How to Get Better (Advanced Tips) at Age of Wonders 4

Age of Wonders 4's release date of May 2nd is mere days away and you're about to jump into a Fantastical Journey Of Mayhem and enjoyment through the games tutorial on all the many videos Paradox has put out you'll learn the basics but in this video I'm collaborating with Paradox to help bring you from Noob To Pro with my top 10 tips that will help chip away at the early learning curve of the game if you're a veteran of this series most of this will be old news but there are still a lot of new systems that exist here that you'll want to really take some time when you get started you can quickly navigate to any of the tips that interest you the most using the chapters in both the timeline of the description keep in mind these tips aren't in any sort of order as far as importance goes so just kind of have at them you can also check out the game using the link in my pin comment and description if you're interested in picking up Age of Wonders 4 when it goes live on May 2nd lastly don't forget to follow me on Twitch where I am doing streams of this game as well as giveaways so you can find that link in the pinned comment and description as well let's get started here on how to go from Noob To Pro in Age of Wonders four so before you even get started before you even become a true noob play the story realm first I know the game tells you to do the beginning scenario over here but it's far more free form the story realm is a conventional kind of Forex or strategy style tutorial I'd recommend just playing also one of the existing factions that are already in the game just to get through it since it's more on the rails and get you through a lot of gameplay mechanics in a very well laid out format it also rewards you with more of these generic factions which also inhabit your gameplay that you would play in the future which is pretty cool feel free to create your own if you so wish but know that in this story realm you are relegated to only playing a champion which is your main character here otherwise you can make a wizard King outside of that though if this is your first time playing Age of Wonders I would recommend only playing on easy difficulty now I know a lot of you probably want to jump into normal but if you jump into normal on on the tier one Realm you will drown ramp up slowly by playing a game on easy to get a sense of the pacing of the game when to make outposts how to expand whatever then jump into normal the normal is far more punishing than it is if you've never played this style and it's just way faster paced conversely though you can edit these Realms here and do whatever you want so you can make us that you're playing with less players or factions on the field which kind of superficially lowers the difficulty if you're just dead set on playing on normal jumping into the game cue up your buildings in your cities on the off chance you get a reward of any kind that grants you production you won't lose that production in fact you'll be able to just produce any buildings immediately or much faster with any banks production but this is a nice way to keep your game going smoothly without having to micromanage your settlements all the time you can also turn on um Auto production for any cities you really just don't care about but a nice cue of buildings gives you a good solid hands-off progression but for the city so that you can focus on other parts of the game quick side effect here make sure you are looking at the requirements for boosting buildings this reduces their cost by 30 percent including the time it takes to make them so make sure you're queuing up any boosted buildings or buildings that you need to further your Empire focus on Gathering magical materials using outposts trade and Province expansions so you can solidify bonuses that will Aid in your Victory conditions these magic materials are used for quests and can even be used to trade with other rulers for diplomatic gain trading them from free cities you vassalize is a quick way to acquire any materials that are not in your immediate vicinity keep in mind having multiple of a material doesn't stack any bonuses but just presents you with more should you lose any but there are three types you've got ores liquids and then plants all of them Grant specific bonuses and then set bonuses for having all three ores give you bonuses towards your military units with a set bonus that aids you in combat liquids age you in casting both spells on the map and in combat as well as speeding up your knowledge and Mana generation as a set bonus finally plants Aid you in your diplomatic efforts by giving you bonuses towards relation with free cities Allegiance towards vasilage and a bonus to your Imperium income all of these then lead back to your Victory condition boosting your efforts in the ones you choose so that make sure you put some thought into your Victory cons at the start of your game so that you're going towards the magical materials that really help out in trying to solidify your quest and knock out those Victory conditions unlike a lot of other 4X games Age of Wonders 4 has a very robust free City Ambassador system other than simply gobbling up every city you find you can actually have a very reliable and strong vassal that will work just as well as an independent ruler as they can then be integrated into your faction later the big thing you want to focus on at first is getting a pack of cooperation once given a whispering Stone right here you should then hit that stage pretty quickly but this opens up trade and one of the best ways to get cheap resources or magic materials the latter being the most important once you progress enough to vassal things get spicy so there are multiple stages of vassal and each stage makes trading cheaper sharing more of its magical materials choosing whether or not to integrate them into your Empire and also sharing a higher percentage of their income at maxed basil you get 50 percent of the vassal's free cities income now this is a great way to spike your Mana knowledge and gold income with very little effort on your part you can see that all right here for vassal income 28 22 and 20. lastly they will also contribute recruitment points towards the rally the legis mechanic here which is our next topic probably one of the most cryptic features in the game is the rally the legis system the game doesn't particularly outline this for you outside of being able to recruit units through the system but it's pretty wide spanning and actually a great way to get unique units so to break this down you get a set number of recruitment points that you can use against the pool of available units these points are gained by relation and vassalage of free cities this pool is reset every handful of turns also known as a rally you can trigger the reset using muster the legions that you can pay to have the rally time cut in half the units of this pool then are pulled from a number of sources your vassal's recruitment pools any integrated faction that you've got that you've brought into your Empire units generated by Ancient Wonders like these guys right here just in any units from special events and this is important because you can pull from any integrated factions top tier units that you might not or cannot make otherwise like these golden Golems here which is a tier V unit that I've gotten no ability to make otherwise so once you've chosen a unit you have two options denoted by these two symbols right here you can either send the unit to a vassal which will take some time and it will cost or it'll be cheaper or you can send the unit to your throne city which is around double the cost of sent to a vassal you can select multiple units to go on one batch or just kind of trickle them as you kind of see fit and as you get money the pool will stay as is until that next rally in which it'll swap out units at any new units from captured wonders Etc and again this is a great way to get units in a pinch because it only takes two turns to get a grip of units if you have the cash to do so keep in mind if you send any units to a vassal then integrate that vassal later in the game with those units alive they disappear just like their own units do when they integrate them so just be mindful of that as your cities grow they are limited in their Annex range to start out all cities have two Annex range which is how many provinces away from the city you can expand to without having to upgrade so for example here I'd be able to go to Forester Forester but I wouldn't be able to go to these two at the start of the game each City upgrade grants one more range of annexation you can see that right here plus one Province Annex range you can jump on any important resource magic material or even ancient wonder by building outposts though and these outposts can be converted into a Work Camp work camps then Grant an additional Province or even upgraded to a city outright whichever one you want to do but don't sleep on outposts though when you start out you might think to use them sparingly but you should be dropping them on any important resource that's a good distance from your city and it helps to secure that resource but it also it puts down claims on anything around you which would become very important in the next tip but you can use Outpost to essentially create a net of claims around any territory you hope to expand to or even use them to box in your opponents this next tip is going to be dense but the game doesn't really explain how important claims are in the beginning but they're the largest driving force behind the conflicts and grievances in Age of Wonders for you have two types of claims the normal claims and they're basically any Province directly outside of your domain which is you know any highlighted territory with a border so as you can see this big huge blob here that's my border that is my domain and anything that is right outside of that like this would technically be something I have a direct claim on as it is denoted in here this is another example you can do it around Outpost that says claims on this province Vlad Dracula um but you also have distant claims and they are any province that is three away from the border of your domain not from the normal claim this is why outposts are so important you're casting a three Province net one two three around you that no one can settle into without creating a grievance and be careful as this is a double-edged sword and it can work against you simply select the land first and it'll show you any claims that anyone has so if you're trying to expand into territory that your enemy has you might have a claim on it as well and this will create a grievance now these grievances are certain actions that you commit or are done against you that create animosity between the two factions these grievances can be paid away to lower the animosity but the higher your grievance the more just a war is should you want to declare one you can also fabricate a grievance using the this button right here that helps with that war justification now on the subject of war and how all this really kind of comes together is you can use all of these grievances that you've compiled against your opponent to wage a just War which means it's a war that isn't particularly evil unjust Wars boost evil as well as they give you a ton of negative relation penalties so it's not necessarily very worth it so take a look at this example I have 56 grievance to acrion's 60 resulting in a negative four that makes the war unjust for me but if I go settle a grievance I can pay to settle one of these grievances I did to acrion which will then lower his grievance score against mine allowing for a just war that I can then take territory and try and knock this guy off the map as you can see it now says I have a 21 balance its War justification is minor and go here to declare a Justified war and this is a dense subject and you'll definitely come back to the diplomacy screen a lot for any kind of treaties but I felt that the war and claim system is so important but so undiscussed in the tutorial sections of the game that I wanted to really dive into it here for you this next tip is about special Province improvements in planning your expansion because expanding your provinces is crucial to increasing the resources of your Empire but you have to both plan this out to be truly successful and you can manipulate this at a pretty early point in the game so you want to click this little blip above the mini map to open up the economic view this is going to give you an idea of the provinces around you and what app options you have when you Annex said provinces now remember as stated you'll start with an Annex range of two so plan out what that looks like focusing mainly on food and production in the beginning to get faster population in buildings now once you upgrade your town to level 2 you can work towards special Province improvements and this is where you get to break these rules these Province improvements usually Grant a number of awesome bonuses also they'll Grant an additional bonus for other provinces that are adjacent to you so there will also count as that type of Province here's the special part you can place these on any Province not just the type it counts as so for instance this dark Forge counts as a mine but I can place it on any province that I want to convert to a mine whereas I would normally need an iron or gold resource node to do that otherwise and there are a lot of different improvements but they're all based on your culture type as well as the tomes you select so make sure you are placing these to maximize your income as much as possible a quick tip for you is on Heroes and their limits but hero limits are dictated by your number of cities generally but this doesn't mean you can't recruit outside of that limit if you do you'll pay more per Recruitment and there is an additional gold upkeep it says that right here right go ahead and inspect and then press recruit and it tells you there's now an additional gold upkeep here but this also applies to anytime you animate a dead hero so if I go back here go back to my heroes press animate I've got this guy can animate and it says that it's going to cost me my normal 30 souls and also an increased gold cost of 100 and it's going to incur a 30 gold each turn because I'm above my hero cap so I just wanted to illustrate how you can recruit above your hero limit you just now have to deal with an upkeep and an increased gold recruitment when doing it I think otherwise you don't pay a gold to animate a hero for any Undead faction you're playing as or what have you our top tip is about affinities and one of the first things you'll be exposed to is affinities the game doesn't really do a great job of breaking down how how truly they bleed into every portion of the game so these affinities are going to influence four big areas that you'll interact with each playthrough and they're worth keeping an eye on first and foremost probably the most obvious is the empire development tree now the affinities here are placed opposite to the ones that they oppose so for example Shadow Affinity is opposite to Nature and chaos is opposite to um order but progressing through this tree will give you a ton of really great bonuses such as additional Whispering Stones upkeep production the list goes on but each turn you gain progress towards these branches based off of your cumulative Affinity values in the upper right corner of the screen now they will also correspond to your culture your Society traits your Tome selections and the general branch is all of your cumulative affinities added up for their per turn income so it's a very very important uh portion of the Affinity thing that I don't think is really kind of explained to you but also second is diplomacy so let's go ahead and look at this faction I believe this faction doesn't like me too much so if I hover over them you can see that we have clashing affinities and your Affinity will either oppose match or be neutral to other free cities and factions in your game this will lead to either an easier time getting vassals or setting up treaties but on the other hand of the spectrum you'll have wars outright declared on you or struggle with massive relation penalties should your affinities oppose one another and in the event you see multiples of affinities like this for yourself or diplomatic targets the game looks at the highest Affinity as the one to check for opposition and the third is access to tomes now we already established that tomes grants you infinity but you need that Affinity to also unlock higher tiers obviously you need to get two tomes of the current tier before progressing but you also need six Affinity of that specific Tome to upgrade to tier 4 and 8 for tier 5. so make sure you have the proper amount to get your best spells lastly our Affinity challenges or dialogue options these are only displayed if you have the Affinity that would grant them and then even further you need to have a set amount of affinity right here it says strength uh rank nine so you need to have nine or more Affinity do you need to have that that set amount of affinity to even have the options or challenges appear higher affinities allow for increased success obviously but these will color all the many quests events and ancient wonders you encounter in your playthrough of Age of Wonders for and a quick honorable mention here is on Pantheon point so the roguelike system that gives you experience with every game you play the points are tracked per game whenever you press Escape now you don't get those points though until you either win the game or by surrendering the system then unlocks Cosmetics realm items and enhancements for your characters and factions and the biggest draw of the pantheon system is that it creates a literal Pantheon of your custom characters so the races that you create can be played against if you ascend them and ascending is only done if you win a game surrendering while it still rewards you the pantheon points will not Ascend the custom factions and you can get a sense here for the progression points for Panther the pantheon is pretty intense you can unlock different Realms here that you can play with or you can get different cosmetic items like I Illustrated and then you can even name your Pantheon whatever you wish but the pantheon system is an amazing thing that you should really be focusing on to build out a lot of the stuff in the later portions of the game at that it brings our video here to a close when you jump into Age of Wonders on May 2nd remember that the game is not a super min max experience I wanted this video to be geared towards better fleshing out some of the more advanced mechanics rather than the most optimal way to play what makes this series so enjoyable is that you get to play and create this Fantastical realm however you want so experiment with a ton of different factions and Realms to come up with the experience you enjoy I'll be making a ton of guides for the game and also don't forget to check me out on Twitch where I'll be streaming this game on launch as well huge shout out once more to Paradox for sponsoring this video but as always guys thank you so much for watching here today have a good one and take care [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: ItalianSpartacus

Views: 74,603

Keywords: How to Go From Noob to Pro in Age of Wonders 4, age of wonders 4, age of wonders 4 trailer, age of wonders 4 tips, age of wonders 4 gameplay, age of wonders 4 guide, age of wonders 4 beginner tips, age of wonders 4 noob tips, best tips age of wonders 4, aow4 tips, aow4 guide, aow4 help, age of wonders 4 tips and tricks, tips and tricks, age of wonders 4 tomes, faction creation, age of wonders 4 advanced tips, age of wonders 4 advanced guide, age of wonders 4 advanced

Id: qHWNR7BHJXo

Length: 19min 33sec (1173 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 30 2023