HIGH CULTURE UNIT GUIDE - Tutorial & Tips AGE OF WONDERS 4

[@kylefanning486]

It's worth noting that a pure evil high culture build has probably the most broken military in the game just by using tier 1 units, if you're willing to exploit it. You take Keen Sighted and Sneaky, pair it with Prolific Swarmers and Runesmiths and use Tome of the Horde as your starting tome. Then you go Enchantment, Amplification and Artificing. You ideal warband is two Dawn Defenders, two Dusk Hunters, one Sun Priest plus an archer/support hero. Your shield units will hit hard and your archers will be monsters. They can fire from extremely far away and thanks Hero Skills and Artificing, they're crit chance is extremely high. They get flat damage bonuses from Spawnkin, Sneaky (because your Sun Priest distracts units) hero skills. On top of this, because of the Amplification arrow buff, not only do your shots arc to nearby enemies, but if you kill the original target before you finish your volley, you will then continue to shoot the second target instead of stopping after a kill. I'm not sure whether that last part is what the developers intended or if it's an exploit, but it's currently how the interaction works. All in all, you have a broken military and because of prolific swarmers and an early Empire Development in the chaos affinity, you can field an absolute Horde of soldiers for dirt cheap upkeep. Final thought - Summon Irregulars is a nasty utility spell because it drops one of these broken units anywhere you want for instant reinforcements.

[@BlackBirdOni]

The crazy thing about High archers, that +1 range stacks with the enchantement for +1 range. So, an awakened archer will have +2 range, and if you go pure evil it's permanent 😅

[@soccrplayr232]

It's a bit cheesy but at least for playing against the ai its actually kind of better for your archers to not be awakened from the start. Letting them walk up and try to wait 1 hex out of range of your archers then activating the awakening to get your full 3 shots is pretty brutal/funny.

[@BlackBirdOni]

@@soccrplayr232 I'm ok with cheese, I normaly bait the AI with meatshields like summon undead (which is OP btw, especially with weaver )))

[@dawn4383]

isn't pure evil awakening just for the first 3 turns?

[@BlackBirdOni]

@@dawn4383 to be honest, I'm not sure, since I won all battles on autoresolve since then ))))) Need to look it up

[@dawn4383]

​@@BlackBirdOniJust tested it, alas no. Pure evil only awakens you for the first 3 turns. After that you're on your own.

[@TheRealMrWolf]

This was really well put. High is an extremely well rounded package, but maybe the least adaptible one to use with other units. While their base enchantment is possible to use on some other units, you can't add a Dormant Enchantment to Shock units, so it's usually better to just use their base military and do damage with Awakened units and maybe add just one or two additional other units for some spice in abilities. I also found that a Shock, Ranged Physical, or Support heroes work best with High, as they add the things High has difficulty achieving, while Support is absolutely perfect for all Cultures anyways.

[@MGShadow1989]

I may just be heavily biased and really like this unit, but Entwined Protectors are one of my favourites to add to High culture - already one of the tougher units being a T3 shield with an AoE heal, so the dormant buff adds to that inherent tankiness, but they can also get to some silly damage potential with all the melee buff so Awakened is a wee extra and another damage type.

[@CyborgLizard]

2x awakeners, 3x zephyr archers with dormant traits, full battlemage enchants, battlemage hero. 2k army power stack. Easy autoresolves and in manual combat everything just melts before they reach you. So far is working like a charm

[@locusofintent]

I would love to watch you talk about or play Endless Legend.

[@-drey]

I like these videos so much ! I played over 70h by now but i still learn something new

[@valacarno]

Pick Unicorns and Sneaky. Let the hero have a bow or a lance. Pick Awekener and a Dread Knight (or Phase Beast) for his army. The end. Imagine you have a Barbarian "friend" in your neighborhood, who also has chosen Unicorn mounts for his race (or any mount really, but Unicorns make it more hilarious). "Borrow" his Furies and Awaken them too. Now you have a _Phasing_ mounted unit with *range of 7(!!!)* that also does _Phys+Spirit+Elem_ 1-hex AOE dmg depending on how hard you leaned onto Unit Enchantments. Awakeners are the backbone of this culture, imho. Archers are my preference for their crazy range. Both Polearm and Shield units are very strong, but I prefer to summon them so I don't have to pay for them (both Skeleton and Phantasmal Warrior are keeping you culture buffs & traits).

[@викторавилов-ь8х]

Yeah Dread knights on unicorns are a menace. I also used a lot of xp gaining buffs and level gaining spell from order book, and the final order perk, so I got an army of legendary level 185 hp dread knights that have a chance to stun. They obliterated everything.

[@erykczajkowski8226]

I don't see it as a problem that the Dormant Enchantment does not buff all types of units , because you won't have this much awakening sources anyway. You want to awaken your archers and Frontliners protecting them as priority. Charge units are waste to awaken, because of single attack and other types you can awaken anyway if need be and get the most important damage bonus. So while it could be interesting to get eg stun on awakened charge, I don't feel like lack of it is a relevant downside.

[@Ic0nGaming]

I think it would be much more difficult to choose if we had different dormant traits for every class type. Currently there is no real pressure of choice here, cause I'll for sure only awaken guys with dormant skills. Everything else would feel like a waste. But I would like to know how it felt if we had that kind of selection variety if you catch my drift.

[@erykczajkowski8226]

@@Ic0nGaming Yeah, ok, I see your point, although my gamestyle focuses on survavibility and raw damage, so maybe that's why I don't see a need to have this on other unit types. This looks like an area for a mod though. I plan to learn modding AOW4, as there's much to be tweaked there. So do you have any ideas on what the Awakened skills could be for Cav, Fighter and Skirmisher units?

[@MrJJ86]

Order Pikeman are some of the best t2 melee in game. With cav and giant slayer they are very cost effective awakened.

[@Ic0nGaming]

Yeah, they are among the hardest hitters in the T2 roster (if awakened ofc).

[@platoonmexx9278]

i just bought this game 2 days ago n am trying around stuff atm... watching a lot of videos... i ve heared many guys say its harder to become and stay pure evil then it is to become and stay pure good - as i said i ve not rlly a lot of experience but, i ve only encountered options to become good via events or tasks that are rather rare and can be costly, however everytime i sack a territory i get 5 evil, in a few rounds i managed 80 evil while in my current campagne where im tryna be a good boy, i took every chance of getting good and just got 30... in turn 50 --- i think im missing smt to get more good affiliation :D

[@badtiming2208]

I find it's quite easy and accessible to build up Evil alignment - every pillaged province is -5, every razed city is -20 (-10 if you do migrate instead). To stay good requires a bit of commitment, I find. Even selecting every Good Alignment choice during events, I rarely find myself at Pure Good. Off the top of my head, ways to help would be forgiving transgressions (so you don't get paid gold), but not many choices other than that.

[@Ic0nGaming]

The main problem is that if you are at maximum evilness you will receive a random "bump up" every now and then raising your alignment from -100 to -95, thus breaking your pure evil alignment. This is a minor thing, every transgression fixes that again, but it's surely annoying smh.

[@badtiming2208]

@@Ic0nGaming Pretty sure you can overcap on evil alignment to add a buffer to this. I've gotten over -165 alignment before. The key really is pillaging, it stacks up so much.

[@Ic0nGaming]

@@badtiming2208 Ah, that's a nice solution, I always somehow thought it caps at -100. Thanks!

[@James-wk4bk]

What’s the highest army strength with this build?

[@khanhnguyen-tt3ff]

Lol considering it cost 100 karma to migrated sonkaing going full evil alot easier is there any way to get good karma other then event?

[@dracodarastrix4175]

Can't your heroes not replace the role of shock troops?

[@Ic0nGaming]

Yes, absolutely

[@kcw1879]

I was hoping he'd talk about the Sun Priest vs The Chaplin.

[@Ic0nGaming]

I haven't analyzed all the Tome Units yet, will get to that as well though!

[@bjorngillefalk8965]

There is a spell called Dormant Awakening, or something like that. Not in any tomb, I guess it comes with the culture. It lets you awaken most non-high units.

[@Ic0nGaming]

Yes, basically every culture has a Unit Enchantment which lets all other units inherit the cultural baseline trait.

[@ToTheNines87368]

This is my most disliked society, just because the whole awaken doesn’t come intuitive to me. It feels so slow.

[@Ic0nGaming]

I wouldn't call it slow, but it's tedious for sure. Try a full on evil run, maybe this makes them more to your liking, cause it removes all the micro management of awakening units later on.

[@mercb3ast]

Pushing it evil removes the tedium. However, if you ever want 7 range archers that hit harder than tier 3 archers. This is for you. If you want tier 1 shield units that might as well hit as hard as tier 3 shock units? This build is for you. Tome of the horde + high culture is just stupidly powerful. You get basically +40% damage for your tier 1 units just for being awakened, and then tome of the horde adds another +40% damage. A fuedal tier 1 unit with tome of the horde goes from 10 damage, to 14 damage. A high tier 1 unit goes from 10 damage to 14 damage for being awakened, and then 19.6 damage for the +40% damage. Then everytime you add a weapon damage increase, you gets an addition 40% off of that from tome of the horde. Which means, if you've stacked say, +8 damage from elemental weapon buffs, you're sitting on like 28 raw tool tip damage. Have fun with your dawn defenders on turn 30 having 28x3 damage on a full round of attacks. Yea, they are a little light in the HP, but, owie they hit hard. Throw in sun priests to distract, or even dip into tome of the beasts to reliably distract. Then throw sneaky on your build. Now you are doing bonus flank damage, and ALL your attacks flank. Stack tome of amplification and tome of artificer for pumping your crit, and now you have tier 1 melee and ranged units that crit 70-90% of the time, get bonus damage on flanks, and you can distract at will! Now you're talking about tier 1 units that can around say turn 40-50 (if you're not running some insane magic research build), start to potentially ONE bang tier 5 mythic units.