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Just won as rear end in a top hat terramancer elves. Turns out there's a couple options that increase unit size and uh.... 
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May 15, 2023 16:32
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exquisite tea posted:the bullshit should be distributed equitably enough that everyone can feel like they're cheating too long for thread title but 
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May 15, 2023 16:33
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Hmm expansion victory indeed.
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May 15, 2023 16:33
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Runa posted:There's at least one mod that does this, Optional Cosmetic Transformations. It accomplishes the effect by giving you two copies of the spell. One with graphical changes and one without. They're mutually exclusive with each other so you can't double up, but if you wanted the spawnkin bonuses without the spawnkin, uh, just a lil guy scrappiness, but also wanted to visually Frostkin it up the option is there. This is fantastic, thanks. I want to get the enchantment that increases size and hit points but if you apply it to a mounted unit it sets their legs to the minimum possible length while doubling their upper body size.
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May 15, 2023 16:56
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Jabarto posted:This is fantastic, thanks. I want to get the enchantment that increases size and hit points but if you apply it to a mounted unit it sets their legs to the minimum possible length while doubling their upper body size. war dachshunds
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May 15, 2023 16:58
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I am Ozymandias, king of kings, look on my works ye mighty and despair.
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May 15, 2023 17:20
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LEGolas.
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May 15, 2023 17:25
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I picked this game up a couple days ago, and It's so drat good. I decided to make a fun mystic spell race, since I haven't messed around with magic yet, but I'm starting to get tired of the auto-resolve for mystics. I have to fight every battle manually to avoid losing half my army, it feels like. (I'm playing on Hard, if that super matters)
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May 15, 2023 17:27
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I don't play on Hard so that I can autoresolve because sometimes I just want to mash end turn and do weird stuff instead of microing Xcom.
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May 15, 2023 17:32
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exquisite tea posted:My perspective on balance is that everyone should get some bullshit, but the bullshit should be distributed equitably enough that everyone can feel like they're cheating. Couldn't have said it better myself. Captain Monkey posted:I don't play on Hard so that I can autoresolve because sometimes I just want to mash end turn and do weird stuff instead of microing Xcom.  If you want a hard adjacent experience, fight the voss siblings. They default to hard and good gods does it show in the raw numbers. Its also insanely frustrating since the game doesn't have "Ally! Attack this city!" like planetfall. Yet. I assume. So if you do the Voss, make sure you prepare the magic victory for when you finally get annoyed.
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May 15, 2023 17:55
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Nuclear Kitten posted:I picked this game up a couple days ago, and It's so drat good. I decided to make a fun mystic spell race, since I haven't messed around with magic yet, but I'm starting to get tired of the auto-resolve for mystics. I have to fight every battle manually to avoid losing half my army, it feels like. (I'm playing on Hard, if that super matters) Difficulty shouldn't directly affect the auto, except that you'll face some more opposition. For Mystic I suspect you're using too many of their tier 1 units, which are ok, but also flimsy as heck without extra health/defense traits and/or echantments. Replace the pikes with Spellshields and get some tier 2 or 3 battlemages and the auto should be a lot nicer to you.
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May 15, 2023 18:19
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On hard custom games (as opposed to hard story maps) you don't start with the support unit which makes the initial engagements pretty rough. Try to clear the map with more than 6 units; the extra power keeps losses down. Try to get summons early and use them to soak or replace losses to keep the gravy train rolling. Generally when you get enough enchants and buffs you can start to autoresolve some surprisingly tough battles without losses. Sometimes I'm pretty sure the AI does a better job than I would have done. Another thing that helps alot is melee heroes. You cannot lose heroes in autoresolve, even if they get horribly murdered, so having a melee hero take hits is advantageous for clearing. You also want to make sure to have enough frontline that moves at roughly the same speed. The AI will happily is suicide dive your one shock cavalry unit while your other units are catching up; this is a big reason why free pickup units like Nightmares often just get killed quickly, because theres nothing backing them up. Similar concerns apply to backline diver units like flying shock units or Banshees. Using these units to dive often makes sense tactically, but is a loss strategically. I'd also recommend not picking Channel Power, or equipping other action-inefficient options on your heroes (some signature skills, weaker Wand skills, etc.). The AI is not great at using these abilities to their full effectiveness, similar to how they will use AOE heals like on the Nymph on a single target. TheDeadlyShoe fucked around with this message at 18:31 on May 15, 2023 |
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May 15, 2023 18:23
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the summon t3 animal/elemental hero abilities are extremely powerful for keeping your perma units alive. same with the spell amplification towers (that also have their own attack). Couple of spell amp towers in front with t3 summons, bunch of arcanists/legendary seeker missile archers in the back and you can kill a stack of gold golems without any real unit losses
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May 15, 2023 18:29
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Having a bit of fun with a hero on a white wolf leading a stack of wargs. They all get pack hunter and if you swarm a target that stacks up extremely hard I'm wondering if I was a feudal culture whether or not stand together would synergise with it too. As weird as the idea of inducting wolves into the feudal system is  I wish that the sustained terraforming spells like enchanted bloom, wouldn't destroy forests. I want a mostly forested environment because I get bonuses moving and fighting in it. It should replace other clear terrain with grassland but I think for forests it should just replace one tile. Same should probably be the case for marching winter. We have single tile spells if we want to completely wipe a province (another alternative would be letting me target those on provinces that already have those features so I can increase forestation on provinces) OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 19:28 on May 15, 2023 |
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May 15, 2023 19:23
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pretty easily cleared story 3 by mana go brrrr and summoning everything. I had won by turn 70~ but had to play out to ~120 because of the lava pit making me go allllll the way around to get the W. think I'm done with AoW4, it's just a lot of incremental little numbers going up. i'm just mashing auto-resolve so I don't have to play out hour long big stack fights.
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May 15, 2023 19:28
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Argh, I also wish the sustained terraforming spell wouldn't delete the loving mountains that are forming important defences for my cities... gently caress this makes the spell basically unusable because it's going to completely destroy the terrain barriers and open me up to attack from a bunch of other factions when we have to start claiming on each other's borders. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 19:55 on May 15, 2023 |
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May 15, 2023 19:53
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It's probably not intentional that the auto arctic terraformer just explodes mountain ranges left and right.
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May 15, 2023 20:04
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There's a couple of mods I found on the workshop that apparently remove those effects, which I am going to try. I feel like there are probably too many effects that annihilate terrain diversity both mechanically and visually.
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May 15, 2023 20:07
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Captain Oblivious posted:It's probably not intentional that the auto arctic terraformer just explodes mountain ranges left and right. Oh so it did do that! In my Artica game at a certain point I could swear there was something missing from my homelands but I couldn't put my finger on what it was.
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May 15, 2023 20:07
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Kanos posted:What are peoples' favorite traits? I settled in on prolific swarmers and either cannibals or mana addicts almost immediately and never really branched out because that setup seemed so strong and flexible. Sneaky, unicorn mounted barbarians with fabled hunters and the tome of beasts.
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May 15, 2023 20:16
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Kanos posted:What are peoples' favorite traits? I settled in on prolific swarmers and either cannibals or mana addicts almost immediately and never really branched out because that setup seemed so strong and flexible. This has been my favorite by far. I don't care too much about most powerful or most optimal (though I will actually say I found this to be powerful when I played it). 
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May 15, 2023 20:25
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While we're talking about bugs, does anyone else constantly get the "free city wants to negotiate" messages even in scenarios where your relationship with them is fixed and can't be improved?
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May 15, 2023 20:26
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Randarkman posted:Oh so it did do that! In my Artica game at a certain point I could swear there was something missing from my homelands but I couldn't put my finger on what it was. Did you remember seeing a mountain there? or did you just see that snowman from very, very close up.
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May 15, 2023 20:33
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OwlFancier posted:Having a bit of fun with a hero on a white wolf leading a stack of wargs. They all get pack hunter and if you swarm a target that stacks up extremely hard It does and it works hilariously well. You can throw the buffs that work on animals or cavalry units on top and make some really really strong boys. I might roll that again in the near future, or something similar, although I think either Materium or Industrial (or both) is my next playthrough. After messing around with Order some more it does work well combined with Barbarians weirdly enough, since their early game is a little pokey normally. There's some nice synergy too with the Barbarian use of skirmisher units transitioning into Inquisitors later, as well as Condemn making the stun effects they have access to more reliable since it lowers status resist. Silver Tongue is also hilariously busted on an Order build. I might end up abandoning that game at around turn 65 since I'm on a track to win it but I set the player distance to Far to see how it works, and that plus a 7 player map is just taking too long for the AI to decide what to do sometimes when I'm in a position to just finish the last few turns of research, plop down the Heart of Order and win the game that way. Boksi posted:Sneaky, unicorn mounted barbarians with fabled hunters and the tome of beasts. I haven't tried it yet but does Heavy Charge work with the Phase ability? That seems like it'd be pretty strong if it does.
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May 15, 2023 20:35
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Gerblyn posted:There's not really a way of fixing this defense thing. I could cap it at 12 or whatever, but I think people would get upset. I suppose we could figure out a way of putting real diminishing returns in, but this was already an attempt at that but it turns out I don't really understand maths, so I failed! There's always stacking more exponents, Damage = (.9)^(Armor^.93) yields a curve that's nearly identical at low armor but slows the scaling significantly.
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May 15, 2023 20:45
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Industrious, peculiarly, syngergises extremely well with nature, because you get very tanky units and you can give them all aspect of the root to let them self-heal. And access to animals gives you a lot of versatility and mobility that you otherwise might struggle with.
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May 15, 2023 20:47
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I kind of have the feeling that with how busted/powerful nature tomes and affinity are at the moment that it will synergize well with just about everything. It's not that others are weak necessary it's just that alot of nature is in that place where it's always gonna be good.
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May 15, 2023 21:10
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Kanos posted:What are peoples' favorite traits? I settled in on prolific swarmers and either cannibals or mana addicts almost immediately and never really branched out because that setup seemed so strong and flexible. My favorite so far is easily Wonder Architects. You basically get a piece of territory without having to associate it with a population. And they generally all count as SOMETHING for the purposes of multiplying with buildings/unique improvements. It works with outposts, too. So you can get an(other) extra territory on an outpost that generally has fairly significant returns. I'm also a fan of Ancient Wise Ones. A random 60% discount on a given spell doesn't sound that much, but it's fairly massive a couple of different ways. First, the discount comes from the tome you just unlocked. So you're never getting stiffed on the return. Second, It's 60% of something in every tome. So you're saving a few thousand points of research by the time you finish the game. Third, if you just accept that you can bumrush the easiest spells possible, (either your discounted spells or earlier tomes) you'll achieve later tiers of spell books much more rapidly than your competitors, and that, in itself, is a fairly massive edge, because any given thing in a 4x game tends to have multiplicative effects on the other things.
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May 15, 2023 21:18
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Man the Voss Bros realm doesn't gently caress around. Spawn in sandwiched between two of them and they both war dec me on turn 30 and each pull up with a dozen full stacks. Short game.
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May 15, 2023 21:27
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Randarkman posted:I kind of have the feeling that with how busted/powerful nature tomes and affinity are at the moment that it will synergize well with just about everything. It's not that others are weak necessary it's just that alot of nature is in that place where it's always gonna be good. That is true, tome of beasts just giving you access to a big pile of recruitable animals along with a province upgrade that scales based off natural terrain rather than stuff you buit, as well as a spammable summoner unit, might put it in the running for best tome in the game.
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May 15, 2023 21:29
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Dr. Clockwork posted:Man the Voss Bros realm doesn't gently caress around. Spawn in sandwiched between two of them and they both war dec me on turn 30 and each pull up with a dozen full stacks. Short game. That was the one I played with Artica where my snowscaping may or may not have deleted a mountain from the map and my memory. I actually got a fairly good and safe spawn up in the north-eastern corner (maybe because of arctic adaptation?) which made it fairly easy to consolidate my. After a while of building up I basically just descended south and destroyed one of the Voss boys, razing his capital and several cities, then I retreated back up north and began spreading glorious winter evere southwards everytime I grew my population or added another city. Won by Age of Shadow after the one furthest away failed the Age of Order.
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May 15, 2023 21:32
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OwlFancier posted:I would say that personally, the only good thing about high culture is seeking missiles. Their other unit abilities from awakening are basically just "this unit now does what it would do normally with another faction" Dawn Defender - +1 defense +2 resistance, nothing amazing but +2 resistance is pretty good and lets them stay relevant for longer. Dusk Hunter - +1 range +20 accuracy, amazing, makes them the best cultural archer in the game. Sun Priest - 60% disorient, makes every attack a flank, great for taking down key targets. Daylight Spear - +1 retaliation, makes them the 2nd best pikeman in the game behind the industrious one. Awakener - +1 range +20 accuracy, amazing, 7 range aoe that lowers physical and magical defense and hugely improves base attack on off turns. Best cultural battlemage in the game.
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May 15, 2023 23:55
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I can kind of see the lore of evil high cultures but what's a good aligned dark culture
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May 16, 2023 00:07
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Impermanent posted:I can kind of see the lore of evil high cultures but what's a good aligned dark culture moles
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May 16, 2023 00:13
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Dr. Clockwork posted:Man the Voss Bros realm doesn't gently caress around. Spawn in sandwiched between two of them and they both war dec me on turn 30 and each pull up with a dozen full stacks. Short game. I think I also conceded that realm around turn 30. The two evil brothers beat me down while attacking each other. I became a vassal of one and then he immediately got dunked on. The funny part was everyone denouncing each other on Wizard Facebook every turn. Even the good aligned allies started stabbing each other in the back.
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May 16, 2023 00:16
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Ratios and Tendency posted:Dawn Defender - +1 defense +2 resistance, nothing amazing but +2 resistance is pretty good and lets them stay relevant for longer. Hey, thanks for just writing this up. I've had the impression that high culture can be really powerful but didn't look too much at the precise numbers for the awakening bonuses, did not know that awakeners got the same as archers. Goddamn those boys are nasty.
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May 16, 2023 00:23
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I suppose I am mostly comparing them to industrious units with tome of beasts which are the other one I've played a lot of so yeah it's just "their pikes are striclty worse, their shields are mostly worse, i can already distract things with a 5 cost spell that doesn't require me to use my supports to attack things, but seeking is very nice" The other main thing I like about high honestly is the area spirit damage buff spell they get which also awakens things, and strengthens them if they're already awake, that's a very nice early buff spell to drop on your whole army in the second turn before they engage. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:46 on May 16, 2023 |
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May 16, 2023 00:44
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The thing I like the least about High culture is that shock, fighter and skirmisher units don't get any dormant stuff with dormant enchantment.
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May 16, 2023 01:03
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Massed awakeners are nasty as hell. I've ran into an enemy where one of their 3 stacks was full of those lunatics, and it was probably pound-for-pound the scariest enemy army I've bumped into.
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May 16, 2023 01:05
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Mass awakeners is the name of the game in Mission 5, and it's kinda ironic that the best way to counter that much spirit damage is to basically become Celestial yourself
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May 16, 2023 01:15
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