Empire tree ranking - 2:03 Evocation - 3:12 Warding - 5:10 Horde - 7:35 Pyromancy - 10:09 Enchantment - 11:27 Rock - 13:11 Roots - 14:30 Beasts - 15:42 Faith - 18:12 Zeal - 20:13 Cryomancy - 21:37 Souls - 23:09 Amplification - 24:18 Scrying - 26:08 Revelry - 27:46 Mayhem 29:29 Artificing - 31:02 Winds - 33:03 Glades - 34:02 Fertility - 36:09 Inquisition - 37:15 Beacon - 38:36 Necromancy - 40:48 Doomherald - 42:13 Summoning - 42:57 Teleportation - 44:18 Pandemonium - 46:47 Devastation - 48:25 Vigor - 51:17 Cycles - 53:02 Sanctuary - 54:59 Subjugation - 56:42 Great Transformation - 58:00 Cold Dark - 59:43 Terramancy - 1:00:50 Transmutation - 1:02:11 Astral Mirror - 1:03:23 Astral Convergence - 1:05:17 Chaos Channeling - 1:06:48 Demon Gate - 1:08:17 Golden Realm - 1:09:39 Crucible - 1:11:05 Paradise - 1:12:33 Nature's Wrath - 1:14:43 Supremacy - 1:17:05 Exaltation - 1:17:51 Reaper - 1:19:58 Oblivion - 1:20:25 Arch Mage - 1:21:03 Chaos Lord - 1:22:26 Creator - 1:23:18 Goddess of Nature - 1:24:23 God Emperor - 1:25:08 Eternal Lord - 1:26:14

I love how this game essentially went down the route of “literally almost every build is broken, therefore it is balanced”

loving the AoW4 content Potato

I think I would rank several tomes differently because I like magic origin units more. If you ration your spells a bit more than mana upkeep isn't worse than gold upkeep IMO, and the ability to summon them right to the front line counts for a lot. Also I would bump Teleportation up from A to S because of the province improvement. Finally it's worth noting that the province improvements and spells that boost your own domain defensively are much, much more useful for both the research and domination victories. There's a big military victory slant in this analysis - which is fine, just something to note.

Glad to see everyone else is just as obsessed as I am with this masterpiece of the 4x genre

Worth mentioning, 4 spells per cycle and new tomes every other cycle means that a tome only needs 2 excellent spells in order to be "worth it". That's why it's much better to have even a single game-changing spell in a tome than 5 pretty good ones.

I think the idea with the Tome of the Archmage teleport hero spell is that you blink somewhere, conjure an army out of your ass, then sneak attack something. Since you can queue up ready spells to cast another turn, you can just blink, dump a ton of spells on something, then peace out.

You should try some more of the Materium tomes. I'm not saying they are great (especially not the early ones), but Terramancy has Tremor Ritual which completely removes all enemy defensive structures and Earth Shatter which is useful on some maps for its ability to remove Mountains. Also Earthshatter Engines have 10 siege power, which makes sieges much faster. If you are going for a military victory you can't overlook them.

IMO early and mid Astral is in a tier of their own. In addition to enabling teleportation which is a must have, a lot of the Imperium improvements also increase research speed. This then allows you to pick up other tomes for increased Imperium tree access. This is why the Arcane Halfling playthrough went so smoothly while other Brutal games were much more brutal.

Tome of cryomancy is probably A-tier book. Ice coffin is actually one of strongest spells in early game because it eliminates 1 unit from fight and white witches are among strongest battle-mages in early game. For stage of the game that you get these battle mages, they're really strong. Free damage+turn skip is really good. Skip turn like moves have always been among strongest ways to mitigate damage in turn based games. Houndmaster is S-tier unit purely from its ability to summon a unit which can tank 1 hit and give big turn tempo. White witches are doing same thing, except they freeze enemy which skips enemy turn. so if you have unit advantage, you gain turns on other units for freezing enemies. Freezing weapons is also good. far superior over flaming weapons if your not using physical marksmans units. Dark affinity is not bad. It has some decent upgrades in tree. crypt blade gives tier 1 zombies and summoning is always good. The extra knowledge on killing heroes is really strong especially if you can find an AI to farm knowledge early on. Knowledge of Vassal is ok because early game, there is not a lot of ways to boost knowledge so gaining knowledge 20 knowledge from 2 vassals when your base knowledge is 60->80 is 33% increase in your early game tech tree. Gaining knowledge on razing cities is good as it works with chaos passive that gives +20 permanent gold income. Living vines+casting on +5 casting points can be useful though this depends on if your running out of casting points in combat. If your playing any faction that wants battle mages early on and your not running into arctic resist enemies. I highly recommend this book. very good. I think this is really strong tome mainly because its best tome for splashing dark affinity and what tome provides at this stage of the game. if your going dark build to tier 5 tome, this is must-pick up mainly because all other dark tomes are not very good in general. Tome of Doomheald is weird book. The bashee is pretty good. you apply weaken which is -20% damage and you apply -morale. every -10% crit is -10% damage in this game, so its effectively 40% damage reduce. Bashee is very expensive unit to upkeep but its pretty good if your running melee-comp. the main thing this book bans you from doing is using undead since undead unit have 0 morale. I don't think its good book purely because melee is kinda pointless in the game but if melee was good, this would be a good book for non-undead melee armies. I could see someone picking this book with industries race that gains bolster and resist stacks to stack with weaken debuff. You need to be stacking bolster+resistence and running some form of healing unit to make this tome relevant. Tome of Amplification+tome of artificing+tome of devastation is no brainer. pick-up order. As I said in my previous paragraph, each 10% crit at 2x is 10% damage in damage. When you combine these 3 tomes, you get 70% crit chance which is max crit in the game. this 70% increase in damage for your entire army. These tomes could have 1 skill and nothing else and they would still be best tomes to pick. If your running archer's Tome of the Crucible+Tome of Amplification is the ranger markman build. Ranged is strong right now over melee so I would say that Tome of crucible is probably an S-tier book exclusively off meteor's arrows. Double-AoE shooting is really good. if you picked tome of pyromancy over tome of horde then chances are that you have flaming weapons which is 20% increase to burning targets. This whole synergy also S-tier for ranged physical damage marksman teams. you get a lot of AoE and damage increase for physical marksman build. in term of tier 5 tomes, I think nature tome and order tome are the best however due to previous tomes, you really need to focus picking your splash tome into 1 of these affinities to choose it. On side note, I think chaos is great splash affinity in early stages of the game due to imperium tree but I don't think you need to chaos in late game.

14:34 There is super cool combo with living vines. Living vines count as death/kill for a few skills and abilities so it works with shadow's ability that gives "+5 combat casting points for every death/kill". Also you can get past maximum combat points with it.

So I'm going to defend the city domain enchantments, particularly the late game ones real quick. 2 of the 3 win conditions in the game involve building provinces that will spawn hostile marauder stacks in your empire that *must* be dealt with in order to progress your wincon. These marauder stacks are no joke, containing 12+ units each and often coming with some pretty strong enchantments. Because your beacons/seeds must be built in your empire, they are by necessity in range for your city buff spells but are notably *outside* the cities proper, so you don't get all the nice things you normally get when defending sieges. Given that 2 wincons involve spawning powerful stacks on units in your territory that *must* be dealt with in order to actually finish the game, some of these stronger lategame enchantments like Cycle of Seasons look a bit better. That's my only real critique of this analysis though. The rest of it looks solid.

It's so interesting how different my experience with the Game has been from Potatoes. For example the Chaos Tree has been pretty useless for my playstyle since I prefer Tall and defensive playstyles and Tier 1 Units are just in the way. Shadow on the other Hand has been a godsend in recent Playthroughs. Really speaks for the Game.

Strongly disagree about Doomherald 42:13, morale damage can be really devastating and all of tome's spells are greatly synergized. It also pairs really well with dark culture's cheap shock T1s. You basically wait for enemy to come at you, cast despair on enemy blobs and start picking off "soft" units to get maximum morale penalties and trigger mass routs. Combine this with tome of the horde for extra T1 damage and you get the idea. I've had a tough fight where enemy ruler was nigh invinsible for my melee troops (first strike, regen, several retaliations and so on so forth) but it didn't matter, since after seeing 5 or 6 allied units being killed nearby she... routed.

Materium is great, most affinities are if you guide your choices well. Materium have Iron Golems, they are very OP, like seriously. And most enchantments are for defense and resistance, it comes a time where only specialized units can really damage Materium.

You know potato's addiction is deep when he makes a tierlist after uploading 1 full run.

I know it's the cliche "how dare you have an opinion different than mine" but there is no way Tome of Cryomancy is that low. It enables you to cheese some unwinnable early game battles with frozen and slow cheese to split up the enemy army. Works very well with a scout in the army to bait the enemy to split up

One thing you might have missed with tome of warding is how powerful the phantomsal soliders are, they gain race transformations and enchantments while being ethereal meaning they are immune to most status effects in the game.

Keeper’s mark has silly synergy with vine summon, since it makes them survive fatal damage. So it makes summoning vines either through the spell or from Horned God really really strong if you don’t mind blocking off part of the battlefield

I think you really undervalue being able to break enemy morale. It's nice to win battles by only killing around half of the enemies

Some spells are useful in ways that are not obvious. "Earth Shatter" is one of the best spells in the game: Besides giving your cities more space to expand to ex-mountains it enables one super unique thing - You can place teleporters deep inside other factions territory. Normally at some point all provinces have been claimed. But now you can flatten a mountain, put down an encampment and construct a teleporter. This give you insane access to parts of the map that are otherwise only accessible with impossibly long walks.

Doomherald is a phenomenal tome, for evil builds you get a 19 mana and 19 research income conduit improvement, you get an exceptionally powerful army spell that applies morale penalties, you get a racial improvement that increases damage against low morale units massively, you get the banshee - one of the best battlemages in the game. I'm definitely feeling a really weird bias against mana based economies and far too much of an economic focus vs a focus on synergistic builds or actual, real quality. Remember that you can only bring 18 units to a combat, it doesn't matter how many tier 1 units you have if your opponent can clear your full stack without taking noticeable losses. I will very much agree that nature is probably the strongest selection of tomes in the game, however. Also, shadow affinity is extremely powerful, even if many of its tomes are rather lackluster - with a shadow affinity focus you can easily hit magic victory by before 50 (casting the spell, after which you become effectively invincible and just count down your remaining 15 turns). The amount of research you get from shadow affinity is massive and will always keep you first in that regard even over economically focused players. I also very much get the impression that this tier list is oriented towards playing vs AI rather than playing against someone capable of human intelligence, tactics and map awareness

Tome of the Astral Mirror has a Summon Astral Reflections combat spell which lets you make 2 copies of any unit, including your heroes. Cast it twice and you could have 5 of your heroes in the battle. You can send the reflections forward to take the damage since it doesn't matter if they're killed. It's insanely powerful, and I use it every battle, though it costs a lot to cast. It also can be used if someone attacks you and you can't get your armies back in time. You summon the best unit you can on the world map and then copy it twice to start a battle and you'll have 5 units to battle with.

i wanna see potato use all the D tier tomes. Please make more aow4 content

Seeking arrow with clairvoyance combo does alot of work

Call forth chaos avatar has literally won me battles against two full stacks including heroes when defending with just a scout. If your ruler has summoning spells and overchannel, you can do stuff like calling down pylons etc, and your ruler will most likely be the most OP unit you have in your army. Couple it with the chaos skill that summons fiends when your ruler kills enemies and you will outnumber your opponent even if you only have one unit getting attacked. One of the most powerful spells especially if you have a ruler built around supporting rank 1 units with summons and spellcasting. In my current case, I summon 3 rank 1 undeads on turn 1, 1 rank 3 elemental on turn 2 as well as a pylon, and then i just pylon spam and go around snipe enemy units to summon hellhounds and nightmares. The chaos win condition spell does damage as well, so the longer you can extend your battle, the more it will be in your favor. I dont know of any other spell that can make you win a 1v12, so that spell plus Demonic Slaughter makes the Chaos Lord tome A tier for me .

We all know this tier list is going to 180 when he starts actually experimenting with all the units and combos haha.

"Only 200 hours" he says I love how obsessed you've become with this game, and I'm looking forward to all the AOW4 content to come

12:03 Bronze golem evolve into nice t3 iron golem from tome of Artificing so it is not so bad, 22:37 Shadow culture has starting spell that inflicts slow on two targets. 1:24:03 Golems counts as elementals, be the way.

Dude thank you for getting this out so fast, my friends and I are obsessed with this game. I’m so glad you put me onto this one!

A nice strategy for all ranged lovers. If you take unicorn mounts, the ranged barbarian tier 2 unit becomes a mounted archer that can teleport and it will be buffed by mount effecting transformations. They are really fun to play

This my first video of yours, and I just wanted to say I love how fast you talk even though it’s a hour long video, you really go through the information well!

The good thing about Terramancy isn't extra quarries, but the extra space you get for not placing them instead of other province upgrades.

There's multiple ways to increase you ranged accuracy(at least +60% that i know of) and so the +1 range is amazing. You're also completely underestimating the Tome of Cryomancy. I don't think you understand that frozen prevents the enemy from acting, which immediately makes it more powerful than other status effects and makes it the best elemental book. Saying there's no way to reliably freeze the enemy when there's 2 things that allow you to reliably freeze the enemy is an interesting oversight.

Cosmic overdrive is pretty great for an astral summoner build. With the capstone astral empire tree skill, and mana channelers, your lightning elementals will instantly evolve to tier 3 when you summon them. At tier 3 they're a shock unit that normally have 32 movement and an amazing phase skill. But just try escaping from them when they have 48 movement plus an amazing phase skill. Not to mention 30% extra damage. Good for your watchers too, and on that note, I'd probably rate the tome of scrying higher for any battlemage centric builds, because guided projectiles are an essential enchantment for battlemages.

The great thing about AoW 4 is that you can watch 10 different guides on tomes / affinities / playstyles and are nearly certain to get 10 vastly different opinions. The only constant seems to be that Tome of the Horde is incredibly powerful. 😂

One thing to note regarding Tome of the Creator: All of the golems are also considered elementals. Which makes Enduring Earth a lot better than if it only applies to the other elementals. Gold Golems are strong, and you can already make Iron Golems incredibly tanky in a materium build, so giving them all a second life is pretty powerful. I do still agree that materium is one of the weaker affinities overall, but iron golems are possibly the best tanks in the game, and copper golems also upgrade into iron so you can start building them up early. You just need to pair it with something else to get your damage, since until Gold Golems that's a bit lacking (though you could use also zephyr archers for that if you want to stay in materium).

You take enchantment when you go for dark culture, your cities ignore stability penalties. Sundering blades work great with weakening and higher range allows both its mages and summons to use special range attacks sometimes 2 turns out of enemy range lol

Love your videos! Biggest thing that i wanted you to point out is that Amplification Arrows proc almost any on hit effect ( DoT, debuff etc ) to the second target AND it also switches target dmg priority: i have 3 arrows, 2 arrows kill the target, 3rd arrow will fly to OTHER target. Taking the archers ( 4 base range ) + t1 buff ( 1 range ) + high ( +1 range ) + elite archer ( +1 range ) makes archers deal damage at a whopping 7 range or 9 range aoe from t3 book archer adn also has 3 bounce range. Taking mark on hit from other book and your archers literally have 80+ accuracy on that range which is insane. So far the most broken build i found out.

The wasp interrupting you was showing how op nature tomes and affinity are lol

I would say that all of the Tomes are balanced. Some are definitely better than others by I don't think any are just straight bad. A big thing I ran into while playing is while a tome may individually not seem that good it has great synergy with other tomes that made it extremely powerful. Really it seems to come down to what build you are making. If you are focusing summons, melee, physical ranged or magical ranged makes a big difference in perspectives of what is good. Same with the imperium abilities. Also I was really surprised that Cryomancy was ranked so low as Frozen was super strong in my recent campaign.

Thank you for hyping this game! It’s been a blast learning and your videos have helped so much. It’s like learning CIV from you all over again.

Can't help but feel you're underselling Tome of the Arch Mage's Astral Travel here. Sure, it's a tier 5 so the Tome ranking is immaterial -- if you can pick it, you will -- but it is definitely a transformative ability that cannot be otherwise replicated. Specifically, far as I know it's the only spell in the game that lets you move your entire army stack across the map in a couple turns by letting you place an outpost with a teleporter anywhere you want. Arguably this is a "win harder" ability since it doesn't make you fight better, however that's often what you want in a T5 tome. It's also potentially one of the only ways you can stop a distant AI from winning, if you're ever in a situation where they build all 3 victory improvements; no idea how relevant that concern actually is at this point. tldr: for non-Barbarians Astral Travel's ability to pop over and put an outpost with a teleporter down wherever you want lets you project power across the map in a way that you otherwise can't.

One of the beautiful things about this game is the complexity. I will update as I watch but my initial thought is that I agree with you about tome of warding, but I think it is especially beneficial to dark origin in that it gives durability to an otherwise squishy bunch (maybe feudal too, haven't played with it yet) so C tier overall but maybe A tier for dark. Edit 1: Materium, Runecrafting and tome of pyromancy into tome of enhancement is one of my favorite builds so far. You're absolutely right about it being similar but +1 range is sooo good. Infectious Insanity is so good! I used it on a melee unit in the back row of the enemy right away and it is super disruptive and did great damage.

I agree with range units. Im playing nature order (with a bit of materium, I took the free wonder bonus prod) elf with every single arrow upgrade I found and my tier 3 ranged units obliterate army because of the shocking arrow enchant Also late game shadow is absolutly stupid. The final perk show you the whole map with every single units. One of the final tome let you summon a full stack of t1/t2 units for only 40 souls and 40 casting, which is fcking easy and cheap to get. Basically you can summon thousands and thousands of undead for free, to snipe people with your army, and THEN you can disband them to not pay the mana cost. Also, if you use them for pillaging they will pay themselves. You can spawn them were there isnt a single ennemi troops and pillage everything from miles away. And since they are so cheap you can pillage a entire empire in one turn Also some shadow perks are really good like -20% discount on magic units, and the 50knowledge per heroes level DOES really stacks to rush tome. I played as Scion of evil (free imperium ans free rank easely) and as Cannibals to generate mana and food as long as long as I keep fighting

I have only played one full game but I did it with a summon build. The tome of warding worked really well because it has one of the best tier 1 summon unit which can get a race bonus and I was playing the dark culture so a tank in the early game helped. Stave of warding worked well with the Nymhs and their healing ability. Also, fertility tome works really well if you have the summon tradition (50% discount on summoning) and play dark. The animate flora only cost 10 mana to cast (because the tradition also works on combat summon spells) allowing you to create a tier 2 unit every turn. Blossom of life works well with the regain you get from cull the weak and Nymfs add to that ensuring you get 5 stacks of regain fast.

Burden of guilt saved a campaign for me, I was able to spam it out 5 times in a turn, locked down most of the enemy and deal with their stacks one at a time. Add in the fact it does chip damage as well, it’s really good imo.

The gamplay was way deeper than i expected. Really looking forward to what they do next with this game

12:39 for maximum range thingy. If you increase maximum range it will increase your general accuracy of range unit. For example, If unit has 4 range and hit enemy in 4 hex away you will get X accuracy but if your unit has 5 range and hitting 4 hex away enemy you will get X+@ accuracy. So range is important

Nymphs are absolutely op imo. You can get them so early. Get a stack of 2-3 nymphs beside your 6stack, and dominate mid game. 1 nymph + astral reflection + multi cast == win every combat in the entire game in which you can mind control. Actually, if all remaining enemy units are mind controlled, you win the fight and they disappear as if they were killed. So if 9 enemies are mind controlled, not only will they tank and dps for you, but they will halve enemy force. Imagine having 1 nymph, casting 4 mirror reflections on it (turn 2). You got yourself 9 nymphs. That's on average 5-6 successful mind controls. And you can keep doing it every turn if you can afford it. Which is ridibroncus. EDIT : And crazyculous

This game is Fuckling DESTROYING my life!! I’ve not played anything the entire week!!! And one of my favorite KZfaqrs is now making a chunky video on it after finishing a bad ass series,, hell yeah

Tier lists are great for trying to do like impossible challenges and stuff so you can figure out the meta choices you need to make to survive. But I'm gonna make my shadow-frost elves that will convert the entire world into a freezing hellscape in the name of the Winter Queen, and there's nothing anyone can do to stop me!

The Necromancy spell 'Raise Zombie' is great to have when you have taken lots of losses in a small area. Saved my arse. Plus who can argue against recycling.

I love how you are aware of your biases and talk about them before going on to the tier list. It shows a good deal of self-knowledge and a desire for fairness. I can't tell you how rare that is. Major respect to you, PotatoMcWhiskey.

Figured it was worth a mention, I've been watching Civ content for a long time and I almost always check out the other games you have series on. While I like the other series, and I've bought quite a few to play through after watching them, AOW4 might be the only one out of them that has really sucked me in wanting to see more content. I'm kind of hoping the videos on it do well so I can see more of it.

Some good insights, though I don't agree on a pretty large number of things: Affinities: Chaos - I'm not sure why you think this is so much better than everything else. I'll give it to you, the bottom half of the tree is really good, with upkeep discounts and 2 ways to get free units, although the infestation one may kinda be too niche to bother unless you see several infestations on the map you can clear early. The one with 50% chance after battle is quite broken. The upper half of the tree is all kind of about "win more" though, it gives you bonuses to razing and sieges for the most part, but if you're already at that point it means you've crushed the enemy armies and are winning anyway. Shadow - It's actually similar to Chaos imo that a lot of the better abilities are in the first half. Shadow Binding is very good though, and Death Magic is solid with some hilarious synergies like the Vines spell. I would say it's not complete shit just on the back of these 2, though you don't really need to go deep into it. +100% hero xp would be pretty broken if you could get it early but it comes too late. Overall it's definitely not as good as Chaos as some others but not completely terrible either. It still may be the worst one overall but it has its uses for dipping into it. Order - this is very context dependent and with the right map/build this is possibly the strongest affinity in the game that allows you to get unparalleled recruitment and eco super fast. Or on the other end there are maps with no free cities where this falls to bottom tier. On the maps with a good number of free cities this is top tier though, if you lean heavily into it with culture traits and tomes. Astral - I honestly think this is A or S, it gives you some of the best research and mana improvements, being able to cast spells on the first turn is a huge advantage in any player vs player battle when used right, +1000 mana rite is pretty clutch to get an upper hand in a tight situation. Nature - I agree that it's just very strong overall. Materium - I agree that it's mostly pretty meh compared to others, it has some decent things and +2k gold rite is seriously good but overall it feels below what most others offer. Something has to be said about the capstone though, since -10% upkeep per unit rank is probably the single most broken improvement you can get, especially if stacked with some others. It does require you to lean heavily into Materium though or otherwise comes incredibly late/never. Tomes: (there are a lot of things I disagreed with but I'll list some that I remember) Evocation - I agree on the overall rating of the book, however I'm surprised you don't like Evokers. Up to 45 damage at 6 range with 100% hit chance and a good chance of 8 dmg DoT is better than what most t2 ranged units can do, and it's actually really hard to not clump for this one since it jumps 3 hexes (which also means, it can technically strike units up to 12 tiles away). It may not be the best tome t2 but it's pretty solid imo and better than most faction ranged t1s-t2s. Pyromancy.- same deal with Pyromancers, I think they're quite good for similar reasons. Against a human player their aoe might be not as good as they may not give you more than 2 targets to hit, while AI will often gladly blob 4-5 units for you to blast at, but even if you hit 2 units it's pretty good value unless they're in range to triple shoot them and you have 100% hit chance. I would add that both of these units get a lot better with Phase enchantment where they can aggressively phase forward without spending AP to nuke things from a very high effective threat range. Cryomancy - Ice coffin is a pretty solid cheap spell, and even if it doesn't Freeze, Slow can be almost as good as Slun/Freeze on a melee unit. Lesser snow spirits evolve into their much more impressive t3 version which can later chain Freeze enemies with Amplified Arrows, and tbh all the elemental tomes should get a better score due to how strong the evolve elementals rush is. If you pick some combination of traits that gives them +2 starting ranks you can be swimming in t3 units like turn 15 or even earlier. Whether your eco can support it is another question but this is also where shadow binding comes being useful. Glades - I kinda don't agree on this being S, especially when you rate Wind as B. I think the 2 archer units are comparable in power, and you might want to look into utility abducting wind gives you for pulling enemy units into your firing lines, it can be almost as good as "kill a unit" in many situations. Sanctuary - on the other hand imo this is an easy S, just on the sole basis of Keepers Mark. It's not just "save a unit", since they can still walk up and lock your units in place with AoOs and retaliation attacks, as well as get healed on their turn. This counters focus fire strategies, which is generally the default. The unique spell jammer is solid too. Teleportation - I'm tempted to give this an S too, just because strategy map mobility is so incredibly important and this helps it a lot. Summoning - I think you've overlooked that the heal is a spammable army wide tactical spell, if you only use magic origin units this is quite amazing and there's no other heal like this at this tier, I would still agree with the overall ranking though. Cold Dark - this actually works very well if you take Arctic Adaptation and Cryomancy, the terraforming spell becomes a powerful economic engine and makes enemies suffer movement penalties in your domain which you on the other hand ignore. You get this at t3 as well and you need t4 to get smth similar with nature for races without Arctic Adaptation. Kind of a niche build though. Astral Mirror - you seriously undersell the Astral Reflections, this spell is crazy and puts this into S tier easily. You can use it on heroes and t5s so hello infinite overchanels or doubling up on your Shrine of Smiting damage output (yes, they do 50% but there are 2 of them, so you still get an equivalent of unit's damage on the field, and with Overchannel you can do it twice per turn. Nature's Wrath - I think this tome defies classification and is better than all of the tier 5 tomes, because of the armywide AP reset spell. Combo it with a mobile army of let's say Phase Beasts and Phasing Battlemages and you can be on top of enemy in no time and then it's gg. You can even do it twice on the same turn with Overchannel which is just utterly ridiculous. Goddess of Nature - I think you overrate this quite a bit. It has almost the same armywide res the 2 other tomes in this tier have, the difference being that it also heals damaged units. But the God Emperor's tome is generally mode widely applicable as you can make more unit types Faithful or Zealots than you can turn into plants. And the Necro tome actually counters your res since no corpse = no res. The unit enchantment is good, but imo it's not as good as the one in the Archmage for example. It's not bad but I wouldn't put it any higher than A. Archmage - I kind of agree on the ranking, I actually think Time Stop is a lot worse than where you put it at vs humans since no one would clump to be hit by that (pvp games would most likely end much sooner than it's available too though). If AI blobs it's a really good spell, but if you only get like 2-3 units in a 18 vs 18 fight it's really meh for t5. Maybe if you manage to hit their best units and heroes. Overdrive is a lot better than you give it credit though, since most t5s are magic origin and this is one of the only ways to buff them. 48 move is also nothing to scoff at, 30% damage is really nice too (damage wise it's twice as powerful as 30% crit unless you have some crit damage synergies, just saying). Disruption wave removing enchantments is massive and is possibly the best lategame debuff spell massively dropping enemy combat power value. Maximized magic + gilding strike is a combo worth mentioning. Chaos Lord - I think you undervalue the Avatar in the same way you undervalued Astral Reflections. If your leader can overchannel, summon 5 different units then reset and summon 5 more units this is pretty good. It's maybe still not as good as some others but it's not really C tier imo. Tome of Creator - tbh with the right synergies this can destroy most things very easily. Keep in mind that repeated casts also inflict Sundered Defence if you have the heart. With Overchannel, Tome of Amplification and the Astral Perk on to cast on the 1st turn you can drop fat 120 damage on all enemy units, while kiting back and corner camping the map. You also stun some of them and sunder resistance. You can do it on subsequent turns too. If you're up against Nature though and see they can heal up, maybe you just conjure some amplification pylons first and wait to engage. As enemies take damage, you start dropping double casts of this to pummel them into the ground and then either eat or just camp their corpses with summons so they don't res. Out of t5 ones, this feels like the hardest one to counter (we don't talk about broken Nature's wrath here). Eternal Lord - it's very strong in terms of spells it gives allowing you to resurrect, counter enemy resurrection, good global summon, great hero skill etc. The shortcoming of it is that this stuff all costs souls, which are harder to get than mana and don't benefit from the discounts mana spells can have. For that reason alone it's probably the worst in terms of practical use, but assuming unlimited resources I think it might be one of the better ones. All in all imo the t5s are all pretty close, with Eternal Lord lord maybe being the worst due to practicality of the casting resource while if I would give any single one an edge that would be Creator since it allows your solo hero to pretty much nuke 3 full stacks without much effort in a lot of cases.

You are addicted but so am I! Thanks for showing me a great game.

very happy with all your AoW4 stuff. My only want for this video might be a vertical separation so you can clearly see the rankings of each teir, but I understand if program doesn't allow for that option.

Gotta say, reducing enemy moral in this game is really strong. With the Doomherald book alone you can turn a battle that the auto-battle has you nearly fully wipe into a causality free win. If you use the army spell before a battle and the tactical spell on at least 4 units all you need to do is kill about 2 enemies and the whole stack routes. Doomherald is ez a or s tier and you are sleeping on it. Good vid tho.

I love how Potato can get me to watch so many hours about a game I’ve never heard of and won’t ever play😂

Hey quick thing i noticed that might affect how you see tome of enchantment. Copper Golems can evolve into Iron Golems by leveling up since you spoke so highly about them. It is a very easy mechaninc to miss since you can see it only on unit level thingy. Love the new content as someone who also fell in love with this game

I recently started playing this game and still feel a little lost at times, so I’m all for more of this content.

You may not have noticed but tome of subjugation's Final Ultimatum *permanently mind controls* As in, after the battle you keep the unit. If you play your cards right and especially if you get the moral debuffing shadow tome you can pull off some silly things. Takes a while to get online though.

Scry Enemy can be pretty good late game as an acrane based civ because if your enemy is sets up a heart it gives you global vision of it. Then you can use astral shattering to pillage their heart, and the army that it spawns can be scried. Then as it runs around you can keep using astral shattering to pillage more provinces and create more armies for your opponent to have to deal with.

ngl in my experience tome of the doomherald is amazing in battle, the enemies all start routing so easily even when they outnumber you by far

Have you played industrious for their casters/supports and spammed frontline copper/iron golems? I believe undying from the tier 5 book effects your golems. I just did that, I was clearing out 10 stacks of units with 2 stacks of 2 steel shapers, and a frontline of golems. No losses or only losing copper golems. Take a transmuter if you have a melee hero, take another golem if you have a ranged/support hero. It's absolutely insane. At one point I had iron golems with 18 armor. Staves of warding is insanely good gets your strength of steel healing for 80. With 2 steel shapers, that's 80 healing back to back on practically invulnerable targets. The heal + bolster defense basic spell synergizes so insanely well with them too. I've never felt so COMPLETELY invulnerable in this game before. I think people think the materium affinity line is bad unless you actually play industrious and use that +2k gold to skyrocket your cities early game with prospecting scouts. The upkeep skill at the end and healing for spare move points are also insanely good. I took the upkeep reduction skill on all my heroes and had an absurdly sized army for the amount of towns I had control over.

I haven't even played the game yet, but I'll gladly listen to Potato talk about it for an hour and a half.

I'm not sure the Arcane Supercharge spell is bug or not. In one of my order campaign, I found out that I could buff every units with Arcane Supercharge. I even buffed a Shrine of Smiting with both Arcane Supercharge and Exalted Champion, and made it has +150% damage

this video is a great showcase on how good the game is. So many things he says is bad or underpowered or even the op stuff i would have to say is not 100% accurate in my opinion and thats great! i like that there is actually good diversity in this game so far with what people thing is strong/weak.

I carefully tracked all of the scores you gave for your books. 5 for "S", down to 1 point for a "D". Nature (40), Order (34), Astral (32), Chaos (28), Shadow (26), Materium (23). Chaos, with one "D" and three "C"'s was rated MUCH lower than your initial rating, especially with just two S, and NO "A" tomes.

The thing about some of the tier 1 units from tomes that’s skimmed over in the video and not being taken into account is the fact that some of those tier 1 not so special units can evolve to be tier 2/3 units that are better … I took copper golems and evolved them early game which gave me powerful tier 3 units fast and I’m sure the same can be said with others here .. depending on your build and how aggressively your units are getting into fights and their survivability it’s definitely worth mentioning that you’re not just getting a tier 1 unit like your culture has it holds more value cause not only do they start out slightly better than your original tier 1s but they have the ability to evolve which is what I think sets them apart they couldn’t give you overly powerful stuff out of the gate but they give you the option to earn powerful units out of the gate …

There's actually an insane way to use mass recall if the map is big. 1. Use the astral walk to teleport your ruler anywhere on the map and build an outpost with teleporter. 2. Mass recall your stacks to home base (assuming you made your teleporter close) 3. Teleport all your stack in wherever place you built said teleporter outpost. This will effectively make your army cover all parts of the map and will let you clear opponents with ruthless efficiency.

Materium tree is awesome. Cheap outposts, more gold, it's great.

"Materium doesn't have many repeating ranged attacks" Zephyr Archer - "Am I a joke to you?" (literally the best Archer in the game)

Materium is the tree I somehow ALWAYS end up, no matter how I start, or what I plan. It's phantastic for economy and in sieges it's an absolute powerhouse, shredding any city to bits to vasallise it afterwards. And you certainly don't want to wait for ages to have buildings finished on your city. If you spend your imperium on growing your city and spam quarries, you have very neat buildings in no time. It can use a buff on some skill tree elements, true, but it definitely deserves a little more credit imo.

I agree on most of those, the only thing that stook out for me was the Tome of Warding being that low, in my eyes it's a solid B to A tier tome because of the Phantasm Warrior. Something you, in my eyes, kinda overlooked about it is that it's an incredibly cheap Rank I Ethereal Shield unit of Magic Origin of YOUR race which makes them scale incredibly well into the later parts of the game as a transportable meat shield that is a massive nuisance for the enemy compared to their cost and upkeep, even if you keep going Astral with a little bit of Materium, you'll get two minor race transformations that will given them +2 to both of their defensive stats among other things. They easily can outperform Iron Golems depending on your unlocked tomes with Astral's Magic Origin buffs especially if the enemy is heavily magic oriented but without massive lightning damage. For a comparison, in my game, my Phantasm Warriors take a 2G 8M upkeep for them and their buffs, have 7DEF and 6RES (except lightning where it's at 0) deal 13Lightning 6Physical per strike, have astral blood, is immune to immobilisations and freeze, can phase through obstacles while having very fast movement speed in both maps. Meanwhile my Iron Golems cost me 17G 3M upkeep for them and their buffs, have 7DEF, 2RES (8 against plague but -2 against lightning), deal 12Physical 4 lightning per strike and are immune to morale effects and alterations but start with ~10 more HP. They won't change the tide of the battle but they make for an incredible meat shield and archer/support/mage blocking unit the later in the game you are for astral, incredible cost for the amount of time they will force the enemy to spend on them while your ranged units do their job given that as soon as you hit 300 world map cast, you can generate a full army of them per turn to protect your ranged armies.

are u nuts? shadow affinity is a good or at least decent affinity. it gives a couple of good empire skills: - free cities with whispering stones give you vision and research. vision is sometimes nice but moreover 10 research per free city early to mid game is decent - it also gives -20% upkeep for magic origin units - death magic: +5 battle casting points per unit death (enemy or yours) is good for spamming more spells - cryptblade is nice, decent damage und gives you the killed unit as a zombie - +200 mana and knowledge for conquering a city - give your whispering stone to other empire vassals to gain their tribute - REALLY strong one: double xp gains of heroes

Hey potato! Tome of enchantment of ranged units works reeeeealy well! Zephyr archer AOE 8 tiles away on legendary rank. The copper golem transform into Iron Golems once they get ranks and seeker arrow doubles with legendary rank ranged units Eagle Eye, making their att 6 range and if you get a Spring Fairy you get a True shot to overcome the lack of acc!

I wanna give a shoutout to the teir III Shadow tome that gives ice stuff. Specifically the Snow Elemental. Its a T3 Magical Summon Skirmisher unit that is absolutely awesome for its ability to very easily apply freezes to enemies as well as their teleport(which also had a chance to freeze nearby enemies too), just finished a game going for an Icy/Lich King theme with an emphasis on ice magic, and I must say they were quite valuable, expecially for seiges and they played quite nicely with Banshees, who have a useful morale debuff but have to get close and are quite squishy themselves. Freezing the enemies around the Banshees allowed me to keep them alive for longer. Even without Banshees they are just a good defensive/support unit with nice utility that can fit anywhere you might need it. Materium I would assume may be for consiteration if you are getting attacked a lot, as a lot of their tome abilities as well as their tree abilities benifit defending and attacking cities. You can also pick up a hero trait that allows you to ride spiders. I did it in the same game listed above. It gives every calvary (or hero riding one) the web abilities of a Spider. Of course you are sacrificing a racial trait for this, but it was very helpful to have Dark Knights that can apply a slow.

Wish we could add how many armies enter a battle. Or adjacent armies could reinforce as troops die or flee the field of battle.

One thing about marching winter, and all teraforming spell for that matter i think is that they can affect uncolonizable provinces which makes it even better. Another funny combo i found was getting the tome of the god emperor, and getting max rank of shadow empire development which lets you see the whole map, and just orbital strike shit across map with half the cost(magic victory)

I feel like the frost damage enchantments lift the Tome of Cryomancy out of D tier because there are situations you find yourself in where your main opponents are weak to frost and you're getting insane value from those in the early game. Admittedly, there aren't that many frost-weak enemies unless you're on a Fiend infested map, but it'll definitely be worth it come the Dragons DLC.

Lots of people seem to disagree on your takes on some of the other affinities, but I'm with you on Chaos affinity. It's very strong, and fun to play too. And really nothing is better than the Horde tome for spamming out quick wins to grind out the Pantheon points.

Tome of the Astral Mirror is a must take for me just for the Combat Spell "Summon Astral Reflections". The spell works on your HEROES! Obliterate your enemies with several copies of your hero in combat. It will summon two copies of your hero each time you cast. Quite fun! :D

You should also mention that the Sanctuary protects all other province improvements from pillages until it goes down. It can really slow down enemies trying to take out spell jamming and is nice for marauder spawns

This tierlist is on point. I definitely agree with most of these! I really want the Cryomancy tome to be good… hopefully they buff it.

46:17 I did find a nice way to use emergency teleportation: it's kinda a weaker version of displacement, if a unit gets pinned and you want to get it out the engagement without losing a move or suffering another hit, and you get some of the hp life you likely lost when your unit got pinned. Obviously in a battle mages based army it works perfect, you get out of pin and you bring down a full volley or make a run for it. It has its limits, but it's neat

Not sure if you know this trick but it might up the book of astral mirror to S tier in your list, you can cast the astral duplicates spell on heroes including your wizard king and the copies can use the overchannel ability, allowing you to cast the spell again to summon more copies with the overchannel ability, again and again for as long as you have casting points, which you'll have a lot of because of the astral affinity perks. I managed to make 10 copies of my king in a single turn at the start of the battle, plus the original for 11 wizard king going around fighting total.

I went pretty magic heavy in one of my games and that tome with the Warbreeds was available and they inherited Mana Addicts, so got life steal when I'd cast a spell - that was quite silly.

Chaos eaters make super easy work of clearing Horned God wonders and units. Since there's usually poison every 3rd turn and health absorption on the chaos eaters, you can literally consistently damage one turn, heal from 20% to full the next, and sustain for dozens of rounds. I was very happy to have them when I did. Coincidentally, despite seeing high value in flameburst weapons, they actually _never proc_ for me. I've never once had an explosion from flameburst weapons in several campaigns. It's good for the 20% crit on its own, but idk why my flameburst has never worked. And lol at the fact that apparently we're polar opposites for these chaos books, but devastator spheres are super handy imo. So many times enemies defending will put their ranged units beside a turret and several palisades, meaning free damage, usually instakill turret, & destruction of 2-3 walls to allow your units a good flanking maneuver

You don't summon the Copper Golem for the Copper Golem. You summon it to evolve it into an Iron Golem. It's a timing push thing - Iron Golems, if you get them early enough, basically let you conquer at least one or two neighbors or some Silver tier Ancient Wonders before hitting the mid game. That's basically Materium in a nutshell - a trickle of stones falling down a hill that eventually becomes an almost unstoppable rockslide.

Important thing you missed about a bunch of the Nature stuff. Notice that a good chunk of it doesn't just affect Animals...but also CAVALRY. I made a utterly ridiculous build the other day. Feudal, Wolf Mounts, Overwhelm Tactics, Book of Beasts. Also the Swarm Culture thing. All those things give crazy buffs to units that stick next to each other. Guess what counts as Cavalry, has ranged attacks, and is a Tier 1 unit? Feudal Scouts. Feudal Scouts with absurd, stacking damage and crit chances for just bunching up every battle. From the literal start of the game. With practically no upkeep, at a extremely cheap price. I am now the Werewolf Mongols

I'm trying to learn a bit how to use each tree by using only one type of book per game. It's not effective, but you learn some the more hidden combos and also the hidden weaknesses.

I am going to argue that tome of pandemonium should take a higher place. If you combine Chaos Eater ability with the arsenal of weakening spells from tome of souls, that unit brings literal destruction at the battlefield. The Tier 1 AOE curse which bestows 3 negative effects from tome of souls and that demon's ability are just enough to cause a massive damage. Weakening spell is one thing, but if you have battle mages infused with a variety of weakening abilities, just one shot from them will make chaos eater ability work like a wonder.

42:15 Also if you use manual combat and then use automatic combat, Banshee really likes commiting suicide. It always jumps in the middle of multiple units and then dies

You missed a critical feature of the copper golem. If you level them, they evolve into iron golems, a tier 3 unit. If you take it as your initial tome you auto-get copper golem as your initial spell which means that as soon as you have the mana, you can summon them. A stack of several tier 3 units very early in the game that you paid tier 1 unit costs for can be quite useful.

Wrath of the faithful is an S+ spell. It always gives near 30damage to mythic units while being dirt cheap. The tier 1 units that have weakness to spirit get instakilled turn 1

Ice prison is an awesome spell and frozen is easy to get with witches on top of it. Early game where you typically have a single tier 2 or 3 and chaff you can CC the boss and trivialize encounters.

It makes sense that it's harder to put frozen on enemies instead of burning. Frozen itself is obviously a lot more powerful than burning.

I finished a game with Arcane High Elves, and even if you're just using the base racials, you can stack bonuses to your battlemages and combat spells to pretty much destroy most things. Astral mixed with Chaos and Mataerium can let you just cast forever with a beefy frontline...sadly Iron Golems don't benefit from racials. Not that they need it.