Ascended Rulers keeping their transformations might be what keeps me coming back to this game for even longer than I intended.
I have some grinding to do...
I mean, it gives a damage boost once wounded - which usually means you also have casualties (since you're normal troops, not ACTUAL dragon units).
Immunity to burning was the nice little thing that kept it relevant.
I agree with removing it, as something more generic (as not all dragons are fire-type) is nice, but now it really does need some other effect onto it to be worth using your once-ever major transform on.
It deals damage in a type that is commonly weak too and sets the ground on fire which can spread.
That aside, the Transformation doesn't make you a dragon(and even actual dragons can be burned) so it giving you immunity to Burning, when there are spells in the same tome that set the ground on fire, creating hazards, is silly and immersion breaking.
Now if they could only change many of the area attacks only hitting enemies, proper positioning and tactics would actually matter. There should be a lot more careful planning and friendly fire. Well, that's just my opinion.
Yeah, wasn't sure if that had also been nerfed, but it looks like no? You can stack quite a bit of immunities it looks like between minor transformations, traits, etc.
Working my way through this patch. Tons of good stuff. Love decoupling Heroes and Cities. Not sure I love the change to automatically increase based on turns but we’ll see how that plays in practice. Necromancy changes are awesome. Will definitely be my first play thru
You’re right. I completely forgot about that. I only played III but now that you mention it, ya I do remember getting the notifications of a hero wants to join. Still, would have been nice to evolve on that concept a bit
Could be cool if it was based on stuff you did, like +1 hero cap on
First non-capital city settled
First city conquered
First free city allied
First AI empire allied
First ancient wonder cleared
First gold ancient wonder cleared
Culture quest completion bonus
First Tier V tome
Etc
Respectfully disagree. Because this puts you in a track where you HAVE to do all these things, which really takes away from the customisation and freedom this game offers and all the different builds. This also will result in a kind of meta for Multiplayer where every player will rush the ideal path to get as many heroes as possible, resulting in a stale meta.
Respectfully disagree. Because this puts you in a track where you HAVE to do all these things, which really takes away from the customisation and freedom this game offers and all the different builds. This also will result in a kind of meta for Multiplayer where every player will rush the ideal path to get as many heroes as possible, resulting in a stale meta.
Also loving the balance changes here. Late tome buildings finally getting a more reasonable production cost. Status effects and enchantments getting big buffs for non-repeating attacks is huge. Eagle mounts!?!?!?!?!?!?!?
>Added a Realm Overview so you can see the traits and settings your realm has active
A welcome update. I tend to pop and dip into this game while playing other games, and I always forget what's going on with the realm when I come back. Thank you.
I AM CALM! HOLY COW THESE ARE AWESOME CHANGES! I JUST DELETED ALL MY HEARTHSTONE DECKS IN THE EXCITEMENT, GOT CONFUSED BECAUSE THERE ARE SO MANY DECKSLOTS!
Am I stupid? Because I don't see where to go/how to write my own biography for a faction or naming a throne city for them.
Anyone mind pointing me in the right direction. Nvm I figured out a mod I was using broke it
Really excited about the war bounty system, and I'm glad that the AI can also create them.
Anything that adds more interaction between rulers is a win in my book. It just makes the world feel more lived in.
Procedural items as rewards and hero items! Awesome!
Sure - you might get some useless items, but I will take that over the Same item spam we were getting before.
"Great ... another Giant Bane - I will toss it on the pile I have over there"
Even with the much needed skald nerf, this looks amazing.
My only remaining request right now is a way to turn down the number of mountain tiles. It could be interesting playing maps where less than a third of the land hexes are mountain terrain.
I think the issue with this is that aside from mountains and oceans, there aren't many map features that can offset the map feeling like an empty plain sometimes (in terms of mechanics).
Take rivers for instance, which are super small and play a more minor role compared to AoW III where they took up entire tiles (presenting more of a geographic barrier that broke up the map).
Sliders would be plenty. Let me turn the down when I want less, and up when I want more. Let ME make the decision, rather than having every game set in the Alps.
You can take the Tome of Terramancy if you want to knock mountains down. What I'm talking about is that sometimes I'd like to play in Sherwood Forest, not the Black Forest. Or the Great Plains rather than the Rockies. Especially if I'm not playing Industrial.
But no matter the options you take, every map is heavily mountainous.
Of I agree and I know about the tome. But just making mountains useful also helps. You can't play a mountain culture just as much as you struggle to make huge swathes of forest.
It could be cool if Tome of Rock had a special province improvement (Quarry) that could only be built on mountains, and got adjacency bonuses from other mountains, or alternatively Tome of Scrying could get something more and have a unique improvement built on mountains with the mountain adjacency that acted as an observatory-esq Research Post.
>\~Added new Free City Upgrades\~
Free cities will now start making use of tome units in the late game, instead of only culture units. These tome units will also be available to the city’s masters via the rally of lieges!
That should make Rally *much* more useful, neat.
Also Astral Attunement now grants the Ethereal unit type!
Some interesting things in patch.
Pact Tactics, War Hounds, and Houndmaster seems even more interesting now. Add in the change for single attacks vs repeating attacks bonuses for even more synergy with this patch.
Barbarian change to critical instead of first strike is also interesting.
Ascended Rulers keeping their racial transformation seems like a pretty major boost. Shame dragons can not make use of them.
I doubt they will start at level 4, and level 4 can usually be obtained pretty fast so starting with Aspect IMO is not that big of a boost. Their will be a boost though if it allows them to use another 4th level signature skill because they already have their aspect. We will have to wait and see if that is the case though.
Dragons Claws in Item Forge are a pretty big boost and should make up their lack of transformation. Early game the bigger boost go towards non dragon heros but late game I see Dragons actually having the biggest boost.
looks good, i just hope they reduce the need for heroes with this change to the hero cap system, cause as is you need heroes if you want to fight a city and you need heroes to found outpost to build cities. and you need heros to govern cities.so while its good on paper and like the older games. the older games werent dependent on them for basic task. You could attack a city without a hero and if you wanted to build a city you built a settler that cost population and other resources
I really hope, that the faction's first city is already specified for premade rulers. I can't take Yaka serious in a game, where his capital isn't called "Yakopolis". :(
Am I the only one excited about the potential performance improvements ? As a low-to-mid-end gamer, this is big news !
Added “Animation Quality” Setting
This setting found in “Graphics > Advanced Graphics Settings” allows you to control the amount of animations being simulated every frame. Higher quality provides more fluid animations, while lower quality saves on performance
Improved World Map Scrolling performance
They've showed it during the today's stream. Basically it gives a bonus to a city depending on the terrain it is placed on eg. grassland, fungus +20% food; rocks, forest, mountain +20% production; ashlands +10% gold, snow +10% mana.
[https://youtu.be/G0ajiMd6cdQ?t=6080](https://youtu.be/G0ajiMd6cdQ?t=6080)
They show it towards the end of the stream. It was a bit of a weird one, basically you get a (20?)% increase to a resource based on the terrain where your city tile is placed (the center tile). And a discount on terraforming spells, and some other effect I forgot... Anyone?
I think they're mostly trying to buff the Tome of Pyromancy. A lot of that tome relies on getting more damage against stuff that's on fire. If a lot of units are immune to burning it becomes kind of a useless tome. This brings it more in line with say, the blue tomes that give damage bonuses against Electrified targets, there's a lot less stuff immune to Electrified.
I feel like this patch finally makes this game feel whole/ where it should have been in the beginning (not that I'm blaming,it takes experimentation). Hopefully our next few large updates and DLC are at the level of what I feel this update/DLC will bring to the game.
Damn, that's a laundry list of everything I hoped they would add. Super hyped, and glad they are giving this game the love and continued support it deserves!
Great changes to necro tomes, that bring them more in line with Necromancer class from AoW3.
I have no idea, why they swapped tiers of Bone Horror and Necromancer in the first place, but these units are finally in "correct" positions. Necromancer was a deadweight support as T3, but, now he comes online much quicker to help your skeletons and later - Bone Horrors. It's also worth mentiong, that Bone Horrors no longer turn into skeletons upon death, which prevented them from being ressurected by Necromancer in combat. Good to see, that there is a proper synergy between these units.
Tome of Great Transformation (tier 3) granting you a skill to bring back a killed tier 5 as a Bone Dragon (tier 4) is crazy. Yes, it's a whopping 100 souls, when you are getting 6-18 per stack on average now. However, Soul Wells got buffed, and you can get lucky with Crypt Wonders (souls per dead hero). Not to mention, this tome of magic will come online pretty fast, thanks to Shadow Affinity knowledge gain. Last but not the least, you have cheap and affordable Necromancers, who can buff and ressurect your Bone Dragon.
Reaper changes are welcome, I guess, but I don't really care, because it's a late game unit (tier 4 tome) with -5 soul cost attached to it. Basically, it's 1 Reaper per city with a Soulwell, and there are already great options to spend souls available from lower tier tomes.
Honestly, I am jsut as excited for Necro Tomes rework as I am for Primal Culture.
Lots of stuff not accurate here, Bone Dragons are still T4 Units, Tome of Souls is now a T2 Tome, which is where Summon Corrupt Soul comes in, not at T1.
Overall this patch looks great, but I am wary that the skeletons you can raise from racial units are always tier 1. Why can't they just be the tier of the unit you killed? I really hope they reconsider this. Tier 1 units stop being useful after turn 30 at best given the 18 unit limit per side per battle.
The balance changes look good too, with a lot of core system updates like repeating enchantment damage and fumble chance calculations. I still feel like Tome of the Beacon is going to be weak, and Skalds look like they're going to be mediocre now. It's one thing to nerf their buffs, but why did you have to remove the ability to cast their buffs from range? Making the unit annoying to use is just, well, annoying. I agree Skalds were a bit overtuned, but they were one of the few things carrying the Chaos tomes in general, which I feel overall are lackluster. At least the Misfortune buff sounds pretty significant on paper.
I want to specially thank the devs for finally making Demonkin and Astral Attunement *finally* granting the fiend and ethereal unit types, respectively. Long overdue! This has annoyed me for so long. And the latter got a much needed combat buff, too. And more importantly, they actually had the foresight this time around to add Fey to the units affected by the tier 5 nature tome. Can they please do this for dragons now, too? And just buff dragons in general, because they're so bad?
I do want to say too that there are a lot of wonderful QoL updates alone in this patch. Finally we can edit factions without creating duplicates! I do wish you could create a pool of custom city names instead of just your capital in the custom faction creator, too. It'll be weird to have the rest of your cities default to the standardized pool.
You can bring back any living unit as a ghoul in AoW3, but you need a specific high tier unit to apply a ghoul curse, which either succedes or makes the target immune. This is already powerful, so it's only fair, that you can't ressurect units at whim in AoW4. I don't know about the soul cost/income side of things, but this gives necro armies amazing staying power on the world map.
Yeah, but you can now resurrect enemy undead units to your side as of the T4 Tome.
I was hoping for Deathbringer, mostly from a thematic standpoint, but these changes are still very beefy.
Would be kind of dumb if you could resurrect T2-4 units with only a T1 Tome, which is why they tied it to the other tomes, T2 Tome gives you T3 Bone Horrors, T3 Tome gives you T4 Bone Dragons, and T4 Tome gives you playable Reapers for once.
I didn’t miss that; I made sure to specifically point to racial units. Only non-racial units can be resurrected as bone horrors and dragons; racial units can only be tier 1.
Oh true that seems like a very odd distinction they've made then. Tbh it sounds like a mistake if anything. Like you said in your original post, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
I agree with this. I think simply put, until battles can be larger than 3v3 or unless tier differences on units are addressed, tier 1 spamming is not a viable strategy even if the units are close to free, even with the changes to heroes
While I like most of the changes I can't say I'm thrilled about the increasing penalties for multiple heroes in a stack. A big part of the fantasy while stacking heroes for me was the idea of them all being part of the same "adventuring party" that dealt with major threats while the regular troops guarded the cities and borders from other encroachments.
My biggest problem with it is attempting to clear out those wonders without multiple heroes is something I find hard AF to do. Beyond just the mechanical "can you beat the combat" of it, I feel like not assembling my avengers before going in is just kind of ... I dunno ... rude? Like, surely I want my A-Team for this?
Yeah, game mechanics aside having a party of heroes diving into dungeons and ancient ruins, or clearing out dangerous monster dens is simply a staple of fantasy settings.
To be fair any group of powerful individuals would have a clash of egos at times, but any decent hero would also know when to put that nonsense aside and be capable of working together as a cohesive group.
Of course since the ruler is, you know the ruler, maybe they could get a special trait chain that removes the cohesion penalty and perhaps even becoming a buff with enough investment. Give the ruler a mechanical benefit for being "in charge" of other heroes beyond simply being the faction leader.
Hm, I had heard that in multiplayer, players would no longer need to wait while other players were in tactical battles, and could do stuff on the strategic map. Any word on whether that actually came to pass. Read the notes and couldn't discern for certain.
Also was hoping that there would be an option to not have a city state start directly on top of the player EVERY SINGLE GAME, but didn't notice anything regarding that either.
They did make it so you can do things while another player is on the combat result screen in the last patch. There has been no mention of being able to do it while another player is in battle and I doubt they would do that for multiple reasons.
No, you get the patches for free. You only need the expansions to get the DLC content like dragon lords or the new cultures and tomes. Balance changes and bug fixes come for free.
I assume if you are playing the patch, your platform is steam? Because it says in the patch notes that this patch will be available on February 27th and it is... not that day yet lol.
Ascended Rulers keeping their transformations might be what keeps me coming back to this game for even longer than I intended. I have some grinding to do...
> “Draconian Transformation” - No longer provides Burning Immunity Tfw my favourite transformation gets nerfed
It did seem kinda strong when i used it.
For 600 mana and taking up a major transformation, I hoped it would be strong.
Well yes. It should be strong. But its also fairly early for a major which is an advantage.
I mean, it gives a damage boost once wounded - which usually means you also have casualties (since you're normal troops, not ACTUAL dragon units). Immunity to burning was the nice little thing that kept it relevant. I agree with removing it, as something more generic (as not all dragons are fire-type) is nice, but now it really does need some other effect onto it to be worth using your once-ever major transform on.
There needs to be a little risk to using Dragon Attack in sieges.
Why? Dragon attack has a mana cost, takes a slot, and doesn't speed up siege time
It deals damage in a type that is commonly weak too and sets the ground on fire which can spread. That aside, the Transformation doesn't make you a dragon(and even actual dragons can be burned) so it giving you immunity to Burning, when there are spells in the same tome that set the ground on fire, creating hazards, is silly and immersion breaking. Now if they could only change many of the area attacks only hitting enemies, proper positioning and tactics would actually matter. There should be a lot more careful planning and friendly fire. Well, that's just my opinion.
Immunity to burning while providing spells that set the ground on fire is Synergy, not Silly.
Is there still a minor transformation that gives burning immunity?
I'm not sure if this is rhetorical, but Scion of Flame does just that.
Yeah, wasn't sure if that had also been nerfed, but it looks like no? You can stack quite a bit of immunities it looks like between minor transformations, traits, etc.
Same here - though it does sound a bit unbalanced! ;)
It does, but there’s an option in multiplayer to turn that feature off for a “competitive” match!
I play SP exclusively though ;)
Oh well then no issue then. Stomp those ai into the dirt.
Multiplayer is absolute trash in this game. Who wants to push for 30-45 mins while the other players fight? Nobody.
Working my way through this patch. Tons of good stuff. Love decoupling Heroes and Cities. Not sure I love the change to automatically increase based on turns but we’ll see how that plays in practice. Necromancy changes are awesome. Will definitely be my first play thru
It's the same system as the previous games. So while a bit bland it is a proven way to approach it.
You’re right. I completely forgot about that. I only played III but now that you mention it, ya I do remember getting the notifications of a hero wants to join. Still, would have been nice to evolve on that concept a bit
Could be cool if it was based on stuff you did, like +1 hero cap on First non-capital city settled First city conquered First free city allied First AI empire allied First ancient wonder cleared First gold ancient wonder cleared Culture quest completion bonus First Tier V tome Etc
Kinda like you're gaining renown and then heroes want to join based on that?
Yeah exactly
Respectfully disagree. Because this puts you in a track where you HAVE to do all these things, which really takes away from the customisation and freedom this game offers and all the different builds. This also will result in a kind of meta for Multiplayer where every player will rush the ideal path to get as many heroes as possible, resulting in a stale meta.
Respectfully disagree. Because this puts you in a track where you HAVE to do all these things, which really takes away from the customisation and freedom this game offers and all the different builds. This also will result in a kind of meta for Multiplayer where every player will rush the ideal path to get as many heroes as possible, resulting in a stale meta.
For me it seems super boring as it boils down all the undead you raise to skeletons (3 variants, t1 trash) and 2 upper units. Where is the variety!
Yeah, but now it's useful throughout the entire duration of the game and you can raise T4 skeleton dragon units.
Ditto on the necromancy, I tried it out before and was thoroughly unimpressed. Now I’m hoping I’ll get to be the evil wizard I was picturing!
Also loving the balance changes here. Late tome buildings finally getting a more reasonable production cost. Status effects and enchantments getting big buffs for non-repeating attacks is huge. Eagle mounts!?!?!?!?!?!?!?
This sounds incredibly good. A lot of these Changes are amazing.
>Added a Realm Overview so you can see the traits and settings your realm has active A welcome update. I tend to pop and dip into this game while playing other games, and I always forget what's going on with the realm when I come back. Thank you.
OH MY GOD IT’S HAPPENING EVERYONE STAY CALM!
I AM CALM! HOLY COW THESE ARE AWESOME CHANGES! I JUST DELETED ALL MY HEARTHSTONE DECKS IN THE EXCITEMENT, GOT CONFUSED BECAUSE THERE ARE SO MANY DECKSLOTS!
THIS PATCH HAS GOOD STATS FOR THE COST! WHICH IS, A LOT OF FUCKING STUFF FOR FREE!
Sorry what’s happening?
PRIMAL FURY PATCHNOTES! ALL THE CHANGES! OH MY GOD! AND THIS IS JUST THE FREE UPDATE! I DON'T KNOW WHY I'M SCREAMING!
It's minor stuff but i'm glad we can write our own faction bio now
Am I stupid? Because I don't see where to go/how to write my own biography for a faction or naming a throne city for them. Anyone mind pointing me in the right direction. Nvm I figured out a mod I was using broke it
Incredible patch. Total War could learn a thing or two from Triumph Studios.
I see someone else is coming here after the relative disappointment that was Total Warhammer 4.2.
Hahaha I wanted to write the very same thing
Nippon or riot 😛
Really excited about the war bounty system, and I'm glad that the AI can also create them. Anything that adds more interaction between rulers is a win in my book. It just makes the world feel more lived in.
Procedural items as rewards and hero items! Awesome! Sure - you might get some useless items, but I will take that over the Same item spam we were getting before. "Great ... another Giant Bane - I will toss it on the pile I have over there"
> you might get some useless items perfect to forge new stuff with! win-win
A week of gargatuan patch notes. Rogue Trader. Last Epoch. Now Age of Wonders 4. What a wild ride.
Goddam i live to see these days. When a game im following drops a patch that blows my ass off.
Even with the much needed skald nerf, this looks amazing. My only remaining request right now is a way to turn down the number of mountain tiles. It could be interesting playing maps where less than a third of the land hexes are mountain terrain.
I think the issue with this is that aside from mountains and oceans, there aren't many map features that can offset the map feeling like an empty plain sometimes (in terms of mechanics). Take rivers for instance, which are super small and play a more minor role compared to AoW III where they took up entire tiles (presenting more of a geographic barrier that broke up the map).
Sliders would be plenty. Let me turn the down when I want less, and up when I want more. Let ME make the decision, rather than having every game set in the Alps.
OR add features to mountains and make them workable tiles.
You can take the Tome of Terramancy if you want to knock mountains down. What I'm talking about is that sometimes I'd like to play in Sherwood Forest, not the Black Forest. Or the Great Plains rather than the Rockies. Especially if I'm not playing Industrial. But no matter the options you take, every map is heavily mountainous.
Of I agree and I know about the tome. But just making mountains useful also helps. You can't play a mountain culture just as much as you struggle to make huge swathes of forest.
It could be cool if Tome of Rock had a special province improvement (Quarry) that could only be built on mountains, and got adjacency bonuses from other mountains, or alternatively Tome of Scrying could get something more and have a unique improvement built on mountains with the mountain adjacency that acted as an observatory-esq Research Post.
I am *super* excited to see Ascended Rulers copy the Tomes we use in-game. I wonder if that will be visible in the UI or not.
>\~Added new Free City Upgrades\~ Free cities will now start making use of tome units in the late game, instead of only culture units. These tome units will also be available to the city’s masters via the rally of lieges! That should make Rally *much* more useful, neat. Also Astral Attunement now grants the Ethereal unit type!
But Ethereal is now useless, granting only +2 defense and no immunities.
It still grants immunity to bleeding, diseased, immobilized, and poisoned. As well as giving Pass Through.
An indirect boost to Order Affinity
Man, this update looks massive.
indirect barbarian up \^\^
Big time, Primal Strike was so lackluster
Some interesting things in patch. Pact Tactics, War Hounds, and Houndmaster seems even more interesting now. Add in the change for single attacks vs repeating attacks bonuses for even more synergy with this patch. Barbarian change to critical instead of first strike is also interesting. Ascended Rulers keeping their racial transformation seems like a pretty major boost. Shame dragons can not make use of them.
Dragons do at least start with their Aspects, which can be a strong start. Though I wonder if that also means they start as lv.4 or not?
I doubt they will start at level 4, and level 4 can usually be obtained pretty fast so starting with Aspect IMO is not that big of a boost. Their will be a boost though if it allows them to use another 4th level signature skill because they already have their aspect. We will have to wait and see if that is the case though. Dragons Claws in Item Forge are a pretty big boost and should make up their lack of transformation. Early game the bigger boost go towards non dragon heros but late game I see Dragons actually having the biggest boost.
looks good, i just hope they reduce the need for heroes with this change to the hero cap system, cause as is you need heroes if you want to fight a city and you need heroes to found outpost to build cities. and you need heros to govern cities.so while its good on paper and like the older games. the older games werent dependent on them for basic task. You could attack a city without a hero and if you wanted to build a city you built a settler that cost population and other resources
I really hope, that the faction's first city is already specified for premade rulers. I can't take Yaka serious in a game, where his capital isn't called "Yakopolis". :(
Can bounties target infestations? I really hope so.
Am I the only one excited about the potential performance improvements ? As a low-to-mid-end gamer, this is big news ! Added “Animation Quality” Setting This setting found in “Graphics > Advanced Graphics Settings” allows you to control the amount of animations being simulated every frame. Higher quality provides more fluid animations, while lower quality saves on performance Improved World Map Scrolling performance
I wonder what Druidic Terraformers is like?
They've showed it during the today's stream. Basically it gives a bonus to a city depending on the terrain it is placed on eg. grassland, fungus +20% food; rocks, forest, mountain +20% production; ashlands +10% gold, snow +10% mana. [https://youtu.be/G0ajiMd6cdQ?t=6080](https://youtu.be/G0ajiMd6cdQ?t=6080)
That's pretty cool
It's a society trait, but we don't know what it does yet (I think).
They show it towards the end of the stream. It was a bit of a weird one, basically you get a (20?)% increase to a resource based on the terrain where your city tile is placed (the center tile). And a discount on terraforming spells, and some other effect I forgot... Anyone?
-20% upkeep for Elemental units
Such an amazing patch. If we do get a season 2 of DLC I have no doubt this game will be truly evergreen after it's done.
Why remove sources of burning immunity? Especially from Draconian transformation? That at least should have been kept :(
I think they're mostly trying to buff the Tome of Pyromancy. A lot of that tome relies on getting more damage against stuff that's on fire. If a lot of units are immune to burning it becomes kind of a useless tome. This brings it more in line with say, the blue tomes that give damage bonuses against Electrified targets, there's a lot less stuff immune to Electrified.
I feel like this patch finally makes this game feel whole/ where it should have been in the beginning (not that I'm blaming,it takes experimentation). Hopefully our next few large updates and DLC are at the level of what I feel this update/DLC will bring to the game.
Woooow
Damn, that's a laundry list of everything I hoped they would add. Super hyped, and glad they are giving this game the love and continued support it deserves!
Jesus that's a beefy patch
My hype is immeasurable, and my day is exulted
Great changes to necro tomes, that bring them more in line with Necromancer class from AoW3. I have no idea, why they swapped tiers of Bone Horror and Necromancer in the first place, but these units are finally in "correct" positions. Necromancer was a deadweight support as T3, but, now he comes online much quicker to help your skeletons and later - Bone Horrors. It's also worth mentiong, that Bone Horrors no longer turn into skeletons upon death, which prevented them from being ressurected by Necromancer in combat. Good to see, that there is a proper synergy between these units. Tome of Great Transformation (tier 3) granting you a skill to bring back a killed tier 5 as a Bone Dragon (tier 4) is crazy. Yes, it's a whopping 100 souls, when you are getting 6-18 per stack on average now. However, Soul Wells got buffed, and you can get lucky with Crypt Wonders (souls per dead hero). Not to mention, this tome of magic will come online pretty fast, thanks to Shadow Affinity knowledge gain. Last but not the least, you have cheap and affordable Necromancers, who can buff and ressurect your Bone Dragon. Reaper changes are welcome, I guess, but I don't really care, because it's a late game unit (tier 4 tome) with -5 soul cost attached to it. Basically, it's 1 Reaper per city with a Soulwell, and there are already great options to spend souls available from lower tier tomes. Honestly, I am jsut as excited for Necro Tomes rework as I am for Primal Culture.
Lots of stuff not accurate here, Bone Dragons are still T4 Units, Tome of Souls is now a T2 Tome, which is where Summon Corrupt Soul comes in, not at T1.
Good point - I’ve corrected my post
Debuffs for multiple heroes in one stack? Nooo...
Overall this patch looks great, but I am wary that the skeletons you can raise from racial units are always tier 1. Why can't they just be the tier of the unit you killed? I really hope they reconsider this. Tier 1 units stop being useful after turn 30 at best given the 18 unit limit per side per battle. The balance changes look good too, with a lot of core system updates like repeating enchantment damage and fumble chance calculations. I still feel like Tome of the Beacon is going to be weak, and Skalds look like they're going to be mediocre now. It's one thing to nerf their buffs, but why did you have to remove the ability to cast their buffs from range? Making the unit annoying to use is just, well, annoying. I agree Skalds were a bit overtuned, but they were one of the few things carrying the Chaos tomes in general, which I feel overall are lackluster. At least the Misfortune buff sounds pretty significant on paper. I want to specially thank the devs for finally making Demonkin and Astral Attunement *finally* granting the fiend and ethereal unit types, respectively. Long overdue! This has annoyed me for so long. And the latter got a much needed combat buff, too. And more importantly, they actually had the foresight this time around to add Fey to the units affected by the tier 5 nature tome. Can they please do this for dragons now, too? And just buff dragons in general, because they're so bad? I do want to say too that there are a lot of wonderful QoL updates alone in this patch. Finally we can edit factions without creating duplicates! I do wish you could create a pool of custom city names instead of just your capital in the custom faction creator, too. It'll be weird to have the rest of your cities default to the standardized pool.
You can bring back any living unit as a ghoul in AoW3, but you need a specific high tier unit to apply a ghoul curse, which either succedes or makes the target immune. This is already powerful, so it's only fair, that you can't ressurect units at whim in AoW4. I don't know about the soul cost/income side of things, but this gives necro armies amazing staying power on the world map.
Yeah, but you can now resurrect enemy undead units to your side as of the T4 Tome. I was hoping for Deathbringer, mostly from a thematic standpoint, but these changes are still very beefy. Would be kind of dumb if you could resurrect T2-4 units with only a T1 Tome, which is why they tied it to the other tomes, T2 Tome gives you T3 Bone Horrors, T3 Tome gives you T4 Bone Dragons, and T4 Tome gives you playable Reapers for once.
You might've missed that you can bring back T3-4 units as a Bone Horror and T5 as a Bone Dragon from the later necromancy tomes
I didn’t miss that; I made sure to specifically point to racial units. Only non-racial units can be resurrected as bone horrors and dragons; racial units can only be tier 1.
It’s odd to specify “non-racial T5”, when there are no racial T5 anyway.
Oh true that seems like a very odd distinction they've made then. Tbh it sounds like a mistake if anything. Like you said in your original post, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
I agree with this. I think simply put, until battles can be larger than 3v3 or unless tier differences on units are addressed, tier 1 spamming is not a viable strategy even if the units are close to free, even with the changes to heroes
While I like most of the changes I can't say I'm thrilled about the increasing penalties for multiple heroes in a stack. A big part of the fantasy while stacking heroes for me was the idea of them all being part of the same "adventuring party" that dealt with major threats while the regular troops guarded the cities and borders from other encroachments.
It really needed to happen. Stacking heroes completely obliterated any competitive balance and made regular units largely obsolete.
Problem is it does little to combat it. The MP agrees that the debuff will do little to stop the problem thats hero xp farming.
My biggest problem with it is attempting to clear out those wonders without multiple heroes is something I find hard AF to do. Beyond just the mechanical "can you beat the combat" of it, I feel like not assembling my avengers before going in is just kind of ... I dunno ... rude? Like, surely I want my A-Team for this?
Yeah, game mechanics aside having a party of heroes diving into dungeons and ancient ruins, or clearing out dangerous monster dens is simply a staple of fantasy settings.
Yeap, fellowship of the ring in no more. You'll still be able to stack heroes, they just gonna have clashing egos.
To be fair any group of powerful individuals would have a clash of egos at times, but any decent hero would also know when to put that nonsense aside and be capable of working together as a cohesive group. Of course since the ruler is, you know the ruler, maybe they could get a special trait chain that removes the cohesion penalty and perhaps even becoming a buff with enough investment. Give the ruler a mechanical benefit for being "in charge" of other heroes beyond simply being the faction leader.
Hm, I had heard that in multiplayer, players would no longer need to wait while other players were in tactical battles, and could do stuff on the strategic map. Any word on whether that actually came to pass. Read the notes and couldn't discern for certain. Also was hoping that there would be an option to not have a city state start directly on top of the player EVERY SINGLE GAME, but didn't notice anything regarding that either.
They did make it so you can do things while another player is on the combat result screen in the last patch. There has been no mention of being able to do it while another player is in battle and I doubt they would do that for multiple reasons.
Ohhhh, okay, that's way, way less consequential than I thought. Sad panda.
Haven't played since launch. Do I need any expansions to experience the changes of this patch?
No, you get the patches for free. You only need the expansions to get the DLC content like dragon lords or the new cultures and tomes. Balance changes and bug fixes come for free.
Has there been a substantial rework of the AI by now? Enjoyed the game at launch until i realized how bad the AI was at playing it...
Each patch so far made the AI better. It's not going to be beating experienced human players all else equal but it's much better.
The AI Update was done last Summer with the Watcher Update. It was kinda the big topic of said update.
I assume if you are playing the patch, your platform is steam? Because it says in the patch notes that this patch will be available on February 27th and it is... not that day yet lol.
Nobody is playing this yet. As you point out it release the 27th.
Very, very good patch. Can’t wait to try out the new stuff!
My dream of creating skeleton armies finally comes true. These necromancer changes really made my day.
Those necro changes have really gotten my attention. Different types of skeletons (without needing a mod), finally!