one cool thing to consider is that tier 5 chaos tome gives you a spell that summons your ruler as a combat summon who benefits from all the magical origin stuff. The only restriction is that your ruler can't be in the army. If you combine with astral reflections you can use some abilities or items you have 3 times instead of 1. I used this kind of strategy to beat a brutal game and I had 1 hero parties, so i was soloing 18 stacks with 1 hero, but only bc i use call forth avatar of chaos and astral reflection to create 3 copies of my ruler so its like 1 lvl 20 hero who summons 3 lvl 20 heros. and you add in all those magic origin spells and you can wreck anything.

Apart from the spells and units, I find the selection of good Battlemage skills and various forms of Conduit special improvements interesting. For the skills: A good Battlemage hero probably want to be a Weaver at lvl 7, and the base Battlemage skills are somewhat bland. The conduits, as long with giving a lot of other perks, provide an incredible mana production base. If you go Astral, you actually can afford an entire army of magic origin units. Btw, not specifically related to tomes, but Powerful Evoker is an incredibly useful racial trait for spell slinging. Best of it, it gives you shadow affinity, so you get the low-hanging shadow perks without necromancy or ice magic.

As a notorious Second-Screen-Watcher I can assure you, that every single one of your videos I watch, will be watched until the last nanosecond :D

Thank you so much for saying the names of what you were talking about. Super helpful

I think tome of warding would be powerfull with industrial culure with staves of warding alone. Where grant defences not only give +2 bolstered defences but also +2 bolstered resistances and each stack of it can be converted into damage and health with strenth from steel (while the ability that convert bolstered stacks into offences also give bolstered resistances itself). But it also give access to a minor race transformation that cover one of the industrial culture's greatest weakness, lack of magic resistances. Ps: If there not enough support unit to buff and heal your army, tome of astral mirror give access to summon astral reflection to boost the combo above to ridiculous proportion with no downside (since you won't need to attack with your support unit) and mirror veil is just the cherry on top of the cake. Pps: I'm aware that mystic culture T3 unit can destroy that combo with a single aoe ability which make spellbreaker insanly strong against strategies like this. Usually, When there rivalry/oppossition beween two forces, I expect them to fight on equal part. But when I look at industrial/materium against mythic/astral, everything that industrial/materium rely on to beat their opponents (physical defences, enchant and buff accumulation over time), mythic/astral just supress it (magical damage, instant enchant and buff supression) even if industrial use astral tome to give themself magical resistances.

Watchers are also immune to flancking ;) Amlified arrows also do 30% to one nearby enemy (debuffs included) 😅

Do the effects to increase magic damage from the hero's passive and the pylon from t2 stack? Or a few summoned pylons?

Does arcane surge work for enemy spells as well ? Does it activate before the enemy spell takes affect or after ?

In my opinion, Astral and Nature are the top tier affinities, with Order, Chaos, and Dark in the next tier, and Materium in last place. Astral has no bad tomes, very few bad abilities or units, and the empire development track is also incredibly strong. The only thing it can't do is heal or prevent physical damage. So you need Nature or Order to take care of those needs.