Age of Wonders 4 – Manual Combat Tips for Newbies

Beginners Tips to Manual Combat

All credit goes to Aunty Herbert!

• I think the first step is to go through right clicking on all of their units, and read their abilities and perks. Boring, but skipping that is what usually kills me.
• If you don’t want to watch replays, well the game has an automatic save scum option for every battle.
• If you are taking too many losses, just replay the battle, until you are certain, you made the optimal decisions on the field. For most types of learners, this will educate you faster, than watching a replay.
• Tailoring your stacks for a specific battle isn’t really viable, though, as you can’t keep switching around what troops and tomes you have available. Neither in general, nor in a given location.
• If anything, you can tailor against a specific ruler, that you are at war with, or better, suspect to start a war against you soon. Look at their portrait and race description to get a feeling of what they are up about, and inspect their armys and individual units, to see, what types of units they prefer, and how they buffed them up. That is what scouts are good for, once you are satisfied with unveiling the map.
• If you see anything, that could cause you trouble, you may have still time to chose a different tome, or build or summon some key units before the war gets hot.
• But as the amount of tailoring is limited, you need to start from a general concept of how you want to fight your battles, which will be mostly dictated by your culture, and then finetuned with racial traits and tomes.
• If you focus on ranged damage output, you also want some chaff units for battlefield control, so your ranged troops can keep doing damage longer.
• If you want to get into melee yourself, you need shock troops and heavy shock troops, to avoid the retaliation damage.
• If you want to turtle and let them come to you, tight formations make your shield units and most of your support units more effective, but also make prime targets for all kind of AoE effects, usually from battlemages or from spells. (or from spiders), so you need to check, which AoEs your oppo can launch against you, how early, and how often.
• Archers generally have the problem, that they want to be protected, but also want free and ideally unobscured line of sight to the enemy. And initially, most of them only have a range of 4, which puts them right into charge range.
• So, polearm units and other units with good retaliation attacks, that can deny the enemy to just pass through the gaps, are useful.
• Shield units with shield wall can often be placed behind the archers, and still give their defense bonus, but then you need something to extract your archers from melee without dying to opportunity attacks.