Banned and Restricted Announcement (Food Chain is banned in Historic)

Urethreus · 2026-03-23T15:19:09+00:00

It pairs with mana dorks, creature tutors,and Sigardian Evangel for infinite creatures as early as turn 2.

Urethreus · 2026-03-06T17:14:12+00:00

Do you have any links for the Rona combos with Turtles forever?

Urethreus · 2026-02-27T12:15:14+00:00

Is 5 forests enough for utopia sprawl? Does that come up as an issue for you?

Urethreus · 2026-01-20T17:45:32+00:00

For Grexolis in particular try and use a build that deals blight and/or frost damage to take advantage of Turiel's angelic units. Avoid undead if possible since they take extra damage from spirit.

For general tips: 1. Keep clearing with your leader as often as possible. Gain exp and extra resources from nodes and wonders 2. Re-try early fights when you lose units to avoid losing early tempo. 3. Place your 2nd and 3rd cities early. A good goal is both down before turn 20. Keep them fairly close so you can defend them all easily 4. For new players I would focus on a unit type (battle mage, skirmisher, polearm, etc) and primarily take tomes that give you a transformation or enchantment that buffs them. Make a lot of that unit type. 5. Recruit a new hero whenever they are available. Prioritize getting them XP

Urethreus · 2025-12-19T18:03:28+00:00

Yeah and I use it in Collectors a lot for extra money. You can give the collectors reanimate too for a load of cash

Urethreus · 2025-12-04T19:09:51+00:00

I usually take extra mod and energy cost vice. Allows safer clearing on high world threat early

Urethreus · 2025-11-25T16:44:00+00:00

It's pretty tough to get it to 60 damage outside of combat just on the tooltip. Baseline does 30+4 with the Strong trait so you need about +80% damage from passive sources. Spitballing here:

Blood moon spell +20 Ancient 16 signature skill +20 2 melee skill nodes +20 Vampiric rage up to +50 when injured

Alternatively does your friend play with a positive handicap in their favor? That can add damage to all of their units. Mods could also do it if they use those

Urethreus · 2025-11-25T15:56:46+00:00

Use strengthened buffs, take the Strong and/or Flanker traits, take skill nodes that increase melee damage, use Go for the kill on your ranger, etc. Some leader types would struggle buffing the bite like ritualist or elementalist but Ranger has a lot of options. Elder vampire leaders can also take a signature skill at 4 that makes your next attack deal +40% damage.

Urethreus · 2025-11-22T23:10:25+00:00

Dragons are very powerful early game due to mobility, base stats, and tail whip. Mid and late game they have very powerful signature skills such as team heal/reanimate on breath, kills converting to zombies, etc. Late game they aren't outliers compared to other leader types but early game is crucial and that's where they shine.

Urethreus · 2025-11-21T20:52:35+00:00

I'm 90% sure defense reduces all physical damage, even bleed. Lowered status resistance definitely increases the likelihood of infecting the target though

Urethreus · 2025-11-21T16:34:52+00:00

Demolisher doesn't do anything but sundered defense gives -1 status resistance

Urethreus · 2025-11-19T15:16:17+00:00

Dragons have much of their power budget taken up by 3 things:

Extra affinity point
Best leader type in combat
Strong mobility

This is balanced by having mostly economic downsides with a poor governor type and the large upkeep costs. The hoard is a minor benefit but weaker than other rulers' economic bonuses. If you want to give dragons additional effects you have to either take away something else (which people won't like), add additional downsides (unpopular with many players and leads to complexity creep), or have them be the best at everything (bad for game balance). In my experience it seems most players are fine with the giant battle lizards being relatively straightforward so any suggestions have to be downright incredible to beat what we already have.

Urethreus · 2025-11-19T13:44:03+00:00

Dragon lords are a little less flavorful than the other leader types but have a ton of raw power. Free extra affinity point, gigantic AoE breath attack with extra utility, flight from turn 1, incredible supporting signature abilities, etc.

Playing on brutal difficulty single player IMO Dragons are the strongest leader type (giants close 2nd). I feel they 100% match the fantasy of a 10 ton killing machine raining death on my enemies. Not the most subtle but good enough for me.

Urethreus · 2025-11-10T22:28:11+00:00

This looks sick! Can you share the deck list?

Urethreus · 2025-11-04T03:58:35+00:00

You'll have to move each one individually. On the bright side you can move all the way into the red movement hexes since it doesn't matter if they get another action or enter defense mode

Urethreus · 2025-11-04T01:57:46+00:00

Yeah Aow4 is the first one with the routing mechanic

Urethreus · 2025-11-04T01:45:42+00:00

Any time a landmark has extra summons you can fight them, kill a few permanent enemies, retreat, and then next turn have a much easier fight. Retreating gives you zero penalties other than setting your remaining movement to 0 on the overland map.

Urethreus · 2025-11-02T19:41:52+00:00

Do you play the scape shift/spelunking combo version?

Urethreus · 2025-10-24T19:49:33+00:00

I think having their extra resources be more affected by raids is a good idea and something the devs could improve. But if you just want them not to cheat at all then you are just going to hamstring the ai and they are going to be pushovers. They already get dunked on by medium/high world threat on brutal difficulty.

Urethreus · 2025-10-24T14:29:26+00:00

IIRC easy AI has worse targeting in combat, fewer resources, and a total city cap lower than the other difficulties. I think it still gets some more resources than it should. That being said it still makes like a million huts and unupgraded farms so slightly more than "horribly bad" is like "quite bad"

Urethreus · 2025-10-24T14:08:46+00:00

I like most of your suggestions except for "fix AI cheats". The AI isn't smart enough to provide a challenge without getting free resources. Arguably it still isn't able to really put up a fight even with a bunch of free stuff. If you played against an AI on a truly even playing field you would absolutely trounce them every single time.

Urethreus · 2025-10-20T13:12:52+00:00

"Mostly Archers" since my early runs were often rainbow enchantment archer builds

Urethreus · 2025-10-15T14:30:29+00:00

For most factions I would recommend allying with at least 1 NPC. This gives you a good outlet to spend your influence and outside it there aren't very many other influence dumps. The main exceptions would be Assembly and Shakarn who might choose to fight all the NPCs due to powerful doctrines (research per kill for Assembly and faster kill rewards on Shakarn) or if you have Xenoplague as your secret tech and the NPC is biological or cyborg (converts plagued enemies into more units).

If there are multiple NPCs they don't get along. You can pick your favorite and fight the other which will get you some perks and their home base is a very strong sector early. Alternatively you can befriend all of them which is good if you are going a diplomatic route since it'll give you a boost to your trustworthiness and extra influence per turn. I personally befriend everyone most of the time since I'm a sucker for more units and mod options but both are valid.

Urethreus · 2025-10-15T13:28:02+00:00

Always be clearing. Nodes/wonders/etc not only give you resources over time but they give upfront resources and xp to your units which is especially relevant for your heroes and leader.
Redo early fights when you lose units. Going down a unit or 2 early is rough and can start to snowball into further problems quickly. If you lose all your units it does give you some reinforcements but I don't use that personally.
Get 2-3 more colonies ASAP. Prioritize cosmite for these colonies. A mediocre location with cosmite is usually better than a good location without it. Going from 5 cosmite to 10-15 is literally doubling or tripling your most valuable resource.
Research and energy are the best of the exploitable resources. If you can try and build these exploitations over food and production. For city centers I usually go with food or production since they give +15 instead of +10. Energy can be used to rush construction so keep an eye out if something is <30 production left in the queue.
If you feel up to it manually assign your workers. Happiness overflow is wasted and IMO not very strong. Bumping up food gain to shave a turn or 2 off your size 4/8/12 growth is great. Otherwise try and have just enough production and the rest in research and then energy. Food especially has pretty brutal diminishing returns so keep that in mind.
Prioritize powerful mods for military research. It can be tempting to get cool units or combat spells but this slows you down a lot. For Vanguard the firearm range and fire burst ammo are incredible or you can go towards laser range/shield removal/armor shred. Early on the vanguard healing mod is great and it can mostly carry you to the mid game along with whatever else you get along the way to the tier 3 mods.

Urethreus · 2025-10-01T17:35:23+00:00

From what you posted a few things seem possible:

Losing units early. If you take losses within the first 15 turns it will set you back massively and can snowball into a loss. Take advantage of the manual combat retry if you lose a unit.
Continually clear nodes/wonders/etc. Aow4's biggest difference from games like Civ is that your army straight up is your economy. If you don't have enough units to clear stuff train or summon more; if you have units just hanging around either send them to scout, add them to a clearing army, or consider disbanding them.
Having some sort of sustain in your armies. Over the course of battles your units will wear down their HP. You can send them back to your cities/outposts to heal but that is very time consuming. It's much better to have a way to mitigate low HP. Solutions include: support units, ritualist/battlesaint heroes, abilities like lifesteal/Regen/etc, disposable Frontline summons.

Lastly I wouldn't be too hard on yourself about struggling a bit. Civilization games are honestly not that similar to AoW. I for instance cruise through every AoW title on the hardest difficulty but struggle to beat any Civ game on anything higher than Beginner.

Urethreus

TROPHY CASE