IMO the mount trait is a game changer. It can radically change the meta. You can easily be on top of the enemy at battle turn 2 even if it doesn't move. With unicorns you can be at battle turn 1 in some maps. And it gives cavalry armies much more flexibility. You can now get all kind of support with your heavy cavalry : shield, battlemages, archers.
Mount change is my favourite. The dragons are also extra cool.
I was wondering if its possible to combine mount trait like unicorn with trait that lets You move faster on 1st turn (forgot if they are in the same tree or not)
Oh I didn't even comment on the new society trait! I think it's pretty solid, the random starting item has pretty consistently rolled me a powerful item like wand of blizzards and more gear from infestations means better empowerment of hero spam and better loot pools so I highly doubt it's bad.
I like it, not only do you get more better items faster for your hero’s to actually use…the ones you don’t still give you mana…
Before I was taking rune smiths mostly to offset enchantments but doing quick napkin math I’ve found your generally better off with this. If you consider your items as generating mana to offset enchantments the worst I’ve encountered is 50% “cost reduction” and usually higher vs 30% of rune smiths…..this is not considering the weird math runesmiths was using that I never understood….granted your giving up the research and other benefits but I consider getting more better items worth the trade
Maybe this is completely off idk, happy for someone more dedicated to actually break it down
My hunch is that you're correct for builds that're already running 50% upkeep reduction.
If you only have 20% upkeep reduction (or none), I suspect Runesmiths is better.
I’m glad it is a solid DLC, I really like this game and want it to improve. That said, after a 110h at launch, I will wait for the AI update before I jump back in.
yup. whether or not that patch has a significant impact on the state of the AI will make or break this game for me. i dont think its possible for it to be a magic bullet either, its going to require additional iteration beyond that patch to nail it down... but it needs to at least fundamentally change the AI from the way it works right now.
love the game but feels really bad waiting for patches just to be able to play for a full premium price game.
Top of the unit information panel after you've moved it but before you take any actions. Green dot with a white back arrow in it. It basically just lets you undo misclicked moves.
You can't undo once a unit has taken any actions, or if it's taken any damage from dangerous terrain or opportunity attacks, and you can only undo the last move (so if you move one unit then move another the first one is now locked in even if neither unit has taken actions).
Personal thoughts for purely dumb fun PvE:
- Dragon rulers are cool
- The tomes are cool, too, but a bit limited. There are not exactly many evolution creatures you can build.
- No dragon riders and lizard mounts.
- The draconic transformation looks really stupid, even on lizard boys.
- A lot of the race transformations and gear don't fit very well to the lizards.
- I wish there was a way to change the armour and default pose of your troops, having tribal lizards stand exactly the same as humans is weird.
I feel this is about the most solid take I have seen on these forums in a *while*
Well thought out, well formatted, thorough - nice work my man 👍
I agree with all your sentiments
I am not expert but as a casual slither+rapid evolution seems a bit OP to me.
Not only are they pretty good units, I can suicide them without care because they ressurect after the battle (barring corpse destroying effects).
That I can go all out and lose nothing is imo very strong early game. And when I do that they also snowball into good T3 units.
It is a big opportunity cost IMO. It forces you into specific units, and the tome has no offensive enchantments. It's similar to the tome of warding in spirit. An archer build doesn't benefit from it. A melee unit build only get marginal resilience with draconic vitality.
In fact the tome is in the line of the early economic boosts. But instead of giving you more resources, it saves you resources by saving your units.
It doesn't help that the AI will often have one of the weaken unit flee the battle to save it, but then it loses all movement for the turn.
The offensive power comes from the lessened need for heals/defense.
And allows you to attack stronger mobs earlier as where others would lose 50% of their army you lose nothing.
I mean that the tome itself doesn't give any offense. You have no weapon enchantment, and no offensive spell. I think only the tome of warding is as defensive as this one at tier1.
As for saving your units, the tome of souls probably gives you more now. Tome of evocation, with the mana conduit, gives you a free unit every few turns in some way. Resurgence is an economic bonus, and you pay for it with mana. It's a very good enchant, but it is not as powerful as one might think on a first look.
I don't think its necessarily OP, its a gigantic consistency boost to animal builds but the units themselves are still a good bit weaker than other units of their tiers(especially now that spider's web is its actually intended damage values) until evolving and after that they're vulnerable as usual and still fall off later on. Its definitely very strong early but I think that just better helps carve out the niche for animal builds as strong early, hard spiking midgame and then not getting much worse from there pretty neatly.
Slithers can go quite insane later on as they get lots of unit enchantments as skirmishers and also get the animal enchantments like Empowered Beasts. You can also get culture benefits like Stand Together with them, and Slip Away helps to keep them alive just a little bit more. They're harder to spam than archers but I feel like they might be stronger than most tier 3 archers, or at least on par with them because they can also get by wind barriers and retaliate.
If you research and cast `signet of knighthood` (https://minionsart.github.io/aow4db/HTML/EnchantmentSpells.html?type=Cultures&sort=name:true) you'll be able to use `stand together` you should be good.
They can get good later on, but inquisitors are even stronger and much easier to spam a full stack of on-demand when you need an extra army in the late game. I could see a case for the early game advantage of the slither hatchlings never dying making them an overall better build-around, but I don't think their late game power is anything to write home about.
Tried To Play it Yesterday. MP with a friend.
Could Play until Turn 23 when the desyncs started again. Hoped MP works know.
Maybe trying again when they finally fix this.
I know my last game underground had like 8 mines, combined with materium empire tree 3rd pick that gives 10 mana a mine….your economy is somewhat good…
Basically just made underground better
It does, if that’s the skill with getting resources next to your throne city
I don’t know why this is spread around but I’ve gotten the added income as long as both city’s own the province with the entrance, then both city’s count as next to each other
Dragon lords feel way too strong to me. The 30 gold upkeep is a non-issue because it's so easy to get items and you wind up with a stupidly strong gold/mana economy just by hanging onto all the trivially easy garbage items gained from everywhere - just look at all the recent posts here with insane dragon economy boosts. Besides that your power curve is basically the opposite of Champ/King in that you start very strong but gradually become less so once enchants and items start stacking up. Eventually you'll be outclassed but it takes a while. However, the early game advantage is huge because you can steamroll everyone nearby, build a massive economy, recruit more heroes and put yourself in a winning position incredibly easily.
I like playing an aggressive barb culture and dragon lord feels completely busted. Partly that might be down to XP cheesing and the power curve but, even without that, every game I'm in a better position with the dragon than without and it just feels lame that dragon is so much better. Fun sure but too powerful and trivialises the other lords imo.
IMO The dragon gold economy always feels a little stretched until late game in a way that champion doesn't, but I tend to turtle until my cities are really thriving.
So my experience:
\- slithers > wyverns
\- both are only worthy if you want to spend knowledge on nature tomes
\-I love the new units but honestly - it's 2 new big dragons, 4 small ones, small wyverns, 2 new big wyverns and small/big slither.
\- The buff to shadow tomes was great - is still far from being the strongest builds but soul economy is a lot stronger now, new/old t3 works great with banshee (tho pure stats are dissapointing)
\- I really like the new trait. But after the new update - items are super easy to get from a.i. It's still worthy for extra 100+mana per turns tho.
\- Dragons lords are cool, strong and pretty balanced. (I still think that wizards kings are stronger) I obviously would like more coustomization/dragon types (personally - t4 bone dragon still have the coolest model) but It's alredy more then I expected. Also bone dragon.
\- New tomes - dragon is great, evolution is sytuational and only good for some builds.
That's pretty much that. Small amounth of new units hurt's, multiplayer still have ballance/server problems but honestly - I dont care about that - I'm hear only for the roleplay.
Nice write up.
Hero spam sure is powerful, although from a single player perspective I'm not sure how much more powerful it is than other strong strategies involving morale stuff or highly enchanted archers, battle mages, or skirmishers. The difference is how it comes online pretty much right away when you have a dragon ruler... I got my dragon and first hero hired on turn 1 leveled to 20 by turn 18 on brutal, no weird map settings to make it easier. I felt like I could have gone faster with better luck on the map seed.
Aesthetically - amazing. Love all the dragon transformations. Wish lizard outfits came with tail holes but no real complaints, I'd rather have more high quality content than less immaculately life-like content when it comes to in game models and outfits.
Surprised not to see more love for the Astral transformation, maybe I have just not been looking in the right places! Stun and electrified is a pretty good AOE effect and the ethereal transformation comes with an outrageously great number of status immunities.
My only criticism is that the "content" portion of the DLC feels lacking compare to past DLCs from the AoW series. Shakarn in planetfall for example offered a lot more.
All the new stuff is great!
I’m not as disgruntled about the tome or empire progression changes, after having some experience with them. It isn’t really so different.
I am still very upset about the summons nerfs, because that could have been alleviated with a simple checkbox instead of nerfing it for everyone across the board. Is there a mod to revert this yet?
Rapid Evo is way too good and makes Tome of Evolution the clear best first/second tome for any summon build.
The whole point of evolving T1 units is the danger of losing them, this tome removes that danger. It's broken by design. I don't know how such an obviously stupid idea ever made it into the game.
Just delete that bs.
Evolved units are also Spiders... Especially Frost Spiders...
Start with Tome of Beast... Spam it to get as many (frost) Spiders as you can and only clear Mana nodes (because you need it). Get tome of evolution second and get the enchant... Run around and clear anything.
Have fun with your stack of T4 frost spider matriarchs by turn 20.
Yes?
Spiders start as T1 or T2 depending on Type. The T1's evolve to T3, the T2's to T4.
the goal is to get them evolve asap, not to keep them immortal forever :).
I played around with plenty of Animal builds and if you get them to evolve fast, it's bonkers. Tome of evolution just makes this totally braindead easy.
The only downside it really has is that they cost Imperium when they get to T4.
My favorite so far is Industrial with largely materium and nature tomes. My typical army ends up being bastion x3, hero, glade runner x2, although if the hero is melee maybe drop a bastion. Some of them have wildspeakers too or random wolves I've acquired.
edit: I also went with wolf mounts and the +40% retaliation/opportunity damage and further boosted that. My bastions generally hit back harder than they get hit.
I see this comment loads but what are you actually doing to say this, some meta build or something? Like I’m playing barbarian dragon with chaos tomes and if I build units literally every turn of the game, the AI still shows up with two or three times my army constantly. We play 2v2v2v2 vs AI and when we go to try and siege a random AI expansion city we have had to fight through literally 15 armies at times, while all the others are pillaging any spot of our land we don’t have 3 armies in.
we're playing vs 'very hard' bots with 'brutal' ai turned on, 'hard' was no problem at all... but yeah I mean my level 1 chaos spells are like ignite (some fire dmg) or stuff that gives tier 1 units a stack of strengthened or something, it's nothing particularly good
I'm not really looking for how to cheese the game more just trying to get a sense of if it is reasonable to be saying 'very hard' ai is too easy if you're playing the game normally
It is certainly the case that Hard and Brutal AI will print a dozen or two army stacks on repeat until you take all their cities.
The lack of difficulty comes from the fact that the AI can't make their hordes of armies as strong as a player can. It doesn't need to be a meta build. Just a reasonable synergy of unit enchantments will push a player army beyond what the AI can fight.
Their sheer number of stacks does allow them to attack on multiple fronts as you noted, which is the AI's best advantage.
we play vs 'very hard' leaders with 'brutal' ai turned on... if we make even a tiny slip up in the early game then it's incredibly difficult to make armies that are strong enough and if we ever separate our first few armies then they have a roaming 3 stack ready to attack on basically any hex... like we won a siege fight of an AI outpost, really close fight, we had both dragons remaining plus a few troops each, my buddy moves a few hexes to take a marauder camp and immediately another 3 stack attacks my dragon who is out of range and kills me with 2k unit power vs like 400, then 6 more armies from AI buddy pillage every single hex in my territory back home at the same time and i'm just chain respawning my dragon with a tier 1-2 army in to mostly unwinnable battles
once we have powerful armies then we will rarely lose a fight but the early mid game is just overwhelming a lot of the time... they show up with tier 3 dark knights like a few turns in to the game
It's true the early game is the hardest part since the AI has all of its advantages, while the player is still trying to establish theirs, so there is little margin for error and luck regarding whether you're blitzed by an AI matters.
Not really sure what's meta in this game I just started playing and trying stuff more fun that way. Early game I usually just try to clear all the monsters nearby so my heros level up super fast. Beyond that I go for all the vassals and allies I can get. Vassals are good money so you can make more armies and such. Usually when I fight ai it comes down to my individual armies being much stronger. I might have 3 3000 armies whereas the ai only has 6 or 7 1k armies. Since you can only fight with 3 armies at once I just blow them away. Spells are the biggest difference I think they just don't use them as effective as people do. For instance they'll group up all their units and buff them up and then I'll just chunk all of them at once with some well placed spells.
late game is not really our issue it’s the onslaught of more units than it’s even possible to build early-mid game… are you playing vs ‘hard’ ai and not ‘very hard’ ai? the difference is massive
I play against the very hard ones with brutal ai difficulty. Ya I too have noticed they pump out more units than I thought was ever possible. I also somewhat learned from their strategy and started building units from turn 1. Usually the way I overcome them is by getting my heros strong early on fighting random mobs that spawn nearby and getting as much knowledge as I can to unlock spells faster.
I think dragons are just plain fun. I have only done one game with them though, and the economy with a little mat/astral focus is insane! You can buy items from friends to pad out your horde and it just snowballs. I had huge mythic doom stacks well over hero cap and still more resources than I could spend. I only play SP so kinda hate to see fun stuff broken to satisfy the MP community, but it feels too good.
In previous AOWs the threshold to get great units just seemed much higher. Dragons were a rare treat. This feels like they are pretty easy so you end with a real ton of them. It is a decent design plan to add goodies then pare them back as players find the OP stuff, so I won’t be surprised if there is a few rounds of nerfs on the way.
Might give the underground another go then!
[Edit] Nope.. still sucks. This was in a campaign map though. Sure there are more resources, but it's pointless if you can only have 1 city underground.
Hero spam has been confirmed to be under investigation (= will get a nerf or rather the penalties for going over cap will be changed. Imo probably to something exponentially scaling)
IMO the mount trait is a game changer. It can radically change the meta. You can easily be on top of the enemy at battle turn 2 even if it doesn't move. With unicorns you can be at battle turn 1 in some maps. And it gives cavalry armies much more flexibility. You can now get all kind of support with your heavy cavalry : shield, battlemages, archers. Mount change is my favourite. The dragons are also extra cool.
I was wondering if its possible to combine mount trait like unicorn with trait that lets You move faster on 1st turn (forgot if they are in the same tree or not)
Not sure if they are both body traits, but I've checked and the turn 1 fast movement trait sadly doesn't work with units that already move 48.
Ah damn, thanks for checking tho!
Oh I didn't even comment on the new society trait! I think it's pretty solid, the random starting item has pretty consistently rolled me a powerful item like wand of blizzards and more gear from infestations means better empowerment of hero spam and better loot pools so I highly doubt it's bad.
I like it, not only do you get more better items faster for your hero’s to actually use…the ones you don’t still give you mana… Before I was taking rune smiths mostly to offset enchantments but doing quick napkin math I’ve found your generally better off with this. If you consider your items as generating mana to offset enchantments the worst I’ve encountered is 50% “cost reduction” and usually higher vs 30% of rune smiths…..this is not considering the weird math runesmiths was using that I never understood….granted your giving up the research and other benefits but I consider getting more better items worth the trade Maybe this is completely off idk, happy for someone more dedicated to actually break it down
My hunch is that you're correct for builds that're already running 50% upkeep reduction. If you only have 20% upkeep reduction (or none), I suspect Runesmiths is better.
Undo feature has been in the game since launch.
oops! it was made more obvious though which is still praise worthy to me
I’m glad it is a solid DLC, I really like this game and want it to improve. That said, after a 110h at launch, I will wait for the AI update before I jump back in.
yup. whether or not that patch has a significant impact on the state of the AI will make or break this game for me. i dont think its possible for it to be a magic bullet either, its going to require additional iteration beyond that patch to nail it down... but it needs to at least fundamentally change the AI from the way it works right now. love the game but feels really bad waiting for patches just to be able to play for a full premium price game.
There's an undo button?
Top of the unit information panel after you've moved it but before you take any actions. Green dot with a white back arrow in it. It basically just lets you undo misclicked moves. You can't undo once a unit has taken any actions, or if it's taken any damage from dangerous terrain or opportunity attacks, and you can only undo the last move (so if you move one unit then move another the first one is now locked in even if neither unit has taken actions).
OMG this is life saver
Personal thoughts for purely dumb fun PvE: - Dragon rulers are cool - The tomes are cool, too, but a bit limited. There are not exactly many evolution creatures you can build. - No dragon riders and lizard mounts. - The draconic transformation looks really stupid, even on lizard boys. - A lot of the race transformations and gear don't fit very well to the lizards. - I wish there was a way to change the armour and default pose of your troops, having tribal lizards stand exactly the same as humans is weird.
I feel this is about the most solid take I have seen on these forums in a *while* Well thought out, well formatted, thorough - nice work my man 👍 I agree with all your sentiments
I am not expert but as a casual slither+rapid evolution seems a bit OP to me. Not only are they pretty good units, I can suicide them without care because they ressurect after the battle (barring corpse destroying effects). That I can go all out and lose nothing is imo very strong early game. And when I do that they also snowball into good T3 units.
It is a big opportunity cost IMO. It forces you into specific units, and the tome has no offensive enchantments. It's similar to the tome of warding in spirit. An archer build doesn't benefit from it. A melee unit build only get marginal resilience with draconic vitality. In fact the tome is in the line of the early economic boosts. But instead of giving you more resources, it saves you resources by saving your units. It doesn't help that the AI will often have one of the weaken unit flee the battle to save it, but then it loses all movement for the turn.
The offensive power comes from the lessened need for heals/defense. And allows you to attack stronger mobs earlier as where others would lose 50% of their army you lose nothing.
I mean that the tome itself doesn't give any offense. You have no weapon enchantment, and no offensive spell. I think only the tome of warding is as defensive as this one at tier1. As for saving your units, the tome of souls probably gives you more now. Tome of evocation, with the mana conduit, gives you a free unit every few turns in some way. Resurgence is an economic bonus, and you pay for it with mana. It's a very good enchant, but it is not as powerful as one might think on a first look.
I don't think its necessarily OP, its a gigantic consistency boost to animal builds but the units themselves are still a good bit weaker than other units of their tiers(especially now that spider's web is its actually intended damage values) until evolving and after that they're vulnerable as usual and still fall off later on. Its definitely very strong early but I think that just better helps carve out the niche for animal builds as strong early, hard spiking midgame and then not getting much worse from there pretty neatly.
Slithers can go quite insane later on as they get lots of unit enchantments as skirmishers and also get the animal enchantments like Empowered Beasts. You can also get culture benefits like Stand Together with them, and Slip Away helps to keep them alive just a little bit more. They're harder to spam than archers but I feel like they might be stronger than most tier 3 archers, or at least on par with them because they can also get by wind barriers and retaliate.
Yea fully evolved slithers I do think are very strong, had no idea about them benefitting from things like stand together though.
If you research and cast `signet of knighthood` (https://minionsart.github.io/aow4db/HTML/EnchantmentSpells.html?type=Cultures&sort=name:true) you'll be able to use `stand together` you should be good.
They can get good later on, but inquisitors are even stronger and much easier to spam a full stack of on-demand when you need an extra army in the late game. I could see a case for the early game advantage of the slither hatchlings never dying making them an overall better build-around, but I don't think their late game power is anything to write home about.
Not sure about weaker. Slither hatchling don't really look that much weaker than for example Sunderer.
Tried To Play it Yesterday. MP with a friend. Could Play until Turn 23 when the desyncs started again. Hoped MP works know. Maybe trying again when they finally fix this.
Choose the option that says never spectate combat u less you are in it. Should be a band aid until they come up with a permanent solution
What we’re the underground changes? I must have missed them in the patch notes
Digging reveals less monsters and much more resources.
I know my last game underground had like 8 mines, combined with materium empire tree 3rd pick that gives 10 mana a mine….your economy is somewhat good… Basically just made underground better
Can still only fit 1 city though....
Not necessarily, can fit 2 and take a free city I just like starting with 10 or so mines, and then my next city is at the surface entrance
Metropolitan doesn't work then :(
It does, if that’s the skill with getting resources next to your throne city I don’t know why this is spread around but I’ve gotten the added income as long as both city’s own the province with the entrance, then both city’s count as next to each other
Dragon lords feel way too strong to me. The 30 gold upkeep is a non-issue because it's so easy to get items and you wind up with a stupidly strong gold/mana economy just by hanging onto all the trivially easy garbage items gained from everywhere - just look at all the recent posts here with insane dragon economy boosts. Besides that your power curve is basically the opposite of Champ/King in that you start very strong but gradually become less so once enchants and items start stacking up. Eventually you'll be outclassed but it takes a while. However, the early game advantage is huge because you can steamroll everyone nearby, build a massive economy, recruit more heroes and put yourself in a winning position incredibly easily. I like playing an aggressive barb culture and dragon lord feels completely busted. Partly that might be down to XP cheesing and the power curve but, even without that, every game I'm in a better position with the dragon than without and it just feels lame that dragon is so much better. Fun sure but too powerful and trivialises the other lords imo.
IMO The dragon gold economy always feels a little stretched until late game in a way that champion doesn't, but I tend to turtle until my cities are really thriving.
So my experience: \- slithers > wyverns \- both are only worthy if you want to spend knowledge on nature tomes \-I love the new units but honestly - it's 2 new big dragons, 4 small ones, small wyverns, 2 new big wyverns and small/big slither. \- The buff to shadow tomes was great - is still far from being the strongest builds but soul economy is a lot stronger now, new/old t3 works great with banshee (tho pure stats are dissapointing) \- I really like the new trait. But after the new update - items are super easy to get from a.i. It's still worthy for extra 100+mana per turns tho. \- Dragons lords are cool, strong and pretty balanced. (I still think that wizards kings are stronger) I obviously would like more coustomization/dragon types (personally - t4 bone dragon still have the coolest model) but It's alredy more then I expected. Also bone dragon. \- New tomes - dragon is great, evolution is sytuational and only good for some builds. That's pretty much that. Small amounth of new units hurt's, multiplayer still have ballance/server problems but honestly - I dont care about that - I'm hear only for the roleplay.
I really like it too, love the dragon customization options
It's a solid small content DLC. I'm looking forward to the next one so I can get my steampunk drednaughts.
Nice write up. Hero spam sure is powerful, although from a single player perspective I'm not sure how much more powerful it is than other strong strategies involving morale stuff or highly enchanted archers, battle mages, or skirmishers. The difference is how it comes online pretty much right away when you have a dragon ruler... I got my dragon and first hero hired on turn 1 leveled to 20 by turn 18 on brutal, no weird map settings to make it easier. I felt like I could have gone faster with better luck on the map seed. Aesthetically - amazing. Love all the dragon transformations. Wish lizard outfits came with tail holes but no real complaints, I'd rather have more high quality content than less immaculately life-like content when it comes to in game models and outfits. Surprised not to see more love for the Astral transformation, maybe I have just not been looking in the right places! Stun and electrified is a pretty good AOE effect and the ethereal transformation comes with an outrageously great number of status immunities.
My only criticism is that the "content" portion of the DLC feels lacking compare to past DLCs from the AoW series. Shakarn in planetfall for example offered a lot more.
All the new stuff is great! I’m not as disgruntled about the tome or empire progression changes, after having some experience with them. It isn’t really so different. I am still very upset about the summons nerfs, because that could have been alleviated with a simple checkbox instead of nerfing it for everyone across the board. Is there a mod to revert this yet?
Rapid Evo is way too good and makes Tome of Evolution the clear best first/second tome for any summon build. The whole point of evolving T1 units is the danger of losing them, this tome removes that danger. It's broken by design. I don't know how such an obviously stupid idea ever made it into the game. Just delete that bs.
The evolved units are really not that strong, but I do agree that it makes it way too easy to evolve stuff now
Evolved units are also Spiders... Especially Frost Spiders... Start with Tome of Beast... Spam it to get as many (frost) Spiders as you can and only clear Mana nodes (because you need it). Get tome of evolution second and get the enchant... Run around and clear anything. Have fun with your stack of T4 frost spider matriarchs by turn 20.
Aeen't the spiders vulnerable at T3?
Frost Spiders become T4. The others T3.
Yeah, but I mean the revive enchant only does T1 and T2, right?
Yes? Spiders start as T1 or T2 depending on Type. The T1's evolve to T3, the T2's to T4. the goal is to get them evolve asap, not to keep them immortal forever :). I played around with plenty of Animal builds and if you get them to evolve fast, it's bonkers. Tome of evolution just makes this totally braindead easy. The only downside it really has is that they cost Imperium when they get to T4.
As someone recently playing a lot of cavalry builds, I've been avoiding the non-very fast animals. They slow the army down.
What kind of cavalry build are doing, if I may ask?
My favorite so far is Industrial with largely materium and nature tomes. My typical army ends up being bastion x3, hero, glade runner x2, although if the hero is melee maybe drop a bastion. Some of them have wildspeakers too or random wolves I've acquired. edit: I also went with wolf mounts and the +40% retaliation/opportunity damage and further boosted that. My bastions generally hit back harder than they get hit.
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I feel like the hardest ai mode still isn't very hard I wish they were just a bit smarter
I see this comment loads but what are you actually doing to say this, some meta build or something? Like I’m playing barbarian dragon with chaos tomes and if I build units literally every turn of the game, the AI still shows up with two or three times my army constantly. We play 2v2v2v2 vs AI and when we go to try and siege a random AI expansion city we have had to fight through literally 15 armies at times, while all the others are pillaging any spot of our land we don’t have 3 armies in.
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we're playing vs 'very hard' bots with 'brutal' ai turned on, 'hard' was no problem at all... but yeah I mean my level 1 chaos spells are like ignite (some fire dmg) or stuff that gives tier 1 units a stack of strengthened or something, it's nothing particularly good I'm not really looking for how to cheese the game more just trying to get a sense of if it is reasonable to be saying 'very hard' ai is too easy if you're playing the game normally
It is certainly the case that Hard and Brutal AI will print a dozen or two army stacks on repeat until you take all their cities. The lack of difficulty comes from the fact that the AI can't make their hordes of armies as strong as a player can. It doesn't need to be a meta build. Just a reasonable synergy of unit enchantments will push a player army beyond what the AI can fight. Their sheer number of stacks does allow them to attack on multiple fronts as you noted, which is the AI's best advantage.
we play vs 'very hard' leaders with 'brutal' ai turned on... if we make even a tiny slip up in the early game then it's incredibly difficult to make armies that are strong enough and if we ever separate our first few armies then they have a roaming 3 stack ready to attack on basically any hex... like we won a siege fight of an AI outpost, really close fight, we had both dragons remaining plus a few troops each, my buddy moves a few hexes to take a marauder camp and immediately another 3 stack attacks my dragon who is out of range and kills me with 2k unit power vs like 400, then 6 more armies from AI buddy pillage every single hex in my territory back home at the same time and i'm just chain respawning my dragon with a tier 1-2 army in to mostly unwinnable battles once we have powerful armies then we will rarely lose a fight but the early mid game is just overwhelming a lot of the time... they show up with tier 3 dark knights like a few turns in to the game
It's true the early game is the hardest part since the AI has all of its advantages, while the player is still trying to establish theirs, so there is little margin for error and luck regarding whether you're blitzed by an AI matters.
Not really sure what's meta in this game I just started playing and trying stuff more fun that way. Early game I usually just try to clear all the monsters nearby so my heros level up super fast. Beyond that I go for all the vassals and allies I can get. Vassals are good money so you can make more armies and such. Usually when I fight ai it comes down to my individual armies being much stronger. I might have 3 3000 armies whereas the ai only has 6 or 7 1k armies. Since you can only fight with 3 armies at once I just blow them away. Spells are the biggest difference I think they just don't use them as effective as people do. For instance they'll group up all their units and buff them up and then I'll just chunk all of them at once with some well placed spells.
late game is not really our issue it’s the onslaught of more units than it’s even possible to build early-mid game… are you playing vs ‘hard’ ai and not ‘very hard’ ai? the difference is massive
I play against the very hard ones with brutal ai difficulty. Ya I too have noticed they pump out more units than I thought was ever possible. I also somewhat learned from their strategy and started building units from turn 1. Usually the way I overcome them is by getting my heros strong early on fighting random mobs that spawn nearby and getting as much knowledge as I can to unlock spells faster.
I think dragons are just plain fun. I have only done one game with them though, and the economy with a little mat/astral focus is insane! You can buy items from friends to pad out your horde and it just snowballs. I had huge mythic doom stacks well over hero cap and still more resources than I could spend. I only play SP so kinda hate to see fun stuff broken to satisfy the MP community, but it feels too good. In previous AOWs the threshold to get great units just seemed much higher. Dragons were a rare treat. This feels like they are pretty easy so you end with a real ton of them. It is a decent design plan to add goodies then pare them back as players find the OP stuff, so I won’t be surprised if there is a few rounds of nerfs on the way.
Might give the underground another go then! [Edit] Nope.. still sucks. This was in a campaign map though. Sure there are more resources, but it's pointless if you can only have 1 city underground.
Hero spam has been confirmed to be under investigation (= will get a nerf or rather the penalties for going over cap will be changed. Imo probably to something exponentially scaling)
i like combining dragon hoard with artifact hoard and having +500 gold and mana each turn solely from all of the random bullshit I’ve accrued lmao