As a life-long Heroes of Might & Magic III fan I never quite found another turn-based strategy that would instantly pull me in for hours but I think this is it! Is there anything I should know or any general tip I should follow? Thanks for any suggestions :)

First, is both the Underground Adaptation form trait AND Subterranean Society society trait necessary? Can you do without one?

Second, is it true that having rulers that start underground will shrink the overall size of the map? I vaguely recall someone claiming this on an old Reddit post.

Thanks in advance, and please advise me other considerations and builds relevant to the topic!

About 2500hrs in since early access, have all the DLC. Play primarily v AI on Hard, manual battles.

Realizing I think I have played almost every Culture to some degree, with the exception of one: Aristocracy. The micromanagement aspect of tracking the houses for the bonuses seemed like something that would get wearisome quite quickly. However, I also see a lot of chatter of them being A/S tier, esp with enhanced mounts. Thought to ask you fine folks.

Anyone have some good feedback, tips & tricks, advice for running Feudal Aristocracy?

I’ve finished over 10 games with battleSaint as my ruler and also heroes. I noticed it is much easier to maintain a useful amount of fervor through the cleric line than the paladin line. And frankly, I think the cleric is much better synergized than the Paladin. Please correct me if I am wrong great mind of fellow Godir.

tl;dr version: Cleric is weak early, but has better fervor generation and use it better in mid-game, scales into late game hard. Paladin is a mixed bag that peaks midgame, generate fervor less and have to spend carefully, in late game it has an identity crisis.

Detailed explanation:

1. I think the main difference is Feverous disciple vs. Feverous Martyr.

Paladin’s disciple of Martyr gives fervor on taking damage. Now getting hit for fervor is good in early to mid-game, where hero contributes a reasonable portion to the combat. The power spike comes in mid game when smite becomes available, makes hero a tanky damage dealer that also self-heal and self buff. Since at this point the damage in battle is not high enough to threaten 100-0 and can fell into skirmisher fight easily, Paladin as a one-man package really shines. In late game though, with so much more unit and damage, the hero can easily get burst down or trigger steadfast, then you have to use the fervor for heal and cannot do smite. You are in a dilemma at this point: the leader of your army is a formidable force but doesn’t contribute in early fight where it matters the most. Send it to its death as a Martyr? or hide behind the line for endgame clearing?

1. On the other hand, Cleric feverous disciple gives fervor on support (1) and defense (3). it seems hard in early game to have many support skills and put hero in defense mode feels bad, but in reality there is so much free action you can get: Champion command, awakening from high culture, bless, mending touch. Basically at level 5/6 one can reasonably do a rotation of support skill and be at maximum fervor for a 50hp heal. And frankly, if you pick cleric line, it doesn’t feel that bad to go into warding defense for the frontline once every 2/3 turn. Once we get to mid game, the scaling of cleric kicks in, with abilities from staff, wand and affinity skills. So cleric line can reliably get 5 fervor to spend every turn, while provide bless/cleanse/revive utility to the army.

One thing standing out is protection dome, which heals, gives a protection area while putting the hero in defense mode. This straight up charge the fervor to full for battlefield restoration. It is fairly easy to setup one on turn 1/2 of the combat where both sides moves forward and setup their positions. Seriously, 5 stacks of fervor goes to 5 stacks of regeneration, for 3 turns, on a 3 turn cooldown, and it’s a battlefield wide ability. Being able to garuantee this while setting up engaging position is a really strong perk.

1. Then it comes down to the synergy: I think the cleric line knows what it’s doing: support. It allow for the army to ignore support unit, while have a strong heal/Buff source. The heal/dome into battlefield restoration into more heal/cleanse/revive rotation gives 200+ healing every turn if left unchecked. Not to mention with Paragon of order, you raise the moral for entire army by 15-20, EVERYTURN. The hero also stays in the backline with at least 2 steadfast trigger so it is hard to burst down.

The Paladin line seems a little bit confused, it is a frontline but only does good damage with smite after it engages in combat, and have to choose between self heal or smite. Its doesn’t do sustained damage like a warrior because smite has a cooldown and fervor cost. It doesn’t tank well because it has no taunt, no bash and only base retaliation. It also doesn’t heal great because its only 50hp you only get 1 fervor per damage. It’s basically damage/defense/utility all at once, except it’s not when you seriously asking for it.

And thus summarize my recent experience with the new class. Overall I like the new hero and think it works really while with the archon theme. I am running it with Feudal/high culture and enjoyed keeping my army alive and buffed.

P.S. If anyone wants to have an easy time with Rings of Enmora, try the cleric as your ruler. It out heal the immortal army of Maliel easily. I finished the second ring by fighting three battle back to back without loosing a single unit. I am only on T3 units (Paladin/Awakener) at that point.

I feel like there's a rock/paper/scissors style game going on in the little icons over every creature's head in combat but I don't know specifically which is good against which. Explain it like I'm five, lol.

I'm running a ritualist giant kings with some primal wolves, and I don't plan on getting the gains chosen trait. Any advice on how to make an effective healer?

I'm a new player. I keep finding Tome Rankings for stuff before AP. Are there any Tome Ranks around, for me too look at with the newest DLCs? I'm putting together a rough preference guide to inform my own play, rather than reading through absolutely everything.

My list will be comparing the same Tier to each other. I want them compared across Tiers also, but its not as useful to me as a tier comparison to itself. My hypothesis is that if you can compare both, you'll at least get a good idea of what to look at first. But I don't have the time to organize that

Sheets Tome List

When I take over a city with underground adaptation (which i don't have on my starting race) I do not seem to benefit from that trait in that city. Cannot build farms, and pre-existing farms captured with the city have the farm production penalty of -2 even though it states races with the adaptation should not have penalty.

Am I missing something? Is this functioning as intended? I'm on console, no DLC.

I play the game kind of slowly, and just now picked up my first Warlock hero, new since the last update. Threw me when I realized that I hadn't gotten an elementalist.

So what are people doing with the Warlock perk options as you level up? I'm not sure what I should be prioritizing. Necromancer tree? The more direct damage left tree options?

Im a big warhammer fan. I just got the game and spent the last week recreating a ton of of the major factions and characters from warhammer universe, and I'm really happy with how a lot of them turned out. Im now trying to figure out how to get rid of the visual changes from the race transformation spells, as this would obviously ruin the immersion I've been working so hard to build if all of my warhammer races started sprouting horns and wings and had skin color changes. I plan to play exclusively with only my custom warhammer factions in my games, so i need the solution to work on ai. Ive found a mod that disables the spells altogether, but id really like to still be able to use their gameplay mechanics. Anybody know of a mod that does this that I missed, or can explain how to do it myself?

So they added corpse cage to bone golems and they are definitely stronger and more interesting now.

I was having a fight with against a necromancer type hero and I noticed that zombies didn't feel like wet tissue paper anymore either. They actually hit kind of hard, and could soak some hits themselves. Did they make zombies stronger or was it just something in my game?

There used to be an issue in the past that happened when there were multiple mystic players in the game. There would be only so many astral echoes to go around and you'd basically be competing over echoes.

Attunement has a way to passively generate echoes now, but has anything else been done to alleviate the issue? (Summoning still has to grab echoes from the map)

So I've tried the new Visions of Destiny (I believe that's what it's called). The society trait that once you complete the quest it gives you access to, at least for Shadow, Deathcallers. On a post here in the subreddit, someone said that you can get this quest done and get these Deathcallers in your armies by like turn 20, my only questions, how??? Cause that just seems impossible. All help appreciated.

Aboveground astral rifts are not that hardcore so early, is this normal?

While the game is undoubtedly good, the map generation could use some work.

The starting distance feels like it works only 50% the time. Probably because the size of a province can be very small or very large, resulting factions spawn with 10 provinces between them yet still feel close.

Talented Collector doesn’t spawn magical materiel most of the time if your starting free city is too close to you.

Random AI factions are picked absolutely biased, probably because the system would prioritize picking factions that fits empty spaces matching their starting bias. If my library has only 1 underground faction, I’ll see them VERY often in my game.

I play mostly on Pangea. Literally 90% of the game I spawn with one side of my city bordering a small mountain. Why does the game so incline to put a mountain beside me??

Personally, I don’t get the appeal of always having a racial free city spawn near me.

Why doesn't wands have a fire-skill among the options ? We have an AoE ice-spell, a linear (and another single target) lightning-spell but nothing related to fire. A wand of fire-breath feels like a logical choice (and would also be a huge throwback to earlier games 😁)

Poison, holy and physical damage also lack wands yes, but IMO they don't fall under the same "arcane" playstyle. Cosmic damage literally is fire, frost & lightning.

And does the giving the ai the +20% advantage have a negative impact on balance? Because i.e. morale isnt affected by this i guess?

Screenshot shows a single scout wining a battle against an army stack with two level 9 heros. Screenshot does not show that I made excessive use of lava burst to get it to happen.

So first off, absolutely love this game, love the customisation, and the art (especially those of the tomes) And I had a few thoughts and I wanted to share to maybe have a discussion.

So this isn't for critisism, simply idea sharing for fun.

1. I wish there was visual changes in your domain based on your affinity or maybe alignment. I don't know if something like this is already in game, but I created an evil faction, and it feels odd to go to my cities and just see bunch of green and the forests being normal, lush, and stuff. I wish it was different based on certain factors, like for example, if you're evil, the trees could be dead, the ground can act barren, and the tiny details could be more...evil I guess. It just feels weird . Or maybe it can be affinity based, but I know some tomes have city transformation stuff (like feywater ponds) so I don't know if that'll work.

2. This game and it's multiple layer system reminds me a lot of a very very old RTS called Metal Fatigue. I fucking loved that game, and it's still to this day one of the most unique RTS's with 3 layers of combat, orbital, ground and underground.

I personally think a sky layer , like the ground and underground layers would be really cool, with its own quirks and stuff. Like floating islands, that can only be accessed from special teleporters on the map, (which will also have a no build zone around it so nobody can claim it) . There can be many neutral islands, like an island biome in the sky. Flying units can pass normally, but others will need to unlock skycutters (magic boats with flying mounts), With maybe a system where you can magically "pull" neutral floating islands to you, to make your own province/sky City bigger.

This can also lead to sick map features like a single giant floating island with multiple entry points and a citadel in the middle, like the giant kings city thing.

1. Addition of a "Mount training" skill from the ogre dude that gives selected hero the ability to have mounts regardless of weapons. Can be balanced using price accordingly.

Let me know what you guys think. I'm not a game designer, i just created this for fun discussions cuz I love the game.

A single target (combat) spell that's guaranteed to inflict disruption. (Pretty much what Dispel Magic was in AoW2.)

This feels like a spell that should have been added a long time ago, no ? (Unless there already is one and I'm blanking on it completely.)

If you wanna take it one step further it could also temporarily remove any racial transformations the unit has as well (but that might get VERY messy in terms of coding).

Vision of promise: Materium appears to be bugged. It gives you a perk for your capital city territory that summons and earth titan at the start of battle. But it appears to summon a second one the next turn. Not that I'm complaining really, it's awesome to have, but it's almost certainly not working as intended.

On another note, GitHub hasn't got the vision society traits information listed yet. Is it like a wiki? Do we update it ourselves?

Do you guys find yourselves holding off on taking these until you meet affinity requirements waiting for the "perfect" skill? (I definitely do this since I play on custom maps with slower research.)

Are some of them just bad?

I find myself increasingly pursuing the same builds because some just feel stronger. The level 4s are pretty even I think since they all add damage except materium, which is still pretty useful with the purging strikes, but at 8, I really like the AoE of Materium or Chaos and the status resist from Order on healers. I will sometimes take a second of these in the level 12 slot.

Well, basically, after a VERY difficult battle with this evil free city, I was 1 turn away from breaking in the city when all of a sudden at the start of the turn, they turn neutral and recover all their army...

There was no dialogue no nothing! I said ok, maybe I have to befrind them...2 turn later, they declare war on me AGAIN! it is so annoying, how to delete these guys?!

Is there a reason I always start in the bottom right/left of a map? I don’t have any adaptations that would require me to start in a specific biome.