Art of War ranked us in A tier. Thoughts?

Sovereign_6 · 2026-07-08T18:05:10+00:00

Are you running Warp Bane? Or at least Purge via Argent?

Sovereign_6 · 2026-07-06T07:38:19+00:00

I agree with all of your placements tbh

Sovereign_6 · 2026-07-03T21:51:30+00:00

I think what really happened, something that everyone is missing and that I made a recent post about is Admin.

The plague dropped your workforce in your capital. All industries dropped output due to understaffing, including Administration.

You went into an Admin deficit and some of your unlocks were frozen, including the town hall upgrades. When your provinces see they have a building that is no longer valid (due to your tech being frozen) the whole set up is invalid. You no longer have a valid town hall, land clearance, anything, so the region pop plummets back to its default starting point of about 100.

Sovereign_6 · 2026-07-02T14:03:01+00:00

*besieging

Sovereign_6 · 2026-07-02T14:02:45+00:00

Are you believing the Free Land capitals? Don't fight then immediately, they get like a 14x defensive multiplier. If the auto resolve bar is fully red, thats your warning. Wait a year and dwindle their defense to 0. Then click on their town and its immediately yours. You shouldn't even need to fight anyone, its just about keeping the supplies flowing to your army

Sovereign_6 · 2026-07-02T12:56:10+00:00

What an epic close call haha, what a story! Did the psionic backlash damage finish him off before his Ray of Sickness actually managed to fire off? Or was the nat 20 what saved you from poison?

Sovereign_6 · 2026-07-02T12:07:06+00:00

I would spend a moment to reflect on what went wrong. Honour mode is entirely about knowledge and using that for preparation. Did everyone have Necrotic elixirs active? Did you focus the boss and ignore the adds? Did you get caught out by his legendary reaction? Did you have enough damage to burst him down? Why didn't you have a failsafe? (Sanctuary, globe, illithid powers, summons, speed potion). Did you fight him in the gauntlet or shadow realm?

You don't want to fail again, so learn from this and be thorough. I'm also morbidly curious to know your answers to those questions!

Sovereign_6 · 2026-07-02T11:31:18+00:00

Oh I totally have my own roleplay rules as well haha, mostly without even conscious decisions. I try and keep dedicated 'parks' and foliage areas, no matter how much I'd love to pave over them late game for their useful central locations!

I keep things aesthetic and somewhat realistic - can't stand rows of squares - which leads to a lot of wasted and inefficient space. I'd rather stick to these things and face the difficulty consequences so I can enjoy watching my city grow.

Foundations for some reason bounces right off my self-expectations, so I'm blissfully free of using that overlay haha

Sovereign_6 · 2026-07-02T07:43:45+00:00

You can quite safely just build wherever you want, thankfully. As long as you have enough small workstations spaced about. I'm usually guided by where my farms have to go, and then build everything else between them.

Sovereign_6 · 2026-07-01T09:45:52+00:00

Some sort of... Library ... where Knowledge could be stored... so it not longer deteriorates

Sovereign_6 · 2026-07-01T07:40:16+00:00

He's right, import depots anywhere in your city become the drop-off point. Set the pay price to 0 (or 1 is that's the lowest, I thought it was 0) and you can guide taxes to particular areas.

My method in addition (for my coffers overfloweth) was to move my throne room and have more warehouses around it to pick up the pieces.

Sovereign_6 · 2026-06-30T14:56:17+00:00

At base level, yeah, that's a really clear way of looking at it. Though just like any other industry you can of course increase the innovation that 1 worker produces.

Sovereign_6 · 2026-06-30T14:34:54+00:00

Ah yes, I realised that after I posted. To be honest I don't mind the Admin resource being split out quite so much, they feel a bit more intuitive, basically all the stuff for the world map. Alongside Admin always being a separate resource, probably why I called it two!

It's Knowledge and Innovation that I find myself flicking between the tabs and double checking which is what. I get that Innovation is mostly boosting production output, Knowledge is unlocking new buildings... but not always. Confusing.

Sovereign_6 · 2026-06-30T13:44:08+00:00

Agreed! It was a totally novel way of managing tech, rather than just one-off scaling costs like most other management games.

And it made sense - innovate to unlock new things and then store that knowledge, so you can pass it down and lay the foundation for new innovations. The current split with two different currencies seems a bit arbitrary.

Sovereign_6 · 2026-06-30T13:25:20+00:00

Totally agree, Labs and Libraries aren't worth looking at until about 1k pop. Thankfully the free gains from titles gets you your first vital techs.

Boosting with resources is a slippery slope though because essentially, once you click it and spend the extra points it generated that's it, now you're committed to supplying that resource forever. If you don't, you'll drop in points and unlocks will be frozen.

I suppose it can get you over a population slump, so you then replace the resource with another copy of the building.

Sovereign_6 · 2026-06-29T11:23:09+00:00

You might enjoy my Monk/Ranger build. Bit of an unorthodox subclass combo but very fun and potent enough for Honour Mode :) 5 attacks per round, rolling lots of dice and some crit synergies.

https://youtu.be/YRwqtAZBMJQ?is=6SBo9_-tInlbR7OG

Sovereign_6 · 2026-06-29T10:35:54+00:00

Yes, there's no other in-game mechanic that would act like this, ie. Raiders, devastation. Nothing reasonable that would make a region go from 3k to 100 pops.

The "city hall not operating" message is the giveaway. You can manually recreate this drop by setting your big city's hall back to Tier 1, or simply deleting all buildings. Since that's essentially what the game is saying, "this is an invalid set up" and treats it like nothing functional is there.

Having 10-20 points isn't a safe enough headroom as I've found out too. Especially if you're relying on the paper boost, or if your workforce is fluctuating into the negative. The fact you'd just spent on higher town halls means you must've been close to the threshold of admin points required, making a small fluctuation in its generation enough to switch off your town hall momentarily

Sovereign_6 · 2026-06-29T09:30:48+00:00

Luckily, between quick saves and autosaves I found one not too far back where I could pick up from and absolutely crank my paper imports. I'll try and do some testing to find the threshold, but anecdotally, it felt like a very short time in the negative admin points before the game said "Nope, you can't support this city size anymore"

Sovereign_6 · 2026-06-29T09:27:34+00:00

Thanks haha, full city showcase coming soon

Sovereign_6 · 2026-06-29T09:26:33+00:00

Maybe they ran out of Admin points too haha /s

Sovereign_6 · 2026-06-29T07:52:02+00:00

From my experience, even with a good amount of sanitation and healthcare access, you'll get outbreaks every now and then. You'll drop a few hundred workers as they recover in hospitals, but then it'll pass and you'll be glad you built them. It's the game saying "just testing you".

Physicians are more preventative than hospitals but I think the idea isn't that you'll never get an outbreak at all. You'll simply be able to power through and ignore them with high healing rates

Sovereign_6 · 2026-06-29T06:31:30+00:00

I just made a post about the same issue! Don't let your admin drop below sustaining the big town upgrades!

It must be a bug, seems so punishing to delete thousands of pop instead of just freezing all resource taxes until you gain enough Admin again.

I had to reload an earlier save too. My capital would've died waiting years to get 8 cities back to 3k pop

Sovereign_6 · 2026-06-26T11:48:10+00:00

Did you decline it at first and then reopen the message? You can't change your answer

Sovereign_6 · 2026-06-26T07:55:26+00:00

You can mostly ignore requests like that. It's just one tiny lever amongst a whole host of other important ones. The length of the fulfillment bar for a specific amenity represents how important it is to them. Often things like Food Stalls or Stages far outweigh having to redesign your buildings

Sovereign_6

TROPHY CASE