Age of Wonders 4: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE - TOMES & RESEARCH 

Before you choose your 5th tome, take an inventory of your economy. Can you support Tier IV units? Can you utilize the spells in the next 5-10 turns? If not, choose a 3rd tier I or II tome. There are some wonderfully powerful infrastructure buildings and province improvements inside those tomes that you should be able to run through very quickly, supercharging your econ, adding more Minor Tx and Enchantments, and adding more tier III unit options. Big brain plays for sure.

I really like the tome system. It provides a lot of flexibility to an otherwise inflexible part of 4x games. It does have a downside however. If you fail to plan out your strategies for war, econ, expansion and eventually victory the system can feel less than impactful. Its always a good idea to look for race and culture synergies. Some tome units fit perfectly into some cultures while some do not. A good example of this is Industrious culture and Iron golems. Bulwarks and iron golems share a role, tier and have very similar stats. So the value of such unit is lesser compared to say an iron golem in a high culture that does not have a similar unit. Its always important to know what these units an spells do so you can make informed choices and plan your strategy. I do want to give a word of warning to race transformation spells. Many of them do have downsides that are less apparent. especially the stronger ones. Spawnkin gives a nice 20% damage boost but it front loads all of your damage output. The longer the fight goes the less damage your army is going to deal due to the losses from damage your units take. It also means your army is now much weaker to AoE spells and abilities due to the sharper damage fall off from casualties. Wightborn also has its down sides. The -4 fire and spirit resistance hurts alot and can lead to a war loss if your not careful. Wightborn is in a tier 3 tome and makes it so your army is hard countered against the tome of pyromancy, a tier one tome, as well as all order based spells and enchantments In addition to all units from the high culture. The same can be said of the tome of Exaltation's angelize transformation. Angelize makes you weak to blight and frost damage. That means all units from barbarian cultures, the tome of cryomancy and all nature units and magic now have advantage against you.

Mass rejuvenation brings back plants to life After casting leafskin (I think, noticed it a while later) ALL my racial units counted as plants So yeah, oof

That tip on changing tile improvements blew my mind.

What you forgot was the most important part of the new player experience: seeing how ridiculous you can get a wizard to look and then setting them to be a lord in game. Hoping its like stellaris and i can bring them with me into the pool for multiplayer. My friends need to get blitzed by my sexy frog witch

Btw you can lock in a spell with the padlock, extremely handy to use

It says you can only have one tier 5 tome but i had shadow and chaos. I got shadow first, and and then eventually after raising chaos affinity to 20+ i got a chaos event where i could sacrifice my leader to unlock the tome of chaos. Was cool to have reapers AND balors in my army.

I never knew tier IV and V tomes were tied to affinity. I actually learned something today. Thank you.

Thank you 🙏

the main issue with "strong" t4 tomes is that you have to commit to the affinity, so if their lower tier options aren't great then that t4 has increased opportunity cost.

the commenter with the most upvotes has the biggest brain

I really want to stress how important it is to also consider the province upgrades each tome offers, especially during the low tier tome picks. These can be built on ANY province (if you are a caster, you can replace your old forester with a unique province conduit), and the low tier ones only cost 60 gold (goes up to 100, 170, 280, based on tome tier). I had a summoning build that had 5 unique conduit provinces which equates to over 100 mana a turn from a city with zero base conduits, including city mana structures, as these unique upgrades "count as" the type of unique province upgrade they are (for city structures like the mage's guild). Each unique province can be built once per city, so 5 unique conduits = 20 guaranteed conduits in a 4 city empire.

You should do a tier list going over the units granted by ancient wonders. Mostly just because the units are cool, not necessarily because it's a useful guide lol

I think the tier list wouldve been more useful if it was in tier I-V order and then tier F-A order, so it's easier to find your best picks for each tier

I wish there is an option or choice to either get a new tome or continuing with current researches. In all of my (vanilla game) RP playthrough, I've had to compromise and picking contradicting (RP wise) tomes, which forcing me to stack up unwanted affinities, just so that I can continue researchinh all of the content of my chosen tomes.

Don't pay for an army... summon one!

What do the white exclamation points mean on the tome icons?

One other aspect not discussed is how quickly you need to get research done. If you take too many different affinities, it will take you a long time to get higher level spells.

I would be interested to watch your feature film.. you are that good :)

Why is there sometimes an exclamation mark next to the spells in the research screen?

I just thought of this while watching the video, do you think one of the new races/cultures we’ll see in the DLC’s will be an ent type race? What are y’all’s hopes/ speculations?!

Always go cheapest research available and rush magic victory?

Skeletons go brrrr

is knowledge wasted in overflow?

i dont get it why nature and show are opposite in my think

I like my covfefe with sugar and cream.

why is everyone saying this game is good? it's actual trash compared to AoW2. no special racial units, every race literally feels the exact same. AoW2 had 15 races with completely different units. The ingame music is uninspired dog shit compared to AoW2, too. Also, why do the buildings/towns look exactly the same for every nation? that's so fucking lazy, in AoW2 every nation had their own, thematic art for buildings... AoW4 is just extremely lackluster in so many aspects compared to its ancestor AoW2