Age of Wonders 4 – How to Counter Spell Caster Armies

How Do You Counter Spell Caster Armies?

All credit goes to RedPine !

The answer is Mystic culture! Their T3 unit, the Spellbreaker, does just that: He cancels all enemy buffs, AND all ally debuffs, in a 1 hex AOE, at 6 range. Yes, it’s a full action ability, has a cooldown, and his damage isn’t the greatest, but he hard counters pretty much everything short of mind control.

(Mind control is tricky because although it’s a DEBUFF, it turns the unit into an ENEMY, and there aren’t a lot of abilities that removed debuffs from enemies.)

Astral Tome T6 does the same thing, but as a battlefield wide spell. Shadow Tome T1 Souls has a similar spell, but it only clears debuffs on allies. Any spell or ability that freezes, stuns, or slows, or otherwise renders a unit ineffective for a turn, for all practical purposes removes that buff for that turn.

Most buffs last 3 turns at most, unless refreshed.

If your fighting an army that relies heavily on supports (Feudal Bannerman, High Awakeners), your best option is to snipe those supports, then survive until the buffs wear off. Easier said than done.

Many tomes have single target damage spells that scale quickly, such as +2 fire damage per allied unit on the field, or +5 spirit damage per faithful allied unit on the field. You may want to start off with an AOE spell to trick the AI into wasting as many single target heals as possible, first. It might take 5 turns to kill a single unit, but if that one unit is propping up the entire army, that’s what you have to do.

The hardest part of any plan, whatever you decide to do, is 1) buying time 2) affording the units/spells/upkeep in the first place. It could be that your core issue isn’t tactical, but economic. If one army has T1 units being propped up by 3-4 unit enchantments, and the other army has T2 units with only 1 unit enchantment, those T1 units are probably going to win AND be more cost effective.

For example, in one extremely long game, I consistently autoresolved single armies containing T4 units and winning with 2-3 stacks of T1 scouts. (Cavalry scouts, which meant they qualified for most “animal” unit enchantments).