[Brutal] Nature Hordes are INSANE in the early game - Age of Wonders 4 - Ep1

[@PotatoMcWhiskey]

I do not have a Telegram

[@mannsama7084]

I reported the channel couple of minutes ago. Looks like the channel is gone now.

[@squirrelhallowino29]

hahahaha I do like the idea though

[@murphy7801]

I thought all russian propagandists did.....

[@2fat4airborne44]

sad how hard people try to scam. thx for another vid though. Tome of the Horde is a real banger..so strong. Still cant really fathom that this Brood thing and the super growth are minor race changes. have a good one.

[@gapl2370]

hey potato, just wondering when the civ blitz vid will be. keep up the great content!

[@JManRox13]

I'm actually so god damn hype for this now being an age of wonders 4 channel. The first series inspired me to buy the game and now I'm obsessed too.

[@dominges]

I am in love with this game too. BTW I am shocked that none of the YT channels ever tried to build a doom stack of heroes only by now! You don't need to pay mana for enchants and every "unit" is a potential BOSS dmg entity that have the ability to at least heal it self or/and others. The only downside is that you pay 30 gold for upkeep per "unit" xD

[@JManRox13]

That's a good point. I hadn't thought of that strategy before, but I bet it would be pretty fun, especially once you've leveled them all up a few times. Casually beginning each battle with 6 ultimate abilities.

[@andrewray4028]

Same happened to me

[@Eakness]

@@domingesGo barbarian, increased accuracy and spider riders for racial traits. all heroes, 3 spider riding archers, 1 healer army buff stick, 1 pure tank and magic resistance and sprint, all with tier 3 summon skills(I like animal for the beast tome synergy) and you have a deathstack that can just murder literally anything in the game by level 5. I've used this single stack to take on entire empires.

[@ruler898]

This game probably has the most fun early aggressive style of any 4x game. Usually you hurt your economy but being able to simultaneously recruit units and build makes it feel so much better.

[@Mihomiti]

It's a tradeoff. Building draft buildings does mean you're not building economy buildings, but as long as you're using that draft to make units to conquer resources and take territory, you kind of make back that economic potential. If you just sit on the units it's a waste.

[@akvyr]

@@Mihomiti there is no tradeoff here. You build units from capacity that is barely used for anything else, and gain massive economic advantage that snowballs + your army snowballs due to chaos. It is what I would call broken.

[@Mihomiti]

@@akvyr It IS a tradeoff if you don't make effective use of the units you produce with the draft. Producing draft buildings and then not making units, or not using units is wasted production. That's how it's a tradeoff. Potato's use of draft with his build was, obviously optimal, and likely quite busted. That's not in dispute.

[@akvyr]

@@Mihomiti tbh producing units (thus draft capacity) IS a waste with this build. He gets an extra unit most of the time in battles. In my chaos game on brutal diff, I had 9 stacks of units by the time this video ends (turn 32 or so) just from freebies, and I stopped producing units around turn 10. In this build building an early army from your idle draft capacity allows you to snowball so hard (economically and military too) that its just busted. Its not a trade off, if it only comes with positives.

[@Mihomiti]

@@akvyr Not instantly, he still has to get that ability off the chaos tree, which you don't have for 20-ish turns. He is also playing on a very high difficulty and going for a pretty min-maxed build where he is producing as many units as he needs at the moment, and barely scraping by with them while he keeps other things balanced.

[@kevinl9858]

Nature seems insane in every stage of the game. So many good spells and summons.

[@TheCarloCarlone]

I dislike animal units for personal reasons. I mean conceptually, I can summon elementals and astral creatures, why would I choose simple animals? However I have to agree that nature tomes are pretty good. I did a dark culture and took the tome of roots. Being able to heal your units as dark culture is really good, poison weapons fits the roleplay and wine prison it's an underestimated crowd control.

[@meptalon]

Yes, and yet no culture with full nature spec. Weird. Can’t wait for the dlcs

[@arturkozanowski1499]

Better than summons is possibility to recruit Animal units by special building and you gonna unlock so powerful t2 unit recruitment.

[@drkmgic]

Definitely. My favorite book so far.

[@bomjus1706]

@@Outwardpd there's only two animal-centric tomes. meanwhile there are other plant tomes and a tome that turns your entire race into plants. how can you say it's more animal focused than plant focused lmao.

[@TheZealo]

Okay, the amount of perfect auto-resolves points to this build being insane early game. Lets see how it plays later on.

[@-Kidzin]

Skirmishers doing I believe. And of course once Houndmasters are out it's even sillier.

[@ukaszgosiewski1529]

Begs the question - did Potato forgot to set the correct difficulty again? ;)

[@-Kidzin]

@@ukaszgosiewski1529 Don't think so, those mobs look correct for hardest difficulty.

[@TheIshShow1]

​@Łukasz Gosiewski yeah he got it right. The npc enemies are way harder than normal

[@QuestionableObject]

Potato has that gigaluck because whenever I autoresolve the AI suicides my skirmishers lmao

[@Katastra_]

The Barb warriors Shield Bash is so underrated on a tier 1 shield unit. 90% base chance to stun and puts them in defence mode

[@arturkozanowski1499]

their defence mode also work on adjacted ally units. With throw jevelin before using stun generete for you 100% stun chance. Its so OP.

[@Ssalamanderr]

The T1 barb units seem really strong. Guess it makes sense since they are well set up to be a horde faction.

[@QuestionableObject]

The stun is actually godly

[@TheNatew97]

Yeeesss!!! So glad you're continuing the series. Really hope these are popular enough for you to keep nursing this addiction! 🙏

[@TimSedai]

I bought this yesterday and love tf out of it as it reminds me of Civ meets Heroes of Might and Magic but I could really use a beginners/factions vid if you're feeling up to the task. Fecker is a touch overwhelming you know?

[@justgameplays833]

itialion spartacus has a few he breaks down everything if you are in dire need

[@jct0064]

The campaign levels seem good for orienting you into the game, it helped me learn the pacing.

[@KingQuatto]

Do story realm 1 a few times and the pantheon points exploit thing to learn

[@talalal-turki313]

more age of wonders please! also would love to see u talk through ur thought process when designing the faction.

[@cavalyn]

I've been using Hearty a lot lately - feels very strong when you consider a lot of early units are between 60-90hp, and that extra 10hp goes a long way. It feels a lot more impactful than most of the others. On the other hand I used to go defensive tactics for mind trait, but now am in love with swarm tactics. Never seen so many crits w/o using specific tomes!

[@avlaenamnell6994]

i personaly use the fast regen, it doubles your health regen in the wild, and even lets you regen a bit in enemy territory, but i either favour that or the 10 hp like you said. for mind i like going tenacious to keep the dmg high as units get wounded ;p

[@jonathanholdridge3576]

Just finished the last series and was like, ahh-I hope he starts another series of it…

[@koonbeast]

the slow movement from the greaves doesn't reduce your world movement, so it's the perfect artifact for staff wielders because they're ranged with no mount anyway. sprint is useful because you can move one tile and still make 3 attacks with the skirmisher. the sprint is especially useful after moving toward an enemy until you're one tile away from melee, hitting them with range, using your hero to give them their action points back, then sprint up to hit them 3 times. also you can use the one tile movement to reposition into a flank if you're at their front side, avoiding any retaliation while also hitting 3 times.

[@NexusNoxCS]

Yay, more AoW4! I'm pretty sure all of us will be voting for more of that game for a long while now!

[@fabnasio]

Excited that this is becoming an AoW4 channel, I could watch these videos forever

[@PedroFerreira-ne3jv]

YES! I too have been fixated with Red/Green swarms in the game(already won 5 games with them) because they looked easy to play and it’s insane how competent they are even after I learned how to play the game more, it truly is throughout ridiculous in power specially if you know what you are doing so I’m excited to see what you do with them!!

[@DmitryOzzy]

One of the misleading tooltips about the alignment is that it DOES NOT lowers your chances to get bad outcome. It increases the changes to have "evil" options in the events. Which could be very beneficial for you. Saw this explanation in one of the forums...

[@benabaxter]

One thing I look forward to is seeing your previous runs as foes or allies. Potato Cinematic Universe.

[@Adriftadept]

So glad you’re doing more of this game!!!

[@celt5457]

Mob rules! It's nice to see a horde comp played well! I see a lot of folks trying to play chaos/spawnkin exactly how they'd run any other empire (stacking up tier 2 and 3 units asap) and end up going broke and losing a bunch of guys. Not to mention -that fire spell can do enormous damage with a big enough peasant mob to bolster the effect (15 tier 1's =45 damage / 22 splash). Anyway, gj, always entertaining

[@SirCorrino]

The vines are stupid OP. Just chain-casting those you can take on 3 stacks with 1 and just focus down a few units at a time. Even better if you have a Dark affinity so you get combat casting points every time a vine dies...

[@webbowser8834]

Man, that's one heck of a combo you've managed to come up with there. Sheeeesh.

[@Lazuli901]

So excited for more AoW4 content! I don't mind other games getting a chance to shine on the channel. The more things getting exposed to Potato power the better!

[@TheDirtyShaman]

Casting "Earth Shatter" on Mountain provinces will allow you to build outposts or settle the province. Any other terraforming spell will be reverted if you try to build an outpost, and cities can't annex those provinces despite terraforming until you destroy the mountain.

[@tarsakh22]

tome of the horde is great early game (can see it being nerfed as everyone takes it). It is even more crazy going with scouts on spiders mounts, doing aoe webbing just makes the zerg even more crazy.

[@YTJayell]

Yep ditch CIV if you are having more fun here, nothing wrong with that! I’ll watch AOW4 all day every day, such a good game.

[@hydefreak9900]

I just started my own Horde game as well so its nice to see my max potential being illustrated for me! Loving Age of Wonders 4 as well!

[@Dratom1990]

Been looking for a good barbarian build and this has been amazing to watch. Good job!

[@jimsenbonzakura9402]

Keep these gameplays coming! Next potato era is age of wonders Era!

[@igavinwood]

Very happy to see another AoW4 playthrough. It's good to see a game that looks complete, where gamers aren't the Beta tester for rushed to market invester backed publisher. I'm still p****d with 2K for breaking Civ VI, so seeing PMcW at the wheel of another great, fun, game is so refreshing and I get to watch one of the internets favs in action. Would still love to see you and JumboPixel in an AoW4 playthrough. It would be such a scream as you're both so knowledgeable and enthuiastic.

[@dhruvagrawal9471]

This was absolutely wonderful to watch. As someone, who has just started playing the game, I can't tell you how many things I learned from 1 single video, you get a follow and sub just for that. I hope you keep making these specially considering that Paradox released the roadmap of 4 DLCs already.

[@donbionicle]

Last run you made Halflings human sized, this time you've made humans Halfling sized. Marvelous!

[@venisontron]

Please do an underground game next. I want to see if that part of the game is just as fun and viable to play. It seems like an afterthought in your games so far, but I'm hoping it's fully fleshed out in terms of gameplay

[@squirrelhallowino29]

OK I WANT THE WHOLE SERIES NOW. THANKS.

[@Jocw27]

I think one big upgrade you can get on skirmishers is anything that gives you +1 range in their normal state, they have to get whithin range of a 1 AP movement of a regular enemy unit to shoot them, leaving them exposed to a double attack next turn +1 range would allow them to systematically disengage melee combat and shoot enemy melee units from a distance, forcing them to use 2 AP to engage again, which is OP against anything that's not shock

[@RcadiaaYT]

Very excited to see you play more AoW4 after binging the mana-addicts playthrough. In fact, started my own sunderer-focused run after watching your tier list video (with a dip into Astral for Amplified Arrows for AOE javelins). Keep the videos coming!

[@QuestionableObject]

The skirmisher's get really mana expensive but they also get massive value from the 50% upkeep reduction, because upkeep reduction also affects enchantment upkeep on units.

[@manwithabasicprofilepic]

Great minds think alike! I did this almost exact same set up but with Ratkin, god is it disgusting. I have an army of Sunderers and an army of Houndmaaters and they tear through everything

[@robbie7557]

This is my fav build but a bit different. Feudal Rats, with the wolf mount. Fury of Horde or Tome of Beasts first and the other one second. Spawnkin and Animal Kinship. Get mounted units. Clean up. Tons of adjacency boosts and animal/cav boosts.

[@Peanuthamperlives]

I found nymph, spider, arcane/life is just crazy - once you get totem of wild and and the astral mirror spell youre more than doubling your number of units, doesnt even take much to get going and just gets better and better

[@猪武者]

before you find a neutral city, you can give the whispering stone to your own city(!). Can help give a small boost in the very early game.

[@zachscomixbox]

Potato this game is so rad. Please please please keep playing it

[@aqvamarek5316]

Houndmaster are hard carry for every build, they are a tier IV unit, in a Tome 1 spellbook. Get them, rush 5 for your hero, and clear the map, which fast level your hero.

[@noneofyourbusiness3288]

"Free city of Slampit" is just so perfect for Barbarians.

[@WeirdGamer20555]

I got this game after watching you, and now I'd addicted and it's your fault, Potato! Seriously though, delighted to see more Age of Wonders 4 content from you.

[@Kaiohyeah]

I have been watching and playing this game non- stop such a fun game. I wish the player RACE adjusted the game play by giving you base stats and natural adaptions. I am watching this video now!! Always LOVE YOUR CONTENT!!!

[@brianolivo1835]

Been having a blast with this game, your videos are the gold standard for AoW4

[@bread1958]

After watching your tome tierlist I've been running a materium brutal run and artificers I've found are amazing. They're like mega sunderers. Repeating sundering attacks with no save + said attack is physical is just great and they honestly compete with the better tier 4 options. Sundered defense also happens to lower status resistance, which just makes their own aoe stun better.

[@moritzkern1053]

Just wanted to comment to say that I enjoy this content and for strengthening this Videos footprint in the algorithm.

[@brjinx]

Reminds me of old-school Heroes of Might and Magic. I love it!

[@andrewschleiss6269]

Please be a strategy channel and not only civ6. Watching your play throughs of all these new games is awesome

[@fenmoorz]

This race setting is STRONG!

[@brickhouse5795]

Mr Potato would you like to give us a necromancer campaign, would love someone skilled to tackle this style of play which some say is on the weaker side

[@crazymammoth]

if you want a broken snowball build go pure Druid, you reproduce like crazy and every new Provence spawns a new unit for free, down side is it eats all your mana so you can't cast spells till after you have a few vassals

[@charlestaylor8344]

I currently don't have a life because of this game. I fucking love it. More content of this please! I'd honesty be happy if you dropped civ for this

[@losmanzani6849]

Glad you are doing another campaign of AOW 4

[@JDuel100]

Barbarians seem to have more interesting units. I noticed that Furies (Tier 2 Barbarian Archer Unit) will be Cavalry if you select a Mount Racial Trait. I picked Wolf, because Pack Tactics gives a 20% damage if standing next to another unit with Pack Tactics and it /stacks/. Auto-Resolve wasn't great, but my archer squads were shredding Tier 5 Mythic units once I got them enchanted.

[@dreamerofthorns]

Yes. Be an aow4 channel for now. Please. Yes.

[@evankurniawan1311]

The Balor from Chaos tree has kill buff limit. It's limited to 50 stacks of kill So, max extra 50 HP and 50% dmg But by god, it's so powerful

[@COOC_PL]

so much value in just one video ;d that is insane :) please make more :D this game have massive potential I really hope it is not sponsored content :) because I enjoy it way to much

[@eddycorny3556]

You prompted me to buy the game and I've been obsessed for the past few days! Absolutely love the content PMW 🎉

[@hoppityscoppity]

I'm so obsessed thanks to you and definitely thanks for this because I cannot get the life of me get to horde playstyle to work

[@TheBouregard]

the reason your auto resolve is doing so well is the enemy composition in forests early. Nature units are usually low armor fighter/skirmishers/support - so pretty much perfect for your composition to auto resolve against. Against spearmen, shielded units and shock you'd suffer quite a few more losses. The autoresolve ai is further pretty bad with archers and battle mages to be honest.

[@charlespaape2258]

Been playing this so much glad you're covering it a lot.

[@oliveguardian7757]

Was thinking of doing a nature playthrough myself. Very interested to watch yours!

[@hrogarfyrninga3238]

Am currently on a nature playthrough myself (on very hard), the amount of free tier 3-4 units I'm getting is insane.

[@QuestionableObject]

Being able to ignore zones of control is real force multiplier for mobility, don't sleep on it :B

[@harjutapa]

huh... I haven't tried making a Support focused Hero, but damn that's effective. All my Heroes so far have been focused on being amazing combatants themselves, but this video has sold me on trying Support.

[@freddouglas5243]

cannibalistic halfling barbarians has been my favorite playthrough so far, Tome of the Horde and Tome of Roots.

[@thaliathemuse6265]

This episode was awesome. You had the best luck with auto battles holy moly.

[@kristopherwatts9466]

That was.. all kinds of amazing and disturbing to watch. I loved it

[@Quarles69]

I feel like this civ is just all the best options available at the moment put together. If there was a meta in this game, this would be the meta build.

[@McKillaboy]

Loving the new AoW content my man! Keep it up!

[@THEKratosirving]

I get the feeling you're either very far in or already wrapped up this one, but Spoils of Destruction along the Chaos line is just broken. You can Raze one of your own Cities and it'll count as giving another tick of +20 Gold; than you can rebuild and Raze infinitely - obviously best done with a crap new settlement, but can work with any of your Cities. Pretty sure it'll get patched pretty soon to just be when you Raze and Conquered City, but for now it's super easy to fuel the war machine. :D

[@charliegrech2026]

If only there was a Heroes of might and magic with these graphics and beautiful art style

[@Krishnath.Dragon]

Well that settles it. I'll be playing chaotic swarming barbarians in my next game. (currently playing some really powerful elven druids.)

[@mavor101]

You really need to do these builds in MP games to showcase how they stack up against actual players and other builds. :)

[@iPressure-]

Please keep this content up!! I absolutely love this game and love your gameplay, i could watch you for hours and hours. Keep it up!!

[@iptf]

Excellent. More AoW4 content.

[@r3dp9]

12:50 Dangit! I was wracking my brains trying to get -100% upkeep, but I guess that isn't possible. That would explain my inconsistent results. It also means the Materium capstone isn't anywhere near as good as I thought it was :(. 45:40 Makes me wonder about the Runesmith chaos culture trait. Will it reduce mana upkeep past the -50% of unit upkeep? 49:00 As rush strats go, that Balor is probably the fastest gamewinner for large maps/multiple opponents. The other imperium capstones require lots of setup (recruiting new units, levelling them up, economy buffs), are useless (who needs map vision if you can see city borders through the fog of war?), TV tomes take a lot longer to chew through than Imperium capstones, and AFAIK none of the factions snowball fast enough to make the Balor redundant (feel free to prove me wrong!)

[@wasterick]

I just started a nature horde game and saw this video. What a coincidence

[@micro314]

Really neat how closely the affinities map to MTG color-pie. Gruul Aggro FTW. All they would have had to do is make Imperium colorless.

[@arturkozanowski1499]

Shieldman with his stun + javelin is so good combo. Before trying stun always throw jevelin first for more % chance for stun. Tome of beast as a first book and you can clear easly everything. Tome of beast is good as 1st book bcs you can unlock to recruitment by a special building amazing t2 spiders with aoe attack and jump.

[@WizoIstGott]

Beasts is very good and the animal building is busted, but T2 units bankrupt you very easily on an aggressive spawnkin build. And Tome of roots is competing with beasts and is straight up broken.

[@arturkozanowski1499]

@@WizoIstGott nah, u need only 5x t2 spiders which is so easy to achive and far from bankrupt ur economy :P

[@WizoIstGott]

@@arturkozanowski1499 Spiders are busted and a staple in many builds. But this build does simply not need to invest into spiders (12g vs 5.6g) when T1 Units are super buff. Also getting spiders early means skipping Tome of Roots which is so not worth it. Yes the spiders would propably beat 2 Stacks of T1 Units, but you can conquer more cities with a 2:1 ratio AND tome of roots.

[@arturkozanowski1499]

@@WizoIstGott what? 1:2 stack spiders winning fight without lose a unit even when t3 units in opponents army. T1 barbs hit hard even for 100 dmg with 2 books but when opponents can hold gate and u cant reach range battle mages its gonna be problem.

[@Xorgrim]

This build is pure lethality in your hands!

[@starmealon4223]

God chaos is just so fun in general. So far my favorite has to be materium + chaos though. Got to love war breeds with stacked defenses, like 3 on kill effects, and 50% base crit chance. Combo that with super growth because why not have more hp, and then either nature or undead major transformations and you have tier 4 melee units who simply won’t die and are swinging for 50s and 60s after support buffs easily

[@Ravach0l_]

You hyped up that Balor pretty well

[@ReistyPanda]

first run: halflings, but BIGGER second run: humans, but TINY

[@ADeatonic]

Found you through SaveorDie, stoked that you play strategy games. Convinced me to buy this and I'm loving it!

[@SoulCrusher669...]

that outpost on your border is great you can just wall it in using imperium and laugh at his worthless city

[@loleo6556]

More age of wonders you love to see it

[@a37n31]

This game is awesome, keep going!

[@christopherg2347]

Apparently I did not quite understand how good Skirmishers are. Being able to have both ranged and melee, while also being able to leave melee without issue can be quite useful for survival. And they are a absolute rarity, only existing on Barbarians and missing even on several tomes. One of my worries with a horde build was actually Enchantment upkeep, so my idea was to pick Runesmiths.

[@kattennan1299]

I JUST started a game yesterday with pretty much this exact same build, down to the early focus on Sunderer swarms. Will be interested to see how it goes for you. Also, regarding Sprint: assuming it works the same way it does for heroes, one extra benefit it doesn't tell you about it that it allows you to move one space without losing an action point, so it enables taking one step and still getting all three attacks.

[@patrast5315]

It does say that, right? It says that you get 8 free movement this turn. And usually moving a space costs 5-8 movement

[@ProvidenceXIV]

Really loving your AoW content. If it helps, I didn't know of your channel beforehand and now I'm hooked.

[@Dezzerkas]

Keep going with AoW4! I need to watch your videos to get my fix while I work.

[@themeerkat5157]

YESSSS POTATO MORE AGE OF WONDERS THANKK U SO MUCH!!!

[@muse0583]

Probably the faction I was least excited to see, only because Barb/Chaos/Nature is so blatantly busted its ez mode. And it's not just at the early game, it converts into a powerful late game army as well. Sprinkle in some Keepers Mark from order and laugh as your berserkers run over everything without being able to die cause it stacks with steadfast. It's just goofy. That being said I still love these series and the commentary. A genuine pleasure to watch.

[@scavenger6268]

Hold up so if you combine the Stake Domain and Mob camp, and the three nearby foresters. You are essentially gaining another 5 foresters for free as buffs. We just need a tavern and Conan stomp on by with some women!!!

[@lochlainnmckenzie5569]

LOVE THISSS LOVE ITTTTTTTT , I mean your civ 6 games were perfect but these are just perfecter ! Keep er lit bai

[@PenitusVox]

Wow, that Balor can really be microed to insane levels, huh? Just going around, making sure it last-hits everything you can find.

[@MANoob100]

Imo it doesn't make a ton of sense to grab most of the empire improvements before reaching your city cap, the earlier you get the cities going the earlier you start reaping the benefits. A good adept settlers start is like ~ 5 cities, 3 full stacks with 3 heroes turn 20 and you snowball from there. The only one I would grab first is the nature one that reduces outpost conversion time by 2 turns and gives +1 pop in your cities as it will make all your new cities start with 3 pop and improve the timings on your 3rd city and forward.

[@pandaclysm205]

I notice the peak at the start of videos showing where people seek to.