Age of Wonders 4 – Dragon Lord Build

Best Dragon Lord Build

All credit goes to Seswatha !

Fire Bomb Rush

Ruler: WK, since we’ll rely on summons a lot and we’re not playing Industrious, but Dragon is still a possibility just because they’re good at rushing. I’m going to assume WK though.

Culture: Mystic – we want t1 battlemages, so this is the only option other than taking pyromancy, but fire spirits evolve and don’t get racial transformations, so not ideal.

Body: Resistant or Quick Reflexes. Resistant helps vs most dangerous enemies and spells (most player units will be doing a lot of elemental damage due to enchantments and not a lot of physical, spells too. Shock units and a few others are an exception). Quick reflexes helps vs enemy ranged that’s pretty dangerous against us until we get some later game enchantments.

Mind: Arcane Focus. This is a battlemage build and we’re not aiming to have 100% crit. Though Overwhelm Tactics is always decent regardless.

Culture Traits:

Mana Channellers – we want to be aggressive and summon a lot, and it makes combat summons cheaper too, though it takes a while to get to decent ones now.

Prolific Swarmers – all around decent, helps eco, earlygame, mid and lategame. Might seem like and anti combo with Chanellers since they boost magic origin unit rank and this reduces non magic origin unit upkeep but we have use for both. Important here that our non magic t1 units with just this and Chaos empire development hit -40% upkeep (previously was -50%). And any magic origin summoned t1 unit will get +2 ranks. We’ll use both of these extensively.

One other option (instead of Prolific Swarmers) is Powerful Evokers, since we’ll be using a lot of battlemages is does give us a nice benefit, but it’s not as universal in terms of boosting t1 unit xp and doesn’t help us with upkeep (it does set us up to get Shadow Binding earlier, but we’ll need more Shadow affinity to get there in a reasonable time so we probably would want to grab an early Shadow tome if we go this way).

Tome Progression:

T1: Tome of the Horde, Tome of Evocation

Tome of the Horde – still a must for any t1 unit build, we want Summon Irregulars (our main unit recruitment spell), Spawnkin, Blaze of the Horde, Battle Seeker Training skill for our heroes.

Tome of Evocation – Most of the things in this tome are good for us, I’d skip Evokers since we’re going for t1 spam though, and perhaps Fulmination as we have other good spells to cast. Storm Spirits give us a powerful answer to enemy archer builds now that crits don’t auto hit anymore. Lightning focus is a nice buff for our Arcanists, Lightning Blades and Torrent can be occasionally useful too.

T2: Tome of Amplification, Tome of Artificing

Tome of Amplification – this is the standard mage & archer tome, Frenzying Focus and Astral Blood are very strong, hero skill for +20% spell damage is a must if you plan to use damage spells (we have Blaze of the Horde so duh), Amplified Minds is good for tech. This build doesn’t use Amplified Arrows and I would’t bother with Pylon before it gets a buff again.

Tome of Artificing – We mostly go here for Siege Magic, this allows our Arcanist hordes to siege cities in no time. The 2nd thing we want is actually the Bolt Repeaters siege project as it’s very strong. Iron Golems and Artisan Armaments are also good picks for later stages but not essential.

T3: Tome of Dragons, Tome of Teleportation

Tome of Dragons – this is the focal point of the build and the tome that we’re trying to get to ASAP. First and foremost we want Flamer Focus as it gives our t1 arcanists a powerful AOE attack we have been building up for. With Astral Blood, Frenzying Focus, Siege Magic, Spawnkin, Battle Seeker Training, Arcane Focus we have no shortage of damage buffs to make it stronger, and apart from direct damage it applies 2 dots for 16 damage per turn with pretty good chance. Other things that we want to get are Dragon Attack and Draconian Transformation. We may not have the best synergy with Draconian Transformation but it’s still all around solid and allows us to keep strategic map tempo.

Tome of Teleportation – we mostly want the phasing enchantment for better tactical positioning / threat range. But the global map mobility improvements are universally powerful too. Phase Beasts are very good, but this build doesn’t really focus on them (we could still get some).

Further Tomes

We can rush t5 at this point, a cheesy way to do this would be to pick a t1 tome with 6 techs like Faith or Cryomancy and then we’ll have enough cheap spells on shuffles to skip all of t4 techs. I’d still take Astral Reflections, even after the nerfs it’s a solid spell and with Mana Channellers it’s also a relatively cheap spell for what it does. So basically we could pick both t4 Astral books, research almost nothing from them, get t5, build Heart & cast Age of Astral, then even if magic victory is disabled you have insane advantage over pretty much everyone else.

Alternatively we could stay with lower tomes a little longer and grab:

• Warding – mostly just for more Astral Affinity to get the juicy lategame stuff faster
• Souls – to collect souls, we can build stacks of Skeletons with Souls & Draft to serve as a distraction and to ramp up our research. More on this later
• Beacon – For Mighty Meek on our Arcanists & Imperium from vassals if we’re playing on a big map vs multiple opponents and starting to vassalize our enemies
• Scrying – even more Astral Affinity, Mental Mark to destroy enemy Resistance, Guided Projectiles
• Pandemonium – we apply a lot of debuffs so Pandemonium +30% damage would be easy to enable, especially if you took Scrying Earlier. Chaos Eaters become a strong possibility at this point and are something we could transition to when Arcanists stop cutting it

After that we can go either Chaos or Astral t5, Astral still makes more sense through.

Key Tips Using The Build:

• Focusing on t1 units via summon irregulars, it’s our main way of building units
• We want to start pushing and taking over free cities and enemy cities early, potentially the moment we have Siege Magic & a good number of Arcanists
• This build is extremely good at sieges, since Arcanist each deal 1 siege damage per turn and we’ll have lots of them. Our go to siege project combo by the time we have t3 is Construct Bolt Throwers + Harass Defenders + Dragon Strike, dealing 46 damage to all defenders at the start and giving us powerful long range artillery. This actually may be sufficient to break enemy defences even under Spell Jammer
• Adaptive Research works now, making research buildings very cheap to build so we want that ASAP, this helps us get to the next stages of our build faster
• A ton of our tech power lies in Philosopher Soldiers trait which is why we want a lot of Astral Affinity to get it sooner. The way it works, you get +20/30/40/50/60 research per level up, up to a total 200 research for a fully levelled unit. If a unit starts with extra ranks, you get research for these ranks immediately. So for example, with our setup, a storm spirit gets +2 ranks, meaning summoning it gives us 50 research. For 30 mana(!) since we have discounted summons. Essentially all our summoning spells have a side effect of converting their mana cost to research, at a pretty good rate. Skeletons will also get +2 ranks, making Tome of Souls interesting, as you can basically convert 1 soul and a bit of draft (which with this build is very low value anyway) to 5 research. Eventually this becomes crazy with Astal capstone, with every magic origin summon giving up to 200 research, but the capstone is too hard to reach while it still matters. So realistically you’re looking at 50 research per trashy t1 summon which is still a lot, plus your units participating in combats level up naturally too. This gives insane synergy with summoning a lot of trash t1 summon armies to harass the enemies from all directions. Actively scout, summon units and pillage enemy improvements where they’re not looking, converting your mana into gold and research while hindering your opponents. Take the -1 turn to pillage trait when available. This is also another reason why WK is most likely the best choice here.