Age of Wonders 4 – Secrets of Tomes

Tomes Guide

All credit goes to Happy Birthday! !

A few little secrets the game doesn’t directly tell you about Tomes.

You can pick up every tome in the game, except the Tier 5 tomes. You can only have one of those bad boys. To do so, when it’s time to choose a new tome after the Tier 1 tomes “Disappear” click the button “Show All Tomes” and filter to “Available Tomes”. Here, you can pick lower tier tomes, even after reaching a higher potential tier. This allows you to do insane Enchantment builds where your units do every element every attack, or modify races with tons of Minor Race Transformations.

To reach the next tier of Tomes, you must do the following:

• Obtain at least two tomes of the previous tier, regardless of their affinity.
• Obtain at least one tome of the same affinity of the higher tier tome.
• Alternatively, Obtain at least two Tomes of the same Tier of any affinity to unlock all tomes of that same Tier for any affinity.
• Alternatively, Obtain at least three Tomes of the previous tier of any affinity to unlock all tomes of the Tier above. EX: Own three Tier 3s, unlock all Tier 4s.
• Tier 2 only follows the first rule.
• Tier 5 requires the second rule to be true, and ignores the alternate unlock of 3 any Tier 4 Tomes.

Affinity does two things for you, so don’t worry too much about affinity itself unless you really want the bonuses from a high affinity. The affinity does nothing towards obtaining new Tomes, nor does it lock out options.

These two things are:

• Increase a resource tied to the affinity. Nature grants +2 food generation across your whole empire per point. Shadow affinity grants +2 Knowledge generation per point. Materium affinity grants +2 production to all cities. Chaos grants +2 draft in all cities. Arcane grants +2 empire mana generation. Unity grants +2 gold generation.
• Speeds up how quickly you obtain progress to being able to unlock new Affinity Tree upgrades, each point of Affinity grants +1 per turn towards the required amount. Losing Affinity does not reset this progress, it only slows it down, unless somehow you’ve obtained negative affinity (which should only be doable by mods).
• “General” affinity is increased any time you would gain Affinity from any other source, and has no specific bonuses, it just gives you useful research like naval movement.