Overview
I’m going to list as many strategies i can think of, Keep in mind this guide will be a work in progress and i play mostly single player. Anyone that can help me with strategies in MP would be much appreciated.
Table of Contents
1. Table Of Contents
2. Races, Units & Good perks P1
3. Races, Units & Good perks P2
4. Races, Units & Good perks P3
5. Multiplayer Strategies
6. Gods
7. Spell Combo’s
Races, Units & Good perks P1
Humans
Units worth using
>Warriors >Veteran >Paladin of dauros or Blademasters
>Rogues >Cutthroat >Assassins
>Hunters >Rangers >Archers of helia
>Catapults (needs to be used cleverly)
Temple Units
>Blademasters
>Sisters of Krypta
>Beastmasters [not worth using]
>Assassins
>Priestess of Agrela
>Paladin of Dauros
>Archers of Helia
The strong point about humans is their quick, cost effictive and cheap upkeep units. They are about constant expansion and use of army upgrades from both resource tiles and your cities.
You want to get training grounds and wizards tower ASAP! When you find holy grounds and build a temple you can upgrade your tier 2 units into temple units and start your world conquest. The wizards are overrall good units all game which can be later turned into magisters and the army upgrades from the build tree is worth it anyways. Catapults are underrated units that really shines in key locations with water walking or invisibility. They can take down those heavily fortified cities/capitals in a matter of a few turns.
(4)Elven Relatives, (4)Archmage or (4)Magnate/trader, (1) heal, (1)lesser fireball [SP]
Best single player perk selection i’ve used. You can cast fire storm in a single turn and many smaller spells in one turn. In late game you can easily cast all the big spells twice a turn, i’d use archmage in single player only and not so much in multiplayer.
I reccomend train elven archers and upgrade them sharpshooters. Buff them with invisibility, damage and resistance spells. Make use of army upgrades and keep an eye out for koatl villages. The koatl village can increase archer units power by 20%.
(6)Favor Of Helia, (4)Archmage or (3)Farmers, (1)treasury or spell of choice [SP & MP]
Favor of helia is somewhat balanced between offensive and defensive spells. You get access to an early game spell that can combo anything with “weakened” bane (extra damage to lesser weakness and weakness). Being able to burn down unfortified buildings inside cities will cripple and annoy your opponents. Helia’s Elemental immunity will make your frontline soldiers very, VERY hard to kill. Helia’s temple units are the best archer’s in the game alongside elven sharpshooters.
Since Helia has close ties with krolm and dauros you will have access to really powerful unit buffs, Aura’s and magic shield/ spell lock. However you will need to play around with the favor’s a little bit for this to work
(6)Favor of fervus, (4)Archon or (3)Farmer, (1)Treasury or spell of choice [SP & MP]
[Rushing Strategy used to constantly harass opponents or expand early quickly]
I reccomend you pair the bears up with archers for maxium killing capacity early game. Build lunord’s temple for assassin’s endgame. You could put invisibility on your elven archers or sharpshooters which give’s you very powerful ranged units or go in a completely different direction. You may have to play around with the god favors to make both fervus and lunord like you. Bears, Bearmen make great meat shields and are wonderful for harassing you’re opponents.
How to harass unguarded cities: Walk bears onto city farms/tile improvements and have them defend. Next turn tell your bears to burn the buildings down. This will cripple any opponent’s economy/military.
If your capable of taking the city over, right click city and click “Destroy City” and your opponent won’t be able to retake their cities from you. Now that is really going to hurt especially if you killed their military/farm/gold/mana specialized city.
(4)Magnate, (4)Archmage or (4)Elven Relatives [SP & MP]
[Rushing strategy to spam early rogues and archers to rapidly expand or harass your opponents or grab tier 2 or tier 3 units early].
Monsters
Units worth using
>Goblin Spearmen (Earlygame) >Seasoned Goblin Spearmen (Fillers only)
>Goblin Archers >Goblin Sharpshooters (early & midgame)
>Ratman Robbers (Scouts) >Ratman Pirates >Paladins Of Life
>Werewolves >Court Werewolves > Wolves of Helia
>Trolls >Old Trolls
Temple Units
>Druids
>Champions Of Grom-gog
>Paladins of Life
>Wolves of Helia
With monsters you want to set up some focused towns on food so you can feed your army and convert the unused food into gold. This does two things for you. One it allows you to focus other towns on gold or mana and you can feed your people/army. It converts the left over food of which 50% of the food is converted into gold. Believe me there will be tons of left overs! Make use of your sturdy units to constantly expand your empire and keep an eye out for tiles that can increase your research production. Monsters aren’t very good at researching things or producing mana so be sure to look for svart or arethi elves towns and capture them.
I don’t recommend converting court werewolves into wolves of helia unless you plan on perk stacking from both monster and warrior perk upgrades. Court werewolves spirit blast is a ranged 7 tile blast that shreds most basic units. That said they can easily compete with their helia counterparts and both are solid with their own roles on the battle field.
(6)Favor of grum gog, (4)Researcher or (4)Magnate or (4)Archon [SP & MP]
[Highly offensive with early summons and city curses good vs any race but only mana and unrest curses work effectively on undead]
Mosquito swarm, if you can get this before your opponent has global dispel for cities you pretty much control the game. -90% population growth will put you so far ahead of your opponent it’s really a joke. (focus spell research only on divine spells early game to achieve this).
I reccomend getting the unit leveled travese terrain perk or wind walking asap to make use of spamming swamps to slow movement ALOT. You could also get levitation but that will cost way too much mana to upkeep -9 per turn compared to -2 upkeep of wind walking.
(in cities you know are going to get attacked spamming swamps will really screw with your opponents, or lay swamps outside your cities or on tiles you don’t plan building on, you could spam swamps in cities you plan on attacking too.).
(6)Favor of Fervus, (4)Archmage or (3) Farmers, (1) spell of your choice [SP & MP]
[Rushing Strategy used to constantly harass opponents or expand early quickly]
I reccomend you pair the bears up with archers for maxium killing capacity early game and harassing unguarded cities mid-endgame.
There is a huge difference to how monsters uses Fervus’s spells compared to the other races. Fervus’s regeneration spell gives werewolves, court werewolves, bears and bearmen 30 hp regen per turn instead of 15 and another 15 regen per turn on old trolls is near unkillable. Monsters don’t have alot of resistance to ranged or elemental and some don’t have much melee resistances, so monsters need to keep a look out for iron mines, neveril mines and make a couple smithy’s.
Fervus is close to lunord and krypta so you can get early spells from them too. Lunords spells will be very helpful with the poor mobility monsters have. Fervus has beastmasters which are probably the most sturdy archers ingame. They regen 8 hp per turn by base and has decent damage and resistances.
Races, Units & Good perks P2
Undead
Units worth using
>Skeleton warrior >Skeleton veteran
>Skeleton Archer >Skeleton sniper
>Vampires >Elder vampires
>Zombies [Use to guard cities and weaken opponents damage]
>Ghost
>Flying galleus >Flying line galleus
>Dracolich
Temple units
>Krolms Housecarls (bad unit don’t use)
>Ancient Liches
>Adepts of lunord
>Paladins of death
Skeleton warriors and archers are pretty much your standard tier 1 unit except they are heavily resistant to ranged and vunerable to melee, life, spirit and elemental damage.
Undead only needs three things, Mana, gold and research. Do not even bother with food as you can see the undead has a nice variety of units to use and being negative 100 food isn’t an issue because undead doesn’t eat. Unless of course you plan on using other factions and in that case just get a human or monster city and get all the food improvements first. Worth noting if your using krolms favor as a main god its better to use a human city to build krolms temple. Blade masters are far superior to the housecarls undead gets and undead lack fire power in the grounded melee department. Dracolich can easily fill your melee slot but they are vunerable to life damage and i think blade masters are far superior anyways.
Flying galleus is a very strong early-midgame unit people don’t really use. They can dish out a nice amount of arrow, elemental and small amount of death damage. They also have demolisher so it’s great for destroying cities, naga fountains and dremmer towers.
Zombies are amazing for reducing the combat potential of waves of weaker units and guarding cities, outside of that they aren’t all that useful. Ghosts are great for clearing tough monster dens and earlygame rushing if your opponent doesn’t have damages outside of melee/ranged yet.
Good ideas for perks
(6)Favor of Fervus, (4)Archmage or (4)Conjurer more mana is good [SP & MP]
Undead lacks strong melee units outside skeleton veterans. Zombies are only good for defending cities and peppering around your opponents to reduce their attack power by -39%. Fervus has bear’s early game, bearmen mid-end game, chaos shield, and spirit resistance through artifact creation. Undead doesn’t need food so essentially you have units that take 0 upkeep. Great god favor for undead.
Gives quick acess to lunord and krypta which is very nice. You’re going to always want krypta as undead as it’s one of the best choices you can make.
(6)Favor of Lunord, (4)Archmage or (4)Conjurer [SP & MP]
Only really useful for time stop, haste and some of his damage spells. Although forcing your opponents to fight you in water isn’t a bad thing, combined with water walking, dracolich and flying galleus it’s pretty powerful.
[Don’t use this strategy against naga as it will back fire obviously].
Getting access to grumgog’s and kyrpta’s spells is a huge boon early game. Grumgog for strong rat summoning and krypta for undead heal’s and skeleton summoning if needed. If you can get grumgogs misquito swarm/swamps or Krypta’s Lands of death/undead buffs for some lol’s.
(4)Conjurer or (4)Researcher/Academic, (4)Archmage, (2)Koatl house [SP & MP]
Undead produces tons of mana so its not absolutely necessary to grab conjurer. I noticed undead doesn’t really produce very much research so getting researcher over academic for the fast short term benefits is not a bad idea. Academic will pay off in the long run of the game though. Koatl house for the koatl spears, koatl hunters and the koatl warlocks. The reason for koatl house is for access to units that can deal damage to elementals and traverse elven terrain. All elementals are immune to death damage and all undead pretty much wither and die in lands of life.
(6)Favor of Krypta, (4)Archmage or (4)Conjurer [SP & MP]
You want this for all the undead heals/buffs single and global, Lands of death is probably the best spell you could possibly get for undead. Getting access to fast spammable skeletons and heals is great. There are only 3 base spells that will heal undead. lesser reconstruction, reconstruction and then regeneration for a slow 3hp per turn heal.
Quick access to Krolm and fervus. This will cover all your earlygame resistance needs and units can be solely bears/skeleton archers. Planting some of krolms runes will make your units stupidly hard to kill.
Svarts
Units worth using
>Prospectors > Senior prospectors
>Honourable Warriors > Elite Guards
>Rune witch > Rune Seer > Exemplar Of Magic
>Dragomort > Dragomort Guardsmen
>Rune Forewoman (not rune warriors, they suck!)
Temple Units
>Flycraft Of Order
>Exemplar Of Magic
>Exemplar Of Strength
(6)Favor Of Dauro’s (4)Archmage or (4)Academic or (4)Magnate [SP & MP]
Favor of dauro’s is the obvious choice facing an undead player getting access to high damage life spells and being able to lock your units/lord’s spell buff’s so they can’t be dispelled is amazing. You can also use magic shield to make your lords and units immune to banes.
Dauro’s has close ties with agrela and helia allowing you to use their favor to increase your poor food production. Very strong choice overall and amazing vs undead.
Archmage and academic are both very solid choices. Magnate will allow you to rush dragomorts early which come in real strong early game. In multiplayer i think dragomorts would help you more in the long run. (Dragomorts have resistance to elemental damage, are flying and has a healing spell for your frontline units or lords).
(6)Favor Of Fervus (3)Farmers (1)Treasury or spell of choice.
Svarts are really crappy at producing food so normally i wouldn’t reccomend this strategy. However quick expansions and tons of units will garentee you capture another race’s city. Preferably monsters or human cities. Fervus has some good defensive and offensive spells ontop of powerful earlygame bears and midgame bearmen. (If you are building fervus’s temple on holy grounds you will easily have access to favor 75++ spells).
Fervus’s temple unlocks exemplar’s of magic, they are the tankiest non-lord mage unit ingame. With some buffs from spells, building perks from cities and leveling they can also deal a nice amount of damage. Exemplars have an AoE spell that can slaughter 6 units at once every 3 turns.
(6)Favor Of Helia, (4)Archmage or (4)Academic or (3)Farmers, (1) treasury or spell of choice
Favor of helia is somewhat balanced between offensive and defensive spells. You get access to an early game spell that can combo anything ontop desert tiles (extra damage to units standing in desert tiles). Being able to burn down unfortified buildings inside cities will cripple and annoy your opponents. Helia’s Elemental immunity will make your frontline soldiers very, VERY hard to kill.
Since Helia has close ties with krolm and dauros you will have access to really powerful unit buffs, Aura’s and magic shield/ spell lock. However you will need to play around with the favor’s a little bit for this to work.
I reccomend you build krolms temple to unlock his war machines (svarts can’t build helia’s temple). They can lash out at every single unit surronding it and give your units nearby 20% attack power. You will need to play around with the favor a bit to keep both helia and krolm happy.
Choosing between archmage and academic is hard because Svarts produce research out the ying yang. Academic gets you to experienced mind and agile mind faster but archmage allows you to cast firestorm, fertlity, blessing of the sun, harvest blessing, Blessing of life and prosperity in one turn. This is really useful throughout the game.
Races, Units & Good perks P3
Plainstriders (Strong early game rush, mid-endgame dependant on temple units)
Units Worth using (When buffed only)
>Grey Striders
>Plains Archers
>Magic Fighters
Units Worth using
>Fighter Of Plains >Sergeant Of Plains
>Charmers
>Master Of Arrows
>Grey Shadows
>Fire Totem >Fire Statue
>Raiding Senpan
Temple Units
>Black Reapers
>Archers Of Chaos
>Sorcerors
>Life Givers
>Order Keepers
>Light Bringers
Just about all your units are wimpy turds earlygame. What you need to do is build a stable economy and set aside a few units you want to keep alive and level up. As you unlock more tech and upgrades for your troops you can start building some really powerful units. Magic fighters can get the benefit of all the warrior upgrades and then rank up into a charmer and take advantage of all the mage upgrades. This essentially makes this unit VERY powerful and it should not be underestimated.
If you look at the variaty of temple units available for plainstriders you will notice that they are very similar to humans. Like humans you can upgrade most of the units you train into temple units as soon as you unlock the corresponding temple and training grounds. It is very worthwhile to unlock training grounds ASAP.
You can cast levitation on raiding senpans and essentially turn them into a flying construct unit that summon grey shadows much like a prospector summing birds.
(6) Favor of fervus, (4)Koatl training or (4)Magnate or (4)Researcher
(4)Magnate (4)Researcher (2)Elven world
With some experiments i found that Plainstirders are really good at going from world to world. Their an expansion race and earlygame they simply don’t have the endurance or fire power to survive. Starting in elven world garentees them lots of silver and gold mines, some decent loot and abundance of food. Ironically it is much easier to survive in the elven world than any other world so if your playing PvP your main goal is to get to Ainadra Asap and gaurd your portal.
Get two to three cities settled asap, lay down a god city fervus or lunord and clear any monsters in your way.
Magnate and researcher helps get Plainstriders train and maintain an army. Buff them with melee/arrow resistance and fervus shield of chaos. Now you have an army that can go around destroying anything in their pass.
Naga
(6)Lunord, ? [WIP]
Lunord for the lunar tide to make all tiles turn into water, Final spell time stop and tailwind is worth using. Reccommend you go through wizardry & Sorcery spells after you get lunar tide to make up for your lacking city buffs. Lunord has some really powerful offensive spells that can make up for your early-midgame softeners/curses if you choose to focus divine spells more.
Multiplayer Strategies
Scout Bombing
Constantly scout everywhere and cast fireballs on any settlers/units your scouts run across. Good units to use for this include prospectors, bats and summon serpent/wolves.
Land Terraforming
Change the map to better suit your need and, lay out traps between you and your opponents. Such as grom-gog’s swamp spams, fervus’s forest spams, agrela’s lands of life and krypta’s lands of death.
Expanding close to or behind opponent boarders
This requires being sneaky as hell but if you can set up a normal city and a couple fortress cities you can lock your opponents in place or make a clear path to push your way through their boarders.
Guerilla Warfare
Using “Hit & Run” mind set use tanky or summoned units to invade cities and burn their building’s down. To do this you need to sit one of your units ontop their buildings for a turn then demolish it the next turn. On your 3rd turn your probably going to die or you will need to run away. Best used with fervus’s bears and bearmen early and midgame.
Alternatively you could use invisible scouts to “see” their cities and burn all their building’s down with helia’s spell. (Ion cannon from Command & conquer anyone?)
Lords
You see a lord? kill it now! No seriously, If you ever make it to endgame whoever has the most buffed up lord is going to win. These guys are like heroes in warcraft 3 they win games.
Using Create artifact and create greater artifact / Unit buffs from spells & Buildings
You can make your lords have 200+ resistance to everything except for spirit resistance, make them levitate, invsibile, hit 6 units at once every 3 turns (mage only), 30% vampirism and deal 200+ damage.
Gods(temple units, Divine spells)
I’m not going to give you their back story i’m only going to list the spells and mention which ones are worth making use of.
Krolm (Offensive & Defensive) Temple units are strong except for undead version
Rune of protection, Fist of krolm, Rune of Wrath, Berserk, Hatred of Magic, Rune of Negation, Krolm’s Nullify, Restore Ardania and Wrath of Krolm.
The runes you can get are amazing, Making use of them is tricky but boy oh boy do they kick the almighty behind. Combine Berserk with a unit that has high regen per turn or use fervus’s elemental regeneration (+15 per turn). Free counter spell, dispell and AoE restore land spell to original form is amazing vs anybody that likes to mess with your terrain. Wrath of Krolm need i say more? +50% attack power to every single unit you own? GG.
Krypta (Offensive, Defensive & Economic) Temple units are strong
Summon skeletons, heal undead, mana vampirism, lands of death, boon of death, Danse macabre, summon ghosts, greater heal undead and curse of the living
This goddess sole purpose is to command and bring death to the land. She is placed really well on the god circle, you can make use of krolm and fervus along side krypta. Heal undead, summon skeletons, lands of death and boon of death are really good spells that can make even the most fragile undead into well oiled killing machines.
Fervus (Offensive & Defensive) Temple units tend to be really overpowered especially the exemplars of magic, druids and archers of chaos.
Spells worth mentioning can be actually all of the fervus divine spells, thx to the +15 regeneration and “spell combo”(read down), magic resistance 60 elemental magic, by the way is a co-op God with Lunord what makes all buffs on you troops just completly EPIC but still can be dispelled, POWERFULL SUMMON SPELLS
(the route follow gods tricking them going 1 side for krolm blesses, lunord and fervus makes you army jsut horrible good, but it cost time, many turns, so beware)
Lunord (Offensive & Defensive) Temple units are strong (human and undead mostly)
Moonwalk, Protection of night, Lunar thief, Terror of night, Veil of darkness, Lunar tide (Nagas), Tailwind and Time stop.(+2 move points(single target), +2 move points(all faction troops), move another turn to either retreat or annihilate your opponents.
If you can get lunar thief before players get global dispel you can steal alot of gold from them and cripple them early game.
Grum-gog (Offensive) Temple units are lacking *SUCKS!! [Spells more than make up for it imho]
Summon rats, corrupted vapors, locust swarm, pestilence swamps, plague weapon enchant, curse of mind worms, corruption punishment and insect scourge.
Strong rats are great early game and take only food to upkeep. Grom-gog is the most offensive god in the game and can really obliterate your food production. If your playing vs undead everything is useless so keep that in mind. [Except curse of mind worms and mosquito swarm].
Mosquito swarm curses cities with -90% population growth. earlier you can cast this on your opponents the better off you’ll be. Try to research this before they have a chance to grab global dispel. This spell in conjunction with the other curses can win you the game if you play aggressively enough and keep the heat on your opponents to prevent them from researching global dispel.
Agrela (Defensive & Economic) Very strong heals and food economy. Temple units are strong at support only.
Dauro’s (Defensive & Offensive vs only undead) Temple units are strong figthers. Namely Death paladin’s and bringer of light.
[Has 1 gold economic terraforming spell “Lands of Order”]
Helia (Offensive, Defensive)
[Has 1 food economic spell and desertification for mana]
The god of the sun and the elements. Helia has early game offensive spells and an food economy buff for cities. Helia can grant your units immune to elemental damage and give’s you a spell that can destroy your opponents buildings.
Spell Combo’s
Warlocks 1 and 2 have spell combo’s that require certain conditions, or spell order’s and spells to create a more powerful effect. Some spell combo’s will really help you in a pinch while other’s are slightly useful at best.
Lightning Combo
Perk: Armored, Advanced armor, Excellent armor + Lightning Bolt
When cast on Armored units, Lightning Bolt causes AoE damage to the surrounding hexes. Casting on a unit with Advanced Armor/Excellent armor will cause more damage than a unit with basic armor.
Ice Combo
Ice Prison + Fist of Krolm
When the Fist of Krolm is used on a frozen target, they are shattered, dealing extra damage.
Sun Combo
Lesser Weakness or Weakness + Sunstroke
When Sunstroke is cast on a unit with (lesser) weakness, the Sunstroke will deal extra damage.
Nature Combo
Nature Regeneration + Unit: Bears, Bearmen, Werewolves, Noble Werewolves, Court Werewolves When Nature Regeneration is cast on these units, the spell’s effectiveness is doubled (from 15 regeneration to 30) for 3 turns (look for the Enhanced Regeneration perk).
Agrela’s Healing Combo
Protection of Agrela or Death Magic Immunity + Agrela’s Healing
The effectiveness of Healing is doubled.
Darkness Combo
Veil of Darkness + Terror of Night
Causes Terror of Night to critical hit, dealing 25 spirit damage.
Dauros Combo
Total Protection or Shield of Dauros + Order to Dispel
When a unit with “shielded” status, which is exclusive status enchanted by those two spells, casting “Order to Dispel” on the unit will cause AOE damage like Lightning Bolt’s spell combo.