Age of Wonders 4 – Reavers Guide and Overview

An overview of the culture, its features and units. I cover what I believe to be the best builds: what tomes and traits to pick, and why.

Guide to Reavers Culture

All credit goes to Mikefield Salviae!

All You Need to Know

Reaver culture basics

• You benefit from MARKING enemies (and can scale a lot from flanking bonuses).
• You benefit from fighting players and free cities (but this means you need to form some alliances or you will be everyone’s enemy early on – this is thankfully easy with War Spoils mechanic).

New resource

• War Spoils – extremely useful as it’s basically another type of “gold”.
• Great for manipulating diplomacy, trading, capturing units and buying cannons.

New units

• Extremely weak early-early game (no tank, no ranged, hard to get Subdue to work, no subdue at the start unless you pick the right society trait).
• Skirmishers are VERY weak without the support unit in play.

You need a powerful fill unit.

Chaos and Materium affinities work great!

• Afflictors from Alchemy tome? -> weak-ish without a frontliner
• Stone Spirit (baby elementals) from Rock tome?
• Tome of the Horde for Houndmasters?

• Tome of Warding for Phantasm Warriors?
• Tome of Beasts for Wildspeaker

Notable traits

• Keen-sighted – Magelocks only shoot ones, you gamble less with this
• Sneaky – You have some options to make enemies flanked so this works well
• “Tactics” traits – later, you get synergy bonuses from Tome of the Construct for standing together if you go with materium
• Hardy and Adaptable – overall solid talents
• Underground adaptation – honestly, digging is super beneficial and gives you huge amounts of materials and loot

Ruler type

• Dragons are always cool since they bring early power;
• Champion gives you more production, which is AMAZING;
• Wizard king doesn’t do much for you to be honest.

A melee hero is great early on; musket hero destroys later (but you can respec…).

Society traits

Chaos route

• Chosen destroyers is very synergistic, but requires very peculiar playstyle
• Ruthless raiders – you will be fighting a lot so why not
• Ritual Cannibals – decent early on to expand your city and build up mana for summons

Materium route

• Mana Channelers – if you go with summon spells (Rock tome early -> Tome of artificing? Terramancy? Chaos eaters?)
• Runesmiths – You will have a bunch of enchantments if you go Materium-heavy so that’s awesome
• Reclaimers – you will get a load of binding essence because you do plunder a lot

Others (to make early game easier)

• Astral: Mana addicts – support!
• Dark: Powerful evokers – you have a support unit at the start!

Scions of Evil – More draft?

Later prospects

• Tome of the dreadnought is amazing!

Check out the video for an in-depth explanation.