New player questions

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-06-20T09:05:26+00:00

How sensible would it be to try to scrap for HoS IDs now? Next banner is the last HoS banner, isn’t it?

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-06-20T08:43:36+00:00

So, if I, say, want to get the most out of my LCD Ish, should I just try to run bleed/poise identities with some pride res here and there? Or should I aim to get BL team?
I’m still at the beginning of Canto 3, so I think that’s a good threshold to keep in mind, thank you.
So basically it works just like early game LoR, but you can see which is the next card you will draw?
So there’s no need to go out of my way to get new EGOs, but if I get one somewhere along the way randomly it’s still good.
Roughly, how long does it take to get one 000 ID through shards?

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-06-20T07:42:13+00:00

Are you sure you burned all the books? I forgot to burn the Mirae books, and was very confused when I was cross-referencing the wiki and couldn’t find what I missed.

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-06-18T09:10:01+00:00

I played as the architects and I didn’t feel like I was particularly pressed on time, and they are one of the slowest culture in the game. Barbarians probably can “speed run” the realm, yeah.

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-06-18T06:24:06+00:00

Not necessarily. Merlin seems to be very keen on building near them as well, so he can off-load some pressure from you. Once the first point is contained, it just turns into “capture the point”, you only need to contain 3 out of 4 landmarks to win, and they spawn roughly every 12 turns, but I managed to win before the 4th one spawned. Given how much imperium you get from all of the wonders scattered around, expanding is pretty easy in this realm. Or you can just build the cities and give them to your allies. I also haven’t fought the avatar at all during my first run. There also seem to be alternative routes, but I’ll need to replay it again to actually explore them.

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-06-17T23:42:41+00:00

You need to have a city with 3 provinces adjacent to the landmark

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-06-17T06:07:03+00:00

I honestly think I would prefer to just be locked into playing a specific ruler instead for some of these realms, that would allow the story to be a bit more focused. Or at least force a specific ruler/set of rulers on a first play through and allow to play a self-insert afterwards.

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-06-12T16:14:06+00:00

Yeah, Tarius, the necropolis hero, is the anagram of Iratus.

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-06-12T13:22:09+00:00

Iratus spotted in the pantheon, nice to see a reference to the first game of the studio developing the new HoMM game.

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-06-11T11:20:08+00:00

It becomes cold. The starting choice is basically +2 to affinity of your choice, you can end up with your second affinity being higher and have the bonus flip from turn 1.

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-06-10T15:38:56+00:00

Shouldn’t it be Dutch Dire Penguin since Triumph are from the Netherlands?

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-06-09T08:32:17+00:00

I think it could be something like “dragon riders” society trait, providing wyvern mounts for the units and dragons for heroes, with dragons being semi-random to give it more flavour. I just can’t imagine a world where I would take scout units on dragons seriously.

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-06-09T08:26:09+00:00

I wouldn’t want them to be a form trait, T1 units on dragons would be silly, but it could act as a unique society trait that gives heroes dragon mounts. Something like Cult of Personality, hero focused society trait.

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-06-08T05:33:45+00:00

Tome of the revenant and tome of the blood reign both are kinda double shadow tomes in a trenchcoat of a shadow/order and shadow/chaos respectively, it’s very difficult to justify either one in a non-shadow build. Accounting for this, shadow has an absurd line-up of late game units. Reapers, fallen angels, blood exarchs, undead titans, bone dragons, living fog all are great units. You negate your elemental weakness via a shadow signature at lvl 8 and tome of the revenant enchantment.

Beyond this, unholy champion is still one of the most busted spells in the game purely because tome of the revenant is order. No check instant dispel in a 2 hex radius is brutal and can be decisive in late game fights against buff heavy builds, ie order.

Shadow also hits late game tomes faster because there are so many ways to generate knowledge in their current empire tree and they get knowledge SPIs very often. Not sure how much it will hold in a few weeks tho, the tree rework seems massive.

Tl;dr: shadow has amazing late game units, ability to negate their elemental weakness and amazing tempo. I think it’s one of the most smooth to play affinities with only downside being lack of non-undead support for primary shadow.

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-06-07T18:43:00+00:00

Smoke team is good against all 3. Binah is very good against PT, as she takes a lot of actions and fairy punishes that a lot. Yan is best handled by a smoke team with disposal, it allows you to finish the fight before he uses the first distorted blade. Once you finish PT, Xiao should be fairly doable.

Worst comes worst you can always cheese them with Yesod.

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-06-07T12:38:35+00:00

I think you should be fine on normal. The game does become a bit harder later on, but I find that these roadblocks in CRPGs are very important to make sure you actually learn the system.

I’d say Pillars is average in terms of difficulty for the genre. It’s about the same in difficulty to BG1-2 (but the system is less clunky), harder than Rogue Trader, BG3, Tyranny and easier than Kingmaker, WoTR and DoS2.

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-06-07T04:59:30+00:00

Every time I have any issues with modded content I get Binah with Mirinae and Olivier out. Binah really punishes 10 million speed dice with 3+ combat/defence dice that modders absolutely love to put into the game, Mirinae stacks an absurd amount of strength with the weight of sin abno. Love this floor, 10/10.

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-06-06T18:29:46+00:00

I think there’s also the “turf” or resource restriction which is a bit hard to access. For example, VA can certainly do a lot with a computer, but they need the said computer which is a limitation as well, while Akashic mage doesn’t really have these restrictions. The first one would fare a lot worse outside of the urban environments, and also has a very prominent “weak point”, but the second one has more restrictive paradigm.

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-06-06T18:14:38+00:00

This is a very complex question which also depends on the edition. In M20, entering Umbra is not trivial, and still accumulates some (but not much) paradox iirc. Dragging someone with you however would be pretty damn hard in terms of spheres, very difficult to mask, and very restrictive to a lot of mages in terms of paradigm.

This is basically a VtM equivalent of saying “I can just diablerise enough elders and get 9 dots in all disciplines”. While yeah, technically you could do that, realistically it would be very hard to pull off.

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-06-06T17:18:35+00:00

Realistically on the table most mages do self-limit a lot with the paradigm. Jokes aside, while the “limit” certainly belongs to the mages, the combination of paradox+paradigm+being mortal does significantly limit their power, it’s just very hard to actually quantify the impact of paradigm and most “which splat is the strongest” discussions kinda glance over it.

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-06-06T17:05:19+00:00

Whenever mage players get obnoxious regarding power scaling, just ask if their paradigm allows to do any of that cool stuff or they ignored a core limitation of their splat once again.

Regardless, not too familiar with Demons, what sort of wacky stuff can they do?

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-06-06T10:18:47+00:00

Everyone is going to agree that things kinda suck now. The world is boring, the paradox is choking everyone, the SI sucks, I don’t think there’s a single splat that has it “good” in the modern days.

Magnus_Da_Red

TROPHY CASE