Tome Tier List - Age of Wonders 4 - PotatoMcWhiskey
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Age of Wonders 4 is a new magic based 4x game that has some elements of civilization as well as Master of Magic.
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![[Brutal] What happens when the good guys are bad? A whole lot of Evil. - Ep.1](/img/n.gif)
Empire tree ranking - 2:03
Evocation - 3:12
Warding - 5:10
Horde - 7:35
Pyromancy - 10:09
Enchantment - 11:27
Rock - 13:11
Roots - 14:30
Beasts - 15:42
Faith - 18:12
Zeal - 20:13
Cryomancy - 21:37
Souls - 23:09
Amplification - 24:18
Scrying - 26:08
Revelry - 27:46
Mayhem 29:29
Artificing - 31:02
Winds - 33:03
Glades - 34:02
Fertility - 36:09
Inquisition - 37:15
Beacon - 38:36
Necromancy - 40:48
Doomherald - 42:13
Summoning - 42:57
Teleportation - 44:18
Pandemonium - 46:47
Devastation - 48:25
Vigor - 51:17
Cycles - 53:02
Sanctuary - 54:59
Subjugation - 56:42
Great Transformation - 58:00
Cold Dark - 59:43
Terramancy - 1:00:50
Transmutation - 1:02:11
Astral Mirror - 1:03:23
Astral Convergence - 1:05:17
Chaos Channeling - 1:06:48
Demon Gate - 1:08:17
Golden Realm - 1:09:39
Crucible - 1:11:05
Paradise - 1:12:33
Nature's Wrath - 1:14:43
Supremacy - 1:17:05
Exaltation - 1:17:51
Reaper - 1:19:58
Oblivion - 1:20:25
Arch Mage - 1:21:03
Chaos Lord - 1:22:26
Creator - 1:23:18
Goddess of Nature - 1:24:23
God Emperor - 1:25:08
Eternal Lord - 1:26:14
Doing the work of the greater good
mvp
Thank you
I love you
I spy a chosen uniter
I love how this game essentially went down the route of “literally almost every build is broken, therefore it is balanced”
Like every other sprawling 4x, because those can't be balanced without being utterly boring and pointless.
Too bad that also means none of them offer any challenge once you invest more than 2 braincells, no matter the buffs you give the AI, because you can outscale any fixed value.
Kinda like Heroes of Might and Magic. The challenge is picking the right OP build for the occasion. And having the micro skill to pull it off I guess.
Very much inline with original Master Of Magic (the Tomes idea comes right from there).
Can't be accused of being a cheater if everybody cheats
It's "Age of Wonders" not "Age of Totally Reasonable Things"
I think I would rank several tomes differently because I like magic origin units more. If you ration your spells a bit more than mana upkeep isn't worse than gold upkeep IMO, and the ability to summon them right to the front line counts for a lot.
Also I would bump Teleportation up from A to S because of the province improvement.
Finally it's worth noting that the province improvements and spells that boost your own domain defensively are much, much more useful for both the research and domination victories. There's a big military victory slant in this analysis - which is fine, just something to note.
Agreed I thought about that too that for different victory options or against real players you will be defending 😂🤷♂️
A big think in multiplayer is the need for magic cancels. Players are way smarter than the AI about abusing buffs and debuffs, so being able to cleanse all that nonsense becomes extremely valuable. Even the threat of being able to cleanse buffs forces them to play differently.
I'm of a similar opinion, but I've mostly been playing Astral and my first game I ran the magic origin reduction trait and the Wayfinder dark trait so that I would get the dark affinity magic origin reduction without needing tomes.
What i also love about them, specifically the elementals are that it allows you to get a tier 3 unit very early.
You can pick and choose which elemental you need based on what class or dage type you need
You should try some more of the Materium tomes. I'm not saying they are great (especially not the early ones), but Terramancy has Tremor Ritual which completely removes all enemy defensive structures and Earth Shatter which is useful on some maps for its ability to remove Mountains. Also Earthshatter Engines have 10 siege power, which makes sieges much faster. If you are going for a military victory you can't overlook them.
I think Materium focused factions really are the siege experts and masters of heavy industry. Both Iron Golem and Gold Golem have Siege Breaker, which means much faster sieges. Golems are immune to status effects and morale penalties. Give them Adaptive Armor enchantment, and they become insanely durable against undead, nature and barbarian units.
The Transmuter Battlemage is one of the best battlemages in my opinion. Able to shred defense and bolster your own while attacking is awesome, and the ability to AoE stun reliably at long range is such a powerful tool. Giving them Siege Magic ups their damage and gives them the Siege Breaker trait as well, which combined with an army of Iron Golems, makes for very quick sieges.
Tome of the Golden Realm(tier IV) is such a strong tome. Goldtouched is a strong minor transformation, giving you +2 Resistance as well as +1 gold for each population. Combine that with Steel Skin and Earthkin minor transformations and you have very durable units without any extra upkeep. And then it has all those economic upgrades. The ability to boost production(buyout with gold) more efficiently and more often is also a very strong tool.
As for the Materium Tech tree, it has a lot of economy stuff, a bit of draft and stability, and a few fun tricks to use.
Barbarian Culture with a Materium focus is a lot of fun. Build a bunch of cheap outposts close to other factions with your scouts, to close them in and farm grievances as they expand into your claimed territories. This allows you to claim various resources out in the world or secure great sites for cities.
-10% unit upkeep per rank the unit has is insane, as it allows a lot more units on the field(even higher tier stuff). Those cheap and numerous tier 1 and 2 units that you have had forever(often Champion or Legendary rank) are now much cheaper. If you have synergized your society traits, you can new "recruits" of Iron Golems(shield unit) have a few additional ranks from the start, so already are at a discount.
I do think you get the most benefit out of the Materium focus, if you lean heavily into its strengths. If you want to have anything to do with the Underground, Earthkin is a must minor tranformation, and you can get it extremely early. Gold is used for almost everything(buildings, units, upkeep, diplomacy, certain events), so having more of it is always good.
Having a lot of gold and production also means that you can spend it in situations where others might wait. You do not "have" to wait for 2 farms to build a certain building at a discount. Your extra gold and production makes up for it.
Materiums greatest weakness is that it does little for food, mana and research, which are all very important. It is a bit reliant on well-placed and organized cities.
Steelskin is an interesting one because it's actually best with the early mage tome for wards against lightning (and the other damages), sure you could just walk away with the lightning resistance but I think I'd rather have 2 armor,
you're taking contradictory tomes but as long as you don't make a habit of it should be fine, especially good to keep squeezing value out of low tier units for bonuses like impressment and Horde
@@Nota-Skaven Materium + Astral, while technically opposed, could thematically fit together if you want to roleplay a magitech/dungeonpunk faction (and this will likely get a boost with the Empire and Ashes DLC, since it's heavily implied to deal with dreadnaught stuff from the previous games). Iron golems with lightning/electric damage and arcane wards just makes sense.
Crushing Earth alone is enough to put Terramancy into S tier. Being able to remove a tier 3 unit in a single cast is absurd. No other combat damage ability is even close. And on the off chance they resist, still take a bunch of damage and are guaranteed stunned. Combine with Overchannel and Weaver, and you can remove 4 units by turn 2.
The earth shatter is also really good late game with all the stacking discounts. You can get it down to 24 mana/casting points and cast it 8-10 times a turn. That's 60-100 damage on all units in a province and really ruins any stacks of doom sent your way.
I think the idea with the Tome of the Archmage teleport hero spell is that you blink somewhere, conjure an army out of your ass, then sneak attack something. Since you can queue up ready spells to cast another turn, you can just blink, dump a ton of spells on something, then peace out.
Plus with spells like Astral Reflection you can basically spawn a very dangerous army behind enemy lines. It was pretty invaluable to me in a massive FFA map where I struggled from the start. Saved me when someone tried for magic victory before I could across a massive map. Sure ideally you avoid situations like these but it would've been an impossible recovery without it.
If your Hero is set up correctly they can even be a force to be reckoned with by themselves. I'm imagining summon ability shenanigans in particular. A hero with both summoning signature abilities and weaver can pump out 4 tier 3 units. And then you just need the spellcasting to back it up.
@@NorthernDruid Yeah, my first win was this. Lone casting hero with elemental summon and channel refresh. Turn 1 summon elemental, astral reflections, refresh, astral reflections. Turn 2 astral reflections. Turn 3 nuke an entire army of T1's with my 7 hero spell aoes. Turn 4, cleanup with op hero spell damage and self heal buffs. My main hero was kept well away from the fight just in case I needed more reflections.
@@8684LYFE Actually if you get a unit somewhere near a town you can completely destroy the town with astral shatterings in short order. It is a very questionable spell. You spawn a 1500 stack of units, kill a pop and destroy an improvement just for having vision, can easily cast it twice in the late game, and since every seed that gets built gets revealed to you with full vision of the province you can destroy each one instantly as they are built if you are at war. You can also easily reduce the cost of the astral damaging spells to wipe out sieging armies later which is just absurd. You can easily get about 20 casts of fulmination per turn so I actually dont know how you can lose.
IMO early and mid Astral is in a tier of their own. In addition to enabling teleportation which is a must have, a lot of the Imperium improvements also increase research speed. This then allows you to pick up other tomes for increased Imperium tree access. This is why the Arcane Halfling playthrough went so smoothly while other Brutal games were much more brutal.
Also, if you get Mana Addict in the meta progression first, Astral WILL carry you. I agree, that is why the spellcasting arcane playthrough didn't look like Brutal difficulty at times.
@@guidohywuler9916 Astral is very strong, though personally I don't like Mana Addict, there are better traits out there, and the Artisans one Potato took is pretty much a hardmode challenge trait, if he took smth like Adept Settlers and went into 4-5 fast cities this would have been so much easier.
@@MANoob100 Could you elaborate further into full build ?
@@NhatAnhPhamDr nothing super special and you could do a bunch of variations, but for example go Mystic culture with Gifted Casters and Adept Settlers, tomes Roots + Evocation, you have some of the best t1 spells for control and damage, can found up to 4 cities very quickly. Prioritise the first nature upgrade to get 3 pop in new cities from the get go (go Roots first with your tomes), kill neutrals with OP Vines you cast at -40% mana cost from Soother and Gifted Casters. Further tomes can include Amplification, Teleportation, Astral Mirror on the Astral side of things, Glades, Vigor, Nature's Wrath on the Nature side, you can go either way for t5.
If you made up your mind about t5 you can splash some Shadow for Shadow Binding and Death Magic by trading some Astral or Nature tomes, though it doesn't go well with this build (if you can find a Shadow Adept hero that would be best). Alternative is to start as the Dark culture which would also solve any Stability problems from overextension, you'll mostly be missing out on the Soother to make your spells cheaper in this case.
Go for all the obvious food, research and mana improvements in the empire development once you've founded your first 4 cities (if you really want to be greedy grab the 5th one but I'd at least take some cheaper improvements like better farms and reduced tech costs first). You'll have a pretty insane eco, though most of your output is food, research and mana, so you really want summoned mana upkeep units actually. Kind of a standard fast expansion build, nothing crazy.
Both Champion or Wizard king work, though if you go Dark, Champion is out of the picture (and if you don't go dark, becomes more attractive, actually). I'd still roll Wizard king, you'll have tons of mana and you'll need casting points.
There's a lot of variations you can do by trying to lean in more into different aspects of the game by swapping around culture traits etc.
Late Astral is nuts as well. Astral Reflections allows for Baldur's Gate-era Simulacrum levels of cheese, except double. Have your Wizard King sit in the back and just cast Astral Reflections on her every (other) round, letting the reflections use Overchannel, Spur to Action, Weaver, etc.
Glad to see everyone else is just as obsessed as I am with this masterpiece of the 4x genre
Worth mentioning, 4 spells per cycle and new tomes every other cycle means that a tome only needs 2 excellent spells in order to be "worth it". That's why it's much better to have even a single game-changing spell in a tome than 5 pretty good ones.
loving the AoW4 content Potato
SAME
Couldn’t agree more! Obsessed with this game and this content!
Me too
Tome of cryomancy is probably A-tier book. Ice coffin is actually one of strongest spells in early game because it eliminates 1 unit from fight and white witches are among strongest battle-mages in early game. For stage of the game that you get these battle mages, they're really strong. Free damage+turn skip is really good. Skip turn like moves have always been among strongest ways to mitigate damage in turn based games. Houndmaster is S-tier unit purely from its ability to summon a unit which can tank 1 hit and give big turn tempo. White witches are doing same thing, except they freeze enemy which skips enemy turn. so if you have unit advantage, you gain turns on other units for freezing enemies. Freezing weapons is also good. far superior over flaming weapons if your not using physical marksmans units. Dark affinity is not bad. It has some decent upgrades in tree. crypt blade gives tier 1 zombies and summoning is always good. The extra knowledge on killing heroes is really strong especially if you can find an AI to farm knowledge early on. Knowledge of Vassal is ok because early game, there is not a lot of ways to boost knowledge so gaining knowledge 20 knowledge from 2 vassals when your base knowledge is 60->80 is 33% increase in your early game tech tree. Gaining knowledge on razing cities is good as it works with chaos passive that gives +20 permanent gold income. Living vines+casting on +5 casting points can be useful though this depends on if your running out of casting points in combat. If your playing any faction that wants battle mages early on and your not running into arctic resist enemies. I highly recommend this book. very good. I think this is really strong tome mainly because its best tome for splashing dark affinity and what tome provides at this stage of the game. if your going dark build to tier 5 tome, this is must-pick up mainly because all other dark tomes are not very good in general.
Tome of Doomheald is weird book. The bashee is pretty good. you apply weaken which is -20% damage and you apply -morale. every -10% crit is -10% damage in this game, so its effectively 40% damage reduce. Bashee is very expensive unit to upkeep but its pretty good if your running melee-comp. the main thing this book bans you from doing is using undead since undead unit have 0 morale. I don't think its good book purely because melee is kinda pointless in the game but if melee was good, this would be a good book for non-undead melee armies. I could see someone picking this book with industries race that gains bolster and resist stacks to stack with weaken debuff. You need to be stacking bolster+resistence and running some form of healing unit to make this tome relevant.
Tome of Amplification+tome of artificing+tome of devastation is no brainer. pick-up order. As I said in my previous paragraph, each 10% crit at 2x is 10% damage in damage. When you combine these 3 tomes, you get 70% crit chance which is max crit in the game. this 70% increase in damage for your entire army. These tomes could have 1 skill and nothing else and they would still be best tomes to pick.
If your running archer's Tome of the Crucible+Tome of Amplification is the ranger markman build. Ranged is strong right now over melee so I would say that Tome of crucible is probably an S-tier book exclusively off meteor's arrows. Double-AoE shooting is really good. if you picked tome of pyromancy over tome of horde then chances are that you have flaming weapons which is 20% increase to burning targets. This whole synergy also S-tier for ranged physical damage marksman teams. you get a lot of AoE and damage increase for physical marksman build.
in term of tier 5 tomes, I think nature tome and order tome are the best however due to previous tomes, you really need to focus picking your splash tome into 1 of these affinities to choose it. On side note, I think chaos is great splash affinity in early stages of the game due to imperium tree but I don't think you need to chaos in late game.
What's a physical archer in this context? As to my main question if you wanted a campaign to pump a ranged unit like Zephyr would you start your splash with Herbalist or Cryomancy before swapping to heavy materium? Any society traits that stand out in your opinion?
@@toggle3927 for me, the single most powerful society trait in my opinion is runesmiths. why its so strong is that it makes unit enhancement upkeeps cost -30% mana. in essence, you get 30% more mana upkeep. What does this mean overall? It means you have more mana to summon mana-army type units and more mana in general to cast spells in combat. You want every attack enhancement in the game as all of these improve your entire army. The other traits are optional. If you have nothing specific in mind, the two traits that you should select is devote of good and scion of evil. these are two trait give +5 imperium income in the game. Imperium income is very hard to generate so gaining 15 imperium income is really good. The one that probably best secondary trait is that destroyer of world trait that appears in patheon tree. it gives 40 gold/40 knowledge/40 mana income for raizing cities. @The Spiffing Brit has content video regarding this trait and how you can easily exploit the AI to get infinity resources by spam raizing cities. If your asking for mutiplayer, I have no clue because I do not play 4X games in mutiplayer. A mutiplayer 4x might have different meta traits then what you use against AI.
a physical archer is an archer unit that has physical attack. For example dark faction has Pursuers. Pursuer is tier 1 archer that has repeating attacks. If your going build archer's, pick a faction that has tier 1 archers. I believe faction with that are fendal, dark and High. Barbarian have repeating archer called fury but its tier 2 unit so no benefits from chaos imperium skill. I would recommend playing these factions over wasting tome to get archers. Zephyr archer is for Mystic and industries faction but industries faction is meant to be played as melee faction and mystic faction is meant to use battle mages as range damage dealers. If you pick Zephyr archer, you can play industries and mystic same as other 4 factions but your wasting tier 2 tome to do this. With how good tome of amplification and tome of artificing are, I seriously think there is no reason to select any other tier 2 tomes then these two tomes. that is how far and above these two tomes are compare to all other tier 2 tomes. The tome of amplification add +1 fortune stack. Lets suppose you cast 2 spells in average turn combat. you gain +20% crit chance. The rune of artificing add 30% critical chance on your entire army. in total, you get 50% critical chance from taking these two tomes. if every battle, your units attack 10 times in total. overall with rng of critical hits, you will miss some crits and gain some crits. the average of those critical hit is 50% damage increase with spike damage here and there from critical hits.
As far tier 1 tomes are concerned, tome of horde is free 20% damage increase and it makes tier 1 units which is entire early game really strong. for how good chaos imperium tree early on with imperium upgrades, I have been picking this tome as my starting tome. 2nd tome is splash tome. its often tome that decides what tier 5 tome you going to pick. if your playing nature, pick nature tome. if your going order, pick order tome. If your picking dark, then you pick ice tome. you said you to play materium then you should pick tier 1 materium tome. this is hard to talk about because it depends your faction. you need 6 points in affinity tree to get a tier 4 tome and 1 of tomes has to be tier 3 tome. different factions have skew on the tier 5 tome due to base starting affinity. You can also skew affinity by choosing 1 hero trait e.g dark affinity skill at level 5 for ruler then picking 1 dark society trait even if your faction does not have matching affinity for tier 5 tome book. You can do this for all colors or you can pick starting faction to match your tier 5 tome which makes your decision making for getting 6 affinity in particular affinity much easier.
cryomancy doesn't quite have the same ability to just kill people but that's because if it did, it would be broken, it does hinge really hard on white witches but also they're good already, get amplification or something like havoc magic and they'll do work, they're also a really good candidate for true death magic once you get to tier 5 expecially as they just stall with freeze
Ya I haver been loving Ice Coffin for my frosting race. Super handy to control the battlefield
Completely agree. A 90-often-100% chance to stun an enemy for a full turn while doing full damage to them is *shocking* in comparison to Cosmic Abolition or Lightning strike. An enemy missing a turn is so much stronger than a tiny chance to do a DOT.
14:34 There is super cool combo with living vines. Living vines count as death/kill for a few skills and abilities so it works with shadow's ability that gives "+5 combat casting points for every death/kill". Also you can get past maximum combat points with it.
Bro, this is some protip right there. I completely missed the combo. I guess thats why tier rankings this early can get sometimes so inacurate, because there are some bonkers combo yet to be found.
It also works with Keepers Mark, meaning if something wants to get rid of a vine, it will have to spend 2 turns doing so. Keepers Mark works on most summons actually, meaning a complete trash tier 1 summon can hold up a chokepoint for at least 2 turns.
Do the vines grant souls?
Do the vines grant souls?
You know potato's addiction is deep when he makes a tierlist after uploading 1 full run.
It also means a tier list that's poorly ranked. Not enough experience with the different tomes and basing the tier list off the Empire tree stuff ends up with a tier ranking that isn't very accurate.
@@skyesfury8511 He has played a lot more than one full run, he has just released one full run. He was playing a lot before the game released.
Said 200+Hrs in the video.
@@sarinonline9127 So he's got a tier list that's bad even with a lot of play time.
To be fair, he did say he was ranking tomes based on the Empire/Affinity tree. That pretty much invalidates the tier list on its own. But hey, he made the video so he MUST be right... 🤣
@@skyesfury8511 No he didn't just say that, and you didn't pay any attention to the video or you would have known he had a lot of playtime. Truth is you had no idea what you were talking about, and no one cares what you have to say regardless lol.
Strongly disagree about Doomherald 42:13, morale damage can be really devastating and all of tome's spells are greatly synergized. It also pairs really well with dark culture's cheap shock T1s. You basically wait for enemy to come at you, cast despair on enemy blobs and start picking off "soft" units to get maximum morale penalties and trigger mass routs. Combine this with tome of the horde for extra T1 damage and you get the idea. I've had a tough fight where enemy ruler was nigh invinsible for my melee troops (first strike, regen, several retaliations and so on so forth) but it didn't matter, since after seeing 5 or 6 allied units being killed nearby she... routed.
Yeah, I had a full stack of banshees in a fight once, and got the enemies to rout after matybe 1-2 kills. Stacking negative morale is insane once you hit enough of it
The thing is, it can also end up being completely worthless if you fight something that do not care about morale, like Undead or Golems. Or you fight something that have an equal(or better) way of boosting morale. Tome of the Bac.. erh, Beacon, pretty much counters it directly.
It is generally much harder to debuff something, because it has to go through resistance to work. A buff is always effective.
It can be dominating, if you use world spells and other effects to stack morale debuffs, if the opponent has no counter to it, but the opportunity cost is that you could have used that mana to simply deal direct damage instead.
If he hasnt played with banshees yet then he also propably doesn't realize that their blink always leaves them with 1 action and the wail is one action. So you can full distance move, blink about the full distance as well, then hit the wail. It's just so much mobility to get that aoe in the perfect spot.
but thats can be true for literally every tome though is it not?
like is debuff tomes worthless now if your enemy is status resistant and has cleanse? or elemental tomes are bad when theres an enemy that are resistant to it
and by your logic, buffs are now bad since there a mass cleanse spell in the game
its not like morale could be countered easily, you still need the proper spells/units to fight them off.
this kind of logic is a bit flawed, specially when the tome has nice general applications, like bashees and the unique building.
while also using a mechanic that is not as specialized as elemental themed tomes and could be used by most builds. morale.
@@Banksy_Collective Yeah, I wanted to mention them as well but forgot. Like seriously what's the point of saying something's bad without actually trying it?
Materium is great, most affinities are if you guide your choices well. Materium have Iron Golems, they are very OP, like seriously. And most enchantments are for defense and resistance, it comes a time where only specialized units can really damage Materium.
I found an AI that had 19 defense and 7 resistance on their tier 3 shield units, and all they used was Materium and a bit of Holy magic. It was a nightmare to fight, clearly the best alone in terms of just boosting stats for your armies.
@@elihill4476 play chaos with crit stack and t1 spam and support them. you shred stat stackers. All with crit and moral + for you and - for the enemies if possible. Hero slams for 60+ like a god spawn and even the small t1 get up to 20+ a hit (and up to three hits with 3ap).
by the way there are so many spells and ways to take buffs away. i recommend take at least on of those for youre main damage type (phys or magic).
i for one think the materium is one of the weakest. tried them several times but find them lacking - like to splash in a tome here and there, like for the siege stuff or +30% crit weapon enchant. depnds on what build i am using.
@@2fat4airborne44 I mean can’t you just use Aoe spells/abilities. A lot of which are in materium.
Yeah, I went a stat buffing build, early game defensive stats are massive dmg reduction and by late game I ended up with 86% less dmg taken from all sources, put that in with some healing spells and your units just don't die.
The thing about materium is that its major power spike is tied to steelfury chant.
It's so interesting how different my experience with the Game has been from Potatoes. For example the Chaos Tree has been pretty useless for my playstyle since I prefer Tall and defensive playstyles and Tier 1 Units are just in the way. Shadow on the other Hand has been a godsend in recent Playthroughs.
Really speaks for the Game.
Yea, Chaos is S tier specifically if you're swarming tier 1 unit hordes, but it's extremely average otherwise.
Personally, I favor the Astral tree. SO much knowledge and mana means I'm facing off using tier 3 units and abilities while my opponents are still in tier 2. Being able to start casting spells in turn 1 means I'm simply better positioned to abuse those Nature summons (as one example), and I can get off 4 big damage spells if I need to before my opponent even gets into range.
Mana's incredibly abundant compared to gold, IF you choose to play it that way.
The game's got some wickedly interesting balance to it.
For me, Chaos has a strong start and end with a weak middle. Extra troops are nice early game, and the siege bonuses are amazing if not a little too late.
Similarly, I'd give the arcane S tier status early game for the ability to get a random research at a discounted rate. Most of my games end in a Magic victory and that upgrade alone can shave off 20 rounds.
So I'm going to defend the city domain enchantments, particularly the late game ones real quick.
2 of the 3 win conditions in the game involve building provinces that will spawn hostile marauder stacks in your empire that *must* be dealt with in order to progress your wincon. These marauder stacks are no joke, containing 12+ units each and often coming with some pretty strong enchantments. Because your beacons/seeds must be built in your empire, they are by necessity in range for your city buff spells but are notably *outside* the cities proper, so you don't get all the nice things you normally get when defending sieges. Given that 2 wincons involve spawning powerful stacks on units in your territory that *must* be dealt with in order to actually finish the game, some of these stronger lategame enchantments like Cycle of Seasons look a bit better.
That's my only real critique of this analysis though. The rest of it looks solid.
One thing you might have missed with tome of warding is how powerful the phantomsal soliders are, they gain race transformations and enchantments while being ethereal meaning they are immune to most status effects in the game.
I know it's the cliche "how dare you have an opinion different than mine" but there is no way Tome of Cryomancy is that low. It enables you to cheese some unwinnable early game battles with frozen and slow cheese to split up the enemy army. Works very well with a scout in the army to bait the enemy to split up
It's down to playstyle. He prefers to disable targets by outright killing them, and always brings enough units to guarantee victory, and doesn't care if he loses chaff. Cryomancy is strong if you DON'T have enough units to guarantee victory, need to somehow win against disproportionately stronger forces, and can't afford to lose a single unit.
It's kinda like the quality vs quantity debate, but with a lot more nuance.
Once the multiplayer connection issues get sorted out, it would be a lot of fun to put these theories to the test.
Keeper’s mark has silly synergy with vine summon, since it makes them survive fatal damage. So it makes summoning vines either through the spell or from Horned God really really strong if you don’t mind blocking off part of the battlefield
At that point, Horned God has a repeatable "Look where all your AoE is going" skill that totally disrupts the enemy formation. It's very much a choice of Go Around and lose damage or batter them down and lose cooldowns and damage. All the while ranged units murder the crap out of you.
I love keepers mark and then supergrowth/gaiaborn Giant immortal plant dudes. :P
I think you really undervalue being able to break enemy morale. It's nice to win battles by only killing around half of the enemies
I got the achievement for routing several units in a single battle.
However, I did not use any morale effects. My point is, you can achieve similar effects through damage alone, rather than hoping for a debuff to get through resistances or while dealing with units that cant be debuffed.
I made a nice faction of Goblins I called the False Faith. They were focused on Order with Shadow as secondary affinity, focusing on having high morale and lowering enemy moral. Tome of the Doomherold and Tome of Subjugation together became nuts. I was at war with a free city, which sent raid over constantly, usually having one or two heroes in the stack. Routed the heroes every time and casted Final Ultimatum on them. They either died or I got a new hero.
But you have to be able to actually break that morale. On paper you are, but there are just too many counters to most stuff that lowers morale. At least during early/mid game.
Of course the AI doesn't really do counterplay, but in a MP game, you'd probably not be happy about the mileage you get from morale lowering skills and spells.
We all know this tier list is going to 180 when he starts actually experimenting with all the units and combos haha.
That's the thing. The number of combos is exponential. It's impossible for any one person to be an expert on all the combos.
My first favourite was a lone spell hero with Astral reflections, summon 2, use their channel refresh to summon 2 more, now I have 5 power heavy heroes turn 1 for 2 spells, plus their abilities and channels for BIG aoe damage, and if they die, only the master unit has to live for more copies on the next turns. Pair exclusively with the revival units from the plant domain and you can harass an enemy without ever leaving the start position for so little casting. Plus if they die, some domains give you bonus casting/heals making even more summons easier. Lucked into that combo, learning so many more.
Some spells are useful in ways that are not obvious. "Earth Shatter" is one of the best spells in the game: Besides giving your cities more space to expand to ex-mountains it enables one super unique thing - You can place teleporters deep inside other factions territory. Normally at some point all provinces have been claimed. But now you can flatten a mountain, put down an encampment and construct a teleporter. This give you insane access to parts of the map that are otherwise only accessible with impossibly long walks.
Call forth chaos avatar has literally won me battles against two full stacks including heroes when defending with just a scout. If your ruler has summoning spells and overchannel, you can do stuff like calling down pylons etc, and your ruler will most likely be the most OP unit you have in your army. Couple it with the chaos skill that summons fiends when your ruler kills enemies and you will outnumber your opponent even if you only have one unit getting attacked. One of the most powerful spells especially if you have a ruler built around supporting rank 1 units with summons and spellcasting.
In my current case, I summon 3 rank 1 undeads on turn 1, 1 rank 3 elemental on turn 2 as well as a pylon, and then i just pylon spam and go around snipe enemy units to summon hellhounds and nightmares. The chaos win condition spell does damage as well, so the longer you can extend your battle, the more it will be in your favor. I dont know of any other spell that can make you win a 1v12, so that spell plus Demonic Slaughter makes the Chaos Lord tome A tier for me .
Doomherald is a phenomenal tome, for evil builds you get a 19 mana and 19 research income conduit improvement, you get an exceptionally powerful army spell that applies morale penalties, you get a racial improvement that increases damage against low morale units massively, you get the banshee - one of the best battlemages in the game.
I'm definitely feeling a really weird bias against mana based economies and far too much of an economic focus vs a focus on synergistic builds or actual, real quality. Remember that you can only bring 18 units to a combat, it doesn't matter how many tier 1 units you have if your opponent can clear your full stack without taking noticeable losses. I will very much agree that nature is probably the strongest selection of tomes in the game, however.
Also, shadow affinity is extremely powerful, even if many of its tomes are rather lackluster - with a shadow affinity focus you can easily hit magic victory by before 50 (casting the spell, after which you become effectively invincible and just count down your remaining 15 turns). The amount of research you get from shadow affinity is massive and will always keep you first in that regard even over economically focused players.
I also very much get the impression that this tier list is oriented towards playing vs AI rather than playing against someone capable of human intelligence, tactics and map awareness
I have only played against the ai, this is a vs ai tier list
Seeking arrow with clairvoyance combo does alot of work
Dude thank you for getting this out so fast, my friends and I are obsessed with this game. I’m so glad you put me onto this one!
Tome of the Astral Mirror has a Summon Astral Reflections combat spell which lets you make 2 copies of any unit, including your heroes. Cast it twice and you could have 5 of your heroes in the battle. You can send the reflections forward to take the damage since it doesn't matter if they're killed. It's insanely powerful, and I use it every battle, though it costs a lot to cast.
It also can be used if someone attacks you and you can't get your armies back in time. You summon the best unit you can on the world map and then copy it twice to start a battle and you'll have 5 units to battle with.
i wanna see potato use all the D tier tomes. Please make more aow4 content
The good thing about Terramancy isn't extra quarries, but the extra space you get for not placing them instead of other province upgrades.
With Artisan Wonder, cities can can reach 400 or more production. That may seem like a waste, until you realize how much gold that churns out when NOT producing buildings.
@@haakoflo What's the conversion in 4? In previous it was something like 25% of production or actually scaled of gold income itself and not production.
@@Washeek Once built up, industrial cities get +10% to the conversion, making it 35%. Let's say you have city with 3 wonders, it gives +60% production to quarries, meaning the gold production yield of quarries is base*1.6*0.35 = 0.56.
Now assume you have a quarry that borders 2 special provinces that grant +5 production from nearby quarries (Builder's Quarters, Central Quarry, Golem Mine) , it end up receiving 5+10=15 yield of production. (Assuming you don't use the Worker's Guild. The best use of this yield is to build buildings, but even when you have all the buildings you want, it gets turned into 8 gold.
That's more than a basic mine, and close to a mine with a Merchant's Guild.
With a Worker's guild, such quarries generate 10 gold when not producing buildings.
Obviously, the main reason to have quarries is to build buildings more quickly. Getting this much gold when not producing is just a very nice bonus.
This my first video of yours, and I just wanted to say I love how fast you talk even though it’s a hour long video, you really go through the information well!
Cosmic overdrive is pretty great for an astral summoner build. With the capstone astral empire tree skill, and mana channelers, your lightning elementals will instantly evolve to tier 3 when you summon them. At tier 3 they're a shock unit that normally have 32 movement and an amazing phase skill. But just try escaping from them when they have 48 movement plus an amazing phase skill. Not to mention 30% extra damage. Good for your watchers too, and on that note, I'd probably rate the tome of scrying higher for any battlemage centric builds, because guided projectiles are an essential enchantment for battlemages.
Thank you for hyping this game! It’s been a blast learning and your videos have helped so much. It’s like learning CIV from you all over again.
12:03 Bronze golem evolve into nice t3 iron golem from tome of Artificing so it is not so bad,
22:37 Shadow culture has starting spell that inflicts slow on two targets.
1:24:03 Golems counts as elementals, be the way.
Love your videos! Biggest thing that i wanted you to point out is that Amplification Arrows proc almost any on hit effect ( DoT, debuff etc ) to the second target AND it also switches target dmg priority: i have 3 arrows, 2 arrows kill the target, 3rd arrow will fly to OTHER target. Taking the archers ( 4 base range ) + t1 buff ( 1 range ) + high ( +1 range ) + elite archer ( +1 range ) makes archers deal damage at a whopping 7 range or 9 range aoe from t3 book archer adn also has 3 bounce range. Taking mark on hit from other book and your archers literally have 80+ accuracy on that range which is insane. So far the most broken build i found out.
I've seen the AI do that, where it's archers would use two attacks on one unit and it's third attack on another, but I had no idea how to do it myself. Amplification tome, gotta check it out.
@@r3dp9 the switch attacsk calculates as a bounce though, so 30%
"Only 200 hours" he says
I love how obsessed you've become with this game, and I'm looking forward to all the AOW4 content to come
I have only played one full game but I did it with a summon build.
The tome of warding worked really well because it has one of the best tier 1 summon unit which can get a race bonus and I was playing the dark culture so a tank in the early game helped.
Stave of warding worked well with the Nymhs and their healing ability.
Also, fertility tome works really well if you have the summon tradition (50% discount on summoning) and play dark.
The animate flora only cost 10 mana to cast (because the tradition also works on combat summon spells) allowing you to create a tier 2 unit every turn.
Blossom of life works well with the regain you get from cull the weak and Nymfs add to that ensuring you get 5 stacks of regain fast.
Phantasm Warrior is such an underrated unit. It is affected by some many things. It is tier 1. It is of your race. It is of Magical Origin. And a shield unit. You can stack so many cost reductions and bonus to recruitment rank on it, buff its health and damage. It is just crazy.
The gamplay was way deeper than i expected. Really looking forward to what they do next with this game
One thing to note regarding Tome of the Creator: All of the golems are also considered elementals. Which makes Enduring Earth a lot better than if it only applies to the other elementals. Gold Golems are strong, and you can already make Iron Golems incredibly tanky in a materium build, so giving them all a second life is pretty powerful. I do still agree that materium is one of the weaker affinities overall, but iron golems are possibly the best tanks in the game, and copper golems also upgrade into iron so you can start building them up early. You just need to pair it with something else to get your damage, since until Gold Golems that's a bit lacking (though you could use also zephyr archers for that if you want to stay in materium).
Ice Spiders are also elemental, which can get very interesting.
The Wind Rager elemental is a bit of a glass cannon(though hard to hit at range), but quite powerful due to frenzy and it is fast. It also has strong lightning resistance, so can cover for the Golems weakness.
I think Materium's greatest strength is during sieges, due to how much you can shorten the siege timer(all Iron Golems and Gold Golems have Siege Breaker. Supports and Battlemages can get the trait with Siege Magic research). And if you live underground, Earthkin is available early to get as much value of it as possible.
And Tome of the Golden Realm is worth it all in my opinion.
One of the beautiful things about this game is the complexity. I will update as I watch but my initial thought is that I agree with you about tome of warding, but I think it is especially beneficial to dark origin in that it gives durability to an otherwise squishy bunch (maybe feudal too, haven't played with it yet) so C tier overall but maybe A tier for dark.
Edit 1: Materium, Runecrafting and tome of pyromancy into tome of enhancement is one of my favorite builds so far. You're absolutely right about it being similar but +1 range is sooo good.
Infectious Insanity is so good! I used it on a melee unit in the back row of the enemy right away and it is super disruptive and did great damage.
I would say that all of the Tomes are balanced. Some are definitely better than others by I don't think any are just straight bad. A big thing I ran into while playing is while a tome may individually not seem that good it has great synergy with other tomes that made it extremely powerful. Really it seems to come down to what build you are making. If you are focusing summons, melee, physical ranged or magical ranged makes a big difference in perspectives of what is good. Same with the imperium abilities. Also I was really surprised that Cryomancy was ranked so low as Frozen was super strong in my recent campaign.
Every tome is good because they always give you something. That doesn't mean they're balanced perfectly, and I don't think they ever could be. Anyone can make anything work, but the point of the video is this: all else being equal, Potato with your cold build vs. Potato with his chaos/nature build, he can win the game much quicker with the latter.
I think a strength of the tome system is that the research is tiered(lower tier means cheaper). If you are technically around tier 4 or 5 tomes, but suddenly in need of frost damage, you can quickly go through a few researched of Cryomancy, and you are back on track in no time.
The system allows for a lot of adaptability in the late game.
The Necromancy spell 'Raise Zombie' is great to have when you have taken lots of losses in a small area. Saved my arse. Plus who can argue against recycling.
The wasp interrupting you was showing how op nature tomes and affinity are lol
A nice strategy for all ranged lovers. If you take unicorn mounts, the ranged barbarian tier 2 unit becomes a mounted archer that can teleport and it will be buffed by mount effecting transformations. They are really fun to play
The great thing about AoW 4 is that you can watch 10 different guides on tomes / affinities / playstyles and are nearly certain to get 10 vastly different opinions. The only constant seems to be that Tome of the Horde is incredibly powerful. 😂
ngl in my experience tome of the doomherald is amazing in battle, the enemies all start routing so easily even when they outnumber you by far
Grab the Tome of Subjugation for the spell that converts routing units or kills them if they resist it.
agreed Tome of the Doomherald is easily a A tier, he just doesn't play dark much I guess, the tier 5 tome is also probably the easiest S tier in the game, you can pretty much go full night king and bring back your entire army instantly. It fits so well also with the way a lot of Dark units like to charge in.
Rn I'm in a game combining tomb of the hoard with necromancy stuff, I've got heaps of skeletons that do a bunch of damage and inflict moral penalties stealing morale
I agree with range units.
Im playing nature order (with a bit of materium, I took the free wonder bonus prod) elf with every single arrow upgrade I found and my tier 3 ranged units obliterate army because of the shocking arrow enchant
Also late game shadow is absolutly stupid.
The final perk show you the whole map with every single units. One of the final tome let you summon a full stack of t1/t2 units for only 40 souls and 40 casting, which is fcking easy and cheap to get.
Basically you can summon thousands and thousands of undead for free, to snipe people with your army, and THEN you can disband them to not pay the mana cost.
Also, if you use them for pillaging they will pay themselves.
You can spawn them were there isnt a single ennemi troops and pillage everything from miles away. And since they are so cheap you can pillage a entire empire in one turn
Also some shadow perks are really good like -20% discount on magic units, and the 50knowledge per heroes level DOES really stacks to rush tome.
I played as Scion of evil (free imperium ans free rank easely) and as Cannibals to generate mana and food as long as long as I keep fighting
12:39 for maximum range thingy. If you increase maximum range it will increase your general accuracy of range unit. For example, If unit has 4 range and hit enemy in 4 hex away you will get X accuracy but if your unit has 5 range and hitting 4 hex away enemy you will get X+@ accuracy. So range is important
You take enchantment when you go for dark culture, your cities ignore stability penalties. Sundering blades work great with weakening and higher range allows both its mages and summons to use special range attacks sometimes 2 turns out of enemy range lol
There's multiple ways to increase you ranged accuracy(at least +60% that i know of) and so the +1 range is amazing. You're also completely underestimating the Tome of Cryomancy. I don't think you understand that frozen prevents the enemy from acting, which immediately makes it more powerful than other status effects and makes it the best elemental book. Saying there's no way to reliably freeze the enemy when there's 2 things that allow you to reliably freeze the enemy is an interesting oversight.
very happy with all your AoW4 stuff. My only want for this video might be a vertical separation so you can clearly see the rankings of each teir, but I understand if program doesn't allow for that option.
Tier lists are great for trying to do like impossible challenges and stuff so you can figure out the meta choices you need to make to survive. But I'm gonna make my shadow-frost elves that will convert the entire world into a freezing hellscape in the name of the Winter Queen, and there's nothing anyone can do to stop me!
The thing about some of the tier 1 units from tomes that’s skimmed over in the video and not being taken into account is the fact that some of those tier 1 not so special units can evolve to be tier 2/3 units that are better … I took copper golems and evolved them early game which gave me powerful tier 3 units fast and I’m sure the same can be said with others here .. depending on your build and how aggressively your units are getting into fights and their survivability it’s definitely worth mentioning that you’re not just getting a tier 1 unit like your culture has it holds more value cause not only do they start out slightly better than your original tier 1s but they have the ability to evolve which is what I think sets them apart they couldn’t give you overly powerful stuff out of the gate but they give you the option to earn powerful units out of the gate …
I did not know this! I thought I had reached the cusp of omniscience in this game and you drop that bombshell on me, holy crap
@@ThatGuyFromJamesBond yeah I’m not sure of every one of them but I know the lesser elementals all evolve to tier 3s, the copper golem evolves to iron golem, the piglets to goretusk pigs etc … if you hover over their rank e.g ‘recruit’ it’ll show the rewards for ranking up that unit usually some medals but for ones that evolve usually the second last rank I think it’s called ‘champion’ will show that they evolve into another unit and that unit then starts at recruit to rank up from there :) hope that was helpful
Hey quick thing i noticed that might affect how you see tome of enchantment. Copper Golems can evolve into Iron Golems by leveling up since you spoke so highly about them. It is a very easy mechaninc to miss since you can see it only on unit level thingy.
Love the new content as someone who also fell in love with this game
If you have Experienced Leader you'd be able to consistently turn big stacks of Copper Golems into Iron Golems, yeah? That might be an interesting way to play.
Figured it was worth a mention, I've been watching Civ content for a long time and I almost always check out the other games you have series on. While I like the other series, and I've bought quite a few to play through after watching them, AOW4 might be the only one out of them that has really sucked me in wanting to see more content. I'm kind of hoping the videos on it do well so I can see more of it.
I love how you are aware of your biases and talk about them before going on to the tier list. It shows a good deal of self-knowledge and a desire for fairness. I can't tell you how rare that is.
Major respect to you, PotatoMcWhiskey.
I recently started playing this game and still feel a little lost at times, so I’m all for more of this content.
You recently started playing this game? You know, this game came out Recently...
What worked for me, is to do a highly thematic run. I played a game where I could only use Spiders and spider mounted units.
Yes, that means in the early game I could only use scouts and my hero! Knowing that, I chose Industrious as my culture, as crossbow scouts are the best at flanking. My racial traits were Spider Mounts (duh) and EXP, since my hero would need to carry the scouts, and I assume the EXP bonus applies to heroes.
I rushed my city to tier II, built the Nature tome province improvement that let me build spiders.
Spiders are animals, fighters, and non magic origin. Every time I picked a tome, I specifically looked for tomes that buffed those three unit types. I ignored battlemages, supports, archers, everything that wasn't a spider. This narrowed my focus, and let me find some really cool synergies.
In the process, I learned a lot about how to buff fighters, the power of hero support skills, and how OP spiders are. I also learned how strong nature tome animal buffs are.
For my next run, I think I'll focus on only two unit types instead of just one.
Can't help but feel you're underselling Tome of the Arch Mage's Astral Travel here. Sure, it's a tier 5 so the Tome ranking is immaterial -- if you can pick it, you will -- but it is definitely a transformative ability that cannot be otherwise replicated. Specifically, far as I know it's the only spell in the game that lets you move your entire army stack across the map in a couple turns by letting you place an outpost with a teleporter anywhere you want.
Arguably this is a "win harder" ability since it doesn't make you fight better, however that's often what you want in a T5 tome. It's also potentially one of the only ways you can stop a distant AI from winning, if you're ever in a situation where they build all 3 victory improvements; no idea how relevant that concern actually is at this point.
tldr: for non-Barbarians Astral Travel's ability to pop over and put an outpost with a teleporter down wherever you want lets you project power across the map in a way that you otherwise can't.
Scry Enemy can be pretty good late game as an acrane based civ because if your enemy is sets up a heart it gives you global vision of it. Then you can use astral shattering to pillage their heart, and the army that it spawns can be scried. Then as it runs around you can keep using astral shattering to pillage more provinces and create more armies for your opponent to have to deal with.
Burden of guilt saved a campaign for me, I was able to spam it out 5 times in a turn, locked down most of the enemy and deal with their stacks one at a time. Add in the fact it does chip damage as well, it’s really good imo.
You should also mention that the Sanctuary protects all other province improvements from pillages until it goes down. It can really slow down enemies trying to take out spell jamming and is nice for marauder spawns
Its even better then that, all you have to do is park a decent army on it and then the ENTIRE domain of that city can't be razed, ever. Never worry about someone razing your Seed/Root/Heart again!
You are addicted but so am I! Thanks for showing me a great game.
Nymphs are absolutely op imo. You can get them so early. Get a stack of 2-3 nymphs beside your 6stack, and dominate mid game.
1 nymph + astral reflection + multi cast == win every combat in the entire game in which you can mind control.
Actually, if all remaining enemy units are mind controlled, you win the fight and they disappear as if they were killed.
So if 9 enemies are mind controlled, not only will they tank and dps for you, but they will halve enemy force.
Imagine having 1 nymph, casting 4 mirror reflections on it (turn 2). You got yourself 9 nymphs. That's on average 5-6 successful mind controls. And you can keep doing it every turn if you can afford it.
Which is ridibroncus.
EDIT : And crazyculous
I haven't even played the game yet, but I'll gladly listen to Potato talk about it for an hour and a half.
This tierlist is on point. I definitely agree with most of these! I really want the Cryomancy tome to be good… hopefully they buff it.
Tome of the Astral Mirror is a must take for me just for the Combat Spell "Summon Astral Reflections". The spell works on your HEROES! Obliterate your enemies with several copies of your hero in combat. It will summon two copies of your hero each time you cast. Quite fun! :D
Damn, that's crazy
You get the summoning spells on heroes and that just lets your summons summon. Turn a hero into a clown car of tier 3 elementals, animals and undead. Especially if they have Weaver to do it twice
Or cast it on a wizard king with overchannel and weaver to get 7 combat spells off in one turn
Its especially hilarious with the Tome of the Eternal Lord. Taking a nigh-invincible melee monster who just comes back if you kill him and making him into SEVERAL nigh invincible melee monsters who ALSO COME BACK WHEN YOU KILL THEM is the most broken thing imaginable.
@@theessenceofawesome1 Except that Astral Reflections are explicitly stated to NOT be able to summon any units of their own. Your hero has "Summon Undead' and "Summon Elemental" signature skills? Their Astral Reflections won't be able to use them.
Overchannel also can't be used two times in the same turn, as any testing with Weaver will tell you. Admittedly Astral Reflections CAN also overchannel, so you will be able to spit out more spells, but over the course of turns, not "7 combat spells off in one turn"
@@jonasfree2 Ha! Got to try that combo. Thx :D
Astral Reflections has insane scaling most notably with the ability that refresh a units actions and Weaver (refresh once per combat abilities) allowing each cast of Astral Reflections give the best unit in range 4 more actions and if done on a Wizard Ruler you can throw out more spells while doing it (assuming you have the mana and casting points to do so)
Also it works great with the mage ability that gives magic +80% damage until the end of the next turn which is so much better when the hero gets to act multiple times before the buff expires (as the copies can refresh the original heros actions)
I feel like the frost damage enchantments lift the Tome of Cryomancy out of D tier because there are situations you find yourself in where your main opponents are weak to frost and you're getting insane value from those in the early game. Admittedly, there aren't that many frost-weak enemies unless you're on a Fiend infested map, but it'll definitely be worth it come the Dragons DLC.
Meanwhile me playing a frost world with frost queen, arctic world with raging blizzards and frostling enhanced enemies x) it's not easy when your armies don't heal.
One thing about marching winter, and all teraforming spell for that matter i think is that they can affect uncolonizable provinces which makes it even better.
Another funny combo i found was getting the tome of the god emperor, and getting max rank of shadow empire development which lets you see the whole map, and just orbital strike shit across map with half the cost(magic victory)
Some good insights, though I don't agree on a pretty large number of things:
Affinities:
Chaos - I'm not sure why you think this is so much better than everything else. I'll give it to you, the bottom half of the tree is really good, with upkeep discounts and 2 ways to get free units, although the infestation one may kinda be too niche to bother unless you see several infestations on the map you can clear early. The one with 50% chance after battle is quite broken. The upper half of the tree is all kind of about "win more" though, it gives you bonuses to razing and sieges for the most part, but if you're already at that point it means you've crushed the enemy armies and are winning anyway.
Shadow - It's actually similar to Chaos imo that a lot of the better abilities are in the first half. Shadow Binding is very good though, and Death Magic is solid with some hilarious synergies like the Vines spell. I would say it's not complete shit just on the back of these 2, though you don't really need to go deep into it. +100% hero xp would be pretty broken if you could get it early but it comes too late. Overall it's definitely not as good as Chaos as some others but not completely terrible either. It still may be the worst one overall but it has its uses for dipping into it.
Order - this is very context dependent and with the right map/build this is possibly the strongest affinity in the game that allows you to get unparalleled recruitment and eco super fast. Or on the other end there are maps with no free cities where this falls to bottom tier. On the maps with a good number of free cities this is top tier though, if you lean heavily into it with culture traits and tomes.
Astral - I honestly think this is A or S, it gives you some of the best research and mana improvements, being able to cast spells on the first turn is a huge advantage in any player vs player battle when used right, +1000 mana rite is pretty clutch to get an upper hand in a tight situation.
Nature - I agree that it's just very strong overall.
Materium - I agree that it's mostly pretty meh compared to others, it has some decent things and +2k gold rite is seriously good but overall it feels below what most others offer. Something has to be said about the capstone though, since -10% upkeep per unit rank is probably the single most broken improvement you can get, especially if stacked with some others. It does require you to lean heavily into Materium though or otherwise comes incredibly late/never.
Tomes:
(there are a lot of things I disagreed with but I'll list some that I remember)
Evocation - I agree on the overall rating of the book, however I'm surprised you don't like Evokers. Up to 45 damage at 6 range with 100% hit chance and a good chance of 8 dmg DoT is better than what most t2 ranged units can do, and it's actually really hard to not clump for this one since it jumps 3 hexes (which also means, it can technically strike units up to 12 tiles away). It may not be the best tome t2 but it's pretty solid imo and better than most faction ranged t1s-t2s.
Pyromancy.- same deal with Pyromancers, I think they're quite good for similar reasons. Against a human player their aoe might be not as good as they may not give you more than 2 targets to hit, while AI will often gladly blob 4-5 units for you to blast at, but even if you hit 2 units it's pretty good value unless they're in range to triple shoot them and you have 100% hit chance. I would add that both of these units get a lot better with Phase enchantment where they can aggressively phase forward without spending AP to nuke things from a very high effective threat range.
Cryomancy - Ice coffin is a pretty solid cheap spell, and even if it doesn't Freeze, Slow can be almost as good as Slun/Freeze on a melee unit. Lesser snow spirits evolve into their much more impressive t3 version which can later chain Freeze enemies with Amplified Arrows, and tbh all the elemental tomes should get a better score due to how strong the evolve elementals rush is. If you pick some combination of traits that gives them +2 starting ranks you can be swimming in t3 units like turn 15 or even earlier. Whether your eco can support it is another question but this is also where shadow binding comes being useful.
Glades - I kinda don't agree on this being S, especially when you rate Wind as B. I think the 2 archer units are comparable in power, and you might want to look into utility abducting wind gives you for pulling enemy units into your firing lines, it can be almost as good as "kill a unit" in many situations.
Sanctuary - on the other hand imo this is an easy S, just on the sole basis of Keepers Mark. It's not just "save a unit", since they can still walk up and lock your units in place with AoOs and retaliation attacks, as well as get healed on their turn. This counters focus fire strategies, which is generally the default. The unique spell jammer is solid too.
Teleportation - I'm tempted to give this an S too, just because strategy map mobility is so incredibly important and this helps it a lot.
Summoning - I think you've overlooked that the heal is a spammable army wide tactical spell, if you only use magic origin units this is quite amazing and there's no other heal like this at this tier, I would still agree with the overall ranking though.
Cold Dark - this actually works very well if you take Arctic Adaptation and Cryomancy, the terraforming spell becomes a powerful economic engine and makes enemies suffer movement penalties in your domain which you on the other hand ignore. You get this at t3 as well and you need t4 to get smth similar with nature for races without Arctic Adaptation. Kind of a niche build though.
Astral Mirror - you seriously undersell the Astral Reflections, this spell is crazy and puts this into S tier easily. You can use it on heroes and t5s so hello infinite overchanels or doubling up on your Shrine of Smiting damage output (yes, they do 50% but there are 2 of them, so you still get an equivalent of unit's damage on the field, and with Overchannel you can do it twice per turn.
Nature's Wrath - I think this tome defies classification and is better than all of the tier 5 tomes, because of the armywide AP reset spell. Combo it with a mobile army of let's say Phase Beasts and Phasing Battlemages and you can be on top of enemy in no time and then it's gg. You can even do it twice on the same turn with Overchannel which is just utterly ridiculous.
Goddess of Nature - I think you overrate this quite a bit. It has almost the same armywide res the 2 other tomes in this tier have, the difference being that it also heals damaged units. But the God Emperor's tome is generally mode widely applicable as you can make more unit types Faithful or Zealots than you can turn into plants. And the Necro tome actually counters your res since no corpse = no res. The unit enchantment is good, but imo it's not as good as the one in the Archmage for example. It's not bad but I wouldn't put it any higher than A.
Archmage - I kind of agree on the ranking, I actually think Time Stop is a lot worse than where you put it at vs humans since no one would clump to be hit by that (pvp games would most likely end much sooner than it's available too though). If AI blobs it's a really good spell, but if you only get like 2-3 units in a 18 vs 18 fight it's really meh for t5. Maybe if you manage to hit their best units and heroes. Overdrive is a lot better than you give it credit though, since most t5s are magic origin and this is one of the only ways to buff them. 48 move is also nothing to scoff at, 30% damage is really nice too (damage wise it's twice as powerful as 30% crit unless you have some crit damage synergies, just saying). Disruption wave removing enchantments is massive and is possibly the best lategame debuff spell massively dropping enemy combat power value. Maximized magic + gilding strike is a combo worth mentioning.
Chaos Lord - I think you undervalue the Avatar in the same way you undervalued Astral Reflections. If your leader can overchannel, summon 5 different units then reset and summon 5 more units this is pretty good. It's maybe still not as good as some others but it's not really C tier imo.
Tome of Creator - tbh with the right synergies this can destroy most things very easily. Keep in mind that repeated casts also inflict Sundered Defence if you have the heart. With Overchannel, Tome of Amplification and the Astral Perk on to cast on the 1st turn you can drop fat 120 damage on all enemy units, while kiting back and corner camping the map. You also stun some of them and sunder resistance. You can do it on subsequent turns too. If you're up against Nature though and see they can heal up, maybe you just conjure some amplification pylons first and wait to engage. As enemies take damage, you start dropping double casts of this to pummel them into the ground and then either eat or just camp their corpses with summons so they don't res. Out of t5 ones, this feels like the hardest one to counter (we don't talk about broken Nature's wrath here).
Eternal Lord - it's very strong in terms of spells it gives allowing you to resurrect, counter enemy resurrection, good global summon, great hero skill etc. The shortcoming of it is that this stuff all costs souls, which are harder to get than mana and don't benefit from the discounts mana spells can have. For that reason alone it's probably the worst in terms of practical use, but assuming unlimited resources I think it might be one of the better ones.
All in all imo the t5s are all pretty close, with Eternal Lord lord maybe being the worst due to practicality of the casting resource while if I would give any single one an edge that would be Creator since it allows your solo hero to pretty much nuke 3 full stacks without much effort in a lot of cases.
Materium tree is awesome. Cheap outposts, more gold, it's great.
46:17 I did find a nice way to use emergency teleportation: it's kinda a weaker version of displacement, if a unit gets pinned and you want to get it out the engagement without losing a move or suffering another hit, and you get some of the hp life you likely lost when your unit got pinned. Obviously in a battle mages based army it works perfect, you get out of pin and you bring down a full volley or make a run for it.
It has its limits, but it's neat
I wanna give a shoutout to the teir III Shadow tome that gives ice stuff. Specifically the Snow Elemental. Its a T3 Magical Summon Skirmisher unit that is absolutely awesome for its ability to very easily apply freezes to enemies as well as their teleport(which also had a chance to freeze nearby enemies too), just finished a game going for an Icy/Lich King theme with an emphasis on ice magic, and I must say they were quite valuable, expecially for seiges and they played quite nicely with Banshees, who have a useful morale debuff but have to get close and are quite squishy themselves. Freezing the enemies around the Banshees allowed me to keep them alive for longer. Even without Banshees they are just a good defensive/support unit with nice utility that can fit anywhere you might need it.
Materium I would assume may be for consiteration if you are getting attacked a lot, as a lot of their tome abilities as well as their tree abilities benifit defending and attacking cities.
You can also pick up a hero trait that allows you to ride spiders. I did it in the same game listed above. It gives every calvary (or hero riding one) the web abilities of a Spider. Of course you are sacrificing a racial trait for this, but it was very helpful to have Dark Knights that can apply a slow.
Main use I can think of for Emergency teleport is to disengage and heal up ranged units that have got enemies that have got next to them (Like teleporting enemy abilities that bypass your front line tanks to go for your archers / mages)
But equally, you could just use a damage spell to try and deal with the enemy instead.
I'm trying to learn a bit how to use each tree by using only one type of book per game. It's not effective, but you learn some the more hidden combos and also the hidden weaknesses.
I did a spider themed run. I only used spiders. Hero riding a spider, spider scouts, spiders recruited from nature tome province improvement, etc. I tried Industrious T3 mounted shields, but it turns out spiders don't need shield support, and T3 units are expensive.
I chose every tome purely based on how much it buffed spiders. I looked for the keywords Animal, Fighter, and Non Magic Origin.
Then I found out that with enough EXP, T2 Spiders evolve into T4 Spider Matriarchs. Those things are expensive... but so, so powerful. Especially with nature tome buffs, hero support skills, etc.
Spiders have AOE physical damage and CC with web. They have mobility with jump. They have multiattack. They have poison. They qualify for an insane number of unit enchantments. The matriarchs are single model units. I went into my playthrough expecting a challenge, but I literally didn't need any non spider units.
This game is Fuckling DESTROYING my life!! I’ve not played anything the entire week!!! And one of my favorite CZcamsrs is now making a chunky video on it after finishing a bad ass series,, hell yeah
I'm not sure the Arcane Supercharge spell is bug or not. In one of my order campaign, I found out that I could buff every units with Arcane Supercharge. I even buffed a Shrine of Smiting with both Arcane Supercharge and Exalted Champion, and made it has +150% damage
I carefully tracked all of the scores you gave for your books. 5 for "S", down to 1 point for a "D". Nature (40), Order (34), Astral (32), Chaos (28), Shadow (26), Materium (23). Chaos, with one "D" and three "C"'s was rated MUCH lower than your initial rating, especially with just two S, and NO "A" tomes.
Yes, but taking that first tier I Chaos book at the beginning will almost level up your chaos tree on its own. -30% upkeep, nuff said ;)
@@dr.paulwilliam7447 -30% upkeep, for tier 1 units. The unit that already has the lowest upkeep.
Meanwhile, Materium gets -10% upkeep for each rank(soldier, veteran, elite, champion, legendary) that a unit has.
@@fendelphi thank you for the correction!
@@dr.paulwilliam7447 Dont get me wrong. -30% upkeep for tier 1 is still good. Especially if you focus on a rush playstyle with a lot of cheap units.
It is just that it only really benefit a small amount of units.
I went pretty magic heavy in one of my games and that tome with the Warbreeds was available and they inherited Mana Addicts, so got life steal when I'd cast a spell - that was quite silly.
You may not have noticed but tome of subjugation's Final Ultimatum *permanently mind controls*
As in, after the battle you keep the unit. If you play your cards right and especially if you get the moral debuffing shadow tome you can pull off some silly things. Takes a while to get online though.
I've actually been having fun going order/chaos using revelry and subjugation tomes. The high morale let's my units get crit chances but the low morale makes the enemy more prone to fumbles. And as enemy units die, the more killer my units get and the weaker thr enemy gets.
I don't know if it gets harder or becomes impossible in games with difficulties higher then normal, but having an entire cities rout is pretty fun.
I finished a game with Arcane High Elves, and even if you're just using the base racials, you can stack bonuses to your battlemages and combat spells to pretty much destroy most things. Astral mixed with Chaos and Mataerium can let you just cast forever with a beefy frontline...sadly Iron Golems don't benefit from racials. Not that they need it.
this video is a great showcase on how good the game is. So many things he says is bad or underpowered or even the op stuff i would have to say is not 100% accurate in my opinion and thats great! i like that there is actually good diversity in this game so far with what people thing is strong/weak.
Hey potato! Tome of enchantment of ranged units works reeeeealy well! Zephyr archer AOE 8 tiles away on legendary rank.
The copper golem transform into Iron Golems once they get ranks and seeker arrow doubles with legendary rank ranged units Eagle Eye, making their att 6 range and if you get a Spring Fairy you get a True shot to overcome the lack of acc!
And then you go high culture, pure evil, for another +1 range 😂
I love how Potato can get me to watch so many hours about a game I’ve never heard of and won’t ever play😂
There's actually an insane way to use mass recall if the map is big.
1. Use the astral walk to teleport your ruler anywhere on the map and build an outpost with teleporter.
2. Mass recall your stacks to home base (assuming you made your teleporter close)
3. Teleport all your stack in wherever place you built said teleporter outpost.
This will effectively make your army cover all parts of the map and will let you clear opponents with ruthless efficiency.
Materium is the tree I somehow ALWAYS end up, no matter how I start, or what I plan.
It's phantastic for economy and in sieges it's an absolute powerhouse, shredding any city to bits to vasallise it afterwards.
And you certainly don't want to wait for ages to have buildings finished on your city.
If you spend your imperium on growing your city and spam quarries, you have very neat buildings in no time.
It can use a buff on some skill tree elements, true, but it definitely deserves a little more credit imo.
I'm looking forward to what they add in the upcoming expansions
I've noticed quite a few suspiciously DLC shaped holes. 2 nature culture, 2 chaos culture, in particular. I shudder to think how complicated the balance and meta will get.
That every race can have any culture and unlock any affinity at any tier, means an exponential increase in options and synergies each time a tome is added.
I like going back to take the +1 range for ranged units. It's effectively only 3/4 research turns till you can get back on tome progression, and you get big combat boost. The sunder weapon also makes your meatshield units be useful by buffing your ranged dmg. Once you have the accuracy perks, you can do double shots at 70%+ from 6 tiles away. Really fun with a tier 1 ranged swarming army. Hard to say how it stacks up in the grand scheme of things, but ranged stacking is strong, I can't see +1 range being only C tier.
Excellent stuff. Looking forward to watching this.
Wish we could add how many armies enter a battle. Or adjacent armies could reinforce as troops die or flee the field of battle.
Doomherald is pretty great together with the Tyrant Knights from Order 3 (Subjugation). Unless the enemy is specifically building to counter it, you can easily drop their morale to the point where you rout most of their army rather than killing it, and then you can pick up some free conversions while they rout. It supports a very efficient playstyle.
how do you rate hero build paths ex: mage, two handed, onehanded with shield, pure support, etc?
Ice prison is an awesome spell and frozen is easy to get with witches on top of it. Early game where you typically have a single tier 2 or 3 and chaff you can CC the boss and trivialize encounters.
Thanks for this, you helped me to get into this game as well. I was wondering if you would do any guides on this game at all?
In my 100% research game I ended up wiping entire armies with Devouring Void. If you can position it properly and then either tempt enemies to move through it or hold them within its radius, it will melt stacks. Especially if it's affected by the Heart of Shadow, which I didn't have. One cast gives you three rounds of damage, plus damage for every square moved within the darkness, in a radius 1, 2, 3. It's only maybe 20 damage per hit, but it adds up.
Absolutely love the AoW4 content from you. Keep it coming!
Gotta say, reducing enemy moral in this game is really strong. With the Doomherald book alone you can turn a battle that the auto-battle has you nearly fully wipe into a causality free win. If you use the army spell before a battle and the tactical spell on at least 4 units all you need to do is kill about 2 enemies and the whole stack routes. Doomherald is ez a or s tier and you are sleeping on it. Good vid tho.
I would say that you take the cryomancy book for the building when your running astral builds. When you use it with cold dark and marching winter to turn tiles to ice and tundra you are generating enough mana that you never run out even with spamming spells and mana summons.
Lots of people seem to disagree on your takes on some of the other affinities, but I'm with you on Chaos affinity. It's very strong, and fun to play too. And really nothing is better than the Horde tome for spamming out quick wins to grind out the Pantheon points.
true, early game horde is for early game aggression, otherwise it kinda sucks
@@tuskular I'm not sure I agree. Spawnkin is great throughout the game. And you're probably going to fight lots of marauders and infestations early on even if you're not going to immediately go conquer someone. Sure, things like Summon Irregulars and Blaze of the Horde fall off later, but I think Horde has enough going for it to make it worth it as a starting book.
I normally stack defensive stats and go hard into matter with a side of undeath
42:15 Also if you use manual combat and then use automatic combat, Banshee really likes commiting suicide. It always jumps in the middle of multiple units and then dies