Lure of the Horde actually puts the new unit where the army you beat was located. It's VERY nice for sustaining army stacks out in the wild

for lure of the horde (50% chance to get unit on combat), you have to consider, that when auto-battling you often lose one or two units. the unit it generates, spawns right where the battle was fought, so you can replenish your stack instantly without having to summon or drafting from a nearby town, which can take several turns. the perk has, however, one MAJOR downside. Lets say its the enemy's turn and he attacked your 3 6-unit stacks, you won the battle and the perk spawned a t1 unit. Now, if the enemy still has forces left he will often times attack the newly spawned 1-unit stack, because its the weakest. Now you have to fight his 3 6-stacks with 2 of your 6-stacks and the one t1 unit, which puts you on a large disadvantage. That's why I generally dont use, also because its annoying to delete troops i dont need right now EDIT: Someone pointed out that you can also just not reinforce when your one-unit stack gets attacked, so my point above is invalid.

I'd like to specify "natural recovery" works on FRIENDLY domains not just your own, it works also on the domains of allies, which can be very handy, remember vassals are counted as allies 😉

Hey! I'm a new player (up to 20 hours the past 2 days) and I've finally found you. One thing I'd really have liked with this, was if you had simply applied S, A, B, C, D to the actual trees. Blow up Astral Tree, apply your marks while commenting and then there's an easily saveable picture for you to post. I think most people would agree with me, that all these symbols on a tier list, even after you've explained them, means very little. I can't identify things easily and will have to rewatch and rewatch and rewatch or go through to process of plotting it up myself. Thanks for the amazing content you're providing and I hope you take the above in the best of ways. You seem super helpful and the above would be. ;-) Cheers!

General teleporters can also be build in outpoats, as discovered in my one city playthrough. Inwish I knew it befor turn 130 thou 😂😂😂

This video is the first time I've heard someone mention that whispering stones can be given to your own cities. That's something I learned by accident while fiddling with city menus, and is a very helpful tip I think

Wild expansion usually gives me tier 3 animals or a lot of tier 4 spiders or wolfs and as u know spiders are broken. It really depends on territory, but for me it's an S+ tier.

Jumboooo you're exploding with the AoW4 content, I love it! I remember it was the same with Humankind. Proud MiniPixel here, I remember when you had like 1K-something subs. You deserve every single one, keep at it!

Road has another innate benefit that when you activate the road building option in most cases your unit can go 1-2 tiles more. Sometimes it can help you reach and start a fight with NPC one turn sooner or just barely reach your territory for healing one turn sooner. Also if it traverses some tiles with the road, gold is not deducted for those. Whatever map you play, the road is useful. But seasurfing and excavation are totally map dependent. If they are S tier, road making is definitely S+ tier. Thanks for the good content btw.

I would put excavation and sailing as very conditional on map setup. If you have a small underground it tends not to be worth it to excavate (underground generally doesn't have much of value in it), and sailing is either generally vital or useless. I find the problem with a lot of the later Chaos tree is that it really swings into evil alignment in the back half. The front end of it is very alignment neutral, and is good for everyone, but once you get your bandit army you go really evil. The fact that Chaos is so front loaded is part of why Barbarian and Prolific Swarmers is so go, it lets you dip the very powerful chaos tree without using the often times mediocre chaos tomes.

47:00 It seems you are not aware of the fact that you don't just get a balor... you get *THE* Balor. The Balor that spawns has the 'Power from Slaughter' which provides +1 hp and +1% dmg per unit he kills... permanently.

Hi Jumbo, will you do the race traits tier list soon? They are much smaller bonuses but that is the reason why a tier list would be useful for them

I struggle to not go any astral affinity at game start purely due to Astral Inspiration and Adaptive research, the progress you can make with them is insane. Also quickening gives you two spells on the first turn if you are a wizard king, excluding the over channel ability. So if you have the weaver ability and you have the combat points and mana you can cast 6 spells in 3 turns, like summon 6 totem of the wilds producing 6 units a turn :D

51:40 Rerolling does not change the discounted research for that cycle. What it can do (potentially) is roll into a really fast research that you don't need, allowing you to mulligan and try to get the discount on a research you actually want to get.

I love call of chaos in that it can give you dragons to add to your army and other powerful units :) For 50 imperium if you fought 2 infestations in the entire game, and got one Tier IV or V unit out of it, that's already worth it I think. So even when you don't fight many infestation in a game it still is nice.

truly great work, thanks a lot!

I would probably put the resurgence wolf on a slightly higher tier. Its main usefulness is for early leveling of your lord, since you can use it as cannon fodder without worrying about it. It will just come back afterwards. Leveling is much faster when you have a maximum of 4 units in your group, so the wolf will make difficult battles a bit more doable.

What do you think of this idea: Don't go for tier 2 or tier 3 tomes when you can, but get many many (if not all) lower tier tomes for crazy affinity in each line! Iirc the tiers cost 200/240, 500ish and 800/1100 research per spell. So each higher tome costs double the amount of time to get through. But you still get 2 affinity per tome, every 4 spells, so way faster! Now looking at this tier list, it allows you to cherry pick from each line! This gets even better. The low imperium costs of the early picks give very good value. Like astral 20 casting points, chaos tier 1 upkeep reduction, anything in the nature line, so many are great in any play through! The same holds for spells, the lower tomes have many affordable spells. I especially like minor race transformations and unit enchantments. Having all these tomes will also help when getting a higher tome you only like one or two spells of. Instead of having to plough through high tier stuff you don't use, you'll get opportunities to research skipped shitty low tier ones in half or a quarter of the time. You only need 4 spells per tome, it doesn't matter what tier. I would mix it up, get all the good tier 1 and 2, then your fave tier 3, then back to low tiers. It might seem counterintuitive, to research Tome of Warding when you don't need any astral spells and could get Tome of Cycles instead. But just 4 spells from that tome take the time of only one spell. You get 2 astral affinity and the Magical wards minor race transformation. Suppose you only want Projectiles of decay and the Druid, you have a bigger chance you can bypass the other huge research spells by a quick tier 1 spell.

And another one , that's my morning video i watch with my coffee :)

Expert sailors are situational. On lava and isles maps its S+, but on normal, where food isnt an issue, its as You said.

Subscribed to you because of your wonderful Age of Wonders 4 coverage. Great and very accessible videos🙂Do you know about Songs of Conquest?

Wild Expansion is an easy S tier because it often spits out Tier IV units.

37:10, raze it, rebuild it, release as vassal :)

Like the fact that it's split between two videos, but I would have love to have them release at the same time. That being said, I absolutly agree with that tier list so far !

Lure of the Horde is an S+++ skill to me. It’s absolutely incredible if you have a horde creeping the map clearing infestations, nodes, etc. I tend to play massive maps, and this is just incredible. The biggest downside is I can get too many units too fast and kill my economy if I don’t start disbanding units.

I personally am always down for longer videos as someone who just puts the stuff on in the background while I’m playing games (right now it’s been age of wonders 4 lol) I’m a great multitasker so I don’t mind longer videos makes me not have to change them as much. I feel this has been very fair, and the fact nothing is rated at the lowest tier (yet) says a lot about the game devs themselves and their ability to make a balanced tree where obviously some things are better then others, but nothing feels incredibly useless or absolutely a waste of time.

You had almost filled up the S tier just from the general tree. Either do one episode per tree or at most 2 trees per episode. Also, don't clip off the tiers (maybe zoom out as you fill up a tree).

Basic Seafaring and Excavation are very situational. I've had games where I didn't need either. As a result, I think it's A tier or very low S tier. Similarly, Siege Specialization is either extremely useful or useless. But it's very strong and should be A tier. Road Building should be C tier. I don't find it that useful and can be another thing that requires gold upkeep. Wild Expansion is one of the best empire skills in the game. I've gotten so many tier 3 and 4 animals from it, especially since it synergizes so well with the rest of the nature empire skills and tomes. It could almost be in a tier of its own because of how good it is.

Isn't mystics whole schtick being +damage and +mana addict from casting a spell every turn? The quickening might be A or B tier for other cultures, but its S+ for Mystic + Mana Addict

Kind of hard to put all of these in tiers because of the scaling that they provide when combined with something else. Which is basically the same for most of the stuff in the game.

Wild expansion doesn't get you only weak units at all, I got several tier 3 and even some tier 4 units out of it, rarely did I get anything below tier 3.

I think it would probably be better to have one video per branch and then maybe a top ten. Also should teleporters really be S-tier when you can easily dip into astral for chrono gates by that point in the game?

Hey man, love your videos. I get the length of the video is a problem. Totally understand that you need to break it up for those sweet sweet youtube impressions. However, could you upload the videos back to back? Like Release one, then release the other one an hour later with the end screen directing you to the second one? This video has been a topic that I've been wanting to see for a bit and the sudden halt if it without the next part to watch is kinda lame. Like whenever I watch the new part 2 I'm not gonna remember much of the 1st part. I would even go so far to break these lengths of videos into 3rds or even 4ths.

I wuld like to see thetier lest for ech afinty in separete chart itlook much clenre and we dont see allthe skill in i think s tier was cut a bit

Hey guys quick question is it worth getting? I played planetfall a while back but stop playing it only cuz I got bored of it. Is it any different from aow planetfall?

20:00 what tier are these animals?

Not sure why the video is cut off on the right, I couldnt see some of the S tier picks. Overall I disagree with a lot of these (but only by maybe 1 tier). I think the S tiers need to be reconsidered if you're filling it that quickly (Im thinking bell curve for any tier list), but maybe thatll come when you rate some of the other tech trees! Great content to upload and make sure the community is having serious discussions.

personally i think that roads should be an S+ and your first 3 picks should be an A maybe A+ as they all really depend on your map and play style. for exemple in my current game i didnt take excavation cause i dont want anything to do with the undergound and the only reason i took basic seafaring is cause im playing on a continent map but if i was to play on a map that doesnt have any sea or water at all it is useless, meanwhile no matter what type of map youre playing on or you playstyle roads are always a good and it the can be real broken with the right stuff like Leafkin, and that rite (i cant remember the name of) in the nature line that buffs your movmet in your own territories, also you might not need to extend your city cap depending on your playthrough, things like Megacity, Choosen Destoryer, or just playing on a small map like the other two it becomes usless depeneding on how you play, hell you might find in one or two playthoughs you might find that you dont need more cities then the cap you start with

:( I have never used the road building Leaf.

i just a mod that will make that the city cap increase always cost 200 imperium. i don't like it being punished by having more cities, specialy on big maps

I'm confused about road-building. I have never researched it, because I always have higher priority uses for my Imperium. Why is it rated so highly?

I think "Battlefield Looting" is not that worth it since it only gives you 3 gold per unit tier. Example case if you recruit T1 from the city which costs 60 gold and it dies, you only get 1/12 gold back.

Rite of war A tier because it summons 6 units for 150 imperium, but Lure of the Horde 50% chance to summon unit after battle is only B tier? i'm pretty sure you will way have more than 12 battles in your game.

Jumbo, you wrong about wild expansions. You often get T3 animals with it. In my mind it is more or equally valuable as chaos unit generation one. getting 40-50 T3 animal units per game easy - it is not a weak skill.

They are not too long. You can easily pick a video back up but maybe its because i dont use the youtube app.

I feel like you are rating too many things in S tier. There's many staples for sure, but having them all be right at S tier means there's no room for anything higher. IMO solid staples should be A tier, with S tier reserved for traits that are incredibly busted and game-changing as soon as you pick them up. On that note, the first two (Excavation and Basic Seafaring) don't feel like S tier at all. Yes, you do pick them up in every single game where they matter, but they feel like a tax if you're in that kind of terrain, not an S tier perk. I am never going to load up a game thinking, "I can't wait to get Basic Seafaring! Woo!" It's just a tax on harsh terrain.

We need a Amazon culture

what dialect is it, that pronounces most, not all, "e" like "ee" as in eexperience

Seems like you don't know how "expanded governance"'s cost scales. Every time cost goes up by 300 authority. 200, 500, 800, 1100 and so on.

Hi I really like your tierlist videos. Can you make one about all the Units in the game?

Road building is a must on all maps while sea one - only on some. And I almost never use excavation. Natural recovery is overrated. You are rarely defending and if you do - usually you have enough time to recover after that. same if you just conquered enemy city. I hate chaos one. The whole tree issuper focused on fighting, raiding, low tier units etc. In early game it will slow your economy, it focus on hord gameplay that feels meh in the late game and if don't like that - the whole tree sucks. If you don't play like this and want to focus on the late game and diplomacy - its the worst one. The only really good one is balor. It's the most expensive unit to get, and this is the most cost efficient way to get it. Also the only one you can get without wasting your t5 book book on chaos lord. My only problem is balors are suuuper overrated. But hey - I rarely raze cities. Blue/purple/orange are the best one for me. Personally waiting for t5/t4 tome unit tier list.

I do dislike the "Chaos = Evil, Order = Good" subtext the game uses for a lot of things, I feel like those two things should be seperate. (Obviously the alignment system itself allows that, but that should also be reflected in the theming of the skill trees and such. A MAX EVIL order empire turning themselves into Angels is fucking weird to me.)

IMO, neither "basic seafaring" nor "excavation" are S tier because I've played many games where I used neither and still won. Neither skill is a must-have for a successful game. They're more like A or B tier skills.

impressment is not an S tier to me, because it only applies to tier 1 units, so good for the early game, then what? and Tier 1 units are not that expensive

I know it is easier to go tree by tree but it is sort of irrelevant. The lower items are better compared to the other lower items that you will be choosing from as you play. Often you are choosing between the first item in various trees. Or selecting which tree gets more points to push for the first few faster. You should do the first one from all 5 then the second all the way around. etc. In this one there is little context and it is pretty meaningless.

I have never used roads pick once. What are you talking about. There are roads on the map already. It's f

Are you internet historian?

Sorry, but imo this is not a good tier list. You rate almost all development too high so you get after 13 mins 6S, 3A, 2B, 0C, 0D) - more than half is S tier!? Excavation - B, Seafare - A, Diplomatic Focus - B, Fruitful Integration B = 2S which is enough