@@VII_Spiritual Out of town at the moment, but I'm planning on getting us some good videos out when I get back (though I might also need to hop back up to my parents' place to do some dog sitting in early September).

@@wepg All good bro, just giving you some feedback. I recently started playing AoW; these guides speed up the entry to the game, help get ahead of the learning curve, and more into the fun. Anyway, you're doing good; I hope to see more.

Thanks!

Glad it helped!

Yeah, if folks find something equivalent useful I could see us doing some more general build guides for things like Barbarians or Necromancy or so forth.

Yeah, these videos are always *insanely* long but I hope breaking it down by chapters has been helpful for you; being able to break it into chunks for easy digestion is the goal.

@@wepg yup! easier to catch a break and return the next day on a clean transition between chapters, than having to pause in middle of video for sure

Yeah, I *was* planning on getting more videos like this done but then Eldritch Realms news started filtering out and it became pretty clear that I needed to play the game a bit with the new rules before making more guides. Plan is currently a bunch of streaming June, July maybe update the Tier Lists and hopefully introduce more build guides (but Tier Lists will take priority).

@@wepg sweet, great news. love your content. wish u the best.

It is planned!

Yeah absolutely, you'll need a different T5 tome then, but you should be able to afford T5 Shadow if absolutely nothing else.

@@wepg got it! you did mention picking archmage because it plays nicely with golden realm, so what's the synergy between them?

I think a MP gameplay basics could absolutely be useful, but benchmarks enter into a realm of danger where the *insanely* meta stuff can accomplish things on a scale so much faster than everything else that it kinda makes benchmarks net negative. Like, even answering your questions on delaying your 2nd city is highly contextual- if you find a T3+ Free City you can attack but the walls won't fall until like T9, you still almost always wait on the 2nd city just because of how huge it is to get a big city online ASAP which frees up the opportunity to take Shadow 1 or Nature 1 or Materium 1 before the city itself, but is map dependent.

@@wepg You're absolutely right. "MP gameplay basics" really is what I want to see, and it's obviously important to stay flexible with questions like these that are so deeply interdependent. I ask these questions not because I think they ought to have a "right answer" - as you say, leaning too hard on fixed timelines leads to a mindset that optimizes all the fun and variety out of the game - but to try and elaborate on the mindset do want to cultivate for myself. It's all checks and balances.

Thanks!

That would be cool!

As in a game playing with one of these builds, or a game *exclusively* played with and against General Builds?

@wepg a game played with the general build. And how to properly advance your economy start to finish. And again I recommend crimson caldera since it can be done with industrious and the primal try failed. It guarantees lots of mountains. And has a general list of problems for a player to fix. And your great with your explanations of what when and why so I think it will be awesome and something most of your viewers would find helpful!

I definitely want to; gotta just find the time to choose a topic and do some research. Invariably I end up watching like 12+ hours of stuff on KZfaq for like half of those videos, but that's not always a negative, just takes some dedication.

@@wepg hell yea. If I want help on the research part college just got out for me so I gotchu but either way hell yea

Enchantment and Artificing are both quite powerful. Enchantment is probably the better of the two on Industrious, especially if you are going tanky as Sundering is stronger in a longer fight, but it isn't strictly necessary. If you are going big tank, Alchemy or *something* with an AoE debuff clear is effectively mandatory. Being super tanky is excellent unless you run into Decaying, at which point it becomes terrifying. Clears/Regeneration should be a core part of your build. T5 Nature is pretty spicy. It's not as impactful as some of the other T5 tomes, but the damage is no joke, and I think people underestimate how good it is that T5 nature only has 3 spells. A bunch of other tomes honestly only have 1-2 that you are excited to research anyways, and Nature Goddess doesn't have any issues with not showing you the good stuff on unlock.

@@wepg Great advice! Now that you bring it up I did struggle a lot versus someone who was using decaying spells. You've helped me settle on my next build to try, thanks a ton! Keep up the great work, I love watching your videos whenever I am going on walks as they are so informative just listening to them is super helpful.

Dark has some serious issues with frontline that make their early game clearing in Autoresolve pretty tricky. With Tome of Souls specifically it is less complicated for Dark (just use Corrupt Souls for a while, they aren't exactly *tanks* but dropping in a bunch of cheap T3 units off of summons is often enough), but I think Industrious can make some easy arguments to skip Souls. Tbh, unless you are definitely going with a Battle Mage-oriented build *and* need the Corrupt Souls for bulking up your army, you can skip Souls even on a Necromancy build and feel fine about your life.

Highly contextual. Most of the time you get the best bang for your buck to make your ruler into at least a pseudo-support, as you don't want to be missing out on Endurance Training and Defensive Training for clearing wonders, and the ruler will take precedence to "lead" the expedition regardless of what their skill set looks like. Your first true hero, on the other hand, I generally advocate building into Warfare unless you *know* you are going to have problems with equipment. A naked warfare hero (or even just a warfare hero with really bad equipment) will generally underperform a naked Battle Magic hero in both manuals and autos, but if you can just find or make a chonky weapon that's typically enough for a warfare hero to absolutely melt faces. Killing Momentum + T4 pistol absolutely dunks on a *lot* of stuff in game right now.

@@wepg Did they remove leadership clash?

@@dzmitryzaitsau6471 Yup, didn't really matter that much for the MP sweaty community as it was pretty easy to break heroes up, and it pissed off a lot of SP folks. Personally, I think the imperium change, the hard cap and disconnecting Heroes from Cities was a great change and kinda all you needed to make heroes less disgustingly oppressive, and don't really miss the clash.

@@wepg How do I increase the pool of heroes awailable? Something like +5% crit chance is way more useful than "friend of the ogres"

I think we might be doing a video like this more often between now and the Eldritch Realms DLC drop, so other cultures or specific strategies or weird things to build around could definitely make an appearance! Keep an eye on the community tab. Next week I feel compelled to go back and clear out some of the things the people have already voted on but I watched Fallout instead, so we'll be working in more streams that folks have been waiting on, but I could see us doing more of this style of video if the demand is there.

Not that I know of, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that someone has a personal repository somewhere. As for me, I generally prefer giving people the tools they need to make fun and effective builds for *themselves*, so on the channel I'm probably going to stick to things like this video for the time being.

Manual combat is only done vs other players for a lot of reasons. First, it slows the pacing down for the other players. More importantly, manual combats vs the map are *really* efficient, like honestly more efficient than effectively everything else in the game because they are typically so easily abused. Manual combat versus other players, on the other hand, is strongly encouraged and a lot of fun.

@@wepg I see. Thanks for the answer.

@@AutorPL Personally I also like to do autoresolve only vs SP for the same reason. The manual battles vs the AI are orders of magnitude less interesting and rewarding than manuals vs humans. Once you understand how to abuse the AI in manuals, the game can very quickly be only about that and result in some serious pacing problems as you can take Gold Wonders *stupid* early.

The value there is in the extra morale damage; you are unlikely to get enemies to rout in PvP through Joy Siphoners, but if you can keep them off High morale it's effectively -20% on enemy crit chance. The tiny amounts of morale gain you miss out on by going Wightborn isn't really that mechanically impactful, as you get nothing for having 60 morale instead of 20.

@@wepg I see! Not quite sure if I fully understood what you meant by the last part. Do you mean that in general for Joy Siphoners? Or only specifically for Undead Joy Siphoners? Since their Heartless trait essentially allows them to avoid/offset getting low morale?

@@pancakes4193 For basically everyone. There's diminishing returns for maxing out your own morale, as you don't really get anything other than strategic flexibility for sacrificing units for being at 90 morale instead of 20, as that's where the +20% crit chance kicks in. So long as you can maintain that, you are getting what you need out of your morale. Wightborn shouldn't stop Joy Siphoners from getting that for you.

@@wepg Duly noted! Wow, that really changed the way I look at things. Glad I asked, and thank you for the detailed explanation.

As of the Wolf Patch, they do not appear to be both according to the encyclopedia as well as the database.

@@wepg test it ingame i just played a necromancer game reapers are magic origin

@@davidjakob1866 I'll have to open debug then because I was pretty sure they were too, but the encyclopedia within the game itself doesn't list them as such. There's also a reddit post from someone trying to use T5 Astral on their reapers and not getting haste, so ???.

@@wepg summoning a reaper give it the magic origin status not summoned reaper don't have the magic origin status

I think if you want to go big Order you can, but yeah, you basically don't use Shrines (or *maybe* a 1x in an 18 stack, but tbh if you can avoid their tome entirely great). If you were so inclined, I'd recommend looking into Bannerlords for Industrious, honestly. Don't think of it as a Free City pick where you have to go crazy and take other Free City stuff. Bannerlords gives you the ability to recruit Mythic Units *insanely* fast, and if your Order affinity is big enough you can actually use the Order Empire tree and get +medals on your early Mythics and just crush the game. You just need lots of cash because they are *expensive*, but Industrious is pretty reasonable at cash. You do have some weird overlap where the nominal recruitable top end for Order is a T4 racial shield and you have T3 racial shields on your culture, plus you'll have to take a pretty large number of Order Tomes to get where you need to go (unlike High who can float a bit longer thanks to the extra affinity), but if you want to make it work you absolutely can.

@@wepg Well, I gotta give Bannerlord a shot at some point! Sounds like it would work pretty well with Industrious, High and Serpent Primal

@@lv83bloodknight 100%. Anything with an abundance of gold should be able to leverage it quite well now that Free Cities are providing insanely good units. Even if you just find a T2 city (so anything with walls), you can get a T3 unit in your rally. Biggest downside there is that you won't have enough rally *points* initially, so you're gonna need to look around for a few of those too, but getting just 1 Free City + 1 Bronze Ancient Wonder in the first ~10 turns means you can get some really great units early and on the cheap, and unlike evolutionary summons you don't even need to do too much babysitting.

No clue how Reapers aren't Magic Origin. I was almost sure they were on the Watcher Patch, but I went back and checked T4 Tomes which was recorded then and Reapers in the Encyclopedia didn't have the tag even then. Transmuter is pretty easy to get to 100% stun even against higher status resistance enemies. Sundered Resistance and Sundered Defense both inflict -status resistance, as does Condemned or Blizzard or Flash Freeze, so you don't even need to go *crazy* to make the stun effectively guaranteed. Awakeners and Spellbreakers are both pretty solid Battle Mage options, but unless you are playing as High or Mystic, not really going to be competing with Transmuters, but they also *do* different things. Transmuters are not really intended to kill units the same way the other two are; rather, they are two support units wearing a trenchcoat.

@@wepg Sorry I don't want to sound rude but you're totally wrong about Reapers. Yeah they aren't Magic Origin units in game library but THEY ARE in game, just like animals, animals aren't magic origin units in library but they are in-game when you summon them with spells. And actually that's a thing that places Magic Origin tag - everything summoned with spells will be Magic Origin! I thought you would know it? And about transmuters , yeah I mentined sundering def and resistance to lower status resistance, but sometimes you can't get it! And condemn is even less optimal because I doubt we have any @ hex aoe spell for it? Only if you have order dragon you'll be fine for mass condemn lol. Or strategic spell, but those not always can be reliable because of Spelljammers. But perhaps because I'm not min maxing and sometimes I don't have access to those sunder effects is my problem. Anyway great video, keep the good job up!

@@IamSpiritAlpha That's what I believed wholeheartedly, but apparently someone on Reddit is experiencing issues with Reapers not getting the T5 enchantment, and is is replicable. It could be a bug, but it's one where I think we need Triumph to probably shift around the way they assign Magic Origin to be cleaner as it has weird interactions with T5 Astral.

That's mostly an advantage on the shield units than a disadvantage; Anvil Guards themselves have pretty limited options for dealing damage out but are excellent at battlefield control thanks to their taunt. You'll want to find damage on your tomes and heroes, so don't neglect getting access to something there, but it sounds like it is a build issue more than anything else. What were you working with for traits and tomes?

@@wepg I usually pick the tome of enchantment for even more production boost + one of the astral tomes. As for the traits - I tried several combos, but even the most militarised variant (resistance + hardy + defensive/strong) didn’t provide what I wanted. I’m sure the anvil guards themselves are good, but their support and ranged units die too often. I also tried playing with high and they seem to yield better results for me.

@@nsdapcommunism2780 Fortunately ranged pieces are pretty bad across the board in most situations that aren't manuals vs AI, so that's not really a big surprise. If you want to make your early game autoresolves better, I'd check out the livestream I did with Nemki maybe a month ago, but the core of it can be boiled down to "limit your ranged pieces when you can" thanks to your desire to bring 4 units and only 4 units to as many fights as you can to concentrate exp on your heroes. If you are interested in MP or autoresolves generally, you should watch some combats with ranged pieces - it's really clear that the AI can't use them without serious help, so that's not really a weakness of the Industrious autoresolve. Steelshapers, especially with Staves of Warding, do insane amounts of healing *and* strengthened, giving you the ability to take lots of fights with 1/2 HP units or solo groups in auto with a reasonable KM hero. The generic Industrious plan of "use buffs that the AI doesn't need to be fancy to get value out of" is another nice piece of the puzzle for Industrious. Enchantment is *typically* pretty big overkill for Industrious (I find it's best on Dark/Mystics/Barbarian Rush) as you don't need to build every piece of bad infrastructure in the game to have good cities. As long as you can get down Academies, Town Halls, Armories and some SPIs you really don't *need* anything else in a city for it to be good (outside of your capital where you need WT and accessories). If you haven't played around with some different tomes on Industrious, give them a whirl.

@@wepg thanks for the reply, I will definitely watch this stream!