Culture Tier List - Age of Wonders 4 (MP) Basics

all right everybody welcome back to we play games I'm Walker and here we are in Age of Wonders for continuing our multiplayer Basics Series today we're going to be talking about our cultural tier list now I thought about doing this as something other than a tier list sort of like the mind and body traits but I do think that a tier list is useful here simply to highlight you know which sort of things are actually genuinely very powerful now of course this is geared towards multiplayer but I think the learnings here are absolutely still applicable to single player as well and for that matter I think if you're thinking about jumping in on on multiplayer that you should play around with your buildin single player first just to get a feel for the way your economy and Army and heroes and tones develop so that way you're not you know flying by the seat of your pants the way that uh some of us sometimes do in our multiplayer streams but before we jump in on the tier list itself I think we should have a conversation about what a culture actually is what does a culture afford you so in Age of Wonders 4 cultures do a lot of different things first of course cultures are going to give you access to Affinity now in Age of Wonders 4 you're going to start with six Affinity or seven if you have a Dragon Ruler so don't put too much emphasis on the the affinities here but be aware that you know onethird of your starting Affinity is going to come from your culture so that does matter especially if you're trying to get early materium and Shadow and and astral online but of course the bigger thing that you're going to be getting out of your cultures are the buildings the special Province improvements the Spells the units the uh the special abilities there's a lot of stuff when it comes to how you should assess a culture lots of different dimensions But ultimately when it comes to a culture in Age of Wonders for because the affinities drop off and because the uh the cultural units do eventually drop off as well as you get more and more stuff from your TOs and stronger and stronger Heroes I think the biggest Dimension you want to assess things on is a how they play at the very beginning of the game what sort of scouting and and economic resources do they make available to you and then B how do they scale into the mid game that's really what you're going to be looking for when it comes to all of these cultures and the way that you can assess them all right so we're just going to be using this tier list here uh courtesy of jumbo pixel I'll try to remember to put a link down below if I don't remind me but this tier list I think is going to be really well organized and we got everything here in alphabetical order and of course that's going to line up with the way it is here inside of the uh the encyclopedia I'm not sure why it isn't like this on the create faction page but I guess nothing's perfect uh but the encyclopedia anytime you see the ey in the upper right you can just click on it and I think this is actually a great resource especially if you're just trying to learn about like a unit you've almost never seen the astral siphoner for instance I I think I got completely owned by this in the first game I played against zombie because he had some wisps that evolved and siphoners can do astral pull which pulls the units towards them which you can use on the enemy ruler to just assassinate them at the beginning of the game uh and if you know you're looking for something that's unique and and hard to find elsewhere in the game I think the encyclopedia is the best way to do it and I think that the rest of the information here is is pretty well organized I wish that some of the uh the pop out things were a little better like this could easily have the production cost on it but I think over over all the information you'll find in encyclopedia is really really good so let's talk about barbarians and let's talk about the things I like first cuz I like a lot of stuff about The Barbarians there is one big problem but I like a lot of the rest of it barbarians first of all they have a fantastic ability here in ritual of alacrity this is a really messed up ability this allows all of the units in one Army to heal on an outpost or a city center you just have to click a little button on it and it's once per three turns I'm not sure if there's a way to reduce that cost in terms of turns if there is I haven't found it yet but it doesn't matter because it's not a global cooldown it's an outpost based cool down so you can have a bunch of different outposts just powering Out Your Heroes you can only use it once per turn per Army but you know like you you're still going to get a lot of good value here cuz healing for 50% hit points and 100% move points and removing exhausted from Force March is an incredible ability at the beginning of the game it'll keep you know one stack of of Heroes plus a couple of units healthy and therefore participating more combat therefore getting higher level heroes faster and of course this is going to scale insanely well into the middle game forced March is a very very powerful ability but it's also very dangerous you can't regenerate hit points or heal on the world world map so you you're just going to have damaged units throughout combat and it's going to be a lot more easy for people to just tpk you through morale problems but nope not with ritual alacrity this removes exhausted oops so with uh barbarians and ritual you basically have teleportation for your armies on like anything other than the biggest map as soon as you hit forced March available as long as you did your your homework and set up a couple of outposts cuz it's only going to take your armies like three turns to get basically anywhere it's really really good and of course you're not just you know getting the normal amount of outposts the other thing that I like about the overall economy here for Barbarians at least you know the military economy is their their insanely high quality of units Pathfinders their Scout replacement can actually build out posts they're more expensive than hero outposts and they take more time but as long as you get materium one online pretty early that's not really a big deal and you'll be playing functionally with like four Heroes on uh turn three instead of your opponent's two cuz I I think you do want to pick up one more Pathfinder as a barbarian just so you can grab high value territory as quickly as possible especially if you get materium one online early and then you have just like really high quality units here Warriors are great just give them unicorns and then they just teleport over to people and shield back bash them and then you basically are just killing units over and over and over again with Warriors Shield bash it's a very messed up unit sunders do a lot of damage they're very squishy though so you can't usually afford to bring a lot of them but at least they're skirmishers and the AI does a pretty good job of not throwing those units away you also get an AOE support ability which plays really well with to of warding Furies which are of course also optional Cavalry and very effective at damage output uh because of the frenzy ability they're very fragile units of course but if you give them them access to extra range through a to of Enchantment and then extra range sort of through the a to of amplification and their ability to do arcing shots you're going to get a lot of damage out of the furies you just you just have to be careful to keep them alive and then of course you have the Berserkers who are also just like ridiculous damage output guys because of the berserker's rage ability this gives you steadfast which of course is just a fantastic combat ability this is probably one of the best combat abilities in the game CU it prevents your units from dying therefore prevents you from having morale problems but more critically this is going to be one of these things that is going to play well here because of the berserk ability damage penalties from casualties are negated it's not that berserk is all downside it's actually quite good once the berserk triggers as long as you can make your Berserkers hasted because these guys cannot be Cav but you just get scalds or necromancers and make them Undead and then done you can you can make these guys tasted and then whenever they go berserk rather than having a pretty reasonable chance of hitting your own line they they should be able to get B basically anywhere with with berserk and and haston and so this is like a really high quality unit uh list here you also have a lot of really really strong things for your Heroes generally you want to get one killing momentum hero built as quickly as possible sometimes two but killing momentum is a very very powerful Warfare skill that it's sort of like the the basic uh finisher for Warfare but it lets you take another action after you kill a unit with a hero now of course you do need a lot of Pips in Warfare and so in order to get there you have to take some of the marginal skills I think Sprint is like the best Warfare skill by a pretty big margin and then the rest of them are just sort of like basic damage output which is all right but like not exciting whereas blood lust and some of the other abilities here like Keen Edge as well these are just really good in terms of the the real damage output and the morale output right because if you have keen Edge and you're getting a lot of crits and you have Tom of rry online for the scald so you can haste your barbarians you're going to get a lot of extra morale out of crits that you roll and then of course Primal Mark is has eight extra damage on the first melee attack which is naturally available to your uh your units but you can also get available on your Heroes here means that your heroes are just going to do a lot of damage super early and they're going to get really high level super early because of ritual lacity in the Pathfinder but of course cultural units they drop off as the game plays right you're not going to be running around with a bunch of tier one units forever in fact you're probably going to disband some of them at a certain point but that's not a bad thing right The Barbarians if you leverage all the stuff early probably by Tak fabled hunters and then just clearing the map as your economy uh that can be pretty good right if if you just clear the map as part of your economy you do have a limited growth potential so you do need to start killing people proactively but that's not a bad plan and the fact that they they do so well with Euros is also a pretty big deal but I do think that there is one big problem for the barbarians and it's a big one I think it's probably the most important one it's specifically their knowledge economy so the knowledge economy here for the Barb Arians is crippled by the fact that they have ancestral sear halls and battle ritual sites instead of libraries and an the Arcane Institute this means that they're going to be functionally down 10 knowledge so you see the Aran Institute is 15 knowledge the uh replacement here the ancestral sear hall is only 10 The ancestral sear Hall can be built after a battle ritual site which is five knowledge and a library is 10 so if you're playing with Barbarian you're basically 10 knowledge behind everybody on every city you're basically down a library the entire game now that's not like a huge deal once you start grabbing a whole lot of Reacher posts on the board through like outposts and clearing stuff but if you're on 200 knowledge and your opponents are on 250 and and you're a couple of turns behind getting to a to of amplification that's a big deal and then from there it can be pretty cascading in terms of the uh the knowledge problems that you're going to suffer as a barbarian I think that overall the package for The Barbarians is very very good they have very high quality units very strong Heroes I really like the Pathfinder ability but I do think that their knowledge problems are enough to bump them down to be tier I could probably make an argument for bottom of a but I think that that overall they're just some very very strong uh cultures available in sna and I think they're they're meaningfully better than the barbarians overall just simply due to the weaknesses there but overall if you play in with the barbarians just like conquer stuff take control of the map as quickly as you can and from there just snowball over people you have very high quality units use them aggressively and and profit from there all right let's talk about dark which is sort of like the weird contrast to The Barbarians here so whereas The Barbarians had just like a lot of things that I really liked talking about lots of good value but because they have a big problem with their knowledge I don't think they're like an A or S tier rank I think the dark have a fantastic knowledge economy and a lot of problems outside of that so the dark have a fantastic knowledge economy for a couple of reasons first although it doesn't show it here we do get two Shadow Affinity at the beginning of the game you get zero sh Shadow Affinity out of Barbarian you kind of have to take probably two materium Affinity with Barbarian pretty darn early in order to get good value out of their Scouts and so you don't have like the flexibility to pick up two or three Shadow the way that dark does and therefore get Shadow one online super early but Shadow one in the empire development tree gets you $150 Doge per hero defeated and that means that you get basically 10 turns of owning an Arcane Institute or 15 turns of owning a library per free City that you conquer that's a lot of turns of real knowledge now like obviously 150 is going to slow down as in terms of value as the game goes on but if you can get to you know to of amplification before somebody else and then just start throwing Amplified mines everywhere you're going to have a pretty big advantage on somebody else who doesn't have Shadow and the early game knowledge economy doesn't just stop there they have a nice little upgrade to some of their their structures here rather than getting a vendor and a market dark is going to get access to an underground laboratory and experimentation chamber each of these is going to replace five of the gold that you would naturally be getting from those buildings with five more knowledge so this means that you know if you're playing Dark you're not playing down a uh a library you're basically playing up a library because you're at plus 10 knowledge for every single City once you can get these online the difficulty though is getting them online so first of course you in order to build the underground laboratory you need two farms in that City Farms are generally really anemic cuz they aren't important when it comes to building an academy or a Scholars Guild so like you're just not going to do that very often so realistically you're probably only going to build the uh the first level here experimentation Chambers and then switch your farm over to something useful for an Academy but you know five extra knowledges still five extra knowledge it's just that they don't get any uh industrial boost they don't have access to the same sort of like Outpost spam that barbarians can get and therefore clearing the map spam and therefore funneling resources from resource uh nodes to your City's ASAP um so dark they need some kind of production bonus you can get that by playing underground and doing Excavating or you can play it by just taking fabled hunters and clearing stuff uh there there are a couple ways to get around it but you really do need to do something to fix up your production economy otherwise all that extra infrastructure that you can build is kind of pointless CU you you don't need it in order to do an academy and that's the important thing don't waste your industry on things that aren't important early game um and dark does kind of ask you to do that whereas Barbarian says just play the game you know strong well and you'll get there uh the the other stuff though for dark isn't too bad getting access to call the week is pretty nice if you can do weakened first of all this counter strengthened which is an incredibly powerful ability that you're going to see a lot of people use on their Heroes and whatnot and of course you know Mythic units cuz you can buff things in combat no problem there uh and weaken counters that and if they don't have enough uh strengthened to resist you then you're going to get a 20% damage bonus that does not require ire you to be in melee this does not require you to have units next to each other it doesn't have any requirements other than the unit be weakened that does of course mean that units that are immune to that stuff like gold golems are going to give you more of a problem um but this is a very nice ability at the beginning of the game and does a reasonable job of keeping your Heroes alive as well and then you get Grim executioner which like we talked about with barbarians this is a Warfare skill gets you closer to killing momentum and critically this is 30% critical hit chance rather than the 20 that you got on barbarians it's counterable with Misfortune but like this is technically more and people are not using Misfortune effects a lot cuz the they're pretty Limited in their application so that's a huge deal sundering curse is also just like an incredibly powerful single Target sniper effect it's not really a an artillery cuz it's Target enemy unit rather than an AOE and so I don't want to give people the wrong advice here this is not a fireball but it's pretty good at assassinating enemy Heroes and enemy highquality units and of course this is a a non rollable Sunder defense Sunder resistance inflict weaken there's no chance to resist this so status resistance doesn't matter against these it's only status immunity and the the Tactical spell here ice shackles I think is very good at the beginning slow is a very powerful ability Now by preventing people from doing retaliation attacks you really get a lot of extra combat efficiency there and the brand of Wrath ability is nice with banful cursed because this is another one of those things that ignores the uh the stat resistance on things but dark Forge does not help you build an academy unlike the Barbarian SPI which at least does uh Foresters I think are generally better than quaries because you can build them on more spots whereas Foresters you can't but I do think that their units here leave a little bit to to be wanted they like they have access to warlocks these guys are like magical snipers pursuers are a tier one unit that can actually be calf so that's a big deal when it comes to scouting but their Scout is functionally a non-unit most Scouts are functionally non-unit so they shouldn't feel too bad about this but unlike The Barbarians they don't have any meaningful reason to want to build more than one Scout and they probably are going to end up disbanding their their starting Scout pretty quickly once they find the the things near them as quickly as they can just to save on the upkeep and then of course their night guards these are good damage output units but you'll notice that there's no support unit here so you kind of like have to get a support unit from somewhere ASAP cuz support units that can like remove uh status effects especially stunned is a really big deal when it comes to the combat Effectiveness against an enemy player and you don't have one of those here so like you got to you got to work for it as dark and then dark Warriors these guys are extremely squishy I would say they're up there with like copper golems in terms of units that the AI has some desire to just throw away for no reason I'm not I'm not sure why they like autor resolving the dark Warriors to death so often but they they really do but fortunately for their dark uh their tier three unit here The Dark Knight is I think very very powerful the heavy charge strike we talked about with barbarians with their Berserkers but it's just a very very powerful ability By ignoring charge resistance and of course dark surge is a great AOE effect if you can just do a couple of of Sund curse on someone then it's going to have a negative status effect almost certainly and then you're just going to do a bunch of extra damage but ultimately cultural units are not like the biggest deal for for anybody and the dark problem with their industry economy being just like Shackled to building Farms as in evil an evil dictatorial magical power that's a little weird I'm not sure why we have to build farms with dark um I think that overall dark is pretty good but because of the the industry economy and the fact that they're just a little slower than the barbarians I think they are a b tier and I think they're probably Behind The Barbarians unfortunately for dark all right so up next we have feudal feudal has like one thing that's really good about it and pretty much only just one thing that's really good about it but it is pretty good so I do want to highlight it they get access to hold the line and undying loyalty these give you access to steadfast on just like a anywhere you want on the battlefield and therefore enormous amounts of Battlefield control and of course this is a support novice hero skill therefore it's going to build you towards spurt action which I think is a very powerful ability and this is a free action and therefore one of those things that the AI in Auto resolves is a little less terrified of using therefore it's going to keep some units alive for you a little longer but of course steadfast is going to keep the unit alive at 1 HP whereas barbarians are going to keep the units Alive by ritual of alacrity and therefore like moving around the board killing stuff faster so they're going to do kind of the same thing in a an autor resolve situation but hold the line in terms of the steadfast ability this is like kind of the only in battle castable tactical spell that any of the cultural TOS get access to in the late game and it's still it's still very very powerful in the late game you can use this on Heroes and on dragons and on uh wild Guardians and basically everybody else uh and that's a really big deal when it comes to the combat effectiveness of your army by just preventing you from having morale problems you can win battles that you really had no shot at winning otherwise unfortunately for the feudal package here everything else kind of starts to fall apart from there so Stand Together gives you a 20% damage bonus when you're adjacent to Friendly units with it um this is unlocked on the the hero and of course it's going to be one of those things like the extra blight damage for barbarian that's available on all your units naturally but you don't want to be clumping all of your units together in PVP like the AI right now doesn't take advantage of AOE situations but other players absolutely do and so if you just Bunch up all of your units and create a perfect opportunity for somebody to blast you with lava blast or a fireball effect or whatever guess what they will and and then your your giant damage output that you thought you were getting from Stand Together is just going to go out the window cuz all your units are going to die and that's going to be bad um and you don't want to do that and for the same reason feudal ruler has some problems anything that just like asks you to be adjacent for a long period of time is a big problem I think the feudal Lord ability is cute but ultimately because these do not build towards any of the The Finisher skills like killing momentum or spur to action this is sort of like asking you to sacrifice a level on your Heroes for a little bit of economic benefit it's not like apocalyptic but this is more of a side grade than it is an upgrade some of these things are good right like getting 25 production income either in your Capital so you can crank out a Scholars Guild there ASAP or on one of your Heroes you can move around and crank out like Arcane institutes on everywhere ASAP is is actually quite good but like are you going to really take some of these things in a game where you're just trying to get to killing momentum ASAP probably not I think War crops and production are like the only ones that are generally pretty good but the big problem for feudal by I think a big margin is the fact that their their military just doesn't work at the beginning of the game so at the beginning of the game most of of the cultures are going to get access to a tier one unit that is an optional Cavalry and the feudal are not one of them you see our peasant Pikeman have no optional calave Archer is no optional calav the Scouts have replacement calav so like if you take a cool calav here you could potentially have nightmare Scouts but like you're not going to bring a nightmare Scout to a fight please don't do that it will die and you'll feel bad for bringing it um and this means that like you're scouting is just a lot slower when it comes to playing as feudal the nice thing of course is that Bannerman and The Defenders are both pretty good in the tier two slot especially with to of Waring for Bannerman because of the way these guys operate you just get so much holstered resistance and then Defenders are optional Cavs so if you give these guys Nightmare and then you just or like unicorns or whatever they can do a lot to act as like light Cavalry but they're light Cavalry these guys are not a real threat in terms of their damage presence heavy Shield just makes them you know more uh bulky not more damage threatening you can just ignore Defenders even if they're mounted just just ignore them focus on the other stuff and then their combat Effectiveness goes down a lot the knights are a little better uh I like the fact that they have Giant Slayer now that I think is absolutely necessary to give the knights a real opportunity to shine especially because in the late game there's very few things that let you do extra damage to large Target units there's like this and gold golems please please Triumph give me a tier three or a tier four po arm please but I I think the fact that this is on a 48 movement speed unit is actually kind of even better than just a normal pull arm cuz this is just way more applicable into a real Combat situation right you just run somebody down and then you're you're rocking but the inspiring killer is like mixed in terms of value it's it's pretty good if you take to of rry which you probably should but it also prudes access to Undead so you know just be aware of that there's just so many problems at the very beginning that's that's like the real issue for the the feudal stuff tier one units are garbage their uh special abilities here are really only concentrated and hold the line and their SPI Levy Camp is kind of unbuildable like 15 food is all right but you you should not be investing industry in order to build a farm that's really bad value cuz you just can't use this Farm to build anything useful and their replacement building here the uh the tithe guy the tithe Shrine is asking you to exchange Mana for gold it's not giving you any extra it's just an exchange and I think that that exchange is like only sometimes good depends on your economy and so I I think the feudal are unfortunately for Age of Wonders 4 and the fans of feudal just kind of like how well do you use steadfast in manual battles and it's a good ability but I don't think it's enough to to save feudal from being a d tier here sorry feudal F in the chat all right so next let's talk about high there's a lot to love here in in the high portfolio there are there are some problems which we will talk about but there's a lot to love here I love the alignment agenda now generally because of the high start at plus 10 uh alignment and and two order Affinity your start is a little slow and so can be dangerous to declare war on a free City on the the highest World threat but most groups are playing on medium World threat that I play with and even if you are playing against a high World threat free City you can declare war on it to get down to neutral alignment and then just like pay attention to where it is and if it spawns an army to attack you then kill it that's kind of the easiest way to get down to neutral you do need to have access to City stability bonuses though which is kind of questionable cuz like a lot of the city stability things aren't great playing as a champion is a big downgrade to playing as a wizard King but imperialists is a good trait and although that means you start with three order which is questionable hey you know 20 20 extra uh raw resources in terms of food and production is a really nice bonus to your city so don't don't overlook it the pure good bonus is basically nonsense 25 City stability means basically nothing but the pure evil thing is a a great way that you can play the alignment agenda out right in the late game after you've built up your cities and you've got everything established in terms of your infrastructure in your economy then just flip to Pure Evil and all your units are going to start in an awaken State and this is sort of like the the Highlight for High when the game goes long so they have a really really powerful uh mid and late game combat ability here in awakened but it's also very good at the beginning plus three Spirit damage is a huge upgrade to the combat effectiveness of some of your guys cuz we'll we'll talk about their units in just a second but the their units have some problems um but the the twin Awakening ability is huge upgrade to the damage especially if you in the underground cuz there's a lot of things down there the undead and stone spirits that you encounter who are going to be weak to Spirit damage and if even if they aren't there are very few units that resist Spirit damage so this is just a great damage type and of course the dormant enchantments which you can see here by just like flipping over this they're always applicable on your high units but you can get this enchantment to get those upgrades for your other guys so you can get like seeking arrows on your Glade Runners that's pretty good getting access to radiant light is generally better distracted is a colossal increase in in damage right you also have access to some other nice little abilities here I think exposing light is kind of what the uh the dark spell wants to be dark is just I'm going to kill one unit whereas exposing light is I'm going to just Fireball people with with magical Spirit damage this is the real battle mage skill if if you want to use a battle mage hero you're probably playing as high unfortunately the combat tactical spells are kind of nonsense that's to be expected but the fact that you have a a research post SPI is just a huge deal like being able to build a scholar Guild literally everywhere is a big deal and even if you can already do that because you just have like good places to put your cities getting an extra knowledge down because you have another research post for your Scholars Guild is is a great upgrade but uh the high unit roster is kind of mixed I'm not a big fan of DUS hunters or DOD Defenders DUS Hunters I think kind of got more press than they needed to cuz people were just like stacking a whole lot of range on them and a whole lot of low-level unit enchantments to make their damage out put really high but against a human player they're just going to kill your dusk Hunters right like against the a the AI kind of would just ignore them and then you would just machine gun people down but against a human they're just going to kill these things they have 50 HP and no resistances and so these things aren't as effective in multiplayer as you've come to expect almost certainly and then the dawn Defenders themselves although they are an optional unit Cavalry here they have no stun um they have no lockdown so like these are cute units and they're very very bulky but they're sort of like Defender light and I'm not a huge fan of like regular Defenders because you just ignore them they're light Cavalry that don't really threaten units that well they they're best when they can threaten people with flanking but like they just don't do that much even with awakened they just don't do that much the but Sun priests are really good right getting access to this mending Awakening 30 temporary hit points is a big deal when you're trying to interact with a hero the real highlight for that the high in terms of their unit roster of course is the awakener themselves they get access to the EXP exposing light ability therefore you're kind of playing with just like a whole lot of hopefully Cav nukes that's a really big deal when it comes to the damage output of your your unit roster here cuz uh they're like I said not not great options in the very beginning of the game but they do have some interesting things like their workshop is replaced with a a special building instead in this case The Artisans Workshop is replacing you so you're losing five draft income for five City stability I think that's generally pretty good and of course the nice thing for me at least is that you can build this using quaries rather than building it using the the normal bonus of farms that means you can ignore picking up a farm very early as a High character and that's a that's a meaningful upgrade in terms of your the speed of your economy now of course you can always start on a farm start building the workshop and then immediately on the same turn flip it over to being either a a Forester or a Corey but you know just being able to avoid that dance is a nice thing and sacrificing five draft for five stability with the alignment agenda in mind is very very good I think that really the only thing holding high back is the fact that a order is just like absolute nonsense outside of the awaken instincts thing which is sometimes banned and generally they do have some issues with their low quality of units at the beginning of the game and their industrial economy isn't so big that they have an easy time taking advantage of their knowledge economy but overall high is one of the strongest cultures in the game and you absolutely should not be afraid to bring this to multiplayer I think really all of the cultures are technically playable just some of them are a lot better than others and I think high is one of those all right so up next we get to talk about industrious industrious if you've been watching my my streams it's definitely my favorite culture and I I think it's one of the strongest for a couple of really good reasons we'll talk about the weaknesses of this in just a moment but the strengths of it should be pretty ubiquitous when you start seeing the way their economy works so barbarians their economy is going to work with fabled hunters and just like conquering stuff industrious their economy just like works all on its own you get plus to materium Affinity which means that you automatically are basically guaranteed to get materium one early enough that it's going to be useful to you you also get access to scout prospecting any Scouts that you have as it says here on a neutral Province containing a cliff mountain or stag Mite including you know in the underground they can click a prospecting button which is going to give you maybe 40 to 50 production same amount of gold or a tier one or a tier 2 hero item this is a gigantic gigantic upgrade to the speed of the indust ious economy in the early game you can get 50 production from a scout just wandering onto a mountain and clicking something and you can click it over and over and over again as long as you keep finding more and more places for you to prospect you can't Prospect the same place over and over again but just keep your Scouts moving around but I think also value here is that this means that industrious and Barbarian and basically nobody else can actually afford to build a second sometimes third or industrious cases fourth or even fifth Scout depending on the size of of the map it's generally really bad to build Scouts cuz they're terrible in combat but if each of your Scouts is out here finding you you know 40 to 50 production or gold or a hero item basically every single turn while also exploring the board to find things for your army to fight uh that's a really really big upgrade to your economy this is just like a great way to start off the gate but you of course also get an SPI that gets you extra production income this is I think generally worse than the SPI for the high it's about on the same level as the SPI for the The Barbarians because Foresters you can't put everywhere whereas quaries you kind of can but this is a lot of extra production which you can then capture with the production you're getting from Scout prospecting and then keep building even more stuff in your cities you're going to find that industrious as long as you can provide them with extra research posts through spis through your TOS like by taking cryomancy or whatever you're going to get to Scholars guilds in all your cities way faster than most players you're just going to have so much industry that that it's not going to be hard for you to chew through any problems that you encounter you also get access to a really nice Warfare ability here which is great for killing momentum ending your turn and defense mode is a gigantic upgrade to the survivability of your Heroes especially if they're Heroes that for whatever reason you're not building as like Warfare machines if you got a if you got a commander that you want to keep on the field alive you're going to have a hard time doing better than throwing defensive Master on there and you only need four Warfare skills to get there so you're going to take Sprint and then a couple of nice little abilities and basically all your guys can pick this up this is a big deal and then defense training is fine right you know we don't want to overemphasize the value of the the command abilities cuz it depends on how many Heroes you're allowed to bring but it's generally really good in addition to the the defensive bonus that most support heroes are going to get access to because you're not just at plus one defense you're at plus two defense on on that case and bolstering is just a nice way to keep your units alive and of course industrious value doesn't even stop there they have a better Storehouse I think their Storehouse sacrifices five uh production for or rather sacrifices five food for five production but of course it's going to do that on the smaller side as well and this means that although your cities are going to grow a little slower than everybody else and you're going to have to suffer with slightly lower population you're going to rush build a tier three anyway in your first city um just so that way you can start cranking out your tier three units ASAP but like that's whatever like five extra production on each of those buildings means that you're going to choose through the infrastructure even faster and their units are pretty good like the industrious roster isn't bad the uh Pioneer is useful economically the Anvil guard has probably the best uh stun in comparison to the warrior the only problem of course is that the the warrior actually can get to where it needs to go cuz it can be mounted and Anvil guards can't but like taunt is sort of three turns of stun instead of one it's not exactly the same thing but it's sort of the same thing and that's that's a pretty good deal and then the watchful ability means that their ability to respond when they've been taunted or when they have taunted someone is very very powerful and the arbalist overdraw crossbow ability is functionally a ranged heavy charged big big uh combat upgrade for the arbalist and you can make them mounted too so that that's a a nice thing and a mounted unicorn you know that's a plus bunch of extra range when it comes to your arbalist in terms of movement and the phase effect and the fact that this is a single shot rather than a triple means that after the phase you can actually do a lot of extra damage with a crossbow versus a regular bow halers are really nice these are just like a a very strong buff uh Frontline unit to to supplement your Anvil guards but tier 2 pull arms they do drop off pretty quickly but steel Shapers are just fantastic these guys are if you if you've never seen a steel shaper with a dragon you should try it out cuz the fact that you can get strength from steel and get like five strengthened on Your Dragon Ruler on turn one with one support unit and like a spell is a pretty big deal in terms of the damage output of your Your Heroes and you can do that over and over again and these have very very short cool Downs so although the steel shaper ability is not an AOE I think that in terms of their value versus the the units that they're modifying which again hopefully are high-powered heroes or high-powered mythics steel Shapers are really good and then bastions they're tier three here this is another optional Cavalry and these things are just functionally unkillable they have so much resistance like the the way that you kill a Bastion naturally of course is to exploit its relative lack of resistance and relative lack of status resistance but just pick Transformations that give your bastion's access to resistance and these things will actually scale pretty well into the mid to late game that generally most of the tier three units for the cultural units stop being playable but I think mounted Bastion either because they're nightmares or or unicorns actually are very combat effective against most things they're just impossible to kill and they can access this inspiring defense ability which is another free action so you can move them around bolster everybody's defense and then just keep moving you have access to watchful which is a really nice ability when it comes to uh utilizing your opportunity attacks if people are just trying to leave the only real problem is that their damage output is pretty anemic but you can fix that just give them some unit enchantments and they'll be pretty good I think that ultimately the industrious uh ability to Output damage is like their biggest weakness but you can get around that steel Fury chant is a great way to increase your your strengthened and your fortune right for each stack lost they gain one strengthen and one Fortune this means you can get 30% crit chance and like 50% uh extra damage on your entire Army if you stack things correctly very very quickly with those bastions right because you're just going to get tons of bolstered Defense on your entire Army steel Fury chant immediately and your damage output will be outrageous for the the remainder of the the B the buff there three turns of of almost double damage is a big deal I it's it's hard for me to find a real problem or a flaw with the industrious plan I think the biggest problem with them is that you do need a lot of mountains so if you're playing on like a big ocean then they're not as good if you're playing on a big ocean they're probably a little worse than than high but like on a normal map I think industrious is the best by by pretty big margin actually all right so finally we have Mystic there are some really great things about Mystic to kick this off we do get two astral Affinity naturally that's going to put us a lot closer to astral 2 that's one of the best picks on the empire development tree I think I think it's like up there with materium one in terms of just like one of the strongest things you can do in the game and these guys have a meaningful Edge on it right starting with plus two astral means you get there that much faster and they also have other things when it comes to their knowledge economy specifically they have this weird mechanic astral Echoes so astral Echoes is going to spawn a whole lot of uh little pickups on the board that are only visible to Mystic players this means that Mystic is sort of a meta call when you show up at the table right if you think you're going to be the only Mystic player in a seven play your map you're actually going to find that you get reasonable long-term value out of out of Astral Echoes you're going to just get a whole lot of extra knowledge and Mana throughout the game the way the industrious uh get a whole lot of gold in production throughout the game generally golden production is better because that's longer term but you know getting a little bit extra value here is not a bad thing and then they have a a big building that they can build as a a Capstone that gives them a lot of bonuses for picking up a lot of Astral Echoes but if they're like six players at a seven player table playing Mystic you're not going to get any out of this so you kind of have to just guess what people are going to bring when it comes to evaluating that value Attunement star blades is nice um this is just going to give you a little bit of extra Elemental damage on all of your units and including your Heroes if you pick up the the little battle magic skill here generally battle magic skills aren't like the best in the game um simply because there aren't a whole lot of big term payoffs like high gets access to a really good one and then there's the Weaver ability but like most of the good abilities are in Warfare I I like having one Mage um but that's okay this doesn't require you invest anything other than just pick this up and then you can also use that to get down to resistance to a little faster so that's pretty good and resistance training is I think generally better than defensive training resistance is one of these things that just scales really really nicely into the mid to late game whereas defense kind of drops off because people are just going to start doing more and more magic damage because of their their units that they have the the different higher tier units they summon and so ultimately resistance does scale a little better than than defensive does combat casting is nonsense don't ever take this three this if this was a free move it would be okay but 10 combat casting points is basically zero and this requires a level up and an entire turn out of your hero it's this is just this is nonsense don't take that um but the Mystic Abby is all right you know plus extra knowledge per adjacent conduit a research post is not nothing and this is a basic conduit and therefore if if you're looking to pick up um a monolith you have to have one conduit the same way where you you have to have a research Post in order to build your an academy and you do need to respect your Mana economy and the Mana economy on the uh the Mystic side is pretty good but the uh spells here are kind of nonsense these these are just basically blank spaces don't research them and unfortunately for Mystic they have a big problem when it comes to their early game so you notice that they have Mystic projection instead of a normal Scout 32 movement does not get uh passed by by this p through ability this is not good enough to sacrifice all that extra movement and look arcanists are not uh Cavalry ready and Arcane guards are not Cavalry ready so this means that like the opening moves for a Mystic at the beginning of the game are going to be crazy slow you can help out Mystic projections by getting wayfinder enchant enchantment but like that's sort of saying that uh you have to research a spell that basically nobody else has to that's a big cost to playing Mystic and just the fact that these guys just don't do that well in combat anyway uh past a certain point is a meaningful downgrade right Cosmic bolts this is nice this is this is a great way to deal with enemy Warriors and stuff but arcanists are pretty short range four range is not a lot when it comes to dealing with melee threats and these do not have the survivability to to stick up to it I think the Arcane guards are supposed to operate a little better as like defensive lines for the arcanists but because they don't have a shield and they only have one defense they are going to get rolled a lot faster than something like an anvil guard and then your front line is going to collapse and then uh unfortunately the rest of their cultural units aren't like that much better I think the spell Breakers are pretty cool cuz they're always mounted um and that means that you know yes you can take an extra amount here and replace this with something better like a nightmare but you don't have to like that you can always just use these guys as as running around nukes and star Purge is a really good ability if you're trying to fight against people who are trying to do all Buffs uh and of course the spell shield stunning flash is a very nice ability with optional Cavalry you just run them up and then you flash in and stun a group of people rather than just an individual the way the Warriors do but the spell Shields aren't like crazy Buff when it comes to their their defensive bonuses and they don't have a ton of extra damage output and because they are a tier 2 unit this does drop off pretty quickly just be aware that stunning flash isn't bad especially if you take your Blizzard or whatever to reduce the uh the status resistance and soothers are nice because they do have a double Target so that means you can do a lot when utilizing Tom of warding but the big problem there is that their early game stuff is just just absolute nonsense and that's going to slow down the way you explore the board and the way you clear the board by a pretty meaningful margin and unfortunately their structures are also not that great so just how the workshop was replaced for the uh the high culture with The Artisans the Mystic here have replaced their workshop with the evocator Abode and unlike the Artisan Workshop which sacrifices a little draft for City stability and therefore might work with the uh alignment agenda that you're working for for high evocators Abode sacrifices production for Mana this means that your production economy as a Mystic is going to be a a lot slower than everybody else you're basically playing with half of a workshop instead of a full Workshop I think if they wanted this to be playable it would just be substituting maybe the draft twice here like literally zero draft on the the workshop and then the uh the stone conjurer just gets the Mana for free to pay for that and then the evocator Abode you know is just a a weaker version of the workshop on the front but the production is still there but like the fact that you lose out on production is enormous of course it's still on a farm so it's not like you're necessarily going to get to Stone Contour all of the time two Farms is a lot to be running on a a an extra civilization that doesn't have access to tons of production and that that's kind of what's holding the Mystic back I I want to rank these guys really high cuz I do like the idea and I do think that generally Elemental damage does scale pretty well into the game but they they just have so many problems at the beginning and their industry is just not there so while their uh their knowledge economy might be good I don't think that the mystics really deserve any higher than a c at the moment so we'll see how this uh shakes up with the the new ashes and Golem update there's supposed to be some adjustments coming for the cultural balance and that might change things around and of course they are introducing a whole new culture I think they're called the reavers so that should be pretty interesting to see once we once we get our hands on it I could see people making an argument for maybe Barbarians in the low a tier but think the value of Barbarians being in low a is like almost entirely contingent on fabled Hunters working well and sometimes you just don't find the uh the Imperium early on I could also see an argument for dark being in the C tier but I I think there are enough ways to get extra industry there that you can actually capitalize on that that little knowledge cap and maybe even just run a farm like that that's another way you can get around it if you start with ad up settlers an extra population with everybody then one Farm isn't as big a tax as you'd think and there's there's different ways to adjust things from here but I think this is pretty representative of of the way that multiplayer actually shakes out and the uh the power of each of the cultures in turn so let me know if you learned something uh let me know if You' shared this with anybody and they've learned something from it that's what I'm really hoping is that we can get the uh the Age of Wonders 4 multiplayer Community to keep growing because I'm having a lot of fun streaming with WIA and playing with those guys but I I want to do a nine-player game at some point I think it would be a real blast and the more people who are engaging with multiplayer content on on YouTube I think the more likely that'll become all right that's uh that's Walker take care

Channel: w(&)e play games

Views: 16,945

Keywords: age of wonders 4, guide, tutorial, aow4 multiplayer guide, multiplayer, culture tier list, aow4 cultures tier list, age of wonders tier list, age of wonders cultures, industrious, high, barbarian, dark, mystic, feudal, age of wonders 4 races, age of wonders 4 guide, aow4 pvp, autoresolve aow4

Id: iSRagc2DY8c

Length: 45min 28sec (2728 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 18 2023