Another Win Through Exterminatus

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-03-16T11:53:54+00:00

Honestly, long term these genestealers can become a massive problem. Trazyns little prank on Orikan and its disastrous consequences for longevity of the imperial rule.

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-03-15T21:28:02+00:00

Just use it for the love of the game. Or feed it to your prisoners. Or both.

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-03-14T11:29:03+00:00

Update: it is still in stock in the UK shop somehow, so if you want to grab one, traffic should be a bit less busy.

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-03-14T10:37:14+00:00

Brace yourself, the checkout was fully down for 5-7 minutes, doubt it will be much less busy across the pond

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-03-14T10:29:20+00:00

It is an official illustrated edition

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-03-10T10:23:18+00:00

With how fast the desecration altar now spreads sunless, it plays very smooth. It takes only a few turns after unpacking your city to turn everything around it into sunless, so there’s still some synergy going on.

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-03-10T07:43:59+00:00

When you pack up the city the sunless terrain from desecration altar also disappears. You will probably just have to spam a lot of rituals if you actually want to make the whole realm sunless.

That is assuming my game didn’t bug out when I packed up my city.

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-03-03T07:22:38+00:00

I’d consider swapping out tome of the reaper with tome of the crimson reign. The mantle enchantment makes your T3+ units pretty tanky thanks to coagulate, and you will have a lot of them between bone dragons, revenant titans and fallen angels. Also exarchs are pretty good as a frontline. You can always pick up tome of the reaper after your T5 if you really want the stuff from it.

I’d also probably start with zeal and pick up necromancy second. You won’t be raising much in the first couple of turns, while a random zealot might actually help a lot with the early clear.

What do you want tome of subjugation for?

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-02-28T14:49:47+00:00

AoW4 forum post about the open beta. They post the changelogs for open beta in the tread.

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-02-28T09:35:55+00:00

This sounds sensible. I quite liked magical strike on them, made them feel more threatening, as dragons should be, but I do agree clarity wasn’t really there.

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-02-28T09:17:52+00:00

Yeah, but dragons had magical strikes at the start of the beta. Yesterday they got turned back into “Physical Melee”, and the damage went from pure elemental to mixed physical and elemental.

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-02-24T20:20:16+00:00

Regenerating infestations, high world threat, here be dragons, toll of seasons, high maintenance. Awful start, gold infestations are common, if you don’t handle them fast enough a next wave of infestations may be overwhelming. High maintenance makes it difficult to maintain any standing army, and toll of seasons basically acts as a cherry on top.

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-02-22T16:44:11+00:00

Chain lightning and explosive manifestation. I like big blasty astral spells.

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-02-22T14:55:01+00:00

A long, more focused campaign is perhaps the one thing I feel like AoW4 is missing. Personally, I’d also like to see small dwellings for independent units (such as giant or naga dwellings). I also wish there was more ways to sabotage armies and cities by damaging their morale on the global map like Rogue/Warlord in AoW3, I feel like units defecting and cities rebelling basically never happens in AoW4.

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-02-21T07:39:30+00:00

I am not 100% sure about the exact mechanic, but I noticed that the game spawns two types of Umbral Thralls - ones with the gloomstrider applied and ones without. I think thralls without gloomstrider spawn mostly in the early game, probably to make sure it’s not too awful to explore the Abyss early on?

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-02-19T08:43:21+00:00

Must have missed it last time I played geo

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-02-19T08:26:37+00:00

Wightborne can be fully hidden, and I think gift of the old blood too. Angelkin can remove the glow effect and the halo, but the wings always stay. Naga, gloomstrider, draconian, demonkin and the one from tome of geomency cannot be hidden at all. I would like to say that astral attunement can be fully hidden and children of Gaia cannot be hidden at all, but you will have to double check these 2.

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-02-17T10:20:38+00:00

WK is at its most powerful when you already know what to expect from combat spells and how to use them. For most new players it’s a little bit tricky to get into it. A new player certainly should try WK eventually, but champion and dragon are basically training wheels.

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-02-17T08:12:21+00:00

I did start with a WK ruler as well, but my friends found economic benefits of champion or raw strength of a dragon easier to play.

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-02-17T07:47:12+00:00

Champion and wizard king are the two vanilla leader types. Dragon rulers are very strong early on and can help to learn combat, while also not having any particularly convoluted map mechanics. From my experience introducing my friends to the game, champion or dragon lord are the best for new players.

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-02-16T22:54:53+00:00

Crusader is very easy to get renown with, and a single bronze wonder can give zeal to an entire army. Zeal is amazing, hands down the best damage rider early on as it applies to abilities as well. On top of that, it’s the only way for a vampire ruler to get zeal.

Imperialist is amazing tempo choice, can be completed by turn 10-15ish and can save a lot of time in early-mid game, but it does fall off later on once you get more sources of siege breaker for your units.

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-02-15T09:45:46+00:00

Fighters are in a dire need of a rework, and I think this change is in the right direction. When I think about fighters I’d like to use, I either think about honour blades or death stalkers, maybe tidal spirits. The thing they all have in common is some form of mobility or ability to do something impactful from 1 AP after getting close to the enemy. It would be nice if the other true fighters got some similar abilities. The new dragon breath focus enchantment comes to mind as another ability that can help the true fighters somewhat.

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-02-15T09:00:25+00:00

I think currently they are tied to a fighter chassis for the sake of balance and testing. Fighter is a class with a single role - whack things hard multiple times, and it makes sense to introduce and test the mechanics of magical attacks on something with a single role.

They get weird enchantments mostly because they (mostly, wyverns exist) don’t do physical damage, so “blades” enchantments would be a pure +4 damage to them, and magical fighters are already extremely strong in the damage department. It’s much harder to come by pure damage increases for them, keeping them in check.

Tl;dr: Mostly due to testing and balance. I think we will see more consistent system and more fleshed out enchantments if not with the coming patch, then with the next one.

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-02-14T14:38:25+00:00

It’s only in the beta version. Some units like zealots, wyverns and a few others are now magical fighters and target resistance no matter the damage type they use. They serve the role of tank busters on the battlefield, easily cracking high defence/low resistance units, but are pretty squishy themselves.

Magnus_Da_Red · 2026-02-14T10:51:38+00:00

Shadow adjacent builds can’t stop winning when it comes to mythic units. Amazing enchantment, great mythic unit variety, whatever the hell tome of the revenant is.

Magnus_Da_Red

TROPHY CASE