  Projectiles of Decay - +2 Blight, 60% decaying
  
• T4 (C) Tome of Chaos Channeling
  Infernal Focus - Whenever a unit dies, +1 fire to attack and +5 morale
  
• T4 (C)(S) Tome of Calamity
  Accursed Projectiles - +2 fire, +2 frost, 60% ghostfire

Ranged & Battle Mage & Supports

• T1 (M)(O) Tome of Discipline
  Focus Aim - once per battle attacks cannot miss for 1 turn

Battle Mage & Supports

• T1 (A) Tome of Evocation
  Lightning Focus - +2 Lightning Damage, 30% electrified
  
• T1 (S) Tome of Necromancy
  Necrotic magic - 60% decaying
  
• T1 (A)(S) Tome of the Tentacle
  Constricting Focus - 30% constricted
  
• T2 (M) Tome of Artificing
  Siege Magic - 10% damage, Siege Breaker (+fort damage during a siege), Demolisher
  
• T2 (S) Tome of Souls
  Soulbinders - 90% soulbound, +20% damage against soulbound
  
• T3 (O)(C) Tome of the Cleansing Flames
  Cleansing Flames - 60% condemned, creates cleansing flames
  
• T3 (A) Tome of Teleportation
  Phasing Enchantment - Gives phase
  
• T3 (A) Tome of Amplification
  Frenzying Focus - gives Frenzy
  
• T3 (C) Tome of Pandemonium
  Havoc Magic - 60% random negative status on hit
  
• T3 (C) Tome of Devastation
  Focus of Devastation - Demolisher, 60% cancel defense mode
  
• T4 (O) Tome of Supremacy
  Supreme Magic - Zeal (+2 spirit), 20 spirit explosion on kill
  
• T5 (S) Tome of the Eternal Lord
  True Death Magic - gives Curse of the Reaper, 60% instant kill, 45 frost on fail that ignores resistance

Battle Mage Only

• T3 (N)(C) Tome of Dragons
  Flamer Focus - gives Firebomb

Supports Only

• T1 (A) Tome of warding
  Staves of Warding - +2 Resistance
  
• T1 (O) Tome of Faith
  Staves of Mending - Faithful, Mending Touch (+15hp heal)
  
• T1 (M)(N) Tome of Alchemy
  Mysterious Tonic - Gives Distribute Tonic
  
• T2 (N) Tome of Fey
  Staves of Mist - gives Fey Blessing (+10 heal, 1 clinging mist)
  
• T3 (M)(C) Tome of the Dreadnought
  Tuning Kits - gives Overcharge (+50% damage to construct, 30% chance to be stunned on attack)
  
• T4 (O)(N) Tome of Prosperity
  Staves of Grace - Inner Grace, Support abilitiies give 1 grace, Cleansing Rain (1-hex dispel)

Scouts

• Wayfinder Enchantment - Very Fast Movement
  
• Enchanted Crow Companion - +2 vision

Evolve Only

• T1 (M)(N) Tome of Evolution
  Rapid Evolution Enchantment - +20% exp gain, Slip Away

Tier 1 Only

• T2 (O) Tome of the Beacon
  Might Meek - +1 spirit damage per tier of target, faithful

Animal, Cavalry, Fey, Plant only

• T5 (N) Tome of the Goddess of Nature
  Force of Nature - +4 blight, +20% crit

Elementals and Constructs only

• T5 (M) Tome of the Creator
  Shaper's Touch - +10hp, 10% max hp healing per turn

Animals Only

• T3 (M) Tome of Vigor
  Empowered Beasts - +20% damage, +10hp, Demolisher, less models

Magic Origin Only

• T5 (A) Tome of the Arch Mage
  Cosmic Overdrive - +30% damage, Very Fast Movement

Minor Race Transformations

Minor Transformations

• T1 (A) Tome of Warding
  Magical Wards - +2 fire, lighting, frost resistance
  
• T1 (N)(C) Tome of Evolution
  Draconic Vitality - +3hp per rank
  
• T1 (M) Tome of Rock
  Earthkin - +1 Defense, Mountain Camouflage, Mountain Walk
  
• T1 (C) Tome of the horde
  Spawnkin - +20% damage, increased number of models
  
• T1 (N) Tome of Beasts
  Animal Kinship - When next to an animal +10% damage, +10% crit
  
• T1 (M)(O) Tome of Discipline
  Inner Mastery - +1 status resistance, +20% healing in combat
  
• T2 (C) Tome of Revelry
  Reveler's heart - +50% morale from all sources
  
• T2 (M)(O) Tome of the Construct
  Linked Minds - Hyper Awareness when next to another Linked Mind
  
• T2 (S) Tome of the Doomherald
  Joy Siphoners - steal 4 morale per hit
  
• T2 (N) Tome of the Glade
  Leafskin - +1 resistance, forest walk, forest camouflage
  
• T2 (N) Tome of Fey
  Fey Touched - Fey Guile (Gain 1 random positive effect when obstructed or in mist), ignore mist
  
• T2 (N) Tome of Shades
  Living Shadows - 10% evasion, when attacked within 2 hex 60% blind
  
• T3 (M) Tome of Transmutation
  Steel Skin - +2 def, +2 blight, -2 lightning resistance
  
• T3 (N) Tome of Vigor
  Supergrowth - +10hp, +1 Retaliation Attack, Decreased number of models
  
• T3 (S) Tome of the Cold Dark
  Frostling Transformation - 3 frost resistance, immunity to frozen, +10 morale, arctic walk
  
• T3 (A) Tome of Amplification
  Astral Blood - Attunement: Fortune
  
• T3 (C) Tome of Pandemonium
  Vessels of Chaos - +10% damage per negative status effect on target
  
• T3 (O) Tome of Sanctuary
  Anointed People - +3 Status resistance, +3 Spirit resistance
  
• T4 (M) Tome of the Golden Realm
  Gold Touched - +2 resistance
  
• T4 (C) Tome of Chaos Channeling
  Scion of Flame - 4 Fire resistance, Vengeful flames (2 fire damage against attacker & 30% burning), Fiery Wake, Immunity to burning

Starting Tome and Society Traits

From this point on in the guide, instead of general advice, everything is hyper specific to the sample builds I've provided in the following sections.

Starting Tome - Tome of Enchantment

There are three reasons I always go this tome.

First reason is because of its Materium Affinity. I always grab Tome of Transmutation because it gives me access to every magic material I need and in order to grab Tome of Transmutation I need 3 materium affinity. This tome gives me 2.

The second reason is because of Awakened Tools. +20 production literally doubles your fledgling cities' production speed. And after that they still provide +30~50% increase in production speed. Faster buildings mean faster everything because your city structures are responsible for 100% of your high tier unit acquisition and early game income and getting all of these quicker is just so good I can't see myself going any other tome.

The third reason is Sundering Blades. It's basically a -50% damage reduction to to tanky enemies. If the enemy has 5 def, this drops them down to 0 def, doubling your damage. The impact this unit enchantment has on the game is not really noticeable until you've played Chosen Destroyers. It's the difference between getting completely wiped by high def enemies even when you outnumber them 3:1 and winning with barely any losses which is a HUGE difference. Sundering Blades is contender for best unit enchantment in the game. It does fall off late in the game because Unit Enchantments significantly skews your damage to non-phys but until then this Unit Enchantment is too essential.

Copper Golems are the cornerstone of my Chosen Destroyers early game. Two things makes them stand out the most.
1. Unlike most other summon spells you are guaranteed to start with Summon Copper Golem.
2. Their upkeep is gold not mana.
Your mana income is a lot lower than your gold income especially at the start which is why if you use summons with a mana upkeep, you're gonna run out of mana after like... 2. But Copper Golems? You can spam stacks and stacks of them out early game and still keep going. I currently have no idea how Chosen Destroyers can reliably succeed without both Summon Copper Golem and Sundering Blades.

So yeah, I love Tome of Enchantment. Please note that my non-Chosen Destroyers builds do NOT utilize Copper Golems. Your racial T1 is always better than Copper Golems due to their lower model count and their ability to benefit from racial traits which is HUGE.

Society Traits

Imperialists - In my 3 city only strategy, this society trait essentially translates to +60 gold per turn at the beginning of the game. More if you add in the city stability bonuses and the Metropolitan Society Empire skill. That +60 gold per turn is responsible for paying for both my increased city building speed caused by Awakened Tools and my full sized army right from the start. With this trait I can afford 3 full stacks of units right from the get go and still have gold leftover to produce buildings non-stop. This society trait also lets me delay building the +gold buildings until after I build my +mana buildings.

Without this Society Trait, you are going to have to intentionally limit your army size and keep an eye on your gold income and prioritize +gold buildings over mana.

This society trait just simplifies so many things I think it's the best Society Trait for new players.

Also, the 1 Order affinity gets you an extra Whisper Stone.

Prolific Swarmers - Gold upkeep is the bottleneck of your army size. If your gold income is less than 150 gold per turn then you're gonna have to start making your cities take turns doing merchandising because you're gonna run out of gold. So this society trait essentially translates to a 20% increase in army size. Even with this trait I struggle to maintain a full sized army of high tier units in the mid game which is why I think this is the second best Society Trait for new players.

The -20% upkeep reduction is not capped by the maximum -50% upkeep reduction you get from Empire Developments. Meaning you can get -70% upkeep reduction rather than -50% if you grab this Society Trait. So if you want the lowest upkeep possible you have to grab this Society Trait.

The Chaos affinity is fantastic too. It lets me skip a Chaos Tome with the Barbarian Culture.

Other Society Traits

This is not a comprehensive list. This is just my experience with the few other Society Traits I played around with.

Cult of Personality - The most powerful Society Trait in the game. I made a dedicated section for it. Basically it increase your Pantheon Hero cap by 3 letting you roflstomp with 5 Ascended Rulers. This is in my opinion the strongest Society Trait in the game bar none by a considerable margin.

Chosen Destroyers - My favorite Society Trait to the point that I made a section in this guide just for it. Before the Ogre update, razing a city only got you +40 gold, mana, and research per turn PERMANENTLY and you needed to raze 3-4 cities to comfortably roflstomp but after the Ogre update, you now get +40 gold, mana, and research for every 3 pops you raze! Which means you can comfortably roflstomp after razing only 1 city with 9-12 pops! Due to this it is my opinion that Chosen Destroyers is now the 2nd most powerful Society trait for Player v.s. A.I. with Cult of Personality being the first. For reference, in a recent game, playing completely normally, I got Tome of the Archmage by turn 71 with 1000+ research per turn. No other Society trait comes even close other than Cult of Personality.

Runesmith - A significant portion of your upkeep is from Unit Enchantments. This Society Trait capsizes that and all non-mythic unit builds are gonna revolve around Unit Enchantments. In addition it reduces the research cost of all Unit Enchantments by a considerable amount letting you blitz through the research tree since a LOT of Tomes have 2 Unit Enchantments. The 1 Materium Affinity lets you grab Tome of Transmutation with only 1 pure Materium Tome.

Umbral Disciples - My favorite non-Cult-of-Personality Shadow Affinity Society Trait. I get it when I want to skip Tome of Cryomancy in any of my builds. You can turn off the ugly visuals of the Minor Transformation in your Spellbook. I kill the free Splittering I get myself on turn 1 and use the corpse to fuel Deathcaller because the Splitterling, having only 35hp, is worthless in combat, and Deathcaller, having only a 1 turn cooldown, will be up by the time the fighting starts.

Also, the early +10 Mana from the Special Province Improvement makes a HUGE difference, the Gloom Terrain saps away enemies sieging your cities making them easy to wipe out, and you are completely immune to Gloom Terrain yourself. All in all, just a great Society Trait.

Mana Channelers - Halves the mana cost of summons so if you hit 30 mana per turn you can summon a Copper Golem every turn without pause. Also gives +20% exp gain for Magic Origin units. It used to give +1 rank on summoned magic origin units which I liked better but whatever.

Perfectionist Artisans - NOT a fan. Getting your T3 racial units out as quickly as possible is MANDATORY on Brutal Difficulty and this doubles the time it takes for you to do that so hard pass. It already takes like the entire game to build all your buildings and if you want the extra gold go Imperialists. After the early game gold becomes a non-issue.

Druidic Terraformers - NOT a fan. The -20% upkeep on elementals does not break the global cap of -50% upkeep reduction and you get -40% from Logistic Training + Shadow Binding. And then there's the Shepherd ambition giving -20% as well. It does beef up your cities production by a very noticeable amount however but Nature affinity imo is worthless.

Barbarian Early Game part 1

Introduction

I only play Barbarians because they do the most damage. For 100% crit builds (Ranger Hero, T3 Melee) they have Savage Strike which increases the base damage of your crits by +4 blight damage and +8 for single hit weapons, and for recruited army builds (Ironclads) they have Shrine of the Wargod which increases all produced units' damage by +2. Both of these bonuses are higher than all the other +damage gimmicks from all the other cultures so I play Barbarians exclusively.

Which is why for most of the guide we'll be only using Barbarians. If you don't want to use Barbarians then follow this guide once and get a Brutal Win under your belt and use that newfound knowledge and experience to make your own non-Barbarian builds that are capable of beating Brutal Difficulty. That is the point of this guide after all.

I will say that most cultures play identically. Spam T1, get 6 ranged T2, then switch to pure T3 until your game winning strategy kicks off. So it shouldn't be hard to adapt this section to a different culture.

The Racial Traits and Tome Selection Order depends on the build you go but everything else is identical for all my builds which is why I grouped them all here.

Throne City Build Order

• Workshop
  
• Stonemason
  
• Masonic Hall
  
  
• Battle Ritual Site
  
• Ancestral Seer Hall
  
  
• Town Hall II
  
• Tavern
  
• Town Hall III
  
• Shrine of the Wargod
  
• Bathhouse
  
  
• Blacksmith
  
• Armory
  
  
• Wizard Tower: Foundation
  
• Wizard Tower: Item Forge
  
  
• Shrine
  
• Obelisk
  
  
• Shipyard
  
• Vendors
  
• Markets
  
  
• Wizard Tower: Crypts
  
• Wizard Tower: Prison Cells
  
  
• Research Post Special Province Improvement (If you can)
  
• Academy (if you can)
  
• Monolith
  
• Mint

2nd and 3rd City Build Order

• Workshop
  
• Stonemason
  
  
• Battle Ritual Site
  
• Ancestral Seer Hall
  
  
• Shrine
  
• Obelisk
  
  
• Shipyard
  
• Vendors
  
• Markets
  
  
• Town Hall II
  
• Tavern
  
• Town Hall III
  
• Shrine of the Wargod
  
• Bathhouse
  
  
• Blacksmith
  
• Armory
  
  
• Research Post Special Province Improvement (If you can)
  
• Academy (if you can)
  
• Monolith
  
• Mint

Everyone grabs production and research first.

Then the Throne City rushes Shrine of the Wargod and draft buildings to produce Furies and Berserkers a.s.a.p.and then the Item Forge for Wands of Spawn Hatchling.

2nd and 3rd cities rush the cheap mana buildings first to quickly pay for unit enchantments and then cheap gold buildings to pay for the increasingly more expensive army.

Then Throne City gets the cheap resource buildings and the 2nd and 3rd cities build Shrines of the Wargod to increase Berserker production speed.

Then everyone gets the expensive buildings.

You get a SIGNIFICANT amount of Research from the Knowledge Extraction Empire Skill so getting Academy up is not a priority.

The above build order is NOT set in stone. Every game is different so if you're short on a particular resource, don't be afraid to switch things up.

Grab Chaos Bolstering Matrix to make your Vision of Victory give 3x Strengthen.

Barbarian Early Game part 2

Strategy

Give your whisper stone to your Throne city for more stability. Or not. If you want to engage in diplomacy and not raze everything then I guess you can use it on free cities but this guide is not going to engage in diplomacy to simplify things so give it to your Throne city and forget about it.

Build 2 outposts as soon as you can and as close to each other and the throne city as possible and turn them into cities as quickly as possible. You want land tiles not water tiles because you can't build special province improvements on water tiles so place them in the direction with more land.

Research Awaken Tools first and cast it on all 3 cities as quickly as you can. Start casting it 1 turn before your Outpost turns into a city so it finishes casting the moment the city finished establishing itself. And then follow my building build order from there.

For combat, have your 3 cities produce Warriors nonstop. You'll be needing them to fend off infestations and other AI. Stop when you reach a total unit count of 18. Use them to clear nearby encampments to get XP for your ruler.

XP is wonky in this game. XP is evenly distributed across all units but according to the Ogre update patch notes, if you have less than 6 units then the total amount of total XP you get is reduced. I guess this was implemented to prevent heroes from leveling too quickly by having them solo clear camps. I believe if you have less than 6 the units then the xp is divided as if you did have 6 units. So in other words, against a stack of 6 units, your Heroes will receive the same xp whether you clear it 4vs6 or 6vs6 so in order to not waste xp always fight with at least 6 units.

When clearing infestations, NEVER clear Brigand Camps and Pirate Coves unless you are planning on actively waging war with the AI early. Brigand Camps and Pirate Coves will supply you with Hero kills all game which not only give 150 knowledge per kill thanks to the Knowledge Extraction Empire Skill, but it also gives a lot of hero equipment to disenchant for essence to forge your endgame gear with. And you can sell the hero corpses for 100 gold a piece. Brigand Camps and Pirate Coves are gifts that just keep on giving. Exploiting Knowledge Extraction is how you turbo through the tech tree so exploit it as best you can.

And declare war on all Free Cities for the exact same reason: periodic free Hero kills from war parties.

Clear all other types of infestations as soon as you can. They are nothing but a pain in the ass.

If you're ever short of money, sell Hero corpses. If that's not enough, depending on your build, you might want to sell some of your gear to one of the AIs. Rangers probably should not because you have soooooo many things to craft but Ritualists probably should because they only need the summoning wands. When selling gear, shop around, AI you have better relations with give better prices.

After your Throne City gets Shrine of the Wargod, produce 6-9 Furies depending on whether your Hero is melee or ranged. All 3 of your armies should be 3 melee and 3 ranged. Only have your Throne City produce furies because it's the only one with Shrine of the Wargod. Ritualists count as melee units because their summons are melee and they don't attack themselves.

Once that's achieved have your Throne City start producing Berserkers while replacing any Furies that die with Berserkers.

Once your 2nd and 3rd cities get Shrine of the Wargod replace 100% of your units with Berserkers.

We get Furies instead of Berserkers first because of both money and recruiting speed. Trying to just grab Berserkers will result in you being too weak because they take too long to build without Armories, Berserkers are only good in large numbers, and they're too expensive before you get all your gold buildings up.

IMPORTANT: Barbarian cities have something called RITUAL OF ALACRITY. It heals 50% of every unit in a stack that is standing in the center of a city or outpost AND it completely refreshes their movement points. To activate it, click your city/outpost, click the gear icon located at the middle-right edge of the city UI and click Ritual of Alacrity. Use this to keep all of your Berserkers healthy after every fight. They're gonna need it. Badly.

Once you get Artisan Armaments and Flameburst Weapons your Berserkers should have a 100% crit chance or close to it depending on whether you're going Rangers or Ritualists. That's fantastic and it's boosted by your culture's built in ability: Savage Strike.

What you do after this point depends on the build.

Combat Tips

Early game I spam Song of the Reckless on my Phantasm Warriors, Zombies, and Copper Golems because their damage capsizes after sustaining damage due to their high model count and Berserk removes the damage penalty from casualties.

Late game I spam Visions of Victory boosted by Chaos Bolstering Matrix to give my units 3x Strengthen and 3x Fortune.

Brutal Mark is not worth casting early game because you have nowhere near 100% crit rate and casting it is gonna end up KOing your entire mana income depending on how many Copper Golems and Elementals you're using. Cast it only late game once you get your +crit rate stuff up.

If you're using only Shock Units and the enemy is stronger than you, remember to move all your units to one side of the battlefield as described in the Shock Units section.

Heroes

As of the Ogre patch, all xp is divided by a minimum of 6 so there is no benefit in clearing camps with less than 6 untis. So there's no real way to level your heroes quickly anymore.

To get the Hero class you want, every 5 turns spend 100 gold to shuffle your hero pool until you get the Hero class you want. In extreme circumstances, recruit random heroes and suicide them into the enemy. Then recruit more heroes and repeat until you get the class you want or you run out of gold.

To prevent RNG from screwing you over, recruit PANTHEON HEROES instead of regular heroes. You can recruit one of your Ascended Rulers as a Hero by paying an obscene amount of Imperium (100 Imperium + 100 Imperium/level). Cheapest is 400 Imperium at turn 11 but you should setup your 3 cities first.

Pantheon Heroes are every bit as strong as your Ruler. They get to keep their Ascension Perk, pick Ruler skills like Command, and you get to choose their Class and Ambition. They are just so much more stronger than regular heroes that you should always spend your first 400 Imperium on one.

By default you can only recruit 1 Pantheon Hero and the only way to recruit more is by going the Cult of Personality Society Trait.

Ritualists + Storm Spirits part 1

This build is for people who don't have any DLCs. Storm Spirits are the strongest Shock unit in the game, stronger than all the T5 Shock units, so naturally getting a full triple stack army of them will win you the game.

So what makes Storm Spirits the most powerful Shock unit in the game?

• They have flying movement so they can traverse any terrain with ease.
  
• They are single model units so even at 1 hp they'll deal max damage.
  
• They have a teleport which means they can ignore zone of control, dive deep into the enemy backline. surround enemies, and has the longest engagement distance in the game which means they will always get the first hit off and cripple the entire enemy army before they get to do anything. Always.
  
• Their teleport electrifies adjacent enemies, triggering Lightning Weapons' +20% damage effect
  
• Their teleported distance counts towards the +20% per tile moved damage bonus Shock units enjoy.
  
• The physical damage of their base attack gets KO'd by 3 Unit Enchantments. This has 2 implications, first is that most unit's resistance is lower than their defense so having no physical damage is a damage increase of itself, and second is that since there is no such thing as negative damage in this game, instead of losing 4 damage and gaining 8 damage, Storm Spirits will just gain 8 damage from their 4th -phys +element damage Unit Enchantment and lose nothing.
  
• As Elemental units they benefit from Shaper's Touch and the Shepherd ambition.
  
• As Magic Origin units, they benefit from Ascension:Summoner and Cosmic Overdrive (though we don't go it in this build).
  
• They have Wind Wall (+60% evasion) which makes them basically impervious to all ranged attacks.

Once you look at all of this, yeah, there's no question this is the strongest Shock unit in the game.

Storm Spirit crit chance

• +30% from Hero (Initiate, Adept, and Master of Chaos)
  
• +30% from Artisan Armaments
  
• +20% from Flameburst Weapons
  
• +20% from Morale
  
• Total: 100%

Visions of Victory can bestow +30% crit chance on Storm Spirits without high morale.

Ruler Ambition

I recommend Shepherd.

Its Major Ambition is trivially accomplished by beating a weak encampment with just your Ruler + 1 Lesser Snow Spirit (you can use more if you want) and the +20hp it gives makes your Elite Rank Lesser Storm Spirits stronger than most T3 units in the game which is amazing because of just how cheap and spammable they are. For reference, Elite Rank Lesser Storm Spirits boosted by Shepherd have 95 hp which is 5 more than base rank Berserkers!

Unlike Berserkers you can reinforce your army with Lesser Storm Spirits while it's far away from your Throne City. The -20% upkeep stacked with the Shadow Binding Empire Skill also makes your Lesser Storm Spirits significantly more affordable.

Ruler Ascension Trait

I recommend Ascension:Summoner. The summoned Phantasm Warrior buffed with Song of the Reckless makes for an excellent damage dealer and tank letting you clear camps without sustaining much damage.

Later, the trait provides +10hp and +10% damage to your Elementals which doesn't seem like much but stacked with the Shepherd Major Ambition and Champion Ruler's army boosting skills, it really adds up.

Racial Traits

• Hardy - +8 hp
  
• Tenacious - halves damage loss from casualties
  
• Fast Recuperation - +10 healing per turn

Your Ironclads are fully indpendent of Racial Traits so we grab the Racial Traits that are great for our Warriors and Berserkers to have an easier early game, and Fast Recuperation to help with healing our Ritualists.

Tome Selection Order

• (M) Tome of Enchantment - Awaken Tools, Sundering Blades
  
• (S) Tome of Cryomancy - Frost Weapons, School of Cryomancy
  
  
• (A) Tome of Evocation - Summon Lesser Storm Spirit, Lightning Weapons
  
• (M) Tome of Artificing - Artisan Armaments
  
  
• (M) Tome of Transmutation - Transmutation Circle
  
• (C) Tome of Pyromancy - Searing Weapons
  
  
• (C) Tome of Devastation - Flameburst Weapons
  
• (M) Tome of Rock - Obsidian Weapons, Earthkin
  
  
• (M) Tome of the Creator - Shaper's Touch
  
  
• (N) Tome of Roots - Poison Weapons
  
• (O) Tome of Zeal - Legion of Zeal

Storm Spirits and Ritualists have build synergy. Ritualists want 6 Materium Affinity, Storm Spirits want 8 Materium Affinity for Shaper's Touch, and all Unit Enchantments that boosts our Storm Spirits boosts the Ritualists' summons too. So that's our build goal: Tome of the Creator, Tome of Transmutation, 100% crit chance, and every +element damage Unit Enchantment in the game.

We start with Tome of Enchantment because it's the best starting Tome in the game and then we grab Tome of Cryomancy for Knowledge Extraction because Knowledge Extraction is the best Empire Skill in the game.

We grab Tome of Evocation both for Lightning Weapons and because it gives us access to the unit we intend to win the game with: Storm Spirits. Please note that there is no way to summon Storm Spirits directly so we have to summon Lesser Storm Spirits and evolve them.

We grab Tome of Artificing for Artisan Armaments and Materium Affinity. Tome of Transmutation's requirements are now met and after we grab that Master of Materium's requirements are met too, maxing out our Ritualists.

We grab Tome of Pyromancy to be able to select the Adept of Chaos signature skill and to be able to grab Tome of Devastation for Flameburst Weapons which not only gives us +20% more crit chance on our Storm Spirits, but also lets us grab the Master of Chaos signature skill for +10% more crit chance.

It's important to note that because we don't get 4 Chaos Affinity until the end of Tier 3, your first couple of heroes are going to have to grab Initiate and Adept of Materium instead of Chaos and either reset later or have the later heroes grab Adept of Chaos instead. Only the Army Leader's army wide stuff affects your units so if you want a later hero to be an Army Leader instead of the one you have now, skip all the army stuff on the hero you have now.

Ritualists + Storm Spirits part 2

We need 2 more Materium Affinity but unfortunately none of the remaining Materium Tomes give us anything that can help our Storm Spirits or Ritualists so we have to just take a hit and pick a worthless Tome. Tome of Rock is chosen because Obsidian Weapons, while worthless for our Storm Spirits because the +elemental damage Unit Enchantments put their physical damage in the negatives, our non-Storm Spirit elementals summoned by our Ritualists still benefit from it.

Once Tome of the Creator is obtained we grab the remaining +element damage Unit Enchantments to max out or Storm Spirits' damage.

You can also grab Tome of the Demon Gate to give your Ruler, Heroes, and Berserkers flight and Frenzy.

Strategy

It is important to note that because we don't get our 4th Chaos Affinity until after Tome of Transmutation, you have to grab Initiate, Adept, and Master of Materium at the start on all of your heroes instead of Chaos and once you finally get Tome of Pyromancy:

• reset your Ruler to grab Initiate + Adept of Chaos and Master of Materium
  
• reset your Heroes who still have a free reset to grab Initiate + Adept of Chaos and Master of Materium
  
• if you have less than 3 heroes who have Initiate + Adept of Chaos then have your newly recruited heroes go them instead and have your non-reset-able heroes keep their Materium signature skills. And remember to skip all the army wide skills on your non-reset-able heroes and put them in the same stack as your 1st hero so they're not the Army Leader.

Your finally army is going to be

• Ruler + 5 Storm Spirits
  
• 1 Heroes + 5 Storm Spirits, 1 Hero with Initiate, Adept, and Master of Chaos + Master of Materium.
  
• 1+ Heroes + Storm Spirits. Army Leader Hero with Initiate, Adept, and Master of Chaos + Master of Materium.

Doing all of this has an added benefit of strengthening your early game because +crit chance is terrible until you start nearing 100% where as +def is good at any value.

If you hit level 8 early, on heroes with free resets you should grab Initiate of Nature at level 8 instead of waiting for Tome of Artificing.

if your scouts get you a free animal or elemental then use that + your Ruler to complete her Major Ambition a.s.a.p.. You generally want to clear your Major Ambition a.s.a.p. not only for the governance bonus but also because it's gonna get much harder to complete it as the game goes on. If your scout did not get you a free animal or elemental then summon a Lesser Snow Spirit to complete your Ruler's Major Ambition instead. In this scenario I don't clear the weakest encampment near my Throne City until I get a Lesser Snow Spirit.

Let's talk about Elite Rank Lesser Storm Spirits. They are almost as strong as base rank Berserkers. They hit just as hard because most enemies have a much higher def than Res and your Unit Enchantments should completely KO your Lesser Storm Spirits' physical portion of their attack. They also have Wind Barrier which makes them impervious to ranged attacks but they are nowhere near as tanky (2 def) as Berserkers against melee enemies as Berserkers can seriously stack defense thanks to racial transformations (9 Def = 61% physical damage reduction. 1 base + 2 Tier III + 2 Legend Rank + 1 Adept of Materium + 2 Steelskin + 1 Earthkin).

With the Shepherd Major Ambition completed your Lesser Storm Spirits will have more hp than base rank Berserkers, closing the gap significantly. While I still put Berserkers above Shepherd boosted Elite Rank Lesser Storm Spirits, I'd say the Shepherd boosted Elite Rank Lesser Storm Spirits are superior to the vast majority of T3 units in the game and because they only cost 60 mana to summon, you can spam 1-2 of them every turn, letting you go on extended campaigns because if any Berserkers die you can just trivially replace them with a near-equivalent anytime anywhere.

Which is why once you grab the Shadow Binding Empire Skill you should summon 5 Lesser Storm Spirits and stick them into your Ruler's stack at all times not only to get a pure Shock army earlier but also because the Lesser Storm Spirits are significantly cheaper than Berserkers to recruit and maintain. And they evolve into Storm Spirits, the strongest Shock unit in the game. Though at this stage in the game don't expect your Storm Spirits to survive for long especially on auto-resolve. Auto-resolve loves to teleport your Storm Spirits by themselves into the middle of the enemy's army so if you don't have a full stack of them they are gonna kamikaze themselves to death so my recommendation is don't use auto-resolve until 100% of your units are Storm Spirits.

If you have 5 level 12 Ritualists you can also keep all your Storm Spirits alive by killing everything with only your Ritualists' summons and have the Storm Spirits hang back solely as backup. 5 level 12 Ritualists summoning everything they can and sending them all against the enemy will kill most armies by themselves. Only the toughest armies like 4 Golden Golems can survive the onslaught and even then they'll be heavily damaged and have low morale, making them easy pickings for your teleporting Storm Spirits.

And that's it. GG you win.

Rangers + Berserkers

The theory behind this build is very simple. Rangers can kill anything and everything as long as they have some kind of fodder to take some of the hits. Berserkers are great fodder thanks to their Berserk ability and can be even greater fodder with Steelskin, Goldtouched, and Keeper's Mark.

Put these two together and you have a build!

You should seriously consider making your Ruler a Ritualist instead of a Ranger because
1. Decisive Command + Conjure Greater Spirit is really that good
2. Ruler Ritualists are stupidly strong early game and only need levels to get stronger.
3. There is only a miniscule difference in power between a Ruler Ranger and a Hero Ranger where as the difference in power between a Ruler Ritualist and a Hero Ritualist is astronomical.
4. Rangers without Magelocks are subpar so if your Ruler is a Ranger your early game is gonna be subpar too
5. You need less Magelocks. You need 1 less T2 placeholder Magelock in the early game and 1 less T4 Magelock + Helm in the lategame letting you outfit all your heroes that much quicker.

Racial Traits

Since you're using Ranger heroes you have to use the mandatory Racial Traits for Rangers.

• Hardy - +8 hp. Best 1 point trait
  
• Keen-Sighted - +20% accuracy. You need it for quick reflexes, obscured, and Wind Barrier
  
• Overwhelm Tactics - +20% crit chance when next to another unit with this trait. Mandatory for 100% crit chance.

Ruler Ambition

If your Ruler is a Ritualist I suggest getting Shepherd and using at least 5 Storm Spirits

If your Ruler is a Ranger Gloryseeker is probably best.

Ruler Ascension Trait

If your Ruler is a Ritualist I suggest getting Summoner to beef up your Storm Spirits.

If your Ruler is a Ranger... I don't know. None of the ascension traits really help with Magelocks. Maybe Dungeon Keeper because it spawns a T3 unit with Undying at the start of every combat to act as your meat shield? Or maybe Deathcaller to keep generating meat shields throughout the entire battle?

Tome Selection Order

• (M) Tome of Enchantment - Awakened Tools, Sundering Blades, Spell-Tempered Shields
  
• (S) Tome of Cryomancy - Frost Weapons, School of Cryomancy
  
  
• (C) Tome of Pyromancy - Searing Weapons
  
• (M) Tome of Artificing - Artisan Armaments
  
  
• (M) Tome of Transmutation - Transmutation Circle
  
• (C) Tome of Devastation - Flameburst Weapons
  
  
• (C) Tome of the Demon Gate - Demonkin
  
• (M) Tome of the Golden Realm - Goldtouched
  
  
• (C) Tome of the Chaos Lord - Demonic Onslaught
  
  
• (O) Tome of Zeal - Legion of Zeal
  
• (O) Tome of Sanctuary - Keeper's Mark
  
• (M) Tome of Rock - Earthkin
  
• (A) Tome of Evocation - Lightning Weapons, Mana Conduit
  
• (N) Tome of Roots - Poison Weapons

The number 1 Priority is Tome of Transmutation to get your Magelocks.

We start with Tome of Enchantment because it's the best starting Tome in the game and then we grab Tome of Cryomancy for Knowledge Extraction because Knowledge Extraction is the best Empire Skill in the game.

We then grab Tome of Artificing for Artisan Armaments and Materium Affinity. Tome of Transmutation's requirements are now met and as an added bonus Adept of Materium's requirements are met too.

Next our Ranger needs 4 Chaos Affinity to grab Adept of Chaos so we grab Tome of Pyromancy for Searing Weapons and Chaos Affinity. Thanks to Barbarians and Prolific Swarmers we now have 4 Chaos Affinity.

Next our Ranger needs 8 Materium Affinity to grab Paragon of Materium so we grab Tome of the Golden Realms because out of all the remaining Materium Tomes, the Goldtouched Minor Transformation does the most.

To grab Tome of the Chaos Lord we need 8 Chaos Affinity so we need to grab 2 more Chaos Tomes. Our choices are Tome of Devastation to increase Berserker's crit chance and Tome of the Demon Gate for the Demonkin transformation which does a LOT for both your Heroes and your Berserkers. And since level 16 is still a while away we grab it before Tome of the Golden Realm.

We then grab Tome of the Chaos Lord to get Killing Momentum on all of our units especially our Rangers. Rangers with Killing Momentum makes them almost as strong as they were pre-rework. The only thing they're missing compared to before is +30% accuracy from Hero Skills.

After that, the only thing left is grabbing the rest of the +elemental damage unit enchantments for our Berserkers. But wait! Thanks to our Imperialists Society Trait we can grab Tome of Sanctuary for Keeper's Mark with only 1 Order Tome in order to make our Berserkers disgustingly hard to kill! So we grab Tome of Zeal first and then Tome of Sanctuary and then the rest of the +elemental damage Unit Enchantments.

And that's our build.

Strategy

Follow the Barbarian Early Game section and once you get Tome of Transmutation build your Magelocks and Crowns of Accuracy. Once you get 6 sets go for the win with 6 Heroes and 12 Berserkers with several stacks of Berserkers staying at home to defend your 3 cities.

The end.

You might want to the build Item Forge really early and build a couple of T2 Magelocks because they are that much better than bows. I don't actually know whether it's worth delaying Furies and Berserkers over so use your own judgement. Currently my decision making tree is:
1. If your Ranger hero starts with a melee weapon then I'd say grab Itemforge a.s.a.p. to make your Ranger hero usable.
2. If your Ranger hero starts with a bow I'd get the Item Forge after Shrine of the Wargod and maybe also after Blacksmith and Armory

Ritualists + Berserkers

This section doesn't give a full build because it's identical to the Rangers + Berserkers build except you go Ritualists instead of Rangers, and grab Tenacious instead of Keen-Sighted. Maybe even Fast Recuperation over Overwhelm Tactics.

I don't recommend going Ritualists + Berserkers because Berserkers are bad at attrition which is what you need in Brutal Difficulty. But I am mentioning it because it is viable.

If your Heroes are high level, if your Berserker mass production speed is up to par, if you move around with at least 4 full stacks of Berserkers, and you're on top of your out of combat healing, then relying 100% on Berserkers is viable because Berserkers are really good units especially after you get all their Unit Enchantments and racial transformations (11 Def = 69% physical damage reduction. 1 base + 2 Tier III + 2 Legend Rank + 1 Master of Materium + 2 Tough + 2 Steelskin + 1 Earthkin). but... still, I recommend going the other builds instead.

Ironclads don't get hit and Storm Spirits are just that good AND they have Shaper's Touch to keep them healthy but Berserkers on the other hand, it's your Heroes who actually win you the game and not the Berserkers themselves. I often found myself with 100% of my Berserkers dead and I win the fight because my Ritualist heroes summoned an army of zombies from their corpses. But again, it's viable. I've beaten Brutal with only Berserkers and 0 Pantheon Heroes. But again, it's your Ritualist Heroes who win you the game and not the Berserkers themselves.

You go Demonic Onslaught in this build not for the killing momentum but for the global range of the spell so your Chaos Bolstering Matrix can bestow 3x strengthen on all of your Berserkers.

Ironclads part 1

Ritualists can replace your entire frontline all by themselves which lets you get away with 1 Ritualist 5 ranged unit compositions.

And the ranged unit I choose is Ironclads because in my opinion Ironclads are the most powerful ranged unit in the game. The reason Ironclads are so good is because of their disgustingly high AoE damage output. Two fully buffed Ironclads will kill any and every unit with their AoE. And their regular attack is disgustingly strong too. Their regular attacks are basically Magelock Cannons that can move and shoot on the same turn with high accuracy and they hit almost as hard as maxed out Shock units right out of the gate, making their single target strike almost as good as endgame Shock Units AND it pushes enemies back a tile too, letting them cluster enemies together for their AoE attack. And, as Mythic Units, at champion rank they get Killing Momentum letting them shoot twice a turn.

So what happens is that your Ritualists' summons bait the enemy, then your Ironclads push your enemies into a cluster with their Direct Fire and then wipe them all out with their Sundering and Incendiary Barrages. Then next turn your Ironclads splatter all of your surviving enemies' brains all over the pavement with Killing Momentum. And then you win the game.

The downside of Ironclads however is that they are stupidly expensive to maintain, like really, really stupidly expensive to maintain, cost Imperium per turn, requires you to manually fight all of your battles, and they're a little luck dependent. Their AoE attack, Barrage, while having a 100% hit rate meaning no amount of stacked evasion is gonna do jack against it, has a 50% chance to scatter. Scatter is when the AoE is shifted by 1 hex in a random direction. It's not a big deal. It's annoying for sure but it's not really a big deal. Also, while you're using Overcharge, the Ironclads might stun themselves mid-barrage cutting your barrage short but that's only in the midgame. You stop using Overcharge entirely in the late game.

So for people who want giant metal battleships on land blasting everything in a fantasy setting into smithereens, this is the build for you.

Ruler Ascension Trait

I recommend Ascension:Prophet. It's like Cascading Command:Reposition except instead of giving haste it gives morale. We are already lining up all of our units for Cascading Command:Reposition, so why not add Ascension:Prophet on top of it to get 2x Strengthen on everyone?

Also, the +Morale buff when stacked with Anthem of Supremacy gets all of your units to High Morale giving them +20% crit, which, when stacked with Order Bolstering Matrix and Initiate, Adept, and Master of Chaos Signature Skills, gives your Ironclads a total of 80% crit chance.

Racial Traits

• Hardy - +8 hp
  
• Tenacious - halves damage loss from casualties
  
• Fast Recuperation - +10 healing per turn

Ironclads are fully indpendent of Racial Traits so we grab the Racial Traits that are great for our Warriors and Berserkers to have an easier early game, and Fast Recuperation to help with healing our Ritualists.

Tome Selection Order

• (M) Tome of Enchantment - Awakened Tools, Sundering Blades, Spell-Tempered Shields
  
• (S) Tome of Cryomancy - Frost Weapons, School of Cryomancy
  
  
• (C) Tome of Pyromancy - Searing Weapons
  
• (O) Tome of Faith - Chaplains, Abbey
  
  
• (M)(C) Tome of the Dreadnought - Ironclad, Tuning Kits, Warding Armor
  
• (M) Tome of Transmutation - Magic Materials
  
  
• (M)(O) Tome of the Construct - Cascading Command:Reposition, Linked Minds
  
• (O) Tome of Sanctuary - Keeper's Mark
  
  
• (O) Tome of Exaltation - Angel Transformation, Ascend Warriors
  
• (O) Tome of Supremacy - Anthem of Victory
  
  
• (C) Tome of Devastation - Flameburst Weapons
  
  
• (A) Tome of Evocation - Lightning Weapons, Mana Conduit
  
• (O) Tome of Zeal - Legion of Zeal
  
• (N) Tome of Roots - Poison Weapons

We start with Tome of Enchantment because it's the best starting Tome in the game and then we grab Tome of Cryomancy for Knowledge Extraction because Knowledge Extraction is the best Empire Skill in the game.

We need to grab Tome of the Dreadnought to build Ironclads so we grab that.

Seeing how absolutely no Unit Enchantment works on Mythic Units we go Tome of Exaltation for Ascended Warriors to level our Ironclads to Legend rank quickly and we go Tome of Supremacy for Anthem of Victory + Order Bolstering Matrix to give 3x Strengthen and 3x Fortune to all of our Ironclads

In order to grab Tome of Exaltation we need 6 Order Affinity. We get 1 from Imperialists so that leaves 5.

Tome of the Construct gives 1 Order Affinity and gives us Cascading Command:Reposition which gives all of our Ironclads and Racial Units with Linked Minds 1x Strengthen and Haste if we line them all up first. That leaves 4.

Ironclads are disgustingly expensive to maintain to the point that even with Imperialists, Prolific Swarmers, and Logistics Training we still can't afford 15 of them until lategame so we grab Tome of Faith for Chaplains who, as support units, can cast Overcharge on the Ironclads AND can cure the stun of any Ironclads that are stunned because of it. They also can give 2 stacks of Strengthen and Fortune on the Ironclad. So that leaves 2.

Since no other Order Tome helps Ironclads we grab Tome of Sanctuary for Keeper's Mark to make our summoned units more durable. Especially our zombies. And that's all the Order Affinity we need.

Ritualists need Tome of Transmutation and 6 Materium Affinity so we grab Tome of Transmutation, which also gives us our 6th Materium Affinity.

Then we grab 2 Chaos Tomes for Adept and Master of Chaos Signature Skills for +crit chance. Tome of Pyromancy has to be gotten early because we need Adept of Chaos as our level 8 Signature Skill.

And that's it. That's the build. No other Tome in the game is helpful for our Ironclads because once again Mythic Units benefit from NOTHING so we grab +element damage Unit Enchantments to beef up our Ritualists' combat summons because why not. We got literally nothing else to grab.

Ironclads part 2

Strategy

Start off by playing Barbarians as normal. You know, starting off with Warrior spam and then transitioning to Furies and Berserkers.

Build Town Hall IV, Shrine of the Wargod, and the War Foundry special province improvement (+2 rank on recruit for Constructs) before Ironclads finish researching.

Once it's done start building only Ironclads in your Throne City and have one of your other cities produce Chaplains. Goal is 6. 6 Ironclads and 6 Chaplains.

Once you get that, that's it. You win. The AI is fully incapable of beating 6 Ironclads and 6 Chaplains.

In combat, line all of your units up in a line so that Cascading Command:Reposition and Ascension:Prophet affects everyone and have your Chaplains cast Overcharge and Bless as soon as they can on an Ironclad for a total of 4x Strengthen on your Ironclads. Overcharge lasts until end of combat so you don't have to Overcharge them again. If your Ironclads ever get stunned because of Overcharge use your Chaplains to un-stun them.

Use your Ritualists' summons to bait the enemy into a cluster and have one Ironclad triple attack with Sundering Ammo and then have the next Ironclad triple attack with Incendiary Ammo. That should kill everything you face in this phase of the game.

Once you get your Transmutation Circles up get all your Ritualists Wands of Summon Spider Monarch and Summon Spider as quickly as you can for a major power spike.

Once you're rich ditch the 6 Chaplains and get yourself 9 more Ironclads. You no longer have to deal with Overcharge now. Major quality of life increase right there. Your Ritualist heroes should also be high level now or have the Wand of Summon Spider Monarch so they should be able to replace all of your Berserkers by themselves now too.

Spam Ascended Warriors to get them all to Legend Rank and go on a War Path killing every Throne City and win the game.

With 15 Ironclads you now have the luxury of using Direct Fire to push enemies into a cluster before barraging and have all your Ironclads move in a little and do 2 Barrages instead of 3 because you have so many.

And that's pretty much it.

Reapers part 1

The bottleneck of your T5 Unit count is Imperium. You only get 60 per turn and it's a ***** to try and increase this. T5 Mythic Units cost 7 imperium per turn and no upkeep reduction skill affects Imperium so T5 Mythic Units are always gonna cost 7 Imperium no matter what build you go.

60/7 = 8.57. You can only get 8 T5 Mythic Units before you go in the negative.

But all that changed with the Feudal Rework. Feudal:Monarchy makes all units in your Ruler's stack have 0 upkeep, including imperium. It's literally the only thing in the game that can reduce a T5 Mythic Unit's Imperium upkeep and with this you can add 5 more T5 Mythic Units to your army for a grand total of 8+5 = 13 T5 Mythic Units. Add in 3 heroes for Army Leader stuff and that's 16, almost a full army. And with +15 Imperium from the 3 plant Magic Materials that's 18!

This is so fascinating and never been done before that I had to make a build around it. And the T5 Mythic Unit I choose is Reapers because ever since the Ways of War DLC, Fight for Power has a 50% chance of producing a Calamity Dragon instead of a Balor and Calamity Dragons are not that great. So rather than recommend you disable a DLC to use this build or tell you to learn to live with Calamity Dragons I just went with Reapers because they're fantastic too.

Reaper's game winning strategy is simple. Move in and instant kill the entire enemy army with Finger of Death. 60% chance to kill is not impressive especially with the high status resistance of lategame enemies but add in an army leader Hero with 3 Astral Signature skills that give a total of -6 Status Resistance and your chance to kill is gonna always be 60%. With 15 Reapers that's 9 kills on average which is half your enemy's army so right from the start the battle is gonna be 18 v.s. 9.

All Reapers on the map gain a stack of strengthen from every death in combat so those 9 deaths from your opening Fingers of Death are gonna bestow 5x Strengthen to all your Reapers.

Their regular attack damage is nothing to write home about but they do ignore 50% def and res so it's above average I guess. And combined with the 5x strengthen from the Fingers of Death and +30% damage from Cosmic Overdrive, I'd say they can hit hard enough to win the game.

Please note that you need 10 x 5 = 50 souis per turn to maintain your 15 Reapers.

This build is probably the most powerful build in this guide for Story Realms especially if you grab Chosen Destroyers.

Culture

Feudal for 5 upkeep free T5 Mythic units and literally nothing else.

Society Traits

Runesmith - Because we use Magic Origin units from the very start and until the end of the game, and because the only gold upkeep unit we use are T2 or lower, Prolific Swarmers isn't that beneficial. So we go Runesmith to reduce upkeep cost AND speed up our research.

Wonder Architects - Gives you 5 Imperium per turn at the start and gives you 1 additional Materium affinity for a total of 3, letting you grab Tome of Transmutation without getting a single Materium Tome. You can change this out for a different Materium Society Trait if you want.

We don't need Imperialists because Militia are 1 upkeep per turn, 1/3 of our army is completely free, and Aspirant Knights are T2.

You can go Chosen Destroyers or Cult of Personality instead of Wonder Architects. Or get both by ditching Runesmith as well. Scions of Evil is also viable if you plan on being evil for +15 imperium per turn.

Ruler Ambition

I think Shepherd is best because Elementals have to carry your early game and getting +20hp (+40 with Ascension:Summoner and Endurance Training) on Lesser Storm Spirits is game changing as it nearly doubles their hp.

But if you want stronger Reapers, Crusader is probably best in that case for +2 spirit damage to all of your Reapers in your stack but I have trouble maxing out the renown with a Ritualist Ruler so I go Shepherd instead.

If you are dead set on getting an ambition that's good for your Reapers and don't want to go Crusader, you only have 2 other choices: Raider (+10hp heal per turn) and Instructor (+50% xp). In this case it might be better to swap Tome of Warding and Tome of Evocation in the Tome Selection Order and go Phantasm Warriors + Astral Serpents instead of Storm Spirits. Just keep in mind, maxing out Raider's renown is incredibly time consuming to the point it actually might not be viable.

Ruler Ascension Trait

I recommend Ascension:Summoner. Lets you clear camps quickly and gives +10% hp and +10hp to all the Reapers and Storm Spirits in your stack. Especially useful at the start of the game. Combined with Shepherd it almost doubles the hp of your base rank Lesser Storm Spirits.

Racial Traits

• Hardy - +8 hp
  
• Fast Recuperation - +10 healing per turn
  
• Tenacious - halves damage loss from casualties

Reapers and Storm Spirits don't benefit from Racial Traits so we go Fast Recuperation to heal our heroes and Tenacious because in my opinion it's the best offensive Racial Trait in the game.

Reapers part 2

Tome Selection Order

• (A) Tome of Evocation - Summon Lesser Storm Spirit, Lightning Blades
  
• (S) Tome of Souls - Soul Collection, Soul Well, Necrotize
  
  
• (S) Tome of Cryomancy - Frost Blades
  
• (A) Tome of Summoning - Arcane Restoration
  
  
• (S) Tome of the Great Transformation - Desecrate Structure
  
• (A) Tome of Warding
  
  
• (C) Tome of the Reaper - Summon Reaper, Harvest Population
  
• (A) Tome of Astral Convergeance - Explosive Manifestation
  
  
• (A) Tome of the Archmage - Cosmic Overdrive
  
  
• (M) Tome of Transmutation - Transmutation Circle

Reapers, being Mythic units, literally only have 3 things that boost their damage: strengthen, crits, and Cosmic Overdrive. Unfortunately we can't go crit because our signature skills have to be Astral for the -6 status resistance for Finger of Death, and we can get 5x Strengthen on all of our Reapers if we have enough of them because they get a Strengthen if something dies and with enough Reapers you're gonna kill at least 5x enemies with Finger of Death at the start. So that leaves Cosmic Overdrive.

Tome of Evocation is gotten first because Storm Spirits are that amazing.

Tome of Souls and Great Transformation are gotten solely for souls.

Tome of Cryomancy is gotten because it's a shadow affinity Tome that strengthens our shock units.

Tome of Summoning, Warding, and Astral Convergeance are gotten just for their Astral Affinity. Arcane Restoration and Explosive Manifestation seems most useful out of all of the remaining pure Astral Tomes.

Tome of the Reaper is our game winning Tome.

Then finally Tome of the Archmage for Cosmic Overdrive.

Then Tome of Transmutation to get the 3 plant Magic Materials for +15 Imperium per turn. Gotten this late because in my experience I struggled to get 13 Reapers by my 10th Tome.

I don't know what to dump research into afterwards. Maybe Anthem of Victory for 3x Fortune with Order Bolstering Matrix? Maybe Materium Tomes to get Master of Masterium on our heroes? And then +damage unit enchantments for elementals to make our combat summons stronger?

Strategy

Structure build order is mostly the same as normal except you don't have to rush Town Hall III. Our army is gonna be Militia, T2 Aspirant Knights, and T3 Storm Spirits before ditching them all for Reapers. So don't rush Town Hall III.

Spam Call Militia. It is stupidly overpowered. You get 2 per cast and they only have 1 gold upkeep. Spam them like crazy and take all infestations and cities near you. Dismiss your Defender and Archer units because they're really not much better than militias yet cost 8 times as much gold per turn.

Spam Summon Lesser Storm Spirit as well. Normally this is not possible because of their mana upkeep which is the chief reason why you go Tome of Enchantment or Horde as your first Tome because their summons have a gold upkeep instead, but thanks to your Ruler's Monarch's Dominion skill you can not only afford magic origin units but also their evolved form as well resulting in an incredibly strong early game momentum. So get 6 Lesser Storm Spirits and level them up alongside your Ruler a.s.a.p. to max out your Ruler's renown.

This is a reminder that in the Ogre patch, XP from combat is divided by a minimum of 6, so winning battles with less than 6 units just wastes xp.

And that's it. 6 T3 Storm Spirits and a ton of Militias and later Aspirant Knights should keep you alive until you get your Reapers up. Then just roll over the enemy. You probably could afford a pure Storm Spirit army instead of Aspirant Knights.

SHUFFLE research as soon as you get Tome of the Great Transformation to get Desecrate Structures a.s.a.p. Reapers cost a lot of Souls to summon and maintain

Ritualists go 3 Astral Signature skills and rush Wyvern Keeper then the 5 army leader skills and then Master of Healing and then finally Battlefield Restoration.

Balor + Calamity Dragon adaptation

Adapting this build to use Balors + Calamity Dragons instead of Reapers is easy. Just swap out 100% of your shadow tomes with Chaos Tomes. The end. My recommendation is Tome of Pyromancy, Cleansing Flame, Pandemonium, and Demon Gate. Cleansing Flame gives you 1 Order which lets you get Tome of Supremacy easier after Cosmic Overdrive.

Balors are just as good as Reapers but Calamity Dragons are significantly worse than both which is why I went with Reapers. But Calamity Dragons are strong enough to beat the game so they're viable too just not optimal. Their attacks are 8 range (which is HUGE), ignore line of sight, hit just as hard as 2 Balor melee attacks, and can achieve 80% crit rate. I view them as differently abled Ironclads. Can't move and shoot on the same turn and has no AoE but has tremendous range and doesn't have to deal with line of sight crap which cripples Ironclads.

The easiest way to amass 15 Balors/Calamity Dragons is by rapid producing Infernal Juggernauts by building the Demon Gate and spamming Fight for Power on them because Infernal Juggernauts cost gold to recruit where as Chaos Eaters cost mana which you will be short of.

Anyways, I just wanted to mention that Calamity Dragons are viable so if you want to go Chaos then go Chaos.

I'd say the main benefit of going Chaos over Reapers is that you can go Eldritch Sovereign. That -6 Ignore Status Resistance is too essential for Reapers, but 30% crit rate is not that important on Balors because most of their damage is from their 2 skills which can't crit. So if you want to use Mythic Units with Eldritch Sovereigns, I recommend you go Chaos instead of Reapers.

One thing I like about Balors/Calamity Dragons over Reapers is that theoretically they are functional without a Throne City. Reapers need to guard their Throne City because they need Mage Tower:Apex to be summoned AND they need 50 souls per turn but Balors/Calamity Dragons? You can summon 16 Demonkin Phantasm Warriors without a Mage Tower and then spam Fight for Power 15 times to turn all of them into 1 Balor/Calamity Dragon. Obviously this will never come up in a real game but I just find the fact that my Ruler can summon them without a Throne City super neat!

Chosen Destroyers: Introduction

Introduction

Chosen Destroyers are actually not that hard and after the early game they play pretty much identically as normal.

The only differences between Chosen Destroyers and normal empires are:
1. You only have 1 city so your ability to recruit units is limited so you have to rely on a lot more on summons.
2. You only have 1 city therefore only 1 Transmutation Circle which means your crafted gear are gonna be weaker. Specifically your Crowns of Accuracy are only going to give +20% accuracy instead of +30% and instead of making Wands of Summon Spider Monarch you're gonna have to make Wands of Summon Spider instead.
3. You have to go all out on razing a free city at the start.

And that's it. Everything else is literally the same. You still have to turtle because of the sheer amount of Infestations, War Parties, and AI armies attacking you prevents you going out and razing more cities. And you go city razing the same exact time non-Chosen Destroyer go city razing, which is after you get your full T3 army. And you only raze Throne Cities. You don't raze more cities than non-Chosen Destroyer builds. That's why I say Chosen Destroyers play pretty much identically as normal.

Before the Ogre update each city raze only gave +40 research, mana, and gold per turn and I comfortably roflstomp after 3-4 city razes. After the Ogre update however, you get +40 research, mana, and gold per 3 pops razed so if you raze one 9-12 pop city as Chosen Destroyers, you'll have enough resources to comfortably roflstomp just from that one city raze. And if you go ahead and raze 3-4 cities anyways, you will be swimming in so much research, mana, and gold that it's not even funny. And this is why I consider Chosen Destroyers to be the 2nd strongest Society Trait in the game for Player versus AI, the 1st best being Cult of Personality. For reference, in a recent game, playing normally, I hit Tome of the Archmage by turn 71 with 1000+ research per turn.

The AI used to rebuild every single City Ruin and releasing them as vassals, letting you farm them endlessly but after the recent updates they stopped doing this so clear every City Ruin so you can add the province to your Throne City. Free Cities usually have a Magic Material in their city province.

All the builds I mentioned in previous sections all work with Chosen Destroyers with no changes so pick your favorite and go. My recommendation is the Storm Spirit build because it was specifically designed for Chosen Destroyers. Champion Rank Lesser Storm Spirits boosted by the Shepherd Ambition are stronger than most T3 units in the game and you can spam 1-2 of them every single turn.

The one city limit doesn't really hurt Chosen Destroyers all that much thanks to summons and the new Renown mechanic. The new Renown mechanic supersizes your Throne City to a gigantic colossal mega city meaning your Throne City is going to grab all the Conduits and mines that your 2nd and 3rd cities would've grabbed which means the sole thing you're missing out on as Chosen Destroyers is the 2nd and 3rd cities' resource income from buildings. Those buildings make a massive difference in the early game but come lategame they are nothing. And 1 City Raze essentially gives as much as one non-throne city without the massive gold investment those buildings require so I'd say after 1 City Raze you break even with normal empires. And you raze your first city by Turn 12.

In my experience you've got all the resources you need to build a full Berserker + Lesser Storm Spirit army WITHOUT any City Razes. I beat Grexolis on Hard without razing a single city until turn 80 and I was able to afford a full Berserker army with only the gold and mana my Throne City was generating. It was really, really hard because my research was **** and basically my 5 high level Ritualists carried me. So 5 high level heroes + Berserkers is all you need to win the game and you get that with 0 city razes but you REALLY have to work hard on leveling your heroes quickly. High level Heroes is how you compensate for trash research.

The only real downside to Chosen Destroyers in my opinion is that they're at the mercy of Free Cities. That first Free City raze is so essential that if you don't have that (like in some of the campaign scenarios), you're gonna have a really, really hard time. Also if you have only weak Free Cities (starting fortification is 20 or lower) near you then you're gonna snowball so hard it's not even funny but if you only have strong Free Cities (starting fortification is 40 or higher) near you then you gotta wait until like turn 60 before you can start burning them all down. So whether you snowball or not is entirely dependent on map generation and completely out of your control.

Society Traits

Chosen Destroyers - Obviously, since this is a Chosen Destroyer build order.

Mana Channelers - That -50% summon cost is what lets you spam out a Copper Golem every turn from the start. +20% exp gain for Storm Spirits ain't bad either.

Culture

As of Ogre Update, Feudal is probably the strongest culture for Chosen Destroyers by a considerable margin because summon militia is so insanely strong that you can raze 2 free cities early game via auto-resolve only but we will still continue to use Barbarians for this section so you can learn how to go Chosen Destroyers with all cultures instead of just Feudal.

City Structure Build Order

• Shrine
  
• Mana Obelisk
  
  
• Workshop
  
• Stonemason
  
• Masonic Hall
  
  
• Town Hall II
  
• Tavern
  
• Town Hall III
  
• Shrine of the Wargod
  
• Bathhouse
  
  
• Blacksmith
  
• Armory
  
  
• Battle Ritual Site
  
• Ancestral Seer Hall
  
  
• Wizard Tower: Foundation
  
• Wizard Tower: Level I
  
• Item Forge
  
• Wizard Tower: Level II
  
• Chaos Bolstering Matrix
  
• Wizard Tower: Apex
  
• Wizard Tower: Prison Cells
  
  
• Monolith
  
• Mage's Guild

The above build order is NOT set in stone. Every game is different so don't follow the build order exactly and adapt instead. If you're short on a resource build the cheap buildings for that resource earlier.

Get mana first to spam Copper Golems and pay for Sundering Blades which is what you should be researching first because you cannot beat a lot of free cities without it even when you outnumber them 3:1. A high def Hero and Bastion supported by a caster Hero, a warrior, and 2 Bannerman wiped out all 3 stacks of my Warriors and Copper Golems without Sundering Blades so always research Sundering Blades first. Always. Then Awakened Tools.

After building the cheap mana buildings you max out on production.

Then you build Town Hall II, Town Hall III, Shrine of the Wargod, and Draft buildings (including research) to spam Furies and Berserkers. Be sure to use Imperium to quickly get yourself to 10 population to boost Town Hall III

Then it's whatever. Gold, Wizard Tower for Champion Rank Lesser Storm Spirits, Item Forge for Wands of Spawn Hatchling, etc.

Chosen Destroyers do not need any Research Posts so grab only Conduits. You're gonna need them to pay for your Unit Enchantment and summon upkeep.

Chosen Destroyers: Early Game

Simply put, you are not razing more than 1 city until turn 50-60. There are way too many infestations, war parties, and AI attacks to the point that you cannot leave your domain to raze cities until turn 50-60 and AI armies are so powerful and outnumber you by at least 2:1 that you need to sit in your throne city for a few turns after every fight to heal up which means that you are not going to be razing more than 1 city until turn 50-60.

Razing your first Free City

Before the Ogre update I would've recommended you rush rush rush and burn the nearest Free City down by turn 12 but after the Ogre update, I'd say let your nearest Free City fatten up to 6 pop before you burn it down for double the research, mana, and gold per turn because once again, you are not razing more than 1 city until turn 50-60.

Before I would've recommended you hurry produce your 2nd scout and siege the Free City by turn 4 to prevent it from spawning more units but now, I'd say produce the 2nd scout normally and just level your Ruler as quickly as possible while amassing a Copper Golem and Warrior army. And once you have 12 units start killing all of the Free City's units.

Kill your initial mana upkeep unit. You want 30 mana per turn a.s.a.p. to spam out Copper Golems and that starting mana upkeep unit which costs 8 mana a turn will murder that strategy. Whether you delete him outright or get him killed in a nearby camp is up to you.

Take out all the camps near the Free City because they'll join the Free City sooner or later. Try to kill all of these camps 1st while leveling your Ruler so as few of them join the Free City as possible.

Start casting Sundering Blades but don't fire it off until you start fighting the Free City's patrol stacks or war parties. Sundering Blades' upkeep is gonna murder your mana income so put off actually casting it until the last moment possible.

Once you have 12 units bait the patrol stack of the Free City far away from the city so the city stack doesn't join the fight and take them out.

Take out all War Parties the Free City spawns away from the Free City for the exact same reason.

Don't spend your Imperium on anything until turn 11 and recruit a Pantheon Hero. If you're not going to recruit Pantheon Heroes then just spend all that Imperium on increasing your Throne City's population to quickly boost all of your buildings.

Once the Free City finally hits 6 pop siege and raze it immediately for 80 research, mana, and gold per turn.

Post Free City Raze

Ok so you razed your first city. Now what? I'll tell you what, rush Town Hall III and Shrine of the Wargod immediately. Don't build anymore Warriors because you can't afford them and once Shrine of the Wargod is up start building Furies until you have 6-9. You want 3 ranged units per stack. Rangers count as ranged units but Ritualists count as melee units so if you're going Ritualists, get 9 Furies.

All of your mana is going to be KO'd by unit enchantment upkeep so don't summon anything with a mana upkeep.

While you are waiting for your 6 Shrine of the Wargod boosted Furies to finish keep spamming Copper Golems in the meantime and start clearing all the infestations near you. 3 stacks of Copper Golems can take out most infestations but they cannot take out a 2nd Free City or AI so clear all infestations near you while you wait for your Furies to be produced.

Be weary of the Infestation that spawns 2 Karaghs and 2 Swamp Trolls. I don't think you can take that Infestation out without ranged units even if you have 18 Copper Golems. That particular Infestation has way too much AoE but all other Infestations should fall to your 18 Copper Golems.

After you get your Furies, start building Berserkers. Your army progression should be:
Warriors + Copper Golems
-> Furies + Copper Golems
-> Furies + Berserkers
-> Berserkers

Do your absolute best to not let any Furies die until you've replaced your entire frontline with Berserkers. Replacing a dead Fury delays your Berserker acquisition by quite a bit.

If you have the space to raze a city that's a little bit further away, do it. Even just 1 more city raze will create a massive, massive snowball effect especially after the Ogre update. If successful you should now have enough research, gold, and mana for your full endgame army.

Try to raze another Free City instead of an AI city if possible.

When picking which AI to pick a fight with, pick the one that's getting it's ass kicked. Keep your scouts roaming the map for cities that are getting sieged and destroyed. That AI's cities should be your number 1 target if you have the space to wage war.

One important thing to note is that you cannot win multiple fights back to back because your army is going to be near dead after only 1 fight and it's possible for the AI to outnumber you 2:1 at this stage in the game and engage you twice in the same turn with a 2nd full stack of 18 units so if you want to take on an AI that's NOT getting its ass kicked by another AI you need to lure that AI's entire army to your throne city, wipe out 3 stacks, and then retreat to your Throne City to heal up while the AI is busy sieging your Throne City. You gotta do this until their entire stockpiled army is dead.

Don't forget to use Ritual of Alacrity to quickly heal 6 of your units.

Once their entire stockpiled army is dead you are now free and clear to raze all of its cities. You need to repeat this for every new AI you declare war on which is why I like to wage war with only 1 AI if possible and raze all of his cities, possibly including his Throne city, before moving onto another AI. I usually don't raze the Throne Cities though because it's so far away and it takes forever to get over their fortification and usually another AI declares war on me in that time.

And that's the entire early game strategy. After this point follow any of the builds I provided and you should beat the game.

Cult of Personality Intro

Cult of Personality is a Society Trait that increases your Pantheon Hero cap by 3 for a total of 4. Including your Ruler that's 5 heroes with Ascension Perks

That's so insanely powerful that I could not stop myself from making a build around it!

If you spend 100% of your Imperium on recruiting these Heroes and increasing Hero cap, and if you rush the Mage Tower structures then you can get all 5 by turn 52.

Let me just say, this is probably the most powerful build in the guide by a considerable margin. The 5 Rulers are so powerful that they can beat the game all on their own start to finish without an army, turning the game into a procedurally generated RPG. The one and only problem with Cult of Personality is that Story Realms don't allow Pantheon Hero recruitment but because heroes are just so much stronger than regular units, this is still the best build even without Pantheon Heroes. So if you want to minmax, this is the build to go.

I've prepared two builds for you. Champion Artificer and Eldritch Sovereign Deathcaller.

Champion Artificer

Ascension:Artificer lets your Ruler create a Bolt Repeater which does three 1-hex AoE attacks at 12-hex range (basically the entire map) for 10 damage each, and is boosted by 20% by the Ascension Perk itself for a total of 36 damage. This attack has a 1 turn cooldown so it attacks every other turn and you cannot make it shoot faster with Command.

So that's effectively a 36 damage physical 1-hex AoE nuke every other turn. Reduced by defenses. That's pathetic.

But with 5 Godirs creating 5 Bolt Repeaters... that's a 180 damage 1-hex AoE physical nuke every other turn! Not bad I say. With like 50% damage reduction from defense it's like 90 damage.

But wait! With Ritualists' Weaver skill you can get 10 Bolt Repeaters! Which gives you a 360 damage 1 hex AoE nuke every other turn! 360! Even if you cut that in half due to defense it still does more damage than any unit's hp in the entire game! Which means you get to essentially delete all units in a 1 hex AoE every other turn!

And with 3x Strengthen on 7 of your Bolt Repeaters via Chaos Bolstering Matrix boosted Vision of Victory, that's 423 damage. 5x Strengthen on those 7 with a 2nd casting of Vision of Victory is 465 damage. And there's a 30% crit chance on top of that.

So that's the strategy. 5 Ritualist Godirs summoning 10 Bolt Repeaters and annihilating everything on the map while their endless stream of summons hold the entire enemy army at bay.

You don't even need an army. These 5x Ritualist Godirs are more than capable of winning the game all on their own.

So that's your win condition. Get your 5 Ritualist Rulers to level 8. That is a stupidly easy to achieve win condition.

Eldritch Sovereign Deathcaller

At first 5x Deathcaller doesn't sound like it'll work because you're not getting 5 corpses a turn but in practice it actually does work because you can Deathcaller your own undead corpses which essentially makes every single one of your Deathcaller Skeletons immortal because if one dies, you will be Deathcallering its corpse immediately for a fresh Skeleton with full action points. So this results in an infinitely regenerating and ever growing wall of skeletons that your enemies cannot punch through resulting in a very easy win.

And if you go 5x Eldritch Sovereigns and grab Fleshweaver with all 5 of them to start with 10 Fleshlings every fight, you can make your Bone Wyverns kill all 10 and Deathcaller their corpses to start with 10 Skeletons every fight instead.

Add in Weaver and Conquerer and you got 10 Devastator Spheres for 10 more corpses! However, practically speaking, you won't be able to raise more than 10 skeletons before the fighting starts, at which point you'll have all the corpses you need so you should instead upgrade Fleshweaver to Fleshsculptor to start with 5 Flesh Abominations, a T3 unit as strong as T3 Elementals, and raise only 10 Skeletons from your 10 Devastator Sphere corpses.

And the best thing about this is absolutely none of your units' deaths will affect moral. Enemies will always rout because they only lose morale and never gain any.

Also, 5 Elritch Sovereigns spamming their Forgotten Tome skills is game winning in its own right. With your Eldritch Sovereigns raining down powerful global AoE nukes, annihilating your enemies before they even get to your 20 combat summons, there is a 0% chance you will lose. Ever.

This is so powerful that I managed to beat Brutal Difficulty without an army even on auto-resolve. That's right, 5 Eldritch Sovereigns solo'd every endgame Brutal Stack back to back on the same turn on auto-resolve.

Downsides of Cult of Personality

There are six downsides to Cult of Personality.

First, each Renown level of your Heroes gives them +1 skill point but it also comes with a +10 gold per turn upkeep. Permanently. So 5 max renown heroes will cost 150 gold upkeep permanently.

Second, because we're spending 100% of our Imperium on recruiting Pantheon Heroes, you're gonna have 0 Empire Skills (other than Knowledge Extraction. That one is so good you prioritize it over your Pantheon Heroes) for the majority of the game. So you're gonna really struggle maintaining a full T3 army. Combined with the first downside you won't be able afford a T3 army until lategame. You're gonna have to try to win with only Heroes and T1 units.

Third, because we get Logistics Training on our heroes so late (level 11) it's gonna be a real struggle to pay for T3 units' upkeep.

Fourth, because we need Imperium so badly we rush Wizard Tower first meaning we can't get a T3 army early even if we could afford it.

Fifth, we are SEVERELY mana starved because Wizard Tower costs way too much mana to build and we need them up a.s.a.p. for Imperium so we're gonna have to hold back on unit enchantments and summoned Elementals until you bank all the mana you need to build the Wizard Towers first. And there's no way you're gonna boost Wizard Tower Apex (16 pops) so you're gonna have to build it the hard way.

Sixth, any army without a hero in it has -20 Morale which immediately puts them in fumble range. If you ever fought a battle with 0 gold/mana and a negative gold/mana income you'd know that fumble = auto-lose. I've seen full 18 stacks of T3 units that roflstomps armies with no losses get completely wiped because I accidentally hit negative mana income. So if you go Cult of Personality you should pretty much expect to lose 100% of fights where you don't have a hero even if you are completely maxed out on Unit Enchantments.

If you notice, all six downsides are completely negated by having no army until the lategame. So don't get an army until lategame.

Society Traits

Chosen Destroyers - I don't want to spend 400 Imperium on founding cities. I want to spend it on Pantheon Heroes so we go the only single city Society Trait in the game: Chosen Destroyers.

Your Rulers are stupidly strong early game powerhouses that they'll be clearing infestations and razing cities way, way earlier than normal, leading to a truly crazy snowball effect that will make you fly through the research tiers and swim in an insane amount of resources to the point you just give up trying to spend it all.

IMO Chosen Destroyers is the 2nd best Society Trait in the game for Player versus AI. For reference, in a recent game, I got Tome of the Archmage by turn 71.

Please note that if you go Chosen Destroyers you won't be able to create a Wand of Summon Spider Monarch.

Cult of Personality - For obvious reasons.

Cult of Personality Artificer Champion part 1

Ruler Ambition

I recommend 3 Shepherds and 2 easy to max out Ambitions like Challenger, Conquerer, Defender, and maybe even Fearmonger. Shepherds for your lategame Storm Spirit army and 2 easy to max out skills because Shepherd does not stack and only the army leader gets renown from evolving units in their stack.

A level 12 Shepherd Ritualist hero can probably solo a 6 man stack by herself so when she does hit level 12 summon a Lesser Magma Spirit and then ram them together into any single stack to complete her Major Ambition.

Culture

I still go Barbarians because Visions of Victory boosted by Chaos Bolstering Matrix is the easiest way to get 5x Strengthen on 7 of your 10 Bolt Repeaters.

And because Brutal Mark increases the damage of your Storm Spirits the most than any other Cultures' perks.

Racial Traits

• Hardy - +8 hp
  
• Fast Recuperation - +10hp per turn
  
• Quick Reflexes - +25% evasion against ranged attacks

Virtually nothing increases your Hero's healing per turn. Not Raider, not Foraging Training, only the Master of Healing hero skill does and your heroes are not gonna get that at least until level 15 and since in this build your Heroes are gonna solo pretty much the entire game we grab Fast Recuperation to get some much needed healing per turn on them.

I honestly don't know what to get as a 3rd trait. Bolt Repeaters and Storm Spirits don't benefit from racial traits. Ritualists don't deal any damage themselves so no point in getting any +damage traits. Storm Spirits don't benefit from Athletics so no point in going that. I used to get Resistant before the nerf but now I think I should just get Quick Reflexes since that seems like the best defensive option. If you can think of a better Racial Trait then by all means grab it over this.

Tome Selection Order

• (M) Tome of Enchantment - Awaken Tools, Sundering Blades
  
• (C) Tome of Pyromancy - Searing Weapons
  
  
• (M) Tome of Artificing - Artisan Armaments
  
• (M) Tome of Rock - Obsidian Weapons
  
  
• (M) Tome of Transmutation - Transmutation Circle
  
• (A) Tome of Evocation - Summon Lesser Storm Spirit, Lightning Weapons
  
  
• (C) Tome of Devastation - Flameburst Weapons
  
• (S) Tome of Cryomancy - Frost Weapons, School of Cryomancy
  
  
• (M) Tome of the Creator - Shaper's Touch
  
  
• (N) Tome of Roots - Poison Weapons
  
• (O) Tome of Zeal - Legion of Zeal

We start with Tome of Enchantment because it's the best starting Tome in the game.

Unlike every other build in this guide this build starts with 1 Shadow Affinity allowing us to skip Tome of Cryomancy in its entirety and get a better Tome.

Because the heroes in this build are gonna level really, really quickly, we need to prioritize the required affinities for Signature Skills before everything else. Which is why we grab Tome of Pyromancy for Adept of Chaos and then Tome of Rock and Artificing a.s.a.p. to hit 6 Materium for Awaken Earth. We can't go Adept of Materium first and then reset to Adept of Chaos because none of your Pantheon Heroes are recruited at level 1 therefore all of them spends their free reset immediately on recruitment.

Since there are no other Tome that increases the strength of our Pantheon Ritualists and since we got pretty much the same Tomes as our Storm Spirit build we might as well just go Storm Spirits since they're the strongest Shock unit in this game and everything that boosts them boosts the Ritualists' combat summons as well.

We grab Tome of Transmutation for Wands of Summon Spider and to achieve Materium Affinity 8 for Tome of the Creator. Please note that because we pop weaver at turn 2 we won't be getting that much mileleage out of it unlike all the other builds in this guide.

We grab Tome of Evocation to get access to Storm Spirits. Gotten this late because our Heroes don't need an army.

We grab Tome of Devastation to get our crit chance up to 80% and achieve 6 Chaos Affinity for Master of Chaos

We now got every we need, and Demonkin Transformation does not apply to our Pantheon heroes so there's no point in getting that, therefore it's time to grab the rest of the +damage Unit Enchantments to beef up our Storm Spirits with.

Alternatively you can just copy and paste my Reaper build if you want to use Reapers instead of Storm Spirits. Your Pantheon Heroes won't be able to solo the game but you'll have Reapers instead. Go Feudal instead of Barbarian in that case.

NOTE: Since Ogre Update, Cosmic Overdrive boosts summoned Bolt Launchers now so if you want to 5v18 the entire game without Storm Spirits, go Cosmic Overdrive

Ritualist Skill Build

• 2:Raise Dead
  
• 3:Zombie Keeper
  
• 4:Wyvern Keeper
  
  
• 4:Conjure Astral Ward
  
• 5:Fortified Summons
  
• 6:Conjure Lesser Spirit
  
• 7:Conjure Greater Spirit
  
  
• 8:Astral Bond
  
• 8:Weaver
  
  
• 9:Decisive Command
  
  
• 10:Restore
  
• 11:Bolstering Support OR Healing Support
  
  
• 12:Master of Materium: Awaken Earth
  
• 12:Obscuring Flora
  
  
• 13:Swift Restoration OR Empowered Support
  
• 14: Master of Healing OR Resurrecting Support
  
  
• 15:Experienced Leader
  
• 16:Logistics Training
  
• 16:Foraging Training
  
• 17:Endurance Training
  
• 18:Offensive Formation
  
  
• 19: Infested Summons

Remember, you get 3 extra skill points from Renown so you should max out by level 16.

The army wide boost skills are not necessary because your 5 heroes can take out anything and everything in manual combat. Emphasis on Manual Combat. For me personally, Manual Combat is fun early but a real pain in the ass lategame so that's why I grab a full army even if I don't need it solely so I can auto-resolve most fights with Storm Spirits. And if you're gonna grab an army you should grab the army wide boost skills. It's not like you have anything better to grab.

Non-army leader heroes should skip the army leader skills and grab Battlefield Restoration instead.

With Artificers, I like to go Rejuvenating, Fortifying, and Swift Wildgrowth afterwards so I can cast Conjure Wildgrowth and Summon Bolt Repeater on the same turn.

Cult of Personality Artificer Champion part 2

Strategy

Don't clear any camps and don't get any Empire Skills except Knowledge Extraction. Knowledge Extraction will be the SOLE Empire Skill we grab before we get all 5 Pantheon Heroes.

Follow the Chosen Destroyers Build Order (mana shrine and obelisk first) until Town Hall 2. Then rush Wizard Tower:Apex solely for the Imperium income.

Lay siege to the nearest free city immediately to prevent it from spawning additional stacks. Then summon Copper Golems until you recruit your first Pantheon Hero. Then cast Sundering Blades and raze the Free City.

After burning down your first Free City DELETE your entire army and start clearing every stack you can find with only your 2 Rulers.

Build the Scholar's Guild instead of Mage's guild. We got 0 mana upkeeps to worry about when we have 0 army units.

Because you don't have an army you will be swimming in gold. Use it to rapid produce the Wizard Towers and Scholar's Guild. Or engage in diplomacy if you want. Flood an Ai with gifts and ally with them.

Keep buying Pantheon Heroes as quickly as you can even by increasing the Hero Cap with Imperium and keep leveling your Heroes. Taking out all camps and infestations with just your Heroes should level them stupidly quickly. Just beware that some infestations are capable of taking out your Heroes. Specifically Lost Wizards. Those giant tentacle monsters out range your Bolt Repeaters so they should be fought with a full army by your side.

And that's it. Once your heroes hit level 8 there should be a 0% chance you lose any battle. And once you're heroes hit level 12 it's a roflstomp. Get Storm Spirits for auto-resolve because why not and win. Or not. Eldritch Sovereigns don't need Storm Spirits to win on auto-resolve but Artificers probably do.

In combat:
Turn 1: Get into position + Summon Bolt Repeater
Turn 2: Conjure Greater Spirit + Weaver
Turn 3: Conjure Greater Spirit + Decisive Command + Astral Bond + Summon Bolt Repeater
Turn 4: Awaken Earth
Turn 5: Summon Spider Monarch
Turn 6: Summon Spider
Turn 7: Awaken Earth
Turn 8: Conjure Greater Spirit + Decisive Command + Astral Bond

Because we pop Weaver so early we don't really get to benefit much from the Wand of Summon Spider.

Against difficult fights, just like Shock Units, move all your heroes to one side of the battlefield before summoning Bolt Repeaters to increase the distance 2/3 of your enemy's army has to travel to reach you.

I'm not actually 100% sold in the above Combat Order. When I faced a stack filled with nothing but Ironclads and Golden Golems, the Ironclads reached my Ritualists and I had to have my Storm Spirits take them out. I think it might be better to prioritize getting my summoned Elemental count up instead of 10x Bolt Repeeaters. I don't know, I'm still experimenting.

Cult of Personality Deathcaller Eldritch Sovereign part 1

Ruler Type

Eldritch Sovereign - Solely for Fleshweaver to start with 2 Fleshlings, which we will kill ourselves for corpses to use Deathcaller on.

Ruler Ambition

Conquerer - Super easy to max out and the 10 Devastator Spheres you get with Weaver gives you 10 more corpses for Deathcaller.

Culture

Mystic:Attunement - We cannot utilize Flameburst Weapons because units enchanted by it explodes corpses on kill, meaning none of our Fleshlings or Devastator Spheres will leave corpses when slain by our Bone Wyverns. Eldritch Sovereigns also don't have Signature skills that give +30% crit chance to all units in your army and without both we cannot come anywhere near 100% crit rate which means going Barbarians for Brutal Strike is not worth it.

Feudal is out too. +10% damage is nothing, and For the Liege does not work on Combat Summons.

Which leaves Mystic:Attunement. Mystic:Attunement gives up to +3 elemental damage if you cast spells in combat which is much bigger than +10%.

Also, Mystic:Attunement lets you use Mystic Echoes (super easy to amass) to finish casting spells which means you can cast multiple expensive spells on the same turn! By casting multiple Phantasmal and Mass Phantasmal Rituals you can reduce the entire incoming AI armies' hp by 45% and one stack by 65%. Cast Mass Phantasmal Rituals 3 times in one turn by having it fully prepared to cast before the turn, having enough casting points to cast it in one turn, and having enough Mystic Echoes to quicken it.

If you don't care about that, you can instead use all these Mystic Echoes to cast as many Dark Knowledge Rituals as possible to get Cosmic Overdrive as early as possible. With the Ogre update giving all 5 of your Eldritch Sovereigns +10 global casting points for a total of +50, you can cast an incredible number of Dark Knowledge Rituals throughout the game. In my most recent game I was able to cast 23 Dark Knowledge Rituals and get Cosmic Overdrive by turn 70.

If you don't care about that either, you can instead use Mystic Echoes to cast an ungodly amount of Necrotize and Explosive Manifestations in combat. Explosive Manifestation is probably the best spell in the game. At first it sounds underwhelming but it's actually a fantastic Ruler sniper. The T3 melee unit with Unit Enchantments summoned right next to the enemy Ruler is gonna hit like a truck in addition to the 40 damage it does immediately on spawn with Astral Amplification Lens. And then afterwards your enemy's entire stack is gonna spend their entire turn trying to kill the unit, holding all of them in place for a full turn.

If you don't care about that either then well, like I said, it gives +3 elemental damage to all of your units including Archers and Battlemages so... that is reason enough alone to go this.

Lastly it gives you 2 astral affinity, letting you skip an Astral Tome to grab Cosmic Overdrive.

Racial Traits

• Hardy - +8 hp
  
• Tenacious - halve damage penalty from casualties
  
• Fast Recuperation - +10hp per turn

Virtually nothing increases your Hero's healing per turn. Not Raider, not Foraging Training, only the Master of Healing hero skill does and your heroes are not gonna get until at least level 16 and since in this build your Eldritch Sovereigns are gonna solo the entire game without an army we grab Fast Recuperation to get some much needed healing per turn on them from the start of the game.

Your skeletons created from Deathcaller not only have your racial traits but they also benefit from racial transformations which means we should go Spawnkin because it gives +20% damage to all of our skeletons instead of just Melee or just Archers or just Battle Mages and Tenacious is mandatory for any Spawnkin builds.

Tome Selection Order

• (S) Tome of Necromancy - Soul Collection, Necrotic Magic, Soul Well
  
• (C) Tome of the Horde - Spawnkin
  
  
• (O) Tome of the Beacon - Mighty Meek
  
• (S) Tome of Cryomancy - Frost Weapons, Frost Arrows, School of Cryomancy
  
  
• (A) Tome of Evocation - Lightning Weapons, Lightning Evocation
  
• (A) Tome of Scrying - Guided Projectiles
  
  
• (A) Tome of Astral Convergeance - Explosive Manifestation, Astral Attunement
  
• (O) Tome of Zeal - Legion of Zeal
  
  
• (A) Tome of the Archmage - Cosmic Overdrive
  
  
• (C) Tome of Pyromancy - Searing Weapons, Fire Arrows
  
• (N) Tome of Roots - Poison Weapons, Poison Arrows
  
• (C) Tome of Revelry - Bloodfury Weapons
  
• (A) Tome of Ampfliciation - Amplified Arrows
  
  
• (M) Tome of Rock - Obsidian Weapons
  
• (M) Tome of Artificing - Artisan Weapons, Siege Magic
  
• (M) Tome of the Dungeon Depths - Raiders of the Deep
  
• (A) Tome of the Crucible - Meteor Projectiles

Unlike Champions and Wizard Kings, the Eldritch Sovereign's Signature Skills have no affinity requirement so we can skip the 3 Materium Tomes we always get.

We start with Tome of Necromancy so we can start casting Thrall Effigy as early as possible to get as many Thralls as possible to cast as many Dark Knowledge Rituals as possible. Also Necrotize is a game winning spell and imo one of the best combat spells in the game.

Then we get Tome of the Horde for +20% damage to our Skeletons.

We get Tome of the Beacon as quickly as we can because not only is Mighty Meek the biggest damage boost for T1 units, but it also boosts all of our Skeleton Types simultaneously instead of just Melee or just Battle Mages. So it's the best Tome for Skeletons.

Then Tome of Cryomancy to get Death Magic, Dark Vigor, and Exalted by Shadows earlier.

Then Tome of Evocation, Scrying, and Astral Convergeance to get Quickening earlier.

Then Tome of Zeal because it boosts both melee and ranged units with 1 Unit Enchantment.

Then finally Tome of the Archmage for Cosmic Overdrive.

Afterwards we dump our excess research into +damage unit enchantments.

Cult of Personality Deathcaller Eldritch Sovereign part 2

Eldritch Sovereign Skill Build

• 1:Raise Dead
  
• 2:Zombie Keeper
  
• 3:Wyvern Keeper
  
  
• 4:Fleshweaver - 2x Fleshlings for 2x corpses for Deathcaller
  
• 4:Eldritch Phase I - so we can reposition and attack or use mind control on the same turn
  
  
• 4:Conjure Astral Ward
  
• 5:Fortified Summons
  
• 6:Conjure Lesser Spirit
  
• 7:Conjure Greater Spirit
  
  
• 8:Forgotten Tome of Curses - Solely for access to Exhume Undead
  
• 8:Exhume Undead - Summon a T3 Lost Soul or Banshee
  
  
• 8:Astral Bond
  
• 9:Weaver - Lets you get a 2nd Devastator Sphere, Exhume Undead, Forgotten Tome Skill, and Conjure Greater Spirit
  
  
• 10:Eldritch Caster I
  
• 11:Eldritch Caster II
  
  
• 12:Fleshsculptor
  
• 12:Avatar of Nature
  
  
• 12:Forgotten Tome Mastery
  
• 13:Tentacled Escape
  
  
• 14: Status Resistance I
  
• 15: Status Resistance II
  
  
• 16:Forgotten Tome of Sorcery
  
  
• 16: Status Resistance III
  
• 16: Battlefield Restoration
  
  
• 17:Mass Phantasmal Ritual I - +10% damage
  
• 18:Mass Phantasmal Ritual II - +10% damage

One of your Eldritch Sovereigns should get Eldritch Rituals at level 10

In one of my games, auto-resolve time shot up to 2+minutes. I think the AI explores every single possible combination of moves before choosing one and I think the sheer nujmber of abilities Eldritch Sovereigns have skyrockets this. If you watch your auto-resolve battles, you'll see that the game freezes during the start of your turn for a little while before everything starts moving again meaning it's the AI decision making that makes auto-resolving take 2min+.

So I did some experiments. On a turn where I had to fight three 18-ish unit stacks back to back oin the same turn, auto-resolving took
No Restoration: 4 minutes 42 seconds
Battlefield Restoration: 4 minutes 37 seconds
Resurrecting Support: 5 minutes 13 seconds
Swift Restoration: FAIL
Battlefield Restoration + Resurrecting Support: 5 minutes 43 seconds

So from this we can conclude that Battlefield Restoration won't increase your auto-resolve time, Resurrecting Support will increase your auto-resolve time by more than a minute, and Swift Restoration will get you killed.

I get Battlefield Restoration because all of our combat summons are permanent duration so they benefit from regeneration, and because it's a great alternative skill to use when you draw a dud Forgotten Tome skill.

Personally, I don't get Restoration because you have enough healing per turn from Fast Recuperation and Avatar of Nature, and in all my years of playing I never once found myself using Restoration in combat because I never need it so what's the point of sky rocketing our auto-resolve time for something we don't need?

Forgotten Tomes

Forgotten Tomes, being Global range, need to make an impact turn 1. Otherwise you need to wait around doing nothing until the fighting actually begins, and when it does your Eldritch Sovereign has better things to do than buff your units. This is why Forgotten Tome skills that buff units are worthless trash. With that in mind...

• Forgotten Tome of Sorcery
  
  • In my opinion Sorcery is the best Forgotten Tome.
    
  • Astral Rift is Explosive Manifestation without the 40 damage nuke on spawn and is just as good. It summons a T3 Astral Serpent or Siphoner and is definitely the strongest single target damaging skill in the game especially after you get your Unit Enchantments up, and your enemy's entire army will spend their turn clustering around the summoned unit afterwards to kill it, wasting their turn.
    
  • Cosmic Barrage is the strongest direct damage AoE skill among all the Forgotten Tomes.
    
  • Astral Storm is the dud. It does NOT benefit from +% damage and takes 3 turns to do its full damage and you can't cast a 2nd Astral Storm while it's ongoing, meaning any additional Eldritch Sovereign who gets Astral Storm is gonna be worthless until the next cycle change. This is why it's imperative that your 2nd Forgotten Tome has no duds.
• Forgotten Tome of Pestilence
  
  • In my opinion Pestilence is the 2nd best Forgotten Tome.
    
  • Rot Away is a great global range single target nuke. Cast it on the enemy Ruler to kill it before it gets a turn.
    
  • Mass Plague doesn't do that much damage but it diseases enemies, reducing their resistance by 4, which greatly enhances the damage of your other Eldritch Sovereign's nukes.
    
  • Debilitate significantly enhances the damage of your other Eldritch Sovereign's nukes.
    
  • The main problem with Pestilence is that a LOT of enemies are immune to poison and disease which will make the Pestilence skills very lackluster against them. But unlike Arcfire, all 3 skills are live even against poison and disease immune enemies and that's why in my opinion it's the 2nd best Forgotten Tome. Because it can always do something meaning there are no duds.
• Forgotten Tome of Arcfire
  
  • Most of the damage of Arcfire skills come from the two damage over time effects: burning and electrified. As a result, they don't really benefit from +% damage.
    
  • Arcfire Typhoon has massive AoE and sets the ground burning and electrified. At a minimum enemies are gonna take a total of 40 damage from this, and add 24 damage for each additional stack of burning and electrified they get from traversing the burning and electrified terrain.
    
  • Blazing Chain Lightning hits 4 units for 84 damage across 3 turns.
    
  • Arcfire Weapons is the dud. It's a buff that gives +4 flat damage boost to your units in a 1-hex AoE. This skill is the reason why I consider Arcfire worse than Pestilence and a grab-at-level-16-only Forgotten Tome. Because if gotten at level 8 there is a 33% chance your Eldritch Sovereign is worthless for the next 4 turns.
• Forgotten Tome of Curses
  
  • After the Ogre update, this is either the best Forgotten Tome or 2nd worst Forgotten Tome. I can't decide.
    
  • This Tome is bad because the Curses are bad. First their AoE is only 1 hex and not 2 hex like the other Forgotten Tome nukes. Second, they don't do much damage. And third their effects aren't that great.
    
  • Flame Hex does the least amount of damage and hexed units will take 8 more fire damage from every attack 50% of the time. So on average its a +4 flat damage boost that is unaffected by Strengthen and the like. This is worse than Arcfire Weapons. The only saving grace is that it can trigger from your other Eldritch Sovereign's nukes.
    
  • Frost Hex is just trash. Chance to proc is just too low to be useful.
    
  • Necro Hex is the best one. It deals the most damage and spawns zombies if the unit hit by this dies which can quickly snowball into an easy win if you kill these units first. But you only have a 33% chance of getting this, it's still only 1-hex AoE so you'll have trouble hitting more than 3 in one cast if even that, and you have to actually kill the units to start benefiting from this.
    
  • So why is it contender for the best Forgotten Tome? Because it gives access to Exhume Undead at level 8. At level 8 hands down this is the best Forgotten Tome. And with Weaver you can get 2 uses out of it every battle.
    
  • So why is it a contender for 2nd worst Forgotten Tome? Because at level 16 Eldritch Sovereigns don't have the action points to spare for Exhume Undead because they're too busy melting the enemy army with global range nukes. Sorcery/Pestilence/Arcfire Eldritch Sovereigns will be melting the enemy army at global range and clearly Curses is bad for this.
    
  • My current opinion is you should always get Curses at level 8 because early game is the hard part. You already have too much overkill as it is lategame so I recommend grabbing the early game option instead of the lategame one.
• Forgotten Tome of Blessings
  
  • This Forgotten Tome is the worst Forgotten Tome by far because it's nothing but buffs and heals.

Cult of Personality Deathcaller Eldritch Sovereign part 3

Strategy

Check the Cult of Personality Champion Artificer part 2 Strategy section for the macro strategy.

Eldritch Sovereigns get to keep their level 4 Signature skill when they ascend so if you ascend your Eldritch Sovereigns with Fleshweaver then they will spawn with 2 Fleshlings right from the get go at level 1.

As mentioned many times above, kill your own Fleshlings with your Bone Wyverns to start with 10 Skeletons. Have your Eldritch Sovereigns stay back and cast their Forgotten Tomes while the enemy approaches you.

Early game use Eldritch Phase to get enemies into Eldritch Mind Control range or to get within 1 hex of your enemy, cast Conjure Greater Spirit, and then protect yourself with Astral Ward immediately after. Possess the resulting Elemental next turn instead of this turn so they die on the same turn they despawn.

Use Weaver to double up on your Forgotten Tome skills and Exhume Undeads.

Your Eldritch Sovereigns, being Magic Origin units, can astral bond each other but please note that they can't be both a receiver and the giver of the bond. So if an Eldritch Sovereign receiving the bond casts Astral Bond on another target, the previous astral bond will end.

At level 8, once I exhaust my Forgotten Tome skill and Exhume Undead, I like to do what I call a "super dive" which is
Turn 1: Conjure Astral Ward
Turn 2: Eldritch Phase near the enemy, Deathcaller a corpse, then Conjure Greater Spirit + Astral Bond + Weaver.
Turn 3: Deathcaller another corpse, cast Possession on your conjured elemental, Eldritch Phase near the enemy and then Conjure Greater Spirit + Astral Bond + Conjure Astral Ward. Be sure to disconnect your previous Astral Ward first so you can connect the new Astral Ward to your Eldritch Sovereign.
Turn 4: cast Exhume Undead

End result: 2 Skeletons, 1 T3 Undead, and 2 T3 Elementals all while under the protection of Astral Wards.

At level 12 get Fleshsculptor. It may seem like a bad idea at first because you're trading 2 skeletons with Mighty Meek and Spawnkin for 1 Flesh Abomination, but Flesh Abominations are as strong as T3 Elementals and they're permanent duration, meaning you can resurrect them to "resummon" them so to speak so they're superior to Awaken Earth in every way since they have a 100% uptime on your enemy's turns while Awaken Earth doesn't. Also you can buff them since they don't go poof after 3 turns.

Also you got 10x Devastator Spheres from Conquerer + Weaver for corpses and adding 10 more corpses from Fleshlings is just too much. You need to spam Raise Dead to utilize that many corpses and spamming Forgotten Tomes is always better than Raise Dead so it's not even a debate. Always get Fleshsculptor.

Also, if all of your Eldritch Sovereigns keep Fleshweaver, then you need to split your Eldritch Sovereigns into 2 armies to get all 10 Fleshlings. If they're all in the same army you only get 7.

Also Puppeteer is completely worthless because all of our combat summons except our elementals are infinite duration and Puppeteer's Possession is gonna kill off all of them when you cast it on your summoned elementals.

Once you complete Conquerer's Major Ambition:
Turn 1:

• Move your Eldritch Sovereigns into position. Put 1 space apart between each Eldritch Sovereign. Bone Wyverns
  
• Move your Bone Wyverns and Flesh Abominations into position, They should be 1 hex in front of your Eldtrich Sovereigns.
  
• Eldritch Sovereigns summon 5x Devastator Spheres which are immediately attacked by both your Bone Wyverns and Flesh Abominations attack your Devastator Spheres. They probably won't die this turn.
  
• Eldtrich Sovereigns cast 5x Forgotten Tome skills.

Turn 2:

• Bone Wyverns and Flesh Abominations finish killing Devastator Spheres.
  
• Eldtrich Sovereigns cast 5x Deathcaller, 5x Conjure Greater Spirit, 5x Astral Bond, and 5x Weaver.
  
• Move summoned Skeletons forward.
  
• Cast Magic Shield to trigger Scroll of Attunement.

Turn 3:

• Eldritch Sovereigns cast Greater Possession on conjured spirits.
  
• Conjured spirits move out.
  
• Eldritch Sovereigns cast 5x Devastator Spheres
  
• Bone Wyverns and Flesh Abominations kill all Devastator Spheres
  
• Eldritch Sovereigns cast 5x Deathcaller and 5x Forgotten Tome Spells
  
• Cast Chaos Bolstering Matrix boosted Fury of the Horde.
  
• Move summoned Skeletons forward.

And from here on out just cast more Forgotten Tome spells with your Eldritch Sovereigns and turn on Auto-Resolve for your 20 combat summon army.

I use 100% of my Thralls for Dark Knowledge Ritual only.

Unlike the Artificer build, 5 Eldritch Sovereigns can beat most endgame Brutal Stacks on auto-resolve without an army and definitely can beat 100% of endgame Brutal Stacks without an army in manual combat.

The reason we don't go Artificer build with Eldritch Sovereigns is because Eldritch Sovereigns need to spend all of their actions on Forgotten Tome skills and Deathcaller and Summon Devastator Spheres are free action skills where as Summon Bolt Repeater is not. I think getting 10x skeletons and 10x Forgotten Tome spells off is better than 10x Bolt Repeaters.

Cult of Personality Dungeon Keeper Eldritch Sovereign

The Giant Kings DLC added a new Ascension Trait called Dungeon Keeper. It spawns an infinite duration T3 Clay Defender, Charger, or Arbalest at the start of combat.

From a minmax perspective Deathcaller is superior to Dungeon Keeper in every way. So why am I talking about an inferior option? Because it's SIGNIFICANTLY easier to use to the point that I'd say going Deathcaller is Brutal Overkill. Just like we go 3 cities instead of putting in the extra effort for 4 cities in the above build orders, I say we go Dungeon Keeper instead of Deathcaller.

List of ways Dungeon Keeper is easier than Deathcaller

• Don't have to kill your own units for corpses
  
  • which makes battles SIGNFICIANTLY less micro intensive. All you need to micro are your 5 Eldritch Sovereigns and then turn on auto-resolve. Micro can't be easier.
    
  • also significantly improves auto-resolve results because auto-resolve AI doesn't kill your own Fleshlings and Devastator Spheres to fuel Deathcaller which is what the Deathcaller build is built around.
    
  • You don't need to use Weaver on turn 2 to turbo out 10 Devastator Spheres. You can instead save Weaver until after you use Exhume Undead.
• No Battle Mage combat summon.
  
  • Most Tomes that beef up melee units also beef up ranged units too where as most Tomes that beef up Battle Mages are usually mutually exclusive with melee units and rarely overlap with ranged units.
    
  • Which in turn makes this build incredibly flexible.
    
  • You can grab every +damage unit enchantment for your melee units, which again has significant overlap with ranged units, before the game is over and dump the rest of your research on the +damage unit enchantments exclusive to archers. This will make all 3 of your combat summons get super strong early in the game.
    
  • You can grab Tome of Devastation and get 50% crit rate on all your combat summons with Tome of Artificing
    
  • You can grab Tome of Transmutation and achieve 6 Materium easily, letting you add regular Ritualists to your doomstack.

But once again, make no mistake, Deathcaller is superior. Once your Clay unit dies that's it where as with Deathcaller you create an infinitely regenerating and evergrowing wall of Skeletons no matter how long the battle takes. Deathcaller lets you punch way above your weight, Dungeon Keeper does not.

Ruler Type

Eldritch Sovereign - For Fleshsculptor. Combined with Wyvern Keeper and Ascension Trait:Dungeon Keeper, your 5 Eldritch Sovereigns are gonna start combat with 15 T2-T3 units. You outnumber your enemies' full 18 unit stack.

Ruler Ambition

Conquerer - Super easy to max out and if you cast Possession on your Devastator Spheres they're gonna annihilate a group of units.

Don't get Gloryseeker or Duelist. I gave them a try and I didn't really care for them. I was not able to max out renown on all 5 Eldritch Sovereigns. Also the vast majority of Forgotten Tome skills don't benefit from +% damage. Astral Rift and Astral Storm do not benefit from them. Most of the damage from Arcfire's nukes come from Electrified and Burning which also do not benefit from them. As a result detonating 5 Devastator Spheres (10 with weaver) boosted by Greater Possession and Cosmic Overdrive will end up doing much, much more damage than the +% damage these two Ambitions give. So go Conquerer.

All the other Ambitions give Army Leader stuff which do not affect our combat summons making every last one of them completely worthless for this build.

Culture

Mystic:Attunement - With 50% crit rate, Barbarian's Brutal Strike is essentially a +2 damage buff. Mystic:Attunement gives +3 which is clearly better and we can achieve +3 damage on all 15 of our combat summons because they spawn at the start and are infinite duration.

Also Mystic Echoes. You get to cast an ungodly amount of Dark Knowledge Rituals, Necrotizes, and Explosive Manifestations.

Lastly, 2 Astral Affinity lets us skip an Astral Tome, which are usually worthless at increasing damage.

Racial Traits

• Hardy - +8 hp
  
• Fast Recuperation - +10hp per turn
  
• Arcane Focus - +15% magic damage

Virtually nothing increases your Hero's healing per turn. Not Raider, not Foraging Training, only the Master of Healing hero skill does and I skip that in this build because restoration worsens auto-resolve AI performance and since in this build your Eldritch Sovereigns are gonna solo the entire game without an army we grab Fast Recuperation to get some much needed healing per turn on them from the start of the game.

Unlike Champion Ritualists, Eldritch Sovereigns attack a lot and spam a lot of nukes so +15% damage bonus from Arcane Focus can't hurt. But at the same time it's not much either.

Because our Eldritch Sovereigns are Large Targets, I don't think stacking miss chance on them is viable so Quick Reflexes is out.

Cosmic Overdrive and Athletics do NOT stack.

None of our Combat Summons benefit from Racial Traits or Transformations so there's really nothing to get. Hence Arcane Focus but feel free to swap it out for something else if you want.

Tome Selection Order

• (S) Tome of Necromancy - Soul Collection, Necrotic Magic, Soul Well
  
• (S) Tome of Cryomancy - Frost Weapons, Frost Arrows, School of Cryomancy
  
  
• (A) Tome of Evocation - Lightning Weapons, Lightning Evocation
  
• (A) Tome of Scrying - Guided Projectiles
  
  
• (O) Tome of Zeal - Legion of Zeal
  
• (C) Tome of Pyromancy - Searing Weapons, Fire Arrows
  
  
• (A) Tome of Astral Convergeance - Astral Attunement, Explosive Manifestation
  
• (N) Tome of Roots - Poison Weapons, Poison Arrows
  
  
• (A) Tome of the Archmage - Cosmic Overdrive
  
  
• (C) Tome of Revelry - Bloodfury Weapons
  
• (M) Tome of Rock - Obsidian Weapons
  
• (M) Tome of Artificing - Artisan Weapons
  
• (C) Tome of Devastation - Flameburst Weapons
  
• (M) Tome of the Dungeon Depths - Raiders of the Deep
  
• (M) Tome of the Crucible - Meteor Projectiles
  
• (A) Tome of Ampfliciation - Amplified Arrows
  
  
• random nature Tome
  
• (N) Tome of Cycles - Projectiles of Decay

We start with Tome of Necromancy so we can start casting Thrall Effigy as early as possible to get as many Thralls as possible to cast as many Dark Knowledge Rituals as possible. Also Necrotize is a game winning spell and imo one of the best combat spell in the game.

Then Tome of Cryomancy to get Death Magic, Dark Vigor, and Exalted by Shadows earlier.

Then Tome of Evocation and Scrying to get Quickening earlier.

Then Tome of Zeal because it buffs both melee and ranged with 1 Unit Enchantment.

Then Tome of Pyromancy because it has both melee and ranged Unit Enchantments.

Then we get Tome of Astral Convergeance for Explosive Manifestation, Tome of Roots for more damage, and then finally Cosmic Overdrive to beef up both our combat summons and our Eldritch Sovereigns.

Then we just get the rest of the +damage unit encahntments, prioritizing melee units first. And that's it.

If you want to use regular Ritualists then grab the 3 (M) Tomes before Tome of Cryomancy, and grab Tome of Transmutation instead of Dungeon Depths.

Strategy

There's no real strategy here. No gimmicks. Just cast your Forgotten Tome skills and ram your combat summons into the enemy. Turn on auto-resolve for your combat summons if you want. Life is easy.

In combat if the enemies are out of range then I would kill 1 Fleshling for Raise Dead and cast Possession on the 2nd one.

If you get a dud Forgotten Skill then cast Battlefield Restoration to give all our permanent duration combat summons regeneration.

IMPORTANT If you have more than 2 Eldritch Sovereigns in a stack then not all of your combat summons will spawn due to lack of space or something. So travel with 3 armies of 2-2-1 Eldritch Sovereigns instead of 1 army of 5.

Concluding Remarks

If you read and followed my guide then you should be good to create your own builds with different Cultures, Units, and Tomes that can beat Brutal Difficulty.

Just the word of caution though, ever since the rework, if you're not going Cult of Personality, I don't think you can win with anything. I think you need a real strategy to beat Brutal Difficulty. I once tried to win with only Bronze Golems and in another game I tried to win with only Magelock Cannons and both failed miserably no matter how hard I tried. So my advice is, come up with a real strategy. A strategy with some kind of real game winning theory behind it and then build around it.

I've beaten Brutal Difficulty with only Phantasm Warriors before but that was before they were nerfed. It's funny how T1 Phantasm Warriors are viable yet T3 Bronze Golems and Magelock Cannons are not.

In the end it always came down to attrition. I could easily remake my Phantasm Warrior army as the AI wore them down but not Bronze Golems. They could not handle 3 back to back battles and I lost. Magelock cannons on the other hand are just bad. A Reaver Free City ended me by utilizing Ironclads and Dragoons.

Anyways, I hope you enjoyed my guide.