The sun priests don’t come with Mending touch naturally, you’ve got it from the mending staves enchantment. Definitely they are still very powerful units though, I missed them badly when going from High to Dark culture.
Pure Evil is actually pretty frustrating to maintain. There is a +5 alignment bump every couple of turns if you don't do anything evil. So you can lose Pure Evil any time you are in a stalemate, or rebuilding your military after a big fight. You CAN have scouts sneak across mountains and pillage things, which helps a bit. But it can be surprisingly hard to stay Pure Evil.
the high culture makes really good necromancers, because if you have a necromancer in the group of the high faction buff undead also awakens dormant traits.
The tome of roots fixes a lot of their slow start via the food+mana province improvement and nature affinity, and also provides them a summoned skirmisher unit that fills a gap in their roster, gives them the blight damage channel which is quite complementary to light damage, and also a broken combat spell that is probably going to be nerfed soon, so I won't take it into account. The tome of glades is an excellent tier 2 followup because it provides them with a tier 3 archer that can be awakened (with the right research), adds even more food, and synergizes with the tome of roots and the High culture's tendency to build lots of conduits.
I love playing them as the "Filthy Neutral Bastards" with Imperialist and a War Hero for like +50 Stability. +20 Food and Production on turn one is pretty fun.
I currently using high along with a nature build with arcane as a third affinity to tack on some damage to my flanking and for the tier 4 cavalry units. The tier 4 eagle rider is both a cavalry and a shield unit. While it's base damage is on the lower end, you can enchant it with zeal from the same level one enchant you get in the early game. Because it's also cavalry it benefits from all your animal and cavalry unit buffs from nature. Since it is a mounted unit it also benefits from your racials. Oh, and you can stack several layers of critical as well. It's a lightning bruiser.
Thanks for the tips! Currently running an evil High Culture inspired by the Volcano Manor quest line from Elden Ring. For Elden Ring Fans: Yes the leader is called Praetor Rykard and they are all Cannibals XDDD
The deficite of the High culture's awakened/dormant mechanics: it pushes you into the Shield/Spear/Archer/Battlemage/supporter unit types. Skirmishers, shock units, fighters and mythic units don't gain dormant traits, which I got painfully aware about when I noticed that my summoned Zealots (tome of zeal) don't benefit from from those mechanics. Neither do tyrant Knights.
Vassals! How can you do a video about High Culture and not mention city states or vassals? Some of their race traits give bonuses to getting vassals, the empire tree helps with getting vassals, getting more money from vassals getting more and cheaper units from Rally of Lieges. Tome helps with vassals. I played them a little and I think this is the biggest thing about high culture, even more than Awakening. High is the best culture for city state and vassal play.
Because the entire Vassal Tree is not exclusive to the High Culture, the bonuses you refer to are open to every culture via Order Affinity Points. Nothing wrong about your strategy summary, it's just not exclusive for the High Culture. And with all the synergies they got, this one slipped. Admittedly it would have been worth a mention. Good thing that I plan to do a advanced version for every culture in the future =)
Kind of don't like playing them before unlocking the awakener, because it's kind of hard to awaken multiple stacks of units without awakeners. You can group up for using the awaken spell when you only have one stack, but it's not so good after you get more units. Guess you really need to get twin awakening for all your heroes asap.
Right now im playing dark culture with dark/order books. It works suprisngly well as a morale breaker which is stronger than you may think especially on big fights
oo that is intreing culture that i didn wasintret at first thenks wath neer all your videos about culture only dark left now i will wait for miing 2 mix culture feudal and barbarian peronly i missng 2 nature culte for this game but devs decite to put it insted in 2 difrent culture that i think i willl be not a fan of.
What is meant about hands free with the free evil awakening? The awakening unique and hero skills cost no action points. You should have no issue maintaining awakening on half or more of your army without using any action points or mana. Dusk Hunters are some of the strongest tier one archers imho because of awakening. 4 radiant damage is a 40% damage buff and they gain +20% accuracy and +1 range? Sign me up every day of the week!
Well as pure Evil you wouldn't even need to bring any Awakeners at all, just get the bonus without having anybody around. I see that as a big improvement! The larger your armies become, the more Awakening troops you'll need and the micromanagement effort increases too. Basically my idea here was that Evil High Cultures get way more freedom in how they structure their armies due to the permanent awakened buff. And yes, I should have talked about those amazing archers a bit more, I somehow overlooked the +4 damage while I did the analysis on these guys.
You never tried the dwarf material build lol, now that's playing tall. By turn 27 my capital had 450ish production with 220 defence. I was sitting on 2 cities pumping out 200 mana and 500 gold per turn.