Top 5 Age of Wonders Tips & Tricks

Age of Wonders 4 has a nifty system called the encyclopedia that is basically one hefty tome (teehee) of knowledge featuring basically everything you need to know about the game.

Whenever you hover over sections and get a text box with an underlined section, it means that the highlighted section is part of the Tome of Encyclopedia (not the official name). To see the full entry, go to the ¡ in the top-right corner to open the encyclopedia and search for anything you might need!

This tip is specifically useful whenever you are facing ancient wonders, but you can actually use your heroes to stack them into one army to fight in areas that only allow a limited amount of armies per fight.

This means that whenever you are trying to take over an ancient wonder or are partaking in a siege with more than four heroes, you can get another one into the fight by getting rid of one of the tiered units and instead using the hero to replace them. Since heroes do so much damage and have a lot of additional benefits, it's always a good idea to have as many heroes as you can muster in each fight.

Learn how to annex properly before you start doing it too much. Basically, learn the balance between annexing too much and risking your stability or being too cautious and not taking advantage of Provinces to get more resources to snowball earlier in the game.

Generally speaking, you want to annex as much as you can so long as your City Stability will not take a significant hit by doing so. If your City Stability goes negative, you are going to receive a penalty to your resources, and you can even lose your Provinces.

Finally, make sure that you are working towards something. Whenever you are annexing, it's essential to keep in mind what you are annexing towards because various areas in the world have a bonus if you annex them, giving you more resources whilst costing you less of a penalty.

Learn what kind of resources you have available to spend versus how much you actually want to earn before you start creating too many armies. Remember that you can only get a limited amount of Mana and Gold before you start having to get them through other means, namely Provinces via annexing.

Unit upkeep can be detrimental because it can stop a snowball if not used properly. Make sure you can support as many armies as you have and evenly spread the costs of units between your Gold ones and Mana, all the while keeping a close eye on the different extra costs, like Mana for enchanted units.

Make sure you try all sorts of combinations. Although it makes sense to have a comfort pick, it's always good to know everything about the Affinities and different builds. You might like being a barbarian as much as you might like playing in the Arcane Affinity, and the only way to know so is to try.

Test out playing a bit as a Champion and play as an Ancient Wizard King; try out different cultures, different weapons, and even different game styles, like going for alternative victory conditions — not everything has to be won through warfare.