Age of Wonders 4 - Overexplained - Beginners Guide - (Shadow/Necromancy) - Pt.1

hey buddies potato mcwhiskey here and welcome to Age of Wonders 4 over explained a tutorial Series where we are going to get down to the nitty-gritty and talk about every single bit of the game that I understand now this tutorial is directly aimed at people who play single player not multiplayer you'll have to go and check out wind Slayer maybe morbus will put a link to his channel somewhere on screen or a picture Quincy does a whole bunch of multiplayer stuff go check him out if you want to learn about the multiplayer this is going to be about single player so uh this is the realm setup screen now my recommendation actually when you're starting a new game is to just pick a different land mass and then that's it don't mess around with any of these modifiers you're not ready for that you should play the standard game first we are going to be able to encounter a wide a variety of situations as possible my personal recommendation is either Coast or continents continents and Coast are both totally fine I'm gonna play continents today because that's the default so I'm just gonna play a totally standard totally default game standard player distance seven players I am gonna bump the difficulty up too hard well no I've changed my mind I'm gonna play on normal so that I can teach you more about the game I'm just not going to change it I'm just going to be a higher difficulty one thing I am going to do though is I will say that the aiike cannot use custom rulers just so you can get a feel for the default factions now I have built a faction for this this is the faction of the dark felines ruled by Darth meow meow is a feline race with quick reflexes I took quick reflexes because I wanted to play a very shock infantry heavy gameplay style where I Rush up into people's faces and I hit him where it hurts and I really get into people's faces with a lot of heavy infantry heavy Cavalry all that kind of thing so by having a little bit of resistance to ranged attacks it significantly lowers the amount of damage I'm gonna take when people shoot at me we're also elusive which should allow us to more easily break out of other people's opportunity attacks uh their retaliation attack so we won't take as much damage when we get counter-attacked now we're going to be relying heavily on shock units so counter attacks are not going to be very common but when they do happen we want to be ready for it we're gonna be playing the dark culture because that's what people voted for I'm not super familiar with the dark culture but I feel confident enough in the game itself that I can play this they are a deep by default evil culture so we are going to be taking as well with the society traits because we are Shadow we're going to be taking the Scions of evil which will give us bonuses the more evil that we are we will get 10 draft which is how fast you recruit your units and five Imperium which is used for a variety of important actions we'll also get a lower alignment our units will be recruited at a higher length when we reach the maximum alignment of I think it's minus a hundred or higher shock units and shield units will have plus one rank and we will start with an extra shock or Shield unit we'll also be taking ritual cannibals so that we will get mana and food whenever we kill a unit based on the tier of the unit so if we kill a tier 5 unit we get 15 mana and 15 food this will help us and allow us to sustain our army using combat right this will give us a little bit of food a little bit of Mana so we can snowball by winning combat and also it gives us the corpse eating ability which is a pretty good snowball heal because if you can get a kill on an enemy unit you don't necessarily have to raise it as an undead you can't just eat that corpse as a free action and gain a little bit of momentum so that's the idea behind there also so the chaos Affinity is really nice because we will get a pretty early ability that will give us a reduction in our tier one unit costs and getting out as many tier one units in the early game is a very good way to build up your power level now we're going to be playing on the Tome of souls here which is all about the undead mostly about Soul harvesting about Shadow Affinity about collecting The Souls of our enemies and then doing things to people who are soul-bound spending souls to recruit and improve certain units so we're also going to be playing as a champion that will give us an extra 10 gold and 20 City stability and our units will level up faster we also get relation boosts with free cities and so that is why we're gonna be playing the Darth Miami faction very much so a faction oriented around getting up and into people's faces and killing them so if you're wondering what we have this is what we have and our starting spell will be ice shackles as well as soulfire now let's take stock of the current situation we are in kinslayer which is our capital I will be renaming my Capital to cardboard box which is a cat's favorite place to be we have quite a few things that we're going to need to explain about the game and what we're going to be doing these are my armies this is a scout unit Scout units are high speed they have a high movement speed of 40 and they have the Fireside ability which gives them extra Vision range the domain the dark Scout unit has the infiltrate ability which gives them plus two Vision when they're in enemy terrain so they can see even further when they're inside one of my enemies domain this is quick reflexes and Elusive these are very weak units that typically don't get much better but they're good for scouting and finding resources on the map my recommendation is don't actually bother manually scouting just click Auto explore and let them do it themselves there is some optimization you can do with exploring yourself but I don't think you necessarily have to worry about that now this right here is my main Army when I click on them and I hover over you can see the yellow sphere the yellow circle of hexes here that we can reach this is how far they can move in a single turn so I can reach any of these tiles inside the yellow box in just one turn now I'm gonna do something a little bit unorthodox here I'm considering recruiting Another Hero but I think I'm gonna wait for that for a moment but yeah I I write down here this is the Army panel I have a hero I have a battle mage unit each simple corresponds to a type of unit Battle Mages arranged magical users they typically have a ranged magical attack that repeats and then a ranged magical special attack that does some sort of special effect this right here is a shock unit they are really good at countering Shield units but they are counted by pole arm units very good at getting in and doing damage then this is a pursuer it is a range unit which is just a ranged physical unit they sometimes have special abilities Tier 1 units typically lack special abilities although sometimes they can have them the very first thing I'm going to do with managing my city is tell you about the city yields right here is food food is used to grow population the more food you have the faster a city grows the more population you have the more food they eat this right here is production production is used to build City structures City structures give you a variety of benefits for example the experimentation Chambers here gives me five knowledge and five gold this is draft draft is used to recruit units for example this dark warrior here takes 80 draft to recruit the outrider on the other hand only takes 60 draft down here so this is the grow population this is to build buildings and this is to recruit units then we have the empire-wide resources okay so you have local resources that only matter for the local City and then you have empire-wide resources that matter for your Empire gold is an empire-wide resource that's used to pay for things it's used to recruit armies it's used to upkeep armies it's used for a whole variety of events Technologies bonus it's used for basically everything and then you've got Mana which is just like magical gold it is used for casting spells summoning units basically anything magical in the game is going to have some sort of interaction with Mana and then you have knowledge which is used for learning new spells and new skills from your tomes of magic that's something we'll talk about a little bit later we have Imperium which is obviously used for a whole bunch of different things now we'll have to talk about when we actually get to it so in terms of decision making what I'm going to do is I'm going to come in here I'm going to take I'm going to zoom out my map slightly I'm going to take stock of which resource nodes are unoccupied near my Capital so I have an iron deposit here and a pasture here so maybe I'll build a farm on the pasture or maybe a lumber mill oh I could do a really strong growth build right if I build a lumber mill because if I build a lumber mill that will boost the storehouse here making it 30 cheaper to build both in terms of gold this will be cheaper in terms of gold and it will be cheaper in terms of production this 130 production will get reduced to like 70 uh not 70 it'll be um like uh 90 something don't remember like 91 production something like that anyway so yeah it will be built a lot faster if we can build a lumber mill plus the lumber bubble provide a tiny little chunk of gold a tiny little bit of food and then a pasture will provide food and then if I get the storehouse is weld I'll grow really quickly and I can claim all these tiles nearby and build up my city really quickly that's kind of the opening moves that I'm going to do I'm going to go ahead and just produce merchandise for a single turn that'll generate me five gold just so I can boost the storehouse I'm also going to immediately start the production of a new pursuer no I should totally get a second no I should I should get a sec I should get a third dark warrior I was gonna produce a pursuer but I'm gonna go for the dark warrior instead and then in terms of things that I want to clear I'd like to clear this this is a production stockpile I would like to clear this one I actually have a building under construction of my Capital so I'm going to wait a turn before I do that and instead I'm gonna come over here and attack this NPC Army of the marauder guard that is guarding the Mana node resource node resource nodes exist inside provinces the entire map is broken up into a variety of provinces that have resources and terrain inside of them this province right here adjacent to my capital city is a grassland Forest terrain that has a pastor inside of it I can build a farm here I can build a lumber mill here whereas for example over here this is just a grassland Forest that doesn't have a pasture this one is a forest so I can only build a lumber mill or because it has a Mana node I can build a conduit or a research station conduits give you Mana research stations give you research these are all really important concepts for us to understand as we move forward let's go ahead and attack this Army so we attack an army by moving towards it and right clicking we move our unit over we hover over their thing and then we attack them and then that red circle that appears that dictates which units are going to reinforce the battle if I take my Scout here and you'll notice when I hover over my enemy the Scout's flag doesn't change but if I were to move my Scout one tile to the left so that it's inside the red circle of calm combat and now when I hover over it you'll see my Scout's flag will bounce up and down indicating that it has been called to battle I can still choose when I initiate the battle to say actually Scout I don't want you to participate but I will allow the Scout to participate and since this is just two little Warriors I could probably auto combat this and get a win without any losses however I'm gonna go ahead and fight it manually just so I can talk a little bit about actual combat it's generally better if you can fight combat manually especially in the early game so that you can minimize the amount of damage that you take and maximize the efficiency of your combat troops because damaged units are more likely to die and losing units early game is actually a really big loss so what I'm going to do is I'm going to push all my units together forward in a very gentle approach I'll also try to bait them in to attack my my Scout over here they typically get very hungry to attack Scouts and then I will just back off now what we want to do is we only want to occupy zones where they will only get a single attack if they approach us so I'm gonna put my shock unit here I'll move U1 tile to the left I'll put my shock unit here I'll move my hero behind by warlock to here my Archer here and then I'll allow the Archer to take a single shot which should provoke them to come forward but then I'm going to inflict slowed with magic anyway you can left click a unit to select it you right click to move it units have a variety of actions they can perform they have action points the more action like uh how do I explain this you see this guy here this Anvil guard he's got three action points every time he steps a couple of tiles his number of action points depletes and he will need action points to actually take actions so you can see here if he were to run forward he would only melee strike once but if my unit was like closer let's say I moved this Warrior forward a tile then instead of doing seven damage he would run forward and actually have two action points on this tile and attack twice to do 14 which is why you want to try to just very carefully navigate and negotiate down here in the bottom right these are your spells I'm gonna go ahead and cast an ice shackles which is a tier 1 damage debuff spell that was 14 Frost damage and slows the enemy so boom we do that now slow code is an effect that slows their movement it gives them the slow movement debuff which means now he can't move quite as fast or fast now he can only move two tiles before he runs out of action so hopefully that is starting to show off the Watts and the whys and the who's of the house and bits and Bobs of combat so they're going to approach me and attack me they do get a primal strike so they do a decent amount of damage that's not important I'm gonna go ahead and use the sundering curse ability on this guy over here the sundering cursed will do 24 damage it's also doing two lightning damage because I'm standing adjacent to this pylon pylons give the uh magically charged ability which gives them plus two damage on all magical attacks now I could use a weakening bolt strike here right and I would do 30 damage or I can do 26 damage and also remove two stacks of bolster defense and potentially Sunder my enemy's defense the lower an enemy's defenses the more damage they take you can see here this guy's defense is at six so he's taking 47 less than damage from physical attacks however his resistance is only zero so he has no reduction in magical ability so if I come in here and I cast sundering curse on him and I completely Sunder away all of his stats then if I hover over here and now you can see his physical damage reduction is only 34 so he went from him taking half of damage to taking two-thirds of it which is actually a 20 increase in the amount of damage that he is now taking very important piece of information to note because that means he's now taking a lot more damage he also has sounded resistance which means he's actually taking 10 percent more magical damage because he has negative resistance resistances can go negative so that's something that's important because now my hero can actually kill this guy very easily uh he has the magical bolt ability now he is also a necromancer so he can raise the undead but we'll we'll kind of talk about all those abilities later but yeah navigating and understanding what your units are capable of doing is very very important for example I'm playing the dark culture so why people have the cool the weak ability which means they do 20 more damage to units at the weakened attribute so if I hover over this and hold down is it control um see do you have weakened no you don't have weekends so let me let me do this right if I shoot this guy this Archer has a chance to inflict the weakened debuff when he attacks now weakened is a debuff that lowers an enemy's total damage see he's got two stacks of weakened which now means my unit is getting the benefit from that cold the weak ability so they're gonna do more damage hopefully that kind of explains things anyway we'll get the kill the camera will slow down and do all sorts of cool stuff we have killed our first battle now because we are playing a necromancer we get a couple of souls but we also get a little bit of food and a little bit of Mana because of our cannibal ability we're basically eating them we also picked up 70 Mana because we cleared a Mana node and we got an item The Ring Of The Vicious killer which inflicts double morale penalties when a unit kills when the unit wearing the ring kills an enemy units have two kinds of Health it's called well just Health which covers regular health and temporary health and then morale which is basically like a second health bar that you can damage indirectly with certain actions like a unit witnessing another unit dying will lower their morale but a unit witnessing an enemy unit dying will increase their morale so there's a whole landscape of decisions and understandings you have to make here so let's talk about research this is the research screen after every four research Cycles we will get to pick a new Tome from the library of tomes each of these tomes has a set of three to six abilities inside of it so you can see here that home of evocation has a whole bunch of lightning focused abilities the Tomo Cycles is much more plant-based the Tome of zeal is all about inquisitions and control the Tome of cryomancy is all about ice and pain and nastiness right so that will hopefully give you an idea of what we're working with here every research cycle you will be presented with three of the options from your current pool of possible research you will get to select one of those options and then after you finish it your options will be shuffled you can Shuffle the options yourself if you don't like your options or you can potentially like let's say I really like like this Soul binder ability and I want to research it next I can lock it in for 20 mana and then instead research painful curse now painful curse is a really great debuff spell because it thunders people's resistance meaning they take more damage and it inflicts weakened which allows us to trigger cold a week to do 20 more damage so this will massively increase our capability of doing damage but also where defensiveness because we're weakening our enemy as well and I believe our units also get regeneration Stacks if they attack a unit that's weakened so there's a whole bunch of reasons that we're going to be taking painful curse let's go ahead and end turn and our Scout automatically scouted the picked up 76 gold for us now when you start the game you're going to have zero Imperium after your first turn you're going to have some Imperium in stock and my recommendation will be to go to your capital city and click the attract population button once you attract a population this way we don't have to wait two turns we can immediately build a province Improvement we can improve a tile Farms increase your farm income by five per turn this Farm will increase by 15 because there's a pasture here Lumber Mills increase your food income by two and your production increased by three Minds increase your gold income by five but there's also an iron deposit here so that'll be another 10 production quarries increase your production by five and there's a couple of other ones that we'll talk about but right now I want to get a lumber mill because I want to Annex those pastors so my city grows faster you can see my city went from growing in four turns to growing in three turns and then I can build a storehouse in four turns instead of seven after I've done that and it's boosted so instead of being 60 Gold it's only 42. so this is like a really efficient way to grow my city and then I can immediately go into the library in fact when you're playing a dark build in my opinion you should go for the library first because uh 10 knowledge income is a 15 increase in the rate of our research and when you're playing Undead what you really want to get to is the third Undead book because it contains a very powerful ability the Tome of the great transformation has both White born which makes all of your units own dead and gives them lifestyle as well as the vetted Legion which makes all of the melee units in your army have 10 extra hit points and the weakening Aura which weakens enemies attacks every turn very very cool very powerful uh so yeah we'll be going for the painful curse now that we have a building in queue I'm going to go ahead and try to clear this gargoyle now unfortunately I can't actually reach that gargoyle this turn I'm out of range but here are things that you can do you can if you want quick buy a unit I can hurry the recruitment of this dark warrior and then this dark warrior will be in range to claim that Soul so I could just move my Army into reinforcement range and when I attack my Army will be part of that battle Bish bash Bosh very easy I'm gonna Auto resolve this battle just to save time but I got four souls out of it which is quite nice now here is something very important to know my unit is hurt he has low Health but he's only going to regenerate five Health per turn because he's outside of my territory if I zoom in on this Army and I see oh actually this guy is hurt but everyone else is fine I'm gonna click on this guy specifically which will deselect everyone else you can click on other units to select them as well or you can then just like deselect and I'm going to tell this guy to go back home inside my own domain because units inside your domain heal much faster five times faster in fact he's now going to heal 25 Health per turn which means he's practically going to be at full health next turn and instead I can just move the rest of my stack forward to explore and see if we can find more stuff to find now I have a total of six units in my main Army here which I think is enough so I'm going to come over to my city and then start recruiting an outrider which is a scout unit and I'm going to use that Scout unit to try to find more information I would say it's a good ballpark to get at least two Scout units I would say most games are going to want three and if you can sustain four if you can get away with it which we can because we have high draft and high gold you can get away with four but I would be careful at least two typically not more than four because you lose a lot of tempo to build Scouts yeah let's do a little bit of Exploration with this guy we do see a couple of interesting things here we do see an ancient wonder over here which is something we'll talk about when we actually get a chance to potentially clear us you should be able to heal pretty quick I am going to go ahead and move my main Army over here I would like to try to clear this NPC Arby they are guarding another pasture and now the note that an enemy Army is guarding that is typically going to dictate the type of reward you get right these guys are getting a food note which means if I clear it I will get food from my Capital City just that's the way it works we finally have an empire development skill available empire development skills are going to be based on your affinities there are six affinities there is Shadow chaos materium astral order nature this down here is the general Affinity tree that you'll slowly build up no matter what but the main Affinity trees are the important things as you acquire Affinity you will unlock new abilities as you go down the tree getting all the way to the the ultimate ability for example the spying Shadow's ultimate ability is to fully reveal the world map and gain infinite sensing range very powerful in contrast for example the astral binding ability makes all new magical origin units gain plus 3 ranks which could be quite powerful for us since we are going to be summoning a lot of units right we're going to be summoning on dead you can see the skeleton here has I believe the magic origin trait so that could be a good way for us to have like really strong skeletons you know you're starting to see how we might be able to piece together all these abilities so I could get a free City overview for the city of darkspire now we have met another player but it's not a player player this is a free City this is a minor player in the game these are independent cities that you can choose how you interact with them you can choose to conquer them or you can choose to be their friend you be their friend by giving them a whispering Stone a whispering stone is a very limited resource that you typically only have one to four of and most people are gonna only ever get two in their games you can get up to four I believe but most of the time you're gonna have one at one or two and you can give this to the city which will slowly raise their allegiance and if you can go through the allegiance steps and get all the way over here to a pact of vassalage they will integrate into your Empire as a vassal it'll mean you don't have direct control over them but they will join your Wars assist you in local combat and potentially send raiding parties to enemy players you can also choose to integrate them at a later date to bring them into your Empire that's honestly worth it to do with the one that you typically find early because they tend to have some sort of special resource like the whispering stone fruit here the silvertone fruit which is a special magical material resource we'd love to talk about magical materials later but I'm going to give these guys a whispering Stone and that will slowly bring up their allegiance with me because you hear Allegiance between plus three now I could also choose if I really wanted to integrate these guys quickly I could choose to boost the allegiance and half the amount of time that we would get to a pact of cooperation it's not a completely terrible idea to do personally I prefer to spend my early Allegiance or my early Imperium on increasing the population of my Capital City so I'm gonna go ahead and attract a population here in the capital and then immediately build a quarry I'm going to build Quarry for a few reasons because if I build a quarry here I'll get 15 production which will near basically double my production per turn right I'm making 24 so I'll go to 40 once I build this which is quite a nice bump yeah exactly 40 which now means I'm building buildings even quicker you can see here this tier 2 Granary building is going to take seven turns now remember on the first turn this Workshop building was taken seven turns so you can kind of tell that we've we've massively increased the amount of production that we make I would like to build the Arcane Institute for another 15 knowledge per turn because I'm doing a little bit of a tech Rush build here because I'm playing as the undead and it's quite important as Undead to attack rush I think that's a pretty important part of playing Shadow is to get a lot of science um so the Arcane Institute is boosted which is the tier 2 knowledge building so I'm going to go ahead and build it ASAP now I also want to build the experimentation Chambers at some point because it also has knowledge as well as the underground laboratory which also has knowledge so yeah we're gonna be we're gonna be pushing in a very knowledge heavy Direction because that's the way that this faction plays let's take this outrider and we're going to put him on auto explore as well and then I'm going to recruit one more outrider because I do think that it's important that you get at least three Scouts in most of your games let's go ahead and conjoin all these units together into a single stack like so and then I will take my leader and unfortunately he doesn't have a mount right now but if he did have a mount I'd be able to do some really interesting stuff we're going to take just the leader and tell him to attack here I'm gonna see how auto combat does my leader took a nice chunk of damage but leaders are you know relatively tanky units so I don't mind them taking a bit of damage we collected five Souls we got 15 food in 15 Mana I'm gonna go ahead and accept that combat especially because a lot of these units actually leveled up it's probably about time that I talked about veteransi so your units are capable of leveling up you can see here at the basic rank they these guys will have 60 health and that's it however every time they level up they're going to get plus 4 help which means they can end with um plus 4 8 12 16 20 Health which is what is that six that's about 30 more Health than they usually have which is pretty darn good that's a very respectable amount of extra Health also if they get to the third level they'll get a damage boost and if they get to the legend level they'll get a boost to their Critical Hits um so yeah keeping your units alive and leveling them up is quite important it gives them that little bit of an edge of survivability very much so worth it different classes of units have different level ups for example this Soldier over here it gets a um ability if it would let me hover it gets an ability called damage and then it gets the Eagle Eye which gives it extra plus one range and I don't need to tell you if you have a range of four and you get plus one range that's a huge increase in your range the Warlock on the other hand they get um they get damage and they revoker and I think if voker lets you cast more spells in combat I think we haven't even talked about casting points or anything like that but mostly because we haven't actually researched the spell that has been worth casting all right let's keep exploring so the main thing that we're looking for in the early game is a potential Second City location so you can have up to three cities when you start a game unless you have a modifier to that and you have your throne City you typically have your first free City and that's going to be two if I decide to integrate it which I probably will this game and then you want to look for like a third place where I want to plug down a city and this place over here is looking pretty okay right we have some kind of magical material in the fog of War we have some sort of resource here and then we have an ancient wonder that we might be able to Annex into the Empire so that this could all be like a very good spot for another city it's kind of at the edge of the match map which I don't love it is near what looks like to be a giant tree which could also be quite good my Capital City can Annex another Province this time I'm going to be annexica Farm I'm going to Annex a farm on this gold mine so that I can boost the experimentation chamber that gold mine will also provide us with gold per turn I want the experimentation chamber ASAP so I'll go ahead and build that and I also want to get the underground laboratory so I will be getting a second firm as soon as possible as well I'm trying to rush as much attack as possible so I'll get a second Farm probably over here and then I'll get a research post over here so that I can build the academy because to build the tier 3 research or to build it the buildings come in typically tiers right so you have like tier one just is easy to build so let's say I build that Shrine that's tier one then you have the Mana Obelisk that's tier two has no requirements you just you just build it the tier 3 building requires you to have the building that produces the same kind of resource so in this case it's conduits I need to have Mana producing building and then the final tier is the Mages Guild which is the tier that provides Mana based on the number of conduits in your city so yeah it's it's just a good rule of thumb and that applies to farming buildings Etc now Heroes can advance their skills in a variety of ways the first way is to get new equipment we haven't found any new equipment I mean we did get the ring of the vicious killer which is fine the other way is that they can actually level up both in terms of their signature abilities and their basic abilities and they're also capable of absorbing your racial traits so I could go for another battle magic skill but instead do I want him do I want him to be actually Thunder and curse could be really good to get in my hero you know what I'm going to take a more of in a magical Direction I really like support skills but I think maybe a magical direction would be good I'm going to take the magecraft ability which will allow his magical attacks which he's carrying a poison orb to ignore one level of status resistance and give them 10 accuracy so he'll be better at attacking that's what I'll do I'll build him more as an actual battle mage so I'm going to do a little bit of a Delta split with my units I don't always recommend doing this but it's a great great thing to do if you're a little bit uncertain in the direction you should go also I found a watchtower which has actually given me a lot of really good information so I found the city of Stapleton over here and this is maybe telling me that over here might not actually be the best place for a new City because I don't know if there's enough room but I could build a very interesting coastal city if I were to plonk a city right here which I might actually do so I'm gonna pull my hero back because what I want to do is to build an outpost and only Heroes can build outposts I'm going to pull my hero back into this tile and I'm going to start the construction of an outpost outposts allow you to claim provinces so there's my Outpost it's coming up now it'll take two turns to build Outpost are the precursors to cities now in terms of exploration Direction I think I'm gonna head south and see if I can find anything interesting to the South alright we found the baneful curse we finished researching it now we could go for soul binders the bone Golem or Soul overflow I think I'm gonna go for soul blinders I think that's a more interesting ability here's a question though do I want to lock in the bone Golem the bone Golem is a pretty strong tier 2 unit I don't quite have the Mana income to sustain it though so I'm just going to go ahead and research Soul binders for now and we'll leave it at that we've got a new empire development skill available so for the cost of 75 Imperium we can get 10 knowledge per turn when we send a whispering Stone to a free City since I am going for a tech Rush build I am going to go ahead and take the All-Seeing Eye that will give me a nice boost to my research per turn now having spotted a second ancient wonder to the South that has kind of changed my opinion of building a city on this on this tile right here in fact I'm gonna go ahead and abort this Outpost and instead place my city on the tile I had initially planned because there's a pasture here that I've already cleared that would allow the city to grow quickly there's a iron mine nearby that'll allow it to build things I have access to an oracle woods and a pilgrim passage so as long as I can clear those out you do have to fight to clear them before you can actually claim them I can do some pretty good work here let's go ahead and rejoin all my armies together and we're going to go ahead and try to clear out this now this is going to be the hardest thing that we fought so far it's got four units in it so we'll see how she goes let's go ahead and begin the combat it's a low risk battle and we lost two units which means I'm gonna have to fight that battle manually to prevent any losses I would say typically if your units lose too much health or you lose a unit it's probably a good idea to fight that battle manually now we have a very aggressive faction so we definitely want to be on the offensive so I'm going to be playing on the left side of the battle here bring my hero to this tile and I'll bring you to there you to there um yeah so generally we're pretty aggressive faction so we want to be moving out towards our enemies generally we don't sit back and wait for them to come to us now we're going to go ahead and cast a baneful curse here on this group of units which will massively Sunder their defenses and weaken them I'm going to move my hero one tile to the left no what if I moved from two tiles to the left yeah but first i'm gonna move these shock units over here because what I'm going to do is I'm going to try to bait the enemies in to attacking me even though that might not be a great idea for them I'm going to cast a thundering curse um this experiment right here is the scariest unit on the battlefield it's a tier 2 unit with a ton of Defense it's got a big DPS so what I want to do is I want to slender him and weaken him even further so cast a sundering curse he takes a whole bunch of weekends and now his defense descended by -3 which means he's taking about you know 30 more damage I'm going to cast magical bolts on him so you can see if he were to rush forward and attack my wizard he would do eight damage as he takes damage units in his formation will die you can see there's a dead unit on the floor so I'm going to attack him right and watch carefully watch the actual unit fall down and die right so he was doing eight damage and there was uh six people in formation now he's only going to do six damage because I killed a couple of the units in the formation right so you're starting to see about actually doing damage to enemies is a way to increase your own survivability let's move forward with this Archer I'm gonna attack him twice this will further weaken him meaning if he were to come forward he'll only do three damage so this guy is effectively dead as far as I'm concerned um we have our uh we have our shock units in a position to counter attack extremely efficiently which is exactly where we want them to be so I'm going to let them come forward and get very weak attacks on my actual units okay so he just did a massive heal which makes this battle a little bit harder but that's fine because we're still in a great position to counter attack now let's go ahead and do an ice shackle I reckon no I think I'm gonna do another painful curse this does cost me just 10 Mana I'll make these guys weak I'm going to do magical bolts on this guy because I want to weaken him one two three so now he's super weakened and now I can Rush forward with my uh shock unit here to cancel his retaliation which will allow my Archer to break contact with him and it'll also give him a regeneration tag so now my Archer can leave without taking a retaliation attack you can see enemy units have a Zona control you see these three swords that are projecting out in front they will do 27 damage next turn but if I try to leave I'll also take a retaliation attack you'd see this guy has a sword underneath his profile however if I use a charge attack on him I will cancel his retaliation right watch Boom the sword disappears I gain regeneration and now I can step out because his retaliation attack is gone however I could just stab him in the face would that be more damage than stepping back let me have a think about that if I step back I can magically bolt this guy I could do 20 damage if I magically bolt this guy one and two that means this Warrior should be able to get the kill which will leave a corpse that I can eat on the floor now now experiment do have first strike but when they're really weak like this the first strike doesn't matter there's another stack of regeneration I'm gonna pull you back a tile and you have two attacks they're the biggest threat on the field is currently the zealous this guy won't do too much even with three attacks this guy won't do this guy will do a lot of damage with three attacks so what I want to do um he's gonna do 14 damage so I'm gonna go ahead and weaken him and I'm getting double value here on the weekend because not only is he getting weakened I'm actually reducing the number of attacks yes he's gonna do 10 damage and he's gonna do eight so we've successfully weakened and navigated this battle our units are regenerating all the good things are happening am i unit counter-attacks into a severe damage but you know it should also counter-attack here and basically kill him that's excellent why don't you go ahead and attack this guy from behind it should be a very quick kill which will free this guy up to go and attack him let's go ahead and drop a weakening curse on him this will Sunder his armor making him more vulnerable to damage to this guy when he charges he should do by the way shock units they gain 20 more damage the further they travel so this 12 damage is really deceptive because he's actually going to do 22. and boom it's against the stack of regeneration I'm going to go ahead and move my Archer forward to blast this kid like so and can I get my hero in position as well to do a blast and boom there we go we got him killed perfect so you can often navigate your way through battles more efficiently than the AI but don't be afraid to Auto resolve um a lot of like really easy battles so there we go the 72 production and we got the staff of Radiance which is a tier 2 primary attack weapon that gives adjacent allies plus two resistance when we use defense mode and it also has the magic blast that can inflect blind blind is a modifier that lowers the enemy's accuracy and prevents them from retaliating um could be an interesting thing to use I don't think we'll take it but we will take the reward which will get us closer to finishing the Arcane Institute feeling pretty good about our current location um I don't think I'm ready to clear this stack I think I would need maybe a few more units which is why I'm going to come into my city here and begin the production of dark Warriors and pursuers I'm not gonna be building skeletons yet because skeletons take Mana upkeep and I'm going for your research early build so I'm not going to get a lot of Mana in the early game skeletons are pretty good because they can be combined together into bone Golems but I would much rather use my basic units let's go ahead and set this scout to Auto explore as well we just finished the storehouse we also finished the outrider my ruler has leveled up again let's scroll down now that my ruler has two battle magic skills they have unlocked the tier 2 battle magic skills so if I come up here and look at the Warfare skills you can see things like Sentinels this adapt it requires you to have two Warfare skills to unlock there are Adept and expert skills or is it um Adept expert and master yeah Master is the final tier of skill so we have a whole bunch of things that we could take on our hero I think it would be good to take Sunder and curse um this is like my faction specific ability and it seems pretty damn good right so there's gonna be it does decent damage 24. it's understood defense it's Thunder's the resistance it weakens them it just seems like it's a really good ability so I'm going to go ahead and take it so Baron Lord lordseeker of darkspark has invited me to a game of high stakes so I can gamble and gain 200 gold which will hurt their allegiance I can let him win gaining Allegiance which allows them to become more loyal or I can humiliate him to lose agents and gained gold and fame well I'm gonna play I'm gonna do the evil thing because that's who I am I want that gold and I want that Imperium he can just stay mad as far as I'm concerned now I think we might be able to clear in Oracle woods but I would maybe like to wait on that one for a I'd like these guys to have at least tier three abilities to gain extra damage before I do that um so I'm kind of looking for somewhere I can go to clear stuff it looks like there's a brigand camp over here to the left and I've already planted down a potential City I would love to clear this right now if I could but that's that's three tier twos and a tier three unit which is probably just a little bit much for me right now I think what I'll do is I'll Loop down to the South maybe let me have a look is there anything down does it there's potentially stuff down here let me zoom in now it doesn't look like there's much down here to the cell so I'm just gonna Head West and see if I can maybe clear this brigantic camp and get some kind of bonus so cardboard box can Annex another Province and I would like to Annex another Farm let's have a look are there any resource nodes in range not really but here's the thing my um free city is bumping up against this so I'm gonna go ahead and just take that research post right now that'll give me 10 minute per term and five research I am claiming a province adjacent to or near another person so this will upset them you can see here um they are upset that I ignored their sector claim which has lowered their relations with me and the higher their relations the faster that I can fossilize them there's a whole bunch of stuff going on in there we could build an underground city as well this is something we should consider now we have finished building The Outpost over here and we have a few choices that we can go for here we could build Palisade walls we could build a work cap we could found a city I personally I really like the idea of building Palisade walls before you Annex the city and sometimes building the Work Camp is worth it too so yeah I think now is the time to get the walls on your outposts because it could make your life just so much easier if you have walls in your cities from the moment that they're born um because if a city doesn't have walls people can walk in and just mash them and when you build Palisade walls in your outposts and then build a city out of them the city inherits the walls okay we finished researching the soul binders enchantment which is a unit enchantment this is a type of spell that applies above to a class of unit in this case it's going to apply above to our Battle Mages it does have an upkeep upkeep per unit which is two Mana per turn this will give my battle mage units a 90 chance to inflict Soul bound which allows us to gain more souls from our enemies when we kill them which is a useful thing here right so and it gives us plus 10 damage against units of it's all about so this is essentially effectively like a 10 damage boost for Battle Mages and a real buff to our soul economy our our yeah the sole economy Arcane research I'm going to take brand of Wrath because this will allow all of my Undead units which technically aren't dark units to have the colder weak ability which is a pretty good ability because it allows them to deal 20 more damage against units that have the weakened debuff and it also gives them regeneration when they attack a weakened unit so we'll take round of Wrath I have just unlocked the shadow binding skill which makes my magical origin units have a 20 reduction in upkeep which will apply to all the undead units that we plan to summon however I don't plant it on someone Undead right now so I'm not going to take it there's no point in spending Imperium for a very small benefit that you're not actually taking advantage of but you're better off having that resource in reserve in my opinion now this over here is an infestation there are three tiers of infestation there's bronze infestations there's silver infestations and gold infestations the higher the tier of infestation and of course bronze silver gold the stronger the infestation is the harder it is to break the more rewards you get for breaking it infestations will send enemy uh will send armies towards their provinces on a cooldown they typically sleep for a while and then they become active they'll Patrol their land and then they'll send an invasion they'll also spread their territory I'm going to go ahead and try to clear this right now this is a very this is a bronze infestation so there's very little in it so it should be a very easy Auto resolve that's a little bit more damage than I would like so I'm gonna go ahead and retry that myself just to minimize the damage that my units take that's a much better outcome with a lot less damage taken a little bit of micromanagement and you can prevent some damage on your army Now by clearing that we did get 60 production as well as the wand of mass healing which is a great reward I'm gonna go ahead and take that and equip it into my Hero's bag slot uh this is a tier 3 miscellaneous item that heals Target friendly units in a one hex radius for 30 temporary hit points temporary hit points are a healing that does not persist after the battle otherwise you could just like delay a battle fight and this was optimal to do in the game before they implemented temporary hit points you would just like delay a battle as long as possible and put as much um healing into your units you would try to leave one enemy alive while you healed up your units it was kind of exploity and a little bit BS so I'm glad they changed it out we would like to build an undergrad laboratory I'm gonna go ahead and spend Imperium to get a farm but I really really really want another Quarry so I'm going to start the production of an underground laboratory and then I'm going to come which which is now boosted by having built two Farms that'll give me five knowledge as well as 10 gold and I'm gonna come over to this farm and I'm going to change this to a quarry in three turns you could swap your tile improvements around based on your needs so don't be afraid to do that because I cannot see another place that I can get a quarry and I need that second Quarry so that I can boost the academy and get it in a reasonable amount of time rather than in 12 turns remember this is a tech Rush build so we're focusing hard on technology which is kind of necessary for shadow in my opinion we've just finished casting the Soul Bond spell which took several turns of spending all of our world map casting points because the Spells have a cost both in mana and in casting points so it might take you multiple turns to cast them and now I can enchant them with this ability so if I continue and I go check out my warlocks down here they have the soul binders ability and they do slightly more damage when they attack you can see here 90 chance of inflicting Soul bound very cool this will increase my soil economy quite a bit oh we got a fireborn hunt I am honored to join you in this hunt which is a random Quest all the way over here we're going to kill some dire Penguins well luckily enough we were making our way in that direction anyway I'm gonna go ahead and pick up this Mana stash for 41 Mana keep exploring there's a serpent Cavern over here that we might be able to clear um we probably need a little bit more going on for us I'm gonna go ahead and head this way we can get to that penguin pretty soon and we're going to continue to produce dark Warriors and pursuers there's Outpost over here finished Palisade walls you could usually get away with Palisade Wells I like to build the full stone walls that's just me we have another empire development skill so we can get the call of chaos which gives us a free unit when we defeat infestation I don't see many infestations so I don't see much of a point taking that and we succeeded in our negotiations with this free City we now have the Pack to cooperation which opens their borders enables trading and get allows us to grab magical materials I'm gonna go ahead and buy the silver tongue fruit because this will give me plus one Allegiance from my Whispering Stones which will you know inevitably lead to me uh annexing these guys faster so I'll trade that and now I'll get them up to a pact of loyalty at four turns instead of um whatever and then I'll spend some Imperium to get them there faster because I really want to vastalize these guys I'm going to go ahead and research the soul mind Army skill which allows which makes all enemy units take the soul bound trait um it can be cast on an enemy on the world map now I do have brand of Wrath but none of my units are actually of these classes so there's no point in casting it until they actually exist right let's clear this Quest we will auto combat it and see if we lose anything this guy took a little bit of damage but that's not important we can play around that we got eight souls and 18 food and 18 Mana I'll take it by completing this we gain a relations boost with dark Spire which will increase the rate that we Annex them I can get all the food I can get a whole bunch of gold I can get a night guard which is a tier 2 pole arm unit uh or I can get a bunch of Imperium I'm gonna go ahead and take the gold because my gold income is going to dip in this build as I continue to spend and spend and spend into a deficit so uh dark expire has now given me the pact of loyalty it allows them to share its Vision they allow me to build on their provinces they contribute to the rally Allegiance which is a mechanic we'll talk about later and they will reinforce in combat against Marauders and rulers that they're at war with I'm going to go ahead and boost the allegiance again for plus nine Legions so that we can get to the pactivacillus in two turns rather than three this isn't super optimal nor is it super worth it but I'm just doing it so that you can see me interact with those mechanics there we go we have the soul bind Army spell let's go ahead and select a new research and we have done enough research Cycles to get to a new research era so a really good combo with um dark is actually the Tome of cryomancy we already have ways to inflict sload and our abilities scale pretty well against Frozen and slow you can see here Frost arrows this would give us a 20 damage boost against Frozen or slowed units we have Frost blades this would also give us a 20 damage boost against Frozen or slowed units and then the tomochromancy itself comes with a bunch of tools to inflict slope so for example ice coffin infrix froze inflicts Frozen their slope uh White witches have the freezing blast ability which has a chance to inflict Frozen you have the Lesser snow Spirit which has the freezing burst ability I believe they can also level up if they tear up to the snow Spirit which has a better version of the freezing burst and the freezing phase now another really good option for the undead is actually the Tome of pyromancy to get the ritual pyre which will allow you to get a bunch of Mana income and then you have the pyromancer instead which is all about inflicting fire now we don't necessarily have a way to inflict many ways to inflict burning um as it currently stands but our range units already inflict weakening and then they'll have a 30 chance to inflict burning and then if we take fiery arrows and Searing blades we'll do 20 damage against targets that are burning so it kind of reinforces the Synergy that we have we could also potentially get a pyromancer and the summon lesser magma spirit and then maybe go with an ignite which is more damage heavy um chaos Affinity is also a very powerful Affinity so really in my mind there are like a whole bunch of like completely valid choices here I feel like the undead path works really well with cryomancy it also works really well with the Tome of zeal because you get the circle of zealotry which gives you an extra 10 draft per positive or negative level of alignment we could theoretically go for the term of zeal this would give us things like fanatical Workforce which allow us to boost the production of our cities we'll get inspiring chat which gives morale to our units the only problem with morale is that we plan to transform into the undead and so we won't be benefiting much from morale later on however there are some really interesting inter actions with morale that we can do if we do go for some order Tome stuff well we are going for a shadow build I think it's good to add a splash of variety and I think the um the Tome of pyromancy with its really good Mana income from the ritual pyre is a fantastic pick it also gives us a really reliable way to get um Lumber Mills um so I'm gonna go ahead and take the Tomah pyromancy here but you know the Tome of cryomancy and the Tome of um Frost are totally valid choices technically the Tome of cryomancy is better for our build because it would actually give us more knowledge which is now making me reconsider my choice you know what let's go for the tomochromancy yeah I think if we're doing a tech Rush build we should go all in on the tech Rush build now ice coffin is one of the best early game spells because it has a chance to literally just stun an enemy um so I'm gonna go ahead and lock that in do I want to yeah I'm gonna go ahead and yeah I'm gonna lock Frost blades and I'm going to research ice coffin so I've managed to build the Palisade here in in The Outpost I could choose to build a work camp but instead I'm just going to go ahead and found the city this is essentially like paying 100 gold to have plus one population when the city is founded but I could probably grow a pop in three turns if I just settle the city because I have a pasture here right so I'm just going to settle the city now now that it's here we don't need to build a watchtower don't need to do any of that stuff and we can start to build up uh our Second City we have got a group of marauder guards guarding a gold stash well I do really need gold in the early game I would like to clear the serpent Cavern but I think I would like to get a little bit of experience from fighting here so let's bring our Stacks in we'll go ahead and make the attack now these guys are so weak that they are running they are fleeing however I am evil and so I will chase them down because I want to get that evil alignment I'm going to go ahead and auto resolve the battle uh get my six souls and my 12 food and 12 mana and a whole pile of cash for clearing them out let's go ahead and step on this Watchtower to give us a little bit more information we could go clear some of these Coastal resource nodes for for experience and resources so I'm going to go ahead and take the basic seafaring skill that'll allow me to Embark and then I'm also tempted to take expanded governance to allow me to settle a fourth city there is room over here for another city especially if we can get that lost queen script um that could be a very interesting thing and I think I would like to build a nice coastal city here so yeah I'm going to take expanded governance which will allow me to settle my fort city expanded governance is a repeatable right you generally I generally you want to click on this at least once maybe twice by the mid game but it's very expensive in Imperium I wouldn't Advocate clicking on this more than like three times in an average game because that'll be to so much Imperium and you want to unlock these other things but clicking on it once in the early game is a totally reasonable thing to do if you plan to settle an expert City now production and cardboard box we're gonna go ahead and get started on the academy we have the two core we have the two quarries and the Forester that will allow me to boost it and now the signs pertured in the city is starting to become very very powerful I am tempted to get the workshop first but this is a rush build we're rushing Tech now I would like to get the scholars Guild but that would be very very expensive and very difficult to do so we're just gonna we're gonna stay on the academy we don't need to go any more than the academy as it currently starts um so we've acquired a number of magical materials we've acquired archon blood which gives us 20 combat casting points which allows us to cast more spells in combat we've got an astral to do which gives us 20 world map casting points we have silver tongue fruit which is giving our Whispering Stones Plus One Allegiance I think we just vassalized darkspire yeah we did so they have the regular pack of vaselich so they give me 30 of all of their money they share all of their magic materials they contribute to the rally of Legions which is a special mechanic that allows you to recruit units from your vassals and they also allow me to trade with them so I can pay five Mana for oh man 20 gold for 10 research that's a bad trade deal but I really want to take it because it really fits into my build my ruler is level four so they can level up once again I will not be taking Frost weapons um let's see so I can get lightning invoker fire invoker I could also take magecraft distant evocation but increase the range of my magical attacks that's not actually quite good and it would unlock things like Arcane strength and frost evoker yeah let's take distant evocation that'll allow me to cast magical bolts and my slendering curse one tile further ah my alignment went down to very evil and which means we're now triggering even more Imperium from Scions of evil and our Capital City should be gaining even more um draft from our level of alignment we just need to go if I hover over this down to Pure Evil so we need to get another 60 evil points when you do 60 60 evil points worth of evil things to become pure evil which is kind of a strange thing to say but you know it is what it is now Stapleton is an insulate insolent um free City they actually start off at war with us which is a bit of a problem now we have a quest for cultivation they want me to build three Farms I'm gonna go ahead and accept that Quest um we'll get a race relation bonus and a mystery bonus which is quite nice let's have a look I am gonna go ahead and try to clear this serpent Cavern yes I'm gonna build a city on this tile I build an outpost first and then I'm going to go ahead and try to clear this serpent Cavern this is going to be a tough fight it is only a bronze ancient wonders Ancient Wonders are a special type of province that acts like a province Improvement so this serpent Cavern counts as a quarry but it also gives you Imperium it's uh like four Quarries in one it counts as a quarry for the purpose of bonuses of boosting buildings it gives us access to a special city-wide bonus which gives us plus two amount of Quarry in the city domain and it also adds a couple of units to the rally of Legions the plague Serpent of the storm scale serpent now when you explore these Ancient Wonders you'll get a series of events in this case it's a pit of vipers I could say I'm not afraid to clear it and I could fight it but I will have the gorgon's curse between every two turns a Target will be stunned or I can just feed them one of my population which upsets my people makes me more evil and just clears it for free I'm gonna clear it for free that's one pop that's practical it cost me nothing so I instantly pick up 214 mana and then I get to choose how I'm going to approach this I can pick up 155 knowledge I can get a whole bunch of Imperium or I can get a second warlock man getting that second warlock is actually really tempting uh another thundering curse but weakening bolts that's really tempting but this is attack Rush build so I'm gonna go for the knowledge boom that should instantly finish whatever it was we were researching which was um ice coffin so now I can select a new research let's have a look Soul overflow isn't bad I'm going to lock in Frost Arrow well yeah I'm going to lock in Frost arrows but then research Frost blades uh we actually instantaneously researched frostblades blizzard I think is a great spell so I may lock that in too it's a great offensive Army spell let's lock that in and then we'll go for frost arrows um I'm gonna immediately start casting Frost blades which will give plus 4 Frost damage to all of my melee units pole arm shock Shield fighter skirmisher it'll reduce their physical damage by two so this is a total plus two damage but it's Elemental damage um so it's actually effectively quite a bit more damage because units tend to have less resistance to Magic damage than physical damage this will be overall a damage buff and I'll be able to do more damage against Frozen units so just overall this is a good step forward for me so we'll start casting that um we used up our 55 world map casting points and we'll use 25 of those world map casting points next turn and we used 80 Mata this is also going to cost two Mana per unit to maintain let's have a look here um I might try to clear this lost Queen's Crypt sometimes you can clear these with just an event click and if I could do that that would actually be super overpowered because that would be worth five research posts worth of mana and I would also get two Mana two knowledge and a soul for every hero that I kill and steal the corpse of so this could be potentially a really powerful early game for me if I can get those if I can get that online so I may actually take my hero over to the left here um it feels like a good move so I'm starting to build a second Army stack and it's going to be made up of 2 dark Warriors two pursuers and then ideally two battle mage units but I don't have my tier 2 building yet so I'm just gonna let that hang for a little while okay so the the city of duskawatch has finished um being produced I think the very first thing that I'm gonna do is to Annex this iron deposit here ideally with a quarry so let's attract population uh we're gonna go ahead and build a quarry that will give this city a ton of production and I'm going to go ahead and start building shrines because I am starting to consume Mana I prefer to build boosted buildings that's like my ideal circumstance and by the time the shrine finishes we should also finish another population I'll be able to place a farm or something like that which will allow me to build other buildings boosted so you generally you want to be really efficient with how you build up your cities and I find that that's just a really good way to build up cities efficiently now I do need to be careful because Stapleton may start sending units against me so I want to finish up what I'm doing over here to the left and then turn around and maybe attack Stapleton so I'm kind of tempted to keep recruiting dark Warriors and pursuers and just build three stacks of tier one units especially because I'm very close to unlocking impressment in four turns I'll be able to reduce the upkeep cost of my Tier 1 units by 30 which is a massive reduction we have to finish casting Frost blades let's go ahead and cast the enchantment and now when I go check out the stats of my dark Warriors right even in the menu here you can see they do 16 base damage plus four Frost damage which is quite nice a very cool ability now we have a second city so we can recruit a hero let's have a look we could get a shadow adapt oh that would give us a lot of Shadow Affinity he's slick or he could be a pragmatic leader which gives units cold-blooded hmm he's a resistant to dualist um I think Shadow adapt would give me a lot more research so I think I might take Shadow adapt here so for 250 gold I can get moloch lordseeker um let's go ahead and recruit them now he's a level three hero he has only one spell so far and I think I'm gonna build him towards being a battle mage as well although it's good to have a diversity maybe I'll build him as a support hero it's good to have support Heroes yeah let's take Soul collector and we'll take the restore ability Soul collector just means his attacks inflicts all about and restore allows him to heal Allied units two very good abilities I'm also gonna appoint molok lordseeker as the governor of this city over here that'll give the city to production and draft as well as 12 sides per turn bringing us up to a very healthy 120 signs per turn we have unlocked death magic which would give us extra casting points when units die and we've also unlocked the Crypt blade hero item which is a very cool weapon that can cause zombies to appear the free city has gone up to Bonded vasilic which will give us even more resources which is very nice as we continue to develop our relationship once we get up to I believe it's flourishing vassalage we can actually integrate them into our Empire at the cost of Imperium right we built an outpost over here um let's go ahead and build up our walls we definitely want to build the walls here they're just building because otherwise it takes forever to build the walls uh you have to build the city up to tier one and then to tier two and then you have to actually build the walls it's just annoying let's go ahead and explore in here we have a couple of choices here uh so I could choose to just attack right and I can fight the Lost Queen script cards it's a relatively difficult fight or I could use my shadow Affinity to weaken the Defenders or I could just feed them another population and gain more evil alignment and clear this for free while I do want to show you some of these battles if I have an option to defeat a population gain evil alignment and clear one of these things for free you bet your ass I'm taking that option now we met Michelle with a radiant she is a good aligned hero of the human paladins fast recuperation adoptable they're high their devotees are good they're imperialists she's an authoritarian Diplomat she never breaks treaties she likes exploration expansion she likes Empires she likes Empires with a single race she likes me strong military she doesn't like people who have good relations with free cities and she Delight dislikes Empires that have many alliances okay so she's kind of a little bit interesting here she really does not like us because we are very opposed I'm order or their order I'm chaos so on and so forth um now the Eternal bed Chambers have been cleared so we gained 300 money we could take the one to the rising Undead which allow us to raise friendly Undead from being dead was quite handy we can add Dara the astute omdara the astute to our recruitment build we can gain a whole bunch of knowledge which kind of at this direction we might take or we can do this I like the idea of the wand of a rising Undead being able to revive my own dead unit seems quite handy um but let's take the knowledge knowledge is the the build that we are going for so there's Frost arrows excellent um ooh do I want Blizzard or do I want white witches freezing blast honestly I gave white witches a lot of because they don't have AOE but honestly early game freezing blast is really good the 90 chance to inflict Frozen or slowed is really damn good especially when you combine it with blizzard so I'm gonna go ahead and lock in blizzard so that I have that as an option but I will take the White Witch I'm doing a little bit of manual exploring with my Scout over here because it was running around the city and Scouts running around cities are likely to get themselves killed particularly when you're at war with them so be careful with your Scouts I'm gonna go ahead and start casting Frost arrows and you can see now we're actually spending mana on our unit and Chapman upkeep so I'm casting Frost stars to make my archers better my melee units have been buffed now I'd like my archers to be buffed so just keep this in mind that this guy does 10 damage he's a he's a low tier recruit compared to this guy that does 11 damage let's keep that in mind Stapleton has sent a war party so we are going to want to make our way back to the East and we're going to be glad that we have the fortification in here and by making our way back to the east we can clear out this node we can clear out the pilgrim of Passage we can clear out the Oracle Woods uh we could also clear out this Bandit Camp maybe even go attack Stapleton I think that might be the play my gold income is really bad right now but I have a ton of gold Reserve which is honestly almost as good let's use you hoping for a good auto combat here okay we lost two units that's completely unacceptable we're gonna go ahead and retry that we're going up against astral fiends and we're on a magical material site magical material sites tend to have a negative effect in this case every two turns all of my units will be displaced by two hexes um we're up against the Astro siphoner here this is a strong melee unit that does up to 30 damage in a single attack 17 of it physical 13 of it magical and it also drains into Chapman from the units it has astral pool astral membrane which means it's really good against melee attackers because anyone who attacks it in melee has a 30 chance of becoming stunned and when it dies it heals everyone nearby very strong very scary unit that's really resistant to Magic otherwise was weak to physical then we have the astral flow serpents which are really damn good at getting into your back line with the ask of pursuit ability dealing up to 20 uh 24 damage to a unit just super good and then putting them into its own control so it can melee strike them very very strong flow serpents then we have the astral whip whip which is a battle mage that does just a whole bunch of magical damage it also has astral membrane so attacking it will stun you uh the real scary thing about flow serpents is they have astral Refuge which means you hit them and then they disappear and you can only hit them once per turn um so yeah Astro Pursuit has no cooldown so they're really good at getting to your back line so honestly the scariest thing in this map right now are these three astral serpents if they all decide to teleport onto a single unit they will kill it um the Astro siphoner is a little bit easier to deal with although In fairness it is quite scary I have the wand of mass healing so I would like to think about my positioning this guy is a little bit hurt so I'm gonna push this Army to the right and I'm gonna have this guy heal this guy to give him a little bit of health and stuff like that I'll bring a second shock unit to the right so I'm gonna have one stack of army come to the right hopefully peeling off a couple of these widths and then this stack the more experienced stack will go to the left and my plan is to break it up into two groups and see how the enemy does um they typically don't do amazingly well if if you split your armies because they kind of struggle prioritizing targets whereas you can prioritize targets really really well so let's see what they decide to do so they decided to concentrate forces here on the left so I'm just going to go ahead and pull back as far back as I can now this might seem like Madness but there's a couple of reasons for this I want to draw them into a more open area where I can use my melee advantage to my advantage and I'm also about to get displaced so I want my units as far as way as way as possible so they don't get put into a vulnerable position let's go ahead and pull everyone back I want to make sure they all face the correct direction as well and since they don't really have any AOE I'm just going to stack all my units together also I have infinite healing thanks to the restorability so technically it plays to my advantage the longer this battle goes on this is also a really great opportunity for me to drop a baleful curse on them which will lower their defense and their damage right let's see what they do yeah we got we got discombobulated which is not great but it isn't terrible either now I really need to kill this serpent he's flanked he has astral Refuge ideal scenario this guy gets up that does a massive strike boom uh whereas my baleful curse gonna go I could hit these two or these two I'm gonna hit all these make them weak let's move you forward and just hit this guy once this will weaken him and put him into his Refuge so he cannot be hurt and then we'll just have you positioned ready to counter-attack whenever he inevitably goes on you um the Astro siphoner I'd like to get as many units up in his face as possible so that's what we're gonna do and then I would really like to get another weekend to stack on him if we can make that work come on one more week in stack nope we missed okay we need to focus fire onto that guy because he needs to die early into this battle let's see if we can't get a little bit of extra damage in perfect okay 14 damage on a very low chance to hit I'm gonna put a shock unit in control of the this guy so if he tries anything he should get counter-attacked and we are now going to cancel this guy's defense we resisted the astral membrane we'll go ahead and blast him again we resisted the astral membrane excellent so this guy now has lost one of his two units meaning um he does half as much damage and depending on who he attacks he may actually die so I'd say that's a pretty successful start now these little wispy dudes they do so much damage it's really annoying uh yeah so I was expecting to lose at least one unit here just because the sheer amount of damage these guys can pump out in a single turn but it bodes well for me because I'm going to get you to run in insta kill this guy that's an instigate right there we're gonna drop another baleful curse I'll move my hero one tile to the left you will get a charge off on this guy and instigate him perfect um I'll step u4 we'll do the sundering curse on him boom make him weak blast him boom boom then use this guy to control this wisp with Astro who does have Astro membrane we resist it perfect and then we could use the rest of our units to try to control this other wisp so we may only lose a single unit which is honestly a major upgrade in outcome move my Archer up blast him once hopefully inflicting weakened yep even a graze which is an attack that only barely hits can still inflict weakened so now these guys are completely zero threat and I have no fear left in me I'm super happy with the outcome of this battle very very nice very very easy battle we still lost a unit but that was just because the enemies have had so much concentrated Firepower they all the time the same unit which the AI will do it was a pretty highly level dark warrior which is slightly upsetting because obviously you don't want to lose units if you can avoid it but we can just add another dark warrior to our production queue yeah I'm feeling pretty good about that now we're gonna head east and see if we can't deal with all these natural wonders and um ideally also stableton itself lovely we just finished researching the White Witch I don't think we can really afford to build any more of them and now here is how you tear up your technology we have researched two tier one books which has now unlocked the ability to research tier two books in order to research tier two books you need to have two tier one books researched in order to research tier three books you have to have two tier one books researched in order to unlock tier 4 books you have to research two tier three books and you also have to have a minimum amount of affinity similarly in order to unlock tier 5 books you have to research two tier four books and have a minimum amount of affinity now uh when it comes to choices Doom Herald is surprisingly good um at completely obliterating enemy morale it also gives us access to the doom-depth trench which would give us an extra nine mana and nine knowledge for each alignment level sorry when we get to negative maximum negative alignment it's also worth just 10 mana and 10 knowledge so it's a really damn good Province Improvement we could go for the Tome of necromancy this will give us access to the soul well which will allow us to passively generate souls in our cities as well as giving us um extra mana and it also counters the research posts so it'll scale off research post stuff we get to re we get the restore Undead ability which allows to restore his health to Undead people we get the rotting explosion ability which allows us to explode zombies we get Rey zombies which allows us to turn corpses into zombies we get necrotic magic which allows our magical units to inflict decaying and we also get access to the Necromancer which has the corpse eating sorry the Rays Undead and strengthened Undead abilities I would say since we're going for a very evil build the Tomb of the Doom Herald is really nice here but there are some other really valid choices the Tome of artificing is actually an incredibly good tome because the Iron Golem is really good at sieging down cities and Siege magic actually allows your Battle Mages and support units to become Siege units and speed up how quickly you you burn cities which is actually a really useful ability the Tome of scrying is really useful because it allows your Battle Mages to ignore accuracy penalties which allows you to hit more stuff um it also gives you mental Mark which makes an enemy really easy to hit with spells and stuff it's basically like another version of the weakening curse the Tome of amplification is also super good here you get Amplified arrows which allows your range units to bounce their damage around you can amplify mind which allows you to get more knowledge right there we go knowledge knowledge knowledge you get astral blood which allows you to get a two minute Fortune so every time you cast a spell in battle your race gains critical hit chance your frenzy in Focus which allows your Battle Mages to gain frenzy whenever they cast a spell you've chained lightning um so I think Tome of amplification here is this really really good for the builds that we eventually want to go for plus we get the resonance field which just gives mana and casting points it's a really really good build particularly for the amplify mines so I'm going to select the term of amplification and then I am going to take astral blood this will allow me to get a two-minute Fortune which will get my race critical hit chance every time I cast a spell I'm going to take Astro blood and then leave it there we did just finish casting Frost arrows it's gonna cost me six Mana per turn I will enchant it now remember my archers were doing 10 damage per turn when they come out fresh or 10 damage per attack now if I go to a pursuer it does eight base damage and then four Frost so overall an upgrade particularly because it's now spread damage which means you need a variety of defensive um stats to actually fight against it okay we're really living on this goals income that we've got from picking up things while I would love to be clearing out these Coastal provinces I think in terms of prioritization I should be heading east so dusk watched has produced a shrine I would like to build a farm and so I am going to plonk down a comfy little farm right there that will allow me to build the experimentation chamber which again knowledge and gold which are two things that I sorely lack and require um and then I will build the workshop which will increase the Recruitment and the production income of the city cities take an awful lot of investment before they start paying back I could recruit units from my vassals however I don't think I'm going to be able to sustain this level of gold income for much longer um we would like to save up to integrate this city but I think before we integrate the city we're probably going to found a city although I guess maybe integration now would be better than integration later um yeah I might I might just integrate darkspired now as soon as I have the the resources for it so we have a battle quest there welcome in my domain of Darkness um we have a quest to get a shadow Boone I have to kill some astral thingies let me see so where are these guys they're down here I could divert down with my armies to take care of that I mean these guys the worst thing they'll do is run around my territory and pillage a couple of tiles um that will suck but it's not the end of the world but potentially clearing a quest um could be very powerful so I'll head down that way I built Palisade walls over in this Outpost let's go ahead and get Stonewall so that we go from 20 fortification to 40 and we build a pursuer new empire development skill let's have a look here conquering a city combat casting points ah here we go this is important impressment this is going to significantly change our income cost right now uh 17 gold and 37 Mana per turn I click this button boom now we're making 43 gold and 47 amount of return very very good ability in the early game I could get a second Whispering stone or I could recruit a whole bunch of free units I'm not gonna do either of those I'm going to go ahead and just continue on save my Imperium and I met a couple of rulers so we've met a few people on the map um Fang gear we have met Michelle the radiant and we have met not all of them like me so we'll have to deal with that right let's come down and come to here can we clear this with just an auto resolve I hope so we lost too many units so we'll have to fight it manually I probably should have cast a soul bounce but I keep forgetting to do that for these bigger bigger battles um so we're dealing with a lot of Shield units so the best thing to do would be to get us around I am going to send two shock units around to the right and otherwise I'm going to create a clog here in the center I'll put my units behind the clog and make sure we're getting over there what do you got one of my ceiling I don't want to cast that um let's go ahead and end our turn so they should move forward to just outside of our range we can choose to approach instead what we're going to do is we're going to do some sundering curses to make them weaker and then we're also going to do a bale full curse to make them a lot weaker we'll do another thundering curse to soften them up even more boom you have the ability to do some zaps what's the scariest unit in here honestly none of these guys are super particularly scary so just doing a little bit of damage to them seems fine let's bring our shock units around to where they might be able to make a difference I'm going to move this shock unit forward a tile and push this Archer forward so that I can get some weakening stacks on my enemies um and then I think we are good to go well let's see how the enemy comes and fight me I'm expecting some healing and some buffing yeah okay so there's a little bit of healing and buffing yep perfect so he taunted me came forward and hit me hit me hit me hit me okay perfect my leader is acting of his own volition which is his right let's go ahead and drop a baleful curse here to make them weak um you have a lot of potential damage here go ahead and blast this guy you are flanking him you were also flagging this is a great kill oh my God that's so much damage you can do amazing damage here you can get a kill oh my god dude we're just killing we're being killing kill kill kill um go ahead and blast him make him soul-bound get the charge attack oh man what are they gonna do they're dead there's nothing they can do okay they can do a little bit of healing yeah okay the healing makes things a little bit more difficult but it shouldn't it shouldn't be enough to really make a difference I'll do one more baleful curse just to make things even easier for me get behind this kid and fullank attack him get behind this kid and like attack then morale is now High um was it ever low you could triple zaps we've got a sundering curse bring this Archer forward shoot him flap flap um let's do the sundering curse on you bye hang let's do the sundering curse a new bang let's kill you easy kill um you can get this kill boom boom boom you can come forward help get this killed boom boom perfect that's what I call some battling right there okay you just gotta manipulate you gotta do things I hope maybe that made sense of how I positioned and used my units and use their abilities in comb mode and focus fire and do a lot of stuff 12 Souls 24 food and 12. 24 uh Mana oh let me finish the quest so we can get a bunch of food we need a bunch of Mana or knowledge we get 66 souls or three skeletons I gain three skeletons I'm gonna go ahead and take the knowledge that's 280 knowledge boom that is going to finish the research of Astral blood I'm gonna start a new research frenzying focus is quite good I'm going to take that makes my battle major stronger we are building up to a late game composition here remember I'm going to cast astral blood this is a minor racial transformation which will apply to every single unit that is of my race which includes some of my Undead units so after upload it is one thing that I would really like is if the Outpost actually showed you how long they're going to take to build the thing that you told them to build rather than relying on you to remember when you built it and how long it's been building it right so let's start matching our armies back um to the capital mainly for the purpose of fighting these guys who are currently pillaging our land now we have a ton of gold on the flow so let's go ahead and get the workshop to increase the production rate I'd like a third shock unit for you and a third shock unit for you so I'll take the shock unit and bring it over there I'll take this shock unit and bring it over there I'm going to start the construction of two white witches um and two dark Warriors a pursuer I'll start the dark warrior over here and we shall see our army now go up to three stacks your goal is right in the early game is to get your cities down and get to those three stacks as fast as you can we've got the blizzard we've got the bone Golem um the bone golden or the Amplified arrows Amplified arrows are really good because it makes your range units AOE and that also means that they inflict any of their negative effects in an AOE so Amplified Arrows with dark ranged units actually works extremely well so I think I might take Amplified arrows here um yeah let's do it this city over here can Annex another Province I think the obvious thing to build is a Forester generally speaking the pattern you want to follow if you want to develop a city efficiently is to go like one firearm one Quarry one Forester although typically I like to go um like Forester Farm Quarry in that order that's how I would like efficiently develop a city and then go two frames two quarries two Foresters three Farms three quarters three like you just slowly build up that way you can build all of the buildings now we're kind of more interested in the tech rushy side of things and the a gold rushy side of things but we need to also keep in mind that we're running out of gold and so that's kind of important but we will go ahead and build the library because it's going to be 10 knowledge per turn which is a pretty big upgrade yeah I need to take out Stapleton they're going to be annoying for a very long time it's my main early game opponent I'm actually quite happy that I managed to spawn down here in the south of the map kind of on my own it's given me a lot of space to sort of build up my Empire um a general composition I like to follow up my armies is two to three melee units and then three to four range units that's like a general composition you can go heavier on ranged or melee if you want depending on your circumstances this Outpost built its stone walls that's immediately found a city here remember we want to go to our city cap so that we can benefit from those cities as fast as possible uh we did just unlock casting reserves that could be 20 casting combat points and world map casting points it seems like a reasonable expenditure however I am going to hold on to my resources so that I can vassalize the city in a few turns probably take me two three turns to um integrate them and then I'll be on a very healthy four cities we just finished researching Amplified arrows because my tech level is insane right now one more research like let me get to the next one I would love a button that would show me what potential research is hanging around we could go for chain lightning I'm going to go ahead and tap a shuffle just once and there it is amplify mines that's what I was hoping to find is this this will give me 20 knowledge per City now it does have a sustain it is a sustained city spell so it will cost Mana to upkeep but the negative morale doesn't matter because when we build our town hall The Dread Spire negative City stability will no longer give economic penalties and we also will start to be able to build Special Province improvements which I haven't really been doing because I focus so hard on Tech rushing but speaking of which we are now going to go ahead and build the town hall here uh building a town hall is important because your cities can only Annex a certain number of tiles away you can see here I do not have the symbols to Annex the tiles down here because I've already annexed one two tiles away cities have it Onyx range of two in the beginning every time you level up your town by building a town hall building you increase the annex range so then I'll be able to Annex one extra ring of tiles out uh one extra ring of provinces out so leveling up this is quite important it also gives you a little bit of gold and some special effects and unlocks a whole bunch of new things particularly unlocking tier 2 units so let's go up to a tier 2 City so that we can get the tier 2 technology now uh we're gonna do a racial transformation here this will apply to all of our units that has no Mana upkeep which is why racial Transformations are fantastic things to get because unlike unit enhancements they don't actually can't stop keep right EO we've got quite a few spells that we need to cast now I'm going to go ahead and cast Amplified arrows now I want you to pay very careful attention to Amplified arrows not only does it increase the Mana upkeep of the unit it also increases the gold upkeep of the unit so be careful as you enhance your units things are going to get expensive this is a tier 2 unit enchantment I'd also like to do frenzy and focus this will also increase the upkeep per unit so you need to be careful about how many of these spells you're really casting yeah I'm going to do Amplified arrows and then I'll get to work on frenzy and focus uh we have now unlocked the right of forbidden knowledge which allow us to jump along the tech tree and the court of Whispers which would be another um Whispering Stone Darth meow meow loses 145 Imperial my relations with Stapleton return to neutral so I can concede to Stapleton I could say concede we haven't been going to fight this will give all of my units a slight bonus to morale or I can do an affinity check and gain a free Bone Golem bone Golems are kind of expensive but that is a pretty metal choice so I'm going to do for the bone Golem looks like somebody settled a uh Outpost over here to my left that's fine I'm quite happy with the Lance that I have now where the hell is my free Bone Golem oh yeah man look at that a free Bone Golem which probably means I can cancel um one of these dark Warriors because I don't need many more Milli units in that stack bone Golems are really cool units because they're actually like a whole pile of skeletons all congealed together which means when they die they actually turn into a skeleton unit so you kind of get two units in one when you build a gold bone Golem they are charged shock units they're my tier 2 shock units the only thing is they're a little bit expensive right they cost 12 Mana per turn plus an extra two for the enchantments they're quite expensive to maintain these bone Golems um yeah but they are quite strong they have charge resistance so they can't get charged they're demolishers so they destroy fortified obstacles um they're immune to morale they have Frost blades they can consume corpses they have a better version of consumed corpse for even more healing and Bone Golems are very very good Frontline shock unit okay the NPC Army of Stapleton I should be able to just Auto resolve this very easily with zero losses because I have three big stacks of units all participating we collect a bunch of silvers we collect a bit of this stuff oh I should have oh I messed up there I should have taken the knowledge extraction scale there and that would have given me knowledge when I kill Heroes that's a big mistake I just made um yeah yeah we also want stolen power um and we would also really like Shadow binding I'm not in a rush to Annex the city of darkspire if we can get it to happen that's great um but if it doesn't happen immediately I'm also like I'm not in a rush like I said let's go ahead and get started on a workshop in this city um because we want that extra production to get the city going the nice thing is because we have so much extra draft from our negative alignment we get a decent boost through our growth because when you're not recruiting if units your draft actually gets converted into food at a rate of 20 or four to one or 25 which is like giving us an extra 10 food in the city which is like having a pastor so that's pretty damn good I would say it's not game breaking it's not game changing it's decent right let's get crossing here and this is actually going to be a fantastic opportunity for us to massively reduce our alignment because we can just run around and pillage all their tiles and every time you pillage a tile you get minus five alignment which will be perfect for us to get to fully negative alignment therefore we'll get the benefit of the dark culture or the science of evil culture rather which means that when we're fully negative on alignment all of our units will be recruited with plus one level okay so now that we've teared this city up to tier two we have a whole lot more options inside this construction menu um I'm not going to be a little bit overwhelming for you so I'm going to talk about those in the next episode I hope this has been a pretty good learning experience for you guys I want to thank you guys very much for watching I love you all very much and I'll see you guys next time bye [Music]

Channel: PotatoMcWhiskey

Views: 123,875

Keywords: age of wonders, age of wonders 4, age of wonders 4 trailer, strategy games 2023, age of wonders 4 gameplay, age of wonders 4 faction creation, age of wonders 4 dev diary, age of wonders 4 races, how to, age of wonders 4 siege, age of wonders 4 ep 1, age of wonders 4 tutorial, age of wonders 4 review, age of wonders 4 tips, age of wonders 4 lets play, triumph studios, age of wonders gameplay, age of wonders guide, aow 4, age of wonders 4 guide

Id: eHPuTbM6vGo

Length: 81min 4sec (4864 seconds)

Published: Tue May 16 2023