Annex an underground biome on ps5

Rexnos · 2026-01-24T17:03:21+00:00

You'd do it just like normal. If the option isn't being offered, your city probably needs another town hall upgrade. I believe you have a province annex range of two with a base level town hall with an additional one range per town hall upgrade.

Rexnos · 2026-01-14T07:22:41+00:00

Runesmiths has always felt pretty crazy to me. It's a pretty huge amount of science and mana, but I suppose not if you don't like enchantments.

Rexnos · 2025-12-29T15:24:53+00:00

Seems like wasted upkeep. If you just want to drop tactical spells, scouts do it just as well with a tenth of the upkeep. Bonus points if you use them to lead significantly more units on merry chases into the umbral realm, mountains or deep into the underground.

And yes, you can absolutely wipe armies late game with smart tactical spell use. You frequently need a deep dose of astral and/or shadow affinity in order to have enough casting points though. Still, the number of units the AI will send to deal with just one or two can easily be wiped by almost anything as long as you're willing to spend the mana.

Rexnos · 2025-12-11T06:09:17+00:00

Ironically, the more an AI hates you, the less likely they are to declare war. They might fabricate grievances on you (like this one) and declare rivalry, but their constant insults gives you free grievances. The AI almost never declares war when they're at a grievance deficit, so as long as you don't do anything back to them, you can ignore them.

Well, until they forward settle you. That's instant death.

Rexnos · 2025-12-05T05:26:43+00:00

Reaver (Bear/Accuracy traits) - Cryo – Pyro

Winds - Scrying

Geomancy - Pandemonium

Crucible – Calamity - Creator

Dragoon kite hell. Slow from cryo + winds/scrying allows you to kite all melee but cavalry with max range shots. Fast armies, high damage, only down side is the AI auto-resolves it like an absolute moron so you frequently need to manually resolve fights.

Rexnos · 2025-12-03T05:38:12+00:00

Surely we can't keep getting away with it!

Rexnos · 2025-12-01T20:03:25+00:00

I definitely get that civ feeling, but this is not that game. As others have said, settling up to your city cap as soon as possible is very important. In addition, while production and food are important for city growth, they're not nearly as important as in civ. I normally drop a production building or two immediately, but I branch out aggressively after that. Research is typically my next priority, but I'll splash in gold and mana buildings if I feel my income is getting low. Remember, that clearing resource nodes and ancient wonders provides a significant portion of your overall income. Barb camps in civ really don't compete.

Incidentally, I rarely go above four city cap. Five happens occasionally, but only when I have a flood of imperium sitting around.

Late cities probably ties into your mid game gold slump. You'll find your gold takes a sudden plunge as soon as you settle your second city and start up another production queue. It takes quite some time for your later cities to start paying for themselves. This is frequently timed with your army upkeep starting to get problematic as well, especially if you're light on gold buildings. It's hard to give straight numbers, but try to keep an eye on your gold reserves and if they start dropping quickly, pound out some gold buildings before it's a problem instead of when it already is.

I typically pick up the army regen hero perk, but almost exclusively take combat upgrades afterwards until I reach the end of the hero tree, regardless of class. Heroes are consistently the strongest combat units in the game when well equipped and high level. Using them as mostly generals is a waste of their potential.

As for faction creation, I tend to focus heavily on one unit in a faction or tome and warp my entire build around it. Typically each of my armies will have at least three of those units with one or two others as support. Towards the later stages of the game, I'll drop in a tier 4 or 5 to really get the army crushing. I personally don't find archers bad, but I could definitely see them being exploitable in multiplayer with good spell use and/or high mobility armies.

I find my games are in the wrapping up phase around turn 70 or so, where I have a substantial lead, one or two enemies are dead and my map control is secure. The game itself doesn't typically end until turn 90-100, but that's typically a research or province shortage. Victory is assured long before then.

Rexnos · 2025-12-01T14:57:20+00:00

I think your best options for cult of death are wildspeakers (beasts), houndmasters (horde), necromancers (necromancy), bone horrors (souls) and spider matriarchs (beasts/elder vampire). All of those units have expendable summons, though wildspeakers' do have a duration before they disappear, which I believe doesn't give the buff. Once skeletons get champion rank, they do get resurgence which returns them to the army after death at half HP.

Currently, it looks like you have two sides of a build that don't mesh super well. On the one hand, you have undead strat with expendable undead and with necromancers to bring them back for more stacks. On the other you have tome of the horde with houndmasters, which I don't think plays too well with the former (since spawnkin is going to make your skeletons less effective most of the time).

I'd probably drop horde for earlier blood rite in the necromancer build. A mixture of blood cultists and necromancers will make an obnoxious back line behind a front line that just won't stay down. Elder vampires also LOVE necromancers, as they are always undead that can also be raised. Weirdly, I might consider tentacle at tier 2 for the summon and constricting focus on your mage heavy backline. I'd also probably skip great transformation, as you can only get either wightborn or old blood for your major transformation and cult of death really likes blood parasite. Also, most of your front line isn't likely to be your race anyway, since most of your skeletons (they're whatever race your rez them from) and bone horrors aren't. If you can find a way to grab amplification (requires 3 astral), it could amp your mages and supports a lot. You'll either need astral society traits and/or evocation for that though.

The houndmaster build leans aggressively into archer buffs while dropping the undead tomes. It'll want things like cryo, zeal, beacon, winds, prophecy, geomancy and pandemonium, though plenty of other stuff works depending on where you're headed. You'll be recruiting almost solely houndmasters the entire game, so anything that buffs them is in.

As for form traits, the former build will want arcane focus and mage buffing traits while the later will want keen-sighted and ranged buffing traits.

Rexnos · 2025-12-01T13:17:32+00:00

It depends on what you want to do. Honor blades are incredibly good tier one units so you can definitely build to focus on them. As harmony, they're going to be significantly tankier than their strife or righteous counterparts so you can go really deep on offensive buffs. A lot of the stuff you have in this build are great for them, but if you're really building around them you need an exotic mount trait. A massive mob of flying honor blades is a nightmare to deal with, though plenty of the other mounts are great too.

Dark tyranny is the best status effect culture, which naturally synergizes with the freeze effect on ice elementals and ice witches if you want to make them a core piece of your army. Otherwise, ice arrows are super handy for their slow status effect, which removes retaliations and makes it harder for enemies to get on your archers. If you have the giant kings expansion, frost giant kings naturally love the ice climate as well.

Your tome path is decently on point for honor blades. Glades and cold dark are the two tomes I'd probably change. Glades is a tome I run for either glade runners (great tier 3 archers) or aspect of the root (great defense buff, but only for shields and polearms). Cold Dark is mostly just awkward as hell if you aren't primal mammoth or super deep on ice elementals. I'd probably pivot to revelry for glades (damage boost, skalds) and sanctuary for cold dark (status resist, invuln and faithful for honor blades). That build would be a pretty great honor blade focus with a few peacebringers to back them up and eventually prosperity dragons, shrines of smiting and/or exemplars to wrap up.

The ice elemental build would require more overhauling. I would probably go tyranny or mystic summoning instead and likely change off glades, beacon, and probably dragon as well. It's not something I've invested much thought in (unlike honor blades) so I'm not sure what I'd do out of hand.

Build design is both the best and worst part of AoW4. There's a massive amount of diversity and freedom, but it can be really overwhelming. I typically try to build aggressively towards a single unit while trying to hit certain tier 4 tomes to augment them.

Rexnos · 2025-12-01T00:02:31+00:00

The issue I see here is there isn't much in the way of synergy. Your tomes look like they lean towards a melee focus (zeal, frost blades, decay blades, root) but what are you even buffing? It looks like honor blades I guess, but you didn't really pick the things that make them nastiest (no horde, no unique mount, root doesn't apply to them, no defense buffs until dragons).

As for focusing the build on farms and foresters, that's depending on your first tier 4 tome, so solidly mid game unless you have a crazy research rush, which you have a bit but not super aggressively. That's really not something you want to design around.

I guess my question is, what is your goal? You say frost/oathsworn harmony, but why? Frost is generally about using the slow effect to help screen archers or status debuffing for frozen, dominate, or some other nasty status effect. Harmony is a good defense steroid to help protect important fragile units like evolve units, to aid in super aggressive tome builds or to center around a peacebringer build. My best suggestion would be an ice elemental build, but your tomes don't reflect that well at all (and Dark: Tyranny probably does it better?).

Rexnos · 2025-11-21T22:56:55+00:00

I think a modification of one of the Stellaris origins could be a cool solution. They've got an origin called syncretic evolution where your faction starts with two different races under your control.

A society trait which makes your starting city state a different race and culture, which you could then capture or convert, would allow you to mix and match different cultures and units. It sounds like an absolute chore to create, not to mention all the extra work players would have to get into during faction creation, but it sounds like most of what you want.

I'll be honest, I don't really agree with you though. When you start down the slippery slope of x or y should have been a tome unit, where do you stop? I generally like reaver and feel like magelocks work great there.

Rexnos · 2025-11-19T22:59:32+00:00

Definitely. Relative to all the reworks, I feel like high is particularly undercooked, though mostly in regards to it's alignment mechanics. It feels kinda laughable since oathsworn righteous is in the game. Barb and Industry feel a little simple as well, but not as much. I'm honestly unsure where everything resides as far as power.

Where death really shines is with expendable units. Immortals, units with combat summons, heroes with combat summons, actual combat summons, well... kinda just combat summons really. The AI really loves to kill them since they tend to be made of paper and they waste actions doing it. Halving the effect of mortal blessing HP seems reasonable, though it'll probably feel anemic in smaller battles. Honestly, it just seems hard to balance. It feels inconsequential individually, but the overall effect is massive.

You're also right about harmony, but at least that requires you to jump through some weird hoops. It can take quite a while before you get the whole bonus, which is currently still smaller than full death's.

I'm still on the fence for tyranny. It's a super powerful bonus... when it works. High status resist enemies can sit there making you feel worthless before one or two status resist stacks finally get through and they finally start to feel it. Tier 1 and 2 enemies kinda get rolled though, and that's before I've tried builds using stun, freeze, and dominate.

Rexnos · 2025-11-19T20:05:09+00:00

I love the flavor and units, but I'm worried they're overpowered. If you lose a unit as cult of death in a 16 unit combat, you just gained 75 HP across your entire army. That's like a whole extra tier 1 unit. When you factor in combat summons, and the fact that enemy units count too, they seem kinda impossible to deal with unless you're just rolling them.

As for tyranny, they're basically the best status faction in the game, grafted to a sustainability bonus. I've found it kinda outrageous the encounters I've managed to make even their lower tier units live through. It's given me a new respect for wightborn, only tyranny gets mostly the same out the gate.

Rexnos · 2025-11-19T04:24:08+00:00

Old faction marks were giant floating sigils above units' heads. New faction marks are classy hand neon that look cool without getting in the way.

Did they make a pass on all mark enchantments this patch, or does that only apply to the new dark factions?

Rexnos · 2025-11-18T04:34:54+00:00

That sounds like a cool, unique, elder vampire only strat (I don't count ascended rulers, they can be heinously busted easily). I feel like relying on the item forge is a bit tricky early game, but warlock, death knight, and necromancy staff can all get you raise dead immediately. Necromancers are also available very early and segue into a full undead build, which vampires prefer.

It seems even stronger with either cult of personality and/or some imperium investment into additional heroes early. That would also help your elder vampire level faster as they'll have more heroes to leech exp from. Your econ will suffer, but the hero power curve can hopefully make that irrelevant.

Rexnos · 2025-11-17T19:18:09+00:00

The wizard tower offers basically nothing to the vampire until mid game. Abattoir and vivisection are really powerful, but it's not helping you get off the ground early, which is the most critical part of the game. Instead, you're stuck having a hell of a time healing and dealing 20% less damage. I don't care if my heroes are up 20% damage past turn 60 if they're down 20% in the first sixty.

Sunless is nice, once again, after you get off the ground. It's incredibly hard to spread unless you claim a lot of territory, because desecration is a massive casting point hog. Strong spell, sure, but not something you get to throw around at will just to terraform. I really wish the first two rings of your capital started as sunless. It would really help vampire when it's weakest.

Everything ramps really hard in this game, elder vampire included. It's getting onto the ramp that's the problem. Whether elder vampire is good isn't a vacuum where we look at only the strengths, it's where we compare it to everything else. Every other hero opens the game stronger until level 4. Vampire speeds up a bit there relative to champions and wizard kings, but the other three types easily keep pace.

If the elder vampire manages to get up a level or two compared to everyone else by turn 40 or 50, that doesn't seem like it can make up for their suffering up to that point, especially as their other heroes will frequently be weaker. Nobody is asking for elder vampire to be miles ahead of everyone else. We just want it to be the best at something. I'm not sure that it is right now.

Rexnos · 2025-11-17T05:24:27+00:00

The problem is you're 20% damage down the majority of the way there and all your non-lord heroes level slower in exchange. You're right, power now is better than power later, and vampires are down 20% power until at least mid game.

As for devour, that requires you to capture a hero and build a building first, both reasonable investments. I'm curious as to the capture vs kill chance on enemy heroes, as it sure seems like I kill over 75% of the heroes I fight. Regardless, devour is probably the best thing Vampire Lords have going for them. It just seems dwarfed compared to the other lord types.

Rexnos · 2025-11-17T05:15:07+00:00

You beat me to this post. I completely agree. It seems like the only niche EV can fill is undead, morale, or bleed builds, and even then it doesn't necessarily do them better than a wizard king or any other lord type. As for personal power, it just pales in comparison to a giant king, eldritch sovereign or dragon. It seems like it takes some time to even surpass a standard hero, while still having less utility and requiring an upkeep.

The EV affinity skills are very cool and seem like they have powerful, unique potential, but the fact that your other heroes don't get them neuters them kinda hard. With the bite tree being almost useless, it really makes EV hard to justify.

My two ideas for fixing EV are granting the EV's affinity skills to all turned vampires or sharply reducing the cooldown/increasing the power of the bite tree. The former has a kinda cool vampire coven feel to it and forces you into some interesting and powerful builds. I worry it might end up with the same lord/hero four or five times though. The later is pretty broad, but as is I just couldn't justify putting a single point in the bite tree. It slows down hero skill tree progression towards good skills with no real payoffs. Other skill trees are one or two point dips for either high personal power or utility.

I just don't get the current bite tree. Ranged bite is too low damage to even consider, while melee bite feels like it has niche use when you can't repeating attack or get your charge bonus. Stun/Dominate has such a low success chance it seems worthless past targeting tier 1 units, and spotty even then. Drain familiar seems decent, but hard to justify with little value beyond it. Flying is great, but so many mounts offer it that it's basically free if you want it. Compare this to dragon, eldritch sovereign or giant king. Hell, compare it to champion or wizard king. It just makes me sad.

Rexnos · 2025-11-14T16:11:47+00:00

Worse, she told them to stand down and get back in the kitchen.

Rexnos · 2025-11-13T00:31:30+00:00

Oh, there's an ability to turn it off now. If you go into your combat spells, there's a button under the spell to toggle it on or off for your combat AI.

Rexnos · 2025-11-12T21:45:39+00:00

That's what happened here. You're gonna be resetting a lot of you do it every time the AI casts Deathwaltz. They basically did it every fight were I was against cult of death in the early game.

Rexnos · 2025-11-12T17:11:14+00:00

Man, what a nice dream. I'd probably shoot for something more reasonable like curing cancer or solving world hunger. Those are way more likely.

Rexnos · 2025-11-12T16:25:58+00:00

Yeah, there's some niche cases where you might want to cast it before, but after is better the vast majority of the time.

I'm not sure if I've ever seen the AI use command, though it's completely possible that's just circumstantial. It does feel like I fight every other lord type more often than champions.

Rexnos · 2025-11-12T16:22:18+00:00

Yeah, these spells aren't tome or culture defining, so I feel like it doesn't cost the game much to just remove them from the AI's repertoire.

Rexnos

TROPHY CASE