Horizontal Acquisition (AOW 4 Advanced 2-17)

[@Devon.Larson]

If you ever want to check to see if your battle is casualty-free, like at 1:43:20, you can click the scales icon. It is one of the ones around the ruler portrait. I find it very useful when you can't remember if you have any units that you need to bring back from the dead at the end of battle.

[@BlackArrowGaming]

Thanks! I think someone (possibly you) might have already shared this info with me, but since I can't look at it outside of combat I probably forgot, lol...

[@nspaulding07]

The Purple (Undead) Dragon: His summoned undead units (Lost Souls, Banshees, Reapers) are all weak to astral damage, so your Watchers will be a good counter on that front once you push past Vox!

[@BlackArrowGaming]

Good to know my army may be somewhat future-proofed, haha :) In off-camera games with friends, we seem to struggle most with the necromancers. They just have this nasty habit of not staying dead, and the "decaying" debuff that many of their units inflict is one of the nastiest debuffs in the game.

[@simonsichelarm8631]

Not sure if it has been mentioned already, but it might be time to build some teleporters

[@BlackArrowGaming]

It's been brought up a few times - teleporters are primarily needed in Denver, Ohio, and Vegas. Denver has space, but Ohio and Vegas are a bit more limited in that regard. Once they grow a little more, I do plan to add teleporters :)

[@Erligan]

1 turn waiting for equipment was added after Dragon Dawn, to stop Artefact and Dragon hoarding cheese.

[@BlackArrowGaming]

That makes perfect sense - I can see how that would get really out of hand really fast...XD

[@Odinsvagt]

Reminder to turn your combat animation speed down Now might be a good time to start putting out a few more scout units to look deep. Real-time reconnaissance would be invaluable toward protecting your center (between Blue and Yellow, where Purple probed earlier) as well as finding Blue's ruler.

[@BlackArrowGaming]

You know, that's a really good point - I've been so focused on beefing up my defenses that I've kinda let scouting fall completely by the wayside. There is an element of risk to meeting the other dragons in the sense that they would be able to target me with some spells, but at this stage of the game that's probably not a good enough reason to avoid gathering better intel about the parts of the map that I'm not currently directly involved in.

[@Sara_Feingold]

17:55 Maybe Vishekkan would be less of an unhappy city if they had a name fitting in with the rest of your cities (: 26:15 I was wondering if you were going to notice that you had enough project slots for the 2-turn siege :) 33:45 With your main armies there having pushed up to Obscurum, you can probably shift that scout a bit to get more vision towards the south. Probably not a big difference-maker since Boszo is unlikely to try sneaking in a single stack, but maybe it can get something in sight outside of spelljammer effects for scrying. (Like you did at 53:35, basically, but staying instead of retreating after a peek)

[@BlackArrowGaming]

Hmmm yes, I do think that city deserves a name befitting of Steve's new vision for the US. (At this point I'm not really sure if he's a civil servant, a CEO, or the President, lol.) I will have to give that some thought...XD As for that scout, I am planning to move him further south and well, but I still want to keep it comfortably nestled in the mountains by probably two hexes or so. My friends and I have noticed that the AI in this game "really" love attacking stray scouts, sometimes to the detriment of their main army formations. In fact, baiting an enemy army to split up and do something stupid in order to take out a scout or two can be a somewhat risky (and cheesy) way to turn an unpleasant situation into a manageable one.

[@klydon1291]

Things seem to be rolling along fairly well. You are correct when you mention spur to action is powerful and should be at the top of any "to get list" when available. Who doesn't like a free action that allows one of your most powerful units to take another turn that is within 4 hexes of your hero? One word of caution is that I don't think it will allow your dragoons to take a second shot in a turn and it may not even allow them to melee instead if you shot earlier in the same turn. Experienced leader is generally better earlier in the game to help evolving units. It still has value now in that it helps to toughen up your new units with more hit points.

[@BlackArrowGaming]

Experienced leader has another nice bonus when paired with the final materium upgrade, which cuts down unit upkeep based on unit rank. As your units level up and get more powerful, they also get cheaper. Making this process happen more quickly is a pretty dang nice bonus :) I also particularly love experienced leader with the new primal culture and/or the tome of beasts (for evolving animals), or with basically any build that relies on evolving young dragons into T5's

[@shipsaccountant6098]

Mage Bane... Ooop.. Watcher..

[@BlackArrowGaming]

Lol, I don't know if you watched my old AOW 3 videos but there was a series I played as a Dwarf. They had a T3 racial unit called a "Firstborn," and for some reason I went through that entire game occasionally calling nearly every different type of Dwarven unit in my army a Firstborn. I can only assume that pretty much every family only had one child, lol.

[@nspaulding07]

I wish they'd rework those endgame racial trait random events. Half of them have terrible rewards and just feel like a punishment since it costs resources to keep turning them down. Just a couple weeks ago, I got one that costed 5 imperium per city, but generated something useful like knowledge or gold. As I had only a few cities, I thought it would be a good option. It turns out, the trait was also bugged to cost imperium for every outpost under your control as well, which put me WELL into the negative. Tip: If you get the option of a trait that costs you imperium per city, don't ever accept it.

[@BlackArrowGaming]

I appreciate the heads up on this, that definitely sounds like a pretty big oversight. I often find myself being pretty picky with those race modifications. I like the idea of them, but I agree that turning one down probably doesn't need to be so punitive. Fortunately I currently have plenty of gold to spare, but if that had happened maybe 15 turns ago it would have been a different story.

[@228zip]

They are punishments, the events are pretty clear about it.

[@QueenWurmeline]

That purple army looks like a great candidate for scry army. You might be able to catch it in vision range by using forced march on a scout if you have that unlocked. I think you have to be careful with major race transformations. Stacking lightning resistance is strong now but that blight and fire weakness might be a problem later when you're going to fight the red and green dragons. Only naga and dragon transformation have no downsides. Or you could go all in on defense at the expense of lightning resistance after defeating the blue dragon.

[@BlackArrowGaming]

I do plan to be careful with the major race transformations. Many of them I often avoid in single player games unless they have some particular synergy with my build (like Gaia's Chosen synergizing well with the plant-based enchantments in the T5 nature tome). In this game, with my army being forced to fight such a wide variety of elemental threats, it might not be worth the research time to unlock stuff that may not be useful by the time I unlock it. What I choose to do will likely depend on how quickly various phases of the war progress relative to my research. I like your idea of getting scry enemy up on purple. Even though they seem to have run off for no, the fact that they got that close to me seems to indicated that they have intentions of invading as soon as they have an opportunity, so keeping an eye on them seems like a good idea :)

[@QueenWurmeline]

@@BlackArrowGaming scry enemy is best on the enemies that aren't invading you though. Like, you cast it on the orange dragon this episode but he's already in vision range and you're going to fight him next episode. If you cast it on a retreating army they will reveal their own territory for you.

[@BlackArrowGaming]

@@QueenWurmeline Yeah, I still think it's good to cast it on an enemy leader whenever you can though since the effect persists when they return from the void. Also while the yellow dragon doesn't seem like they are the type to run and hide, my friends and I have run into a few AI rulers in some of our MP games that did (and it was super annoying lol).

[@umardara7723]

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