Giant growth is another good one to stack on this culture. Increases health and adds another retaliation attack.

​@@zraal3759 Supergrowth?

@@thevoxdeus yes. My bad.

If it's a wizzard he should be named Rincewind though =)

I agree they are really bad because they are single target buffers. Late game however they are good for buffing heroes. One of them plus bolstering chant can give 4 defence to a unit then make that strengthen the next turn. Two plus a Bastion can give them 5 strengthen and 5 defence on turn 2 (and lots of healing).

This faction does not have a good tier 2 and tier 3 units and does not deal damage for some reason.

@@theslayer5978 Their halberdiers are quite nasty though. I usually switch the steelshapers for chaplains though, being able to buff more people usually trumps having a slightly stronger single target buff.

In large battles they sometimes send the melee to the front while the supports stand around buffing each other.

Yeah, this is a pretty fair point. I think with these guys it's way better to aim for crits and invest your unit enchantments somewhere else. Tome Of The Horde or any other %-Dmg Bonus applies on these guys very good, combined with crits this could make up for the lack of synergy with elemental enchants. I mean unlike other archers these guys could - in theory - move AND shoot for a lot of dmg per turn. But all in all i gotta agree that the Industrious Archers will always be a bit behind in the competition of other archers. The entire Industrious culture wants you to play the game very different on many angles and I still haven't made up my mind if they are just underpowered or I'm just too dumb to use it properly. I do deem this culture unnecessarily micro-intense though. In combat and the prospecting mechanic - it's so effing much micro with these guys. That's my personal biggest complaint about this culture. They just take so many little things to work - industrious indeed lol. But I fear other cultures will always achieve similar results with way less brain-power. In this point though I'm still experimenting ^^

@@Ic0nGaming Industrious is just painfull to play. The worst part of it : Their melee unit, due to low base damage, perform incredibly well with element enchantement, while their arbalest, which by design should be their main damage dealer, dont. The prospector thingy should also be automated like : There is auto explore, add auto prospect. And yeah, the micro management around their bolstering stack ... oh boy. It was THE culture I was the most interested in cause I totally dig this gamestyle, slow and steady, it's just that right now they just the most horrendous to play with. I'll do another try with them soon, going into another direction : I'll do a moral build. Ignoring entirely the base unit appart from the arbalest I'll build Horde book, the Zealot in order as my main melee unit then I want, as enchantement : Crit and +1 range from materium. Enhanced projectile and maybe guided projectile from astral, cruel weaponery from dark, crit and moral from chaos. Only issue with building like it is I delay major race transformation buy a LOT.

@@dorianodet8064 Yeah I hear you. I really disagree with the low base damage on the melee units cause I don't think they are otherwise that strong or sth. The entire situation would be better if the baseline damage of Industrious shield units would be higher. Or alternatively give them the friggin damage reflection trait from the spear units as well. That would at least be a good reason for lowering their damage output like this. And yeah prospecting? It sucks. Yeah the rewards are amazing, but it's so unfun to micro all your effing scouts like this every turn. I bet this makes the culture massively unpopular right now - it's just too much micro and too little payoff in combat. At least prospecting has huge payoffs but it's still annoying to pull off. I'd gladly take a nerf on the prospecting if I'd be able to automate it.

@@Ic0nGaming I mean, look at it this way : If you play a repeat attack build, which, let's be honnest, is pretty common and easy to build since researching tier 1 tome is very fast, and spreading a bit your affinity early on is pretty strong for imperium skill : Poison, fire, frost weapon and zeal. With additionnal bonus point like revelry weapon that aren't hard to get (but I won't count them cause it's not tiers 1). Still by this point a normal tiers 1 melee unit would hit for 18 damage, your industrious tiers 1 melee unit will "only" hit for 16. At this point the extra innate armor do a lot more than 2 damage. Once again, all this take is researching 4 tier 1 book, so you'll get it pretty fast. So far my game with industrious have been pretty good due to researching those fast, all your unit are tanky, add some healing spell on top of it (or a wightborn transformation) and your unit just won't die will dicing up enemies. But when playing this way you basically need to get an actual archer like glade runner or Zephyr cause arbalest don't work with those bonus

I tried 3 games. The last 2 worked. I made my heroes the damage dealers. One time a made a meele brute with knock back. The other time an archer who got buffed with resistances from the support units.

I like taking their tanking units along with the archers from either tier 2 materium or nature tomes. I dislike steelshapers tho and tend to pick up a different support or skip them for another tank

What the other guys said use heroes and tome units. Two handed weapons and Bows usually give best damage. Heroes also take the buffs from the Steel shaper best as they are the best units, or use a better tome support. Crossbows are pretty good at focusing enemies down. The heroes get a warfare ability that lets them always end in defence mode which is easy to abuse.

I have found that with Industrious, you want TWO supports per stack, instead of the usual 1 per stack... one steelshaper buffs, and then the other does a decent to huge heal on the buffed unit (depending on how many stacks of bolstered it already had), while ALSO granting it a nice boost in damage. This can become truly nasty on a shock hero, or on any ranged units. But yeah, very different play style to other factions. My Bonkus the Delicate did an average of around 85 damage per bonk with this strat, and once he had a few levels under his belt that average rose to 130 per bonk. And he rarely took more than 10 damage from any given source (even enemy heroes, or tier 5 units)

Use the arbalest special attack to do high physical damage and to disable defensive stance /retaliation and THEN whack them with your melee units. Their combats will typically take a little longer than other cultures, unfortunately, since they're so defensive.