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Anyone played Dark culture recently? I know they were kind of considered weak at launch, how is Dark these days? What have you found does/doesn’t work for them I think they’re my least played Culture sadly much as I love Dark Knights
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Apr 24, 2024 10:35
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Dark is still kinda weak, mostly still due to the same reasons: Their tier 1 units are extremely squishy (and not really great for damage either), making them bad at clearing and thus slow to develop economically. Their tier 2 units are pretty good, but tier 2 doesn't scale well, so building too many of these gets wonky. For sp I think you can compensate for the weaker scaling/slower start well enough that rushing a tier 2 town hall to build some tier 2s and ignoring tier 1 completely is very workable; personally I find Dark feels much better this way. Tome of Alchemy is really fun to add here as it activates Dark's culture trait a bit more as well. Otherwise Dark really, really benefits from early summons and rushing an early Hero to bump up their weak military; and Heroes and evolving summons do scale significantly better. I will say I had a lot of fun with a Spider and White Witch build: archers and witches riding spiders, freezing and webbing everything is hilarious, and if you do manual combat will walk over just about everything in the first half of the game.
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Apr 24, 2024 12:32
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It doesn't help that the Shadow affinity is one of the weaker ones either. With the buff to neutral cities you can't really use them to farm knowledge easily anymore so now the Dark's early game is very weak and to be honest none of their high level stuff is really worth rushing for either.
PaybackJack fucked around with this message at 14:48 on Apr 24, 2024 |
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Apr 24, 2024 12:46
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Barbarians punch harder and as far as cultural bonuses go the 20% conditional damage and 1 regen on squishy units isn't super amazing, it's hard to find a good way to consistently apply weakness before a attack, fetid legion would be great if it didn't trigger at the end of turn, I tried a game focusing on bronze golems doing the weakening cleave but cull the weak even when active is a bit underwhelming, the 6 hp from the regen isn't going to save a squishy unit that just attacked on the frontlines and other cultures can hit harder without needing a debuff applied first. Industrious will remain the king of cultural units and bonuses so long as defense/res are some of the best stats to have.
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Apr 24, 2024 12:57
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Shadow Affinity is _not_ weak: Knowledge Extraction, Shadow Binding, Stolen Power, and Death Magic (situationally: Dark Vigor) all slap by mid-game making it probably the third best Affinity overall. But in comparison to the big 2 that are both very strong for economy and development, it does double down on Dark being weak to develop early on.
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Apr 24, 2024 13:04
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iirc dark warriors are fairly good t1 units, but have the * of "if you manual battle" which is a big issue for mp dark suffers from not having a support, which they ostensibly make up for via the regen from cull the weak but between weak being pretty hard to apply outside of your cultural units and 1 stack of regen not being super impressive anyways it's not really a good equivalence. dark having economic problems is the main killer for them in mp to my knowledge though, ditto reavers
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Apr 24, 2024 13:15
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Autsj posted:Shadow Affinity is _not_ weak: Knowledge Extraction, Shadow Binding, Stolen Power, and Death Magic (situationally: Dark Vigor) all slap by mid-game making it probably the third best Affinity overall. But in comparison to the big 2 that are both very strong for economy and development, it does double down on Dark being weak to develop early on. I actually say it's the weakest because at least with Nature and Order they're reinforcing a strategy. Dark has a couple things that are nice "win more" features but has little in the way of actually getting you there. As I mentioned, you can't abuse Knowledge Extraction to farm neutral cities early on and you just won't have that many hero kills unless you're actually trying to farm an enemy. Stolen Power is nice but it's still a win more feature and doesn't help you get there unless you're conquering massive numbers of enemy cities. Shadow Binding is obviously nice but it's not high enough on the tree that you can snag it by dipping into a Tome and letting the +2 get you there in the late game. Death Magic is good, but and will easily give you the spell points needed for a last turn Mass Raise Undead. Obviously, that's great for Order and Nature with their mass resurrect spells as well, but again, this more of a mitigation of losses kind of deal for the most part. Otherwise though, you're really relying on Astral to bolster what you want to be doing with those spell points, not to mention give you the mana for those spells. The main problem is really that Dark is very unfocused. It's a great splash for other builds but there's no reason to choose it as your primary unless you're specifically never planning on ever taking a Tome that gives you points in it. Then you factor in the bad economy and Cull the Weak being not very good and you're left with a very unappealing Culture.
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Apr 24, 2024 15:15
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I haven't actually had a chance to play in a while but I did get the season pass DLC so I have all of the current content. I want to get into the reworked necromancy stuff in a big way since I was always kind of disappointed with how it worked out originally not feeling very necromancey. What cultures/leaders/tomes combine well with those these days? It's been long enough since I've played a rough guide or idea to work off of to get back into the game would be nice.
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Apr 24, 2024 18:12
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shimmy shimmy posted:I haven't actually had a chance to play in a while but I did get the season pass DLC so I have all of the current content. I want to get into the reworked necromancy stuff in a big way since I was always kind of disappointed with how it worked out originally not feeling very necromancey. What cultures/leaders/tomes combine well with those these days? It's been long enough since I've played a rough guide or idea to work off of to get back into the game would be nice. Highly recommend a Wizard King - Mystic in order to get as much mana as you can. Runesmiths & Tome of Enchantment is very useful for getting some nice enchantments for your bony boys. Since the rework you'll actually be taking mostly Shadow tomes, but you'll want to grab a couple Astral ones along the way to keep your affinity building quicker. My suggestion would be Evocation as Lightning Blades can add some magic damage to your skeletons so they aren't pure physical, and the province improvement is good. Although there isn't a whole lot in the early Order affinity tree, late game grabbing it just for Tome of the Beacon is nice for Mighty Meek which can help reduce your upkeep costs as well, you can then roll that into Tome of Sanctuary for Keeper's Mark. Really focus Astral Tomes as much as you reasonable can though because once you unlock Philosopher Soliders in a necro build your knowledge just goes through the roof. Here's an example build for you.
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Apr 24, 2024 20:17
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PaybackJack posted:Highly recommend a Wizard King - Mystic in order to get as much mana as you can. Runesmiths & Tome of Enchantment is very useful for getting some nice enchantments for your bony boys. Since the rework you'll actually be taking mostly Shadow tomes, but you'll want to grab a couple Astral ones along the way to keep your affinity building quicker. My suggestion would be Evocation as Lightning Blades can add some magic damage to your skeletons so they aren't pure physical, and the province improvement is good. Although there isn't a whole lot in the early Order affinity tree, late game grabbing it just for Tome of the Beacon is nice for Mighty Meek which can help reduce your upkeep costs as well, you can then roll that into Tome of Sanctuary for Keeper's Mark. Makes sense, thanks! Will give this a spin as a baseline to build off of.
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Apr 25, 2024 04:28
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Bone horrors make a pretty decent cheap and disposable high damage frontline with synergy with being revived and pooping out more zombies, spending souls on them every chance you get isn't a bad idea for building a frontline. Sadly skeleton melee is pretty bad compared to pre-rework, -15-20 HP below pre-patch and what other T1 melee troops have makes them incredibly squishy and even undead can cause morale issues with how fast they die, especially before wightborn for your other units and heroes. Industrious pairs well with undead and wightborn heroes but industrious pairs well with everything honestly. Tome of necromancy is a lot better then it used to be but it's still somewhat skippable if you want to use other supports in your army besides necromancers, necromancers are pretty worth it though, Tome of Souls and Tome of the Great Transformation are still some of the best tomes in the entire game though. Ra Ra Rasputin fucked around with this message at 05:54 on Apr 25, 2024 |
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Apr 25, 2024 05:51
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Random question, why are there no tier 4 culture units? What is even the point of the level 4 town hall if you don’t unlock a new unit?
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Apr 25, 2024 07:09
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T4 Town Halls are one final source of stability if cities grow big enough T4 racials are intentionally sparse and restricted to tome units because as T4 units, they get to retain unit classes instead of counting as Mythic units, and combined with being racials means they can still draw from both unit class enchantments and racial transformations. This means they can become absolute monster units that often outperform T5 Mythics regularly.
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Apr 25, 2024 07:36
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T5 units honestly still seem kinda lackluster compared with a few notable exceptions.
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Apr 25, 2024 08:04
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Captain Oblivious posted:T5 units honestly still seem kinda lackluster compared with a few notable exceptions. I think they're solid enough depending on when you can get them - counter-intuitively they're less impressive in the late game than if you can progression break a bit and get them early or mid.
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Apr 25, 2024 18:20
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T5 usefulness comes down entirely to their unique abilities and passives, statstick T5 get outscaled by unit enchantments and racial transformations quickly. The reaper is one of the best T5 units because it has decent stats, a healing/buff passive on kill, a ranged kill ability that summons a zombie and a corpse consume heal/buff and is sorta cheap to summon and maintain to boot, while a dragon is pretty much just a expensive glass cannon that can get off a breath and tail swipe before being shot to death by a few T1 or T3 archers and pikes most of the time. Balors are one of the strongest T5's but require some extra hoops to jump through to get access to them, but can be summoned earlier then most.
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Apr 26, 2024 09:15
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I think Shrine of Smiting is pretty good as a stat stick? It basically mandates you using the Angel transformation and sticking with racial units, but if you do you can get 3-5 of them in an 18-stack which are each shooting a base 70 damage bolt that ignores half resistance every turn. Plus they're in the same tome as the spell that gives all non-heroes in a stack a level so you can power them up to max rank super fast, and if you have the max-level Order skill that gives them another +1 armor/resistance and 10% damage.
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Apr 27, 2024 00:30
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Problem with the shrine is they changed it in the last patch so it's a full action single target that also requires no enemy in the zone of control, they are basically T5 magelocks for faithful builds.
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Apr 27, 2024 00:38
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I've been playing this for a few days and it's hitting home just how bad I am at what this game wants me to be doing. I'm playing on normal and I'll make a city or two, have a vassal or two, and have maybe 5 in my main affinity and 3-4 in two or three others, and think I'm doing ok. Then I'll meet an AI and they'll have like 10s and 11s in their main affinity. If I check the scores, I'm routinely at the bottom in every category (I might be in the middle in one). How do I learn to play this game correctly?
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Apr 27, 2024 19:31
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Cool Dad posted:I've been playing this for a few days and it's hitting home just how bad I am at what this game wants me to be doing. I'm playing on normal and I'll make a city or two, have a vassal or two, and have maybe 5 in my main affinity and 3-4 in two or three others, and think I'm doing ok. Then I'll meet an AI and they'll have like 10s and 11s in their main affinity. If I check the scores, I'm routinely at the bottom in every category (I might be in the middle in one). right there with you buddy, plus my preferred play style is necromancy, which I guess makes things harder. I finally beat the tutorial map on a conquest victory after watching some youtube video on starting mistakes and another saying not to fight the ai as a necromancer until you can summon banshees and corrupted souls, as well as making it clear how important souls are for my playstyle.
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Apr 27, 2024 19:45
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the answer is usually "be more aggressive" and "make more cities really early" but i'll let the people who actually play strat give detailed advice
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Apr 27, 2024 19:46
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yeah i love these kind of games, but I'm pretty bad cuz i'm hella dumb and can't plan ahead
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Apr 27, 2024 19:59
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Cool Dad posted:I've been playing this for a few days and it's hitting home just how bad I am at what this game wants me to be doing. I'm playing on normal and I'll make a city or two, have a vassal or two, and have maybe 5 in my main affinity and 3-4 in two or three others, and think I'm doing ok. Then I'll meet an AI and they'll have like 10s and 11s in their main affinity. If I check the scores, I'm routinely at the bottom in every category (I might be in the middle in one). Soonmot posted:yeah i love these kind of games, but I'm pretty bad cuz i'm hella dumb and can't plan ahead The basic 3 tips to get going c/p: -Fill out your starting city cap before turn 20, this lets you keep pace with the ai and develop from there. Make sure you don't overspend Imperium on other things before this. Cities don't need to be perfect, just plop them down near the next resource cluster, a modest city early is better than a perfect city later. -Always keep your army on the move to clear nodes, not just for access and xp but also to feed the resource rewards back into your cities, most of your early economy is probably straight up from these bonus rewards and your army functions as part of your economy this way. -When it doubt, get more research (Knowledge). Developmentally this is the most important resource that you can get out of your cities, so get those research buildings up and if a province can have a research post then build a research post over anything else on that province. If you need more advice after these 3, feel free to shoot of course, but generally doing this well is more than half of the struggle. Edit: For Necro it sounds like you got it mostly already; over-investing into skeletons is dangerous as it'll just drain your resources for low quality units. Necro is a bit of a setup/investment type of thing where your payoff comes mostly from your later tier stuff, but there is really solid stuff there if you have your economy running healthily (which is where the above 3 tips help out hopefully). Autsj fucked around with this message at 00:14 on Apr 28, 2024 |
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Apr 28, 2024 00:03
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Cool Dad posted:I've been playing this for a few days and it's hitting home just how bad I am at what this game wants me to be doing. I'm playing on normal and I'll make a city or two, have a vassal or two, and have maybe 5 in my main affinity and 3-4 in two or three others, and think I'm doing ok. Then I'll meet an AI and they'll have like 10s and 11s in their main affinity. If I check the scores, I'm routinely at the bottom in every category (I might be in the middle in one). Really the question you need to be asking yourself is, why are your affinity values so spread out? To what end? Affinity isn’t a number that is just more better the more of it you have, what tomes are you taking and how do they work with your culture/form traits/what specific units you are building? Not saying spread out affinity is inherently bad, but it’s not a number that exists in a vacuum.
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Apr 28, 2024 00:33
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I will preface this by saying I am not especially great at this game either, but here's some other helpful tips I found- -Your starting army is mostly disposable, you don't want to waste units for no purpose but if you can capture an early silver wonder or conquer an independent it's usually worth sacrificing a unit or two. T1 units don't scale very well past the very early game. -Research, gold, and mana are your general priorities in that order. Mines and research posts can only be built in regions with specific resource deposits so you'll want to focus on them. You can also build research posts on water zones that have the little 'ruin' doodads on them. Note that you do need to have two copies of most region upgrades and three sea territories to be bale to build the third resource production city structures, though you can swap out the region structure after the building is constructed. -Outposts have a 10-gold upkeep but you'll want to spam out a good number of them to establish territorial control. If you can build one in a zone with a mine that'll cancel out the upkeep. Note that the AI is not shy about trespassing if they want something though, don't expect to block them out of your territory this way. -Magic materials give big resource bonuses and having at least one copy unlocks some pretty significant bonuses, so they make good early-game expansion targets. Getting all three in a category also unlocks major boosts, getting more than one copy doesn't get special bonuses directly but some of the item forge skills require multiple copies of a given resource. Note that the three ores can only be found underground and usually only by excavating, though there's a level three Materium tome that gives a special territory upgrade that can produce any magic material if you don't want to dig. -Materium is the best early-game affinity and I always put at least one point in it when I can, the initial skill that cuts outpost costs and gives the territory expansion for free will save you huge amounts of income and time over the game. Nature and Arcane also have strong skills though the earliest ones aren't as high value. The other three are of varying use, with Shadow generally being the best, but are mostly situational and/or only useful when warring against other players. -Heroes get special skills every 4 levels that are of varying use. Getting a summon skill is useful early on for providing a free meat shield that's usually fairly strong melee, it doesn't scale well but a lot of them aren't too useful. The teleport skills, the healing ones, and Assassination can be good as well. Note that these also give a rank in their respective affinities, for generic heroes this just boosts their governor bonus but your leader adds them to your global stock. -Tier 3/4/5 tomes require 3/6/8 affinity points to unlock, dual type tomes only need that rank in one of them. You can also only have one tier 5 tome period as well. It's probably a good idea to figure out what tomes you want to focus on early, there's a tome viewer on the research page you can use to look at what's available. Ra Ra Rasputin posted:Problem with the shrine is they changed it in the last patch so it's a full action single target that also requires no enemy in the zone of control, they are basically T5 magelocks for faithful builds. Shrines do have a secondary attack which Magelocks don't, so it's not quite the same; the damage isn't great but it has a big AOE so can still contribute. They're also high enough on the tech tree that you should have probably gotten a way to deal with blocking units, emergency teleport or abducting whirlwind can get them out of small scraps easily enough. They also have enough defense and raw HP to survive a beating so if the enemy is putting enough units on them to keep them out of the fight you're still probably winning on action economy. I will grant that they do have some significant issues you need to work around but they're about the only units that can exceed a high level geared out hero's DPT.
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Apr 28, 2024 01:12
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kvx687 posted:-Magic materials give big resource bonuses and having at least one copy unlocks some pretty significant bonuses, so they make good early-game expansion targets. Getting all three in a category also unlocks major boosts, getting more than one copy doesn't get special bonuses directly but some of the item forge skills require multiple copies of a given resource. Note that the three ores can only be found underground and usually only by excavating, though there's a level three Materium tome that gives a special territory upgrade that can produce any magic material if you don't want to dig. This tome, The Tome of Transmutation, is probably the best tome in the game. The effect of getting a magic material, whatever you're missing, is hugely impactful to every playstyle. They nerfed the Transmute Resources spell, which used to give draft, and it's still op as hell for builds that focus on "building" units since it can help with the production cost of the armory/etc and then also give you a nice stockpile of gold on top of that to pay for the units. Adaptive Armor is a fantastic upgrade that covers pretty much every unit type, and Steel Skin is very strong is your opponent isn't using lightning/blight damage. Melt Armor is a nice spell for situations where you need to break though a line of enemy defenders. The Transmuter is a fantastic unit, AOE stun is a hugely impactful spell to be able to drop.
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Apr 28, 2024 08:14
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For the first time since playing, I got a reward from a Gold Landmark that was worth it. Choices were: -Tier 3 magic item (Phase Cloak) -400 gold. -The Tome of Astral Convergence. Tier 4 Astral Tome. Just to have. I was playing an Astral build so...
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Apr 30, 2024 11:08
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https://twitter.com/AgeOfWonders4/status/1785282676837986433?t=gB4XiSBQlIHJUfCoxxs1EQ&s=19 season 2 dlc 
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Apr 30, 2024 21:07
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Swiftfoot raptor mounts and a UI skin coming in the anniversary patch.
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May 2, 2024 13:10
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Dino mounts were the one thing this game was lacking in compared to Planetfall.
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May 2, 2024 13:15
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Mounts; Dragon UI; 
Thyrork fucked around with this message at 13:20 on May 2, 2024 |
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May 2, 2024 13:17
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Hopefully chaos aspect dragons get a buff in the patch, they are by far the weakest version.
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May 2, 2024 14:21
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Yeah, the big news is that we'll get a second season of DLC, also Eldritch Realms next month???
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May 2, 2024 14:56
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48% play on easy! Amazing. Very glad to spend more money on this.
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May 2, 2024 15:28
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Yeah, looks good. I still wish the gameplay difference between wizard king, champion, and dragon were more pronounced but maybe there's a mod for that.
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May 2, 2024 15:33
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I am surprised more people went champions then wizard kings and that any difficulty above normal is single digit % playrate.
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May 2, 2024 15:38
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ZearothK posted:Yeah, the big news is that we'll get a second season of DLC, also Eldritch Realms next month??? hell yes very very pleased to see continued support, and I'm super happy this has done well for them I wonder if there's any chance we'll see Planetfall 2 or if they'll work on aow5 or something new next controllable ai in combat when?! Ra Ra Rasputin posted:I am surprised more people went champions then wizard kings and that any difficulty above normal is single digit % playrate. the hard/brutal numbers are actually higher than I was expecting
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May 2, 2024 16:30
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Fitzy Fitz posted:48% play on easy! Amazing. I think its very easy to underestimate the amount of people who just want to build pretty cities, level their guys up and explore.
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May 2, 2024 16:38
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Really looking forward to info for Eldritch Realms! Hopefully Planetside 2 is next, it's nice with some variation!
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May 2, 2024 16:42
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Noir89 posted:Really looking forward to info for Eldritch Realms! it came out in 2012, my sibling in Christ
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May 2, 2024 16:52
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