Send Them Running With This Busted Age Of Wonders 4 Build

In this Age of Wonders 4 guide we take a look at the most op race and tomb setup for the game that I have been able to find so far. This build makes the best use of the most broken race transformations and enchants.
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♫ 𝙊𝙪𝙩𝙧𝙤 𝙈𝙪𝙨𝙞𝙘: Spark of Excellence
By The Talented @xXasdfMAN12Xx AKA: Sean Wolf

[@Butch273]

Worth noting that undead hard counter this build as they are immune to morale effects, IE any factions that picks Wightborn as their major race transformation. I think this could also have be improved further by taking nightmare mounts with dark culture for earlier access to intimidating aura via scouts and dark knights. PS you should try out scout spamming with spider mounts. Their web attacks are brutal.

[@zacharyeisenman1086]

I'd like to request a dark necromancer build please. I have been trying to make it work, but just keep getting stomped. The idea of being a necromancer just desolating the surroundings then raising them has always been the coolest thing to me since I did it in d&d. plus i just found out you can get freaking Bone Dragons from Rally the Lieges! So the desire to make it work is at an all time high.

[@alimaeus455]

Hello are you open to advice from strangers on the internet because I have ideas. So good start is Dark + Wizard + Cryo + Roots and take both frost and blight buffs immediately and only then pick up Souls. Then Necromancy + Doomherald + Transformations + Cold Dark + Cycles gets you to mid game. Late game Eternal Lord is must pick and chaos is good expansion. Cull the Weak + Weakening aura (Fetid Legion) is your melee bread and butter T2 Night Guard to T3 Dark Knight to T4 Warbreed. T1 Pursuer early to T2 Warlock to T3 Banshee gives more Weaken then mid-late game saps Morale. Support is strong in AOW4 but necro support is lacking, T3 Necro and T4 Druid give reanimate but that's about it. T5 Reaper is nice but best 1 to a stack in late game. Frost and Poison damage buffs are early and important, you want to debuff enemies and pick up free +20% damage against weakened and slowed enemies. Cruel weaponry and Joy siphoners are another potential advantage and good synergy with Banshee. Wightborn + Frostling is no brainer. Shadow affinity gives you knowledge and hero xp but not much else. Nature affinity makes your cities grow fast and gives you fast army healing and movement. Chaos affinity is good especially if you want to pillage, raze and burn the world.

[@zacharyeisenman1086]

@@alimaeus455 I will try this out when I get off work!

[@tylerchesney7395]

​@Zachary Eisenman If you're open to more, Dark + Materium Is a pretty solid combo. Silvertongue + Runesmith and ToE(T1) makes your T1 units viable until Mi-late game, which is when necromancer really kicks off.

[@cemarz]

Wow. I basically did this build randomly when I role played Dr. Evil. I imagined that he was constantly insulting the entire enemy army.

[@WilhalmBrion]

I made a build last night and it was almost tome for tome this. Doomherald definitely being slept on.

[@HappyAspid]

Tome of revelry is one of my favorites. Especially revelers heart upgrade.

[@justalesbianmage9811]

I'm honestly not sure what barbarian culture does for this build. Also, I think the fastest way to rout an enemy is to focus fire on a couple units and kill them quickly without losing your own units because that moral penalty applies to the whole enemy army. To that end, I've had the most success with unicorn mounts, sneaky, and dark or feudal culture with tome of the beasts. Tome of the beasts gives your heroes pack leader, which is a further bonus to flanking. Unicorn mounts give phasing, which lets you flank easily. Combine it with critical bonuses and cruel weaponry, and you'll have the enemy running after a few cavalry charges

[@EsotericDrifter]

Starting affinities. Probably to get materium and nature affinities from the start I guess

[@danielsgamerprofile4067]

@@EsotericDrifter barbs are chaos and nature affinity

[@Ravenzadow]

Hey look, it's my build. I learned in Planetfall I really liked messing with morale.

[@gsparta876]

Champion or wizard king?

[@jaywall4591]

This works better with Dark imo. It also gets more flavour from Revelry ^^

[@Alexander-wk4gl]

Ive been doing a cannibal barbarian froglok build. All nature and chaos just about. Spam heals and mindcontrol to just completely slaughter my enemies. My favorite is to mindcontrol their calvary to kill their back line, then have my berserkers eat the corpses as they cut their way through. Been winning battles I am at a huge disadvantage for (1500 vs 3000). Ive been using tome of the horde, tome of fertility, (theres one more tome with a mindcontrol unit i cant remember the name of), and mostly nature tombs after that. The druid unit that can revive fallen allies and instantly kill other units is a good edition to my armies as well. I am not looking forward to facing this army in successive playthroughs.

[@ECSizemore]

Thanks for the tips! Just started playing AOW4 and it’s my new obsession. Cheers !

[@schlimble]

Throw the demonkin away and get angels so they become faithful with the buff for your hero so they start with +20 moral at the start

[@BeastlyGoldfish]

Love the vids, thanks for dropping all the great content.

[@Peanuthamperlives]

Think moral build would work better with feudal or dark with nightmare mounts for free intim aura on your knights,

[@skarnexonline4446]

Loved the guide and learned a lot - subbed - would love to see - more detail in build order from building side and also - maybe some ways to counter these boys in PvP as seems not extremely fun to play againt. Lime there’s the anti morale damage perks for race but those kinda gimp you I guess - then there’s the anti range damage vs those op archer builds so then you just anti building for what might be :))

[@Spinexus]

Do not use this on an undead map. Whole build becomes useless! xD I learned it the hard way.

[@pupa42]

Nice build. Is there a reason for the keen sighted trait beside that barbarian skirmisher's are good with it, or would the nightmare mount for the -moral aura be a viable option too?

[@IDidntVoteForThisOption]

Nice work! Great build

[@jacobbriggs6125]

the last build i had was awesome nature and chaos mixed with magic addicts and teleportation you have so much mana and world spells you can literally summon armies with awaken the forest and golden horde right on the enemies throne cities and then you attack iwth your main army to brng the AI to you and divide them. and you use storm elemtantal (45 mana) to scout deep into enemy territory and summon a 3 stack in one turn and teleport your main hero on the stack. PLUS!!!!! you can literally stop any other faction from acheiving victory by blowing up there provinces whenever they create a pillar etc (because the map shows you where they are )

[@elwourmo993]

your AI doesn't build spelljammers? lucky you

[@paeppafpaefpafepa2]

would be great to have a cheat sheet to refer back to as we build the civ

[@blitzhacker6981]

Any specific Hero traits? Archer? Melee? Caster? does it matter?

[@keenanmccracken6758]

My first build was built around doomherald. Such a cool tome

[@Styrupp]

1:50 you dont add % inc like that xD

[@Mr.Monster1984]

what about ruler origin?

[@jacobmoore4687]

Any chance you can show us a gameplay video for this build?

[@dsinemoi1mouton]

Tome of the Herald is indeed very strong, but only against non morale immune enemies. So I would say it's situational (even if AI is often not morale immune). It's not as reliable as let's say combat summons (imo)

[@hitmanmaloe]

Going to use this build with the mole ppl and do the underminer from incredibles. Lmfao

[@Daafiejj]

With the tier V Nature tome, you can get an additional 20% crit hit chance if ya take Force of Nature.

[@t.s.8430]

I need help with Story realm 5 but not youtubers seem to care about the story realms

[@Peanuthamperlives]

WHat difficulty level ? The biggest issue with that realm is you need to basicly "cheese" The easiest ive seen is you want mana channelers trait and pick the mirror bonus option (last option) for your bonus perk, it gives you free astral summons that are tier 1-3 you can build a full stack army very quickly, and mana channelers reduces their upkeep so you dont go mana bankrupt too fast. You want to have 3-4 cities by turn 20 at least , watch out for nimue she spams outposts more than the other allies, so may block you in if you dont expand fast enough. Magic victory is probably the easiest but if you build fast enough you can steamroll military also with your astral army. As for tomes the life/astral summoner build is prob the easiest to win with. The final story realm is def hard and punishes non optimized play. Found it harder than brutal diff on custom realms for sure.

[@endlessfreedom6015]

What point did you put on your ruler? Like abilities and such

[@michalkrasnodebski8709]

I feel like dark migh work better with overall build, it has city order penalty negation it works great with awakened tools

[@elwourmo993]

doesn't the building only become available on lvl 3 cities? never really got that, tbh thats the worst part of dark culture for me. you just wait around for ever to get to lvl 3 because of the debuffs everyone else just needs to spend a turn or 2 to build a tavern every 15-20 turns. also sunderer with tome of hordes just stomps everything in the early game. Dark really only has one good physical unit at T3, I do like the Warlock but for this build your laserfocused on physical damage (at least that's how I understood it when I tried it.

[@kawgrath1876]

What’s your favorite tome? Mine’s pandemonium, I like the randomness.

[@ICrazySkills]

Moral is super busted especially with the rings. Wish more people would stop pushing damage and status effects and instead focus on it!

[@thevoxdeus]

It's less obvious so it will take time for people to embrace it.

[@PCRyder]

Moral? Did you mean Morale? Ive been trying to make a morale build myself. With the tome of revelry in chaos. Its just tough.

[@vovanbalashov]

@@PCRyder Here in the video, the tome of doomherald is used. And it looks like it worked

[@Enos666]

I've yet to see a more busted build than Spider Mount Barbarians with Fabled Hunters and Book of Beasts starter tome. Building an entirely Tier II Mounted Fury (Archer) army with inbuilt AOE stun/damage coupled with Animal Kinship and Call of the Wild is a brutal early game. I'm not sure what they were thinking making it so Furies could be mounted but boy is it fun.

[@metalhev3989]

I'm pretty sure Prelude of Doom is bugged to only reduce morale by 5

[@voidsentoni5977]

idk what I did wrong but it feels like your 1st build is the most balanced to sustain themselves compared to this. tried 3 game and lost all in early turns.

[@yomogami4561]

what no ritualistic cannabilistic halfling fabled hunters?

[@Feet_Sniffer]

It's a really fun bill but if somebody goes undead you're completely 100% useless against them and basically auto lose

[@pikachu2003]

Champ or wizard king?

[@dsinemoi1mouton]

always wizard king. The only real benefit from champion is the 20 stability bonus, which isn't needed to win a game anyway and depending on what is your game plan, you shouldn't need vassals that bad. (can just raze / conquer them). If you do want to go for a diplomatic game, then champion is the way to go I would say. The extra spell (x2 with reset cd ability) is absolutely amazing (turn 2 -> 4 spells cast is ridiculous), and the amount of extra casting points you get is quite handy too.

[@jha7623]

Amazing thanks bro subbed

[@Cons1337]

The 20% damage from Tome of the Horde only triggers for Tier 1 units. What would be a good alternative for this tome? I dont like the Barbarian Tier 1 units too much ;) /edit: Also why did you choose Barbarian? Would this build also work with another culture?

[@jaywall4591]

He went for Horde because of Spawnkin but you can get a generic 10% damage boost and spread across the board with Dark culture and going with Souls

[@pepeadamczyk2163]

I'd go with tome of beasts. It synergizes alot - spiders are animals that You get dmg boost for, they can evolve. Upon evolution they can spawn more spiders, throw nets and those nets can give different results depending on spider type. You also get imo strongest one able to be recruited (from tome tile improvement) - jumping spider that has extra mobility in the form of jumping (can get behind enemies and/or use it as extra movement). Culture impact is not that huge, You can easily go for any just for affinity if You want different t4 and t5 tomes

[@kestcer1486]

The hero buffs only tier1 units

[@danielabbott2026]

ok I havn't found a vid on this, but came across a AI that got a tier 4 weapon and just slaughtered my army with it, i have only came across tier 2 weapons didn't even know there was tier 4 weapons, how do u get these weapons? I did a tower of destiny that was max lvl and only got a tier 2 weapon??????

[@nohymennodiamond20]

Neutral mobs get stronger after a certain number of turns so you can wait for them to evolve instead of killing them as soon as you spot them, although you miss out on the yields, so this is usually reserved for sea mobs. Alternatively you could always kill ai heroes and get the sick drops off their corpse. If a single ai hero unit is wiping your army, there’s probably a deeper problem that a single piece of tier 4 gear won’t fix

[@elwourmo993]

strategy would be to wait a few turns and then clear the dungeons/spawners, they scale up, later even the world guards have like 2 t5 units. also have you ever noticed all the AI heroes always have the complete same loadout? pretty sure they cheat that in, so kill them and take it or ally with one or two factions and look at trade from time to time that's how I get 90% of my gear. which weapon was it though? only one I could see being problematic would be the godbreaker (big old hammer that hits and stuns in an AOE)

[@lukedemler4421]

I played a race of t1 gobbos remnant of borderlands fire psychos, basically all t1 with every weapon enchant possible even on brutal they smashed everything, t1s hitting upward 30s 3x apiece, games insanely unbalanced, I don't think I've ever played such an easy 4x game you have to handicap yourself miserably to make battles hard.

[@elifire4147]

Lawful Good High Elves rule.

[@xmixaplix]

The only weakness I see in this is goblin slayer 🤔👀

[@HS-mu9tw]

Try Max Astral trait Mage build. The last Astral tome gives 100% crit. Im currently building a super hero battlemage

[@justalesbianmage9811]

Don't forget Astral mirror to get copies of your hero. The copies deal less damage, but can use any once per battle abilities your hero can. Combine with spur to action and weaver for max shenanigans.

[@bene5428]

And then go for the gilded magic which turns enemies into gold upon crit and you can just massive aoe stun them with your hero spells

[@ViRavenMusic]

This build is useless vs undead mana spam builds. Undead units have NO MORAL.

[@aimhighpinay]

Champion or Wizard King?

[@PCRyder]

WK

[@dorianodet8064]

I mean, there is nothing very busted, or original, about this build, it's just a glass canon build, there are a lot of other way to make similar ones. In your case I'd just point out a few thing : Pro : Most of your enchantement and buff are very tranversal, so this build is very fluid in the type of unit you can use, this one is a really really good pro. It'll work for any tiers and any type of unit as long as they're from your race. It will do a crazy amount of damage if you can start the killing momentum Con : It's a build with a LOT of upfront investement until you reach a sweet spot in the end game. It rely heavily on race transformation, so won't work with rally/summoned/other race unit. You pick a lot of tomes without balancing tiers and affinity. You not picking tomes with strong unit (appart from the war breed), so you'll rely heavily on your inate unit. You didn't picked economy focused tome, so you'll have smaller army made of lower unit to support the upkeep. You have only damage, your whole survival strategy is wreckking the enemy moral so bad they fumble, any moral immune race like undead will hurt you.

[@fyr3st0rm35]

Like as soon as I heard the word 'morale' I started rolling my eyes, anything could be slotted in instead of morale damage and probably be a better build. Yeah enchants and runesmith is really good, yeah spawnkin is really good... morale damage is not very good unless it's supported by other things that are independently useful. Rolled eyes again at this being a morale build and ignoring the fact Iron Golem has intimidation aura. Yeah just don't get that T2 tome if you want to have something strong, pick up some Glade Wardens / Protectors maybe. Any elemental enchants isn't bad and fits the enchant theme, honestly when you're dealing that much damage that fast your morale should be all the way up and theirs all the way down on turn 1 regardless.

[@brandonzzz9924]

"The use cases of morale debuffs increase proportionate to the knowledge and intelligence of the user." -someone probably

[@selvinramos8276]

why does he talk like that?

[@MrZeldion]

Lmao i know right? I find his videos across loads of games and I click on it not knowing and then i hear the intro and i cringe.

[@Solipsis31]

That's just how he talks, like cmon guy

[@wiefdiwbofdbw]

bro AoW4 is such a downgrade from AoW2 it's laughable

[@insaeculasaeculorum]

Its way better tbh

[@wiefdiwbofdbw]

@@insaeculasaeculorum not even close

[@smonkey001]

It's getting there. At least better than 3.

[@jago18777]

This comment is laughable age of heros 2 was fun and all but pretty much units were a null and moot point kek

[@wiefdiwbofdbw]

​@@jago18777 you don't even know what the game is called. AoW2 had 15 races bro, and they all had unique units and infrastructure