Age Of Wonders 4: 10 Best Empire Skills, Ranked

As you develop your empire in Age of Wonders 4, you may find yourself wondering what to do with Imperium. This extremely valuable resource can be used to grow your cities or found new ones, further develop ties with free cities, or, perhaps most significantly of all, unlock unique benefits in the form of empire skills.

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Empire skills can be unlocked starting on turn three, but you’ll also need to develop your affinity to unlock skills from the various schools of magic. The unaffiliated general skills are not particularly strong, but can be useful. There are, however, some absurdly powerful empire skills in the game. The system is complicated, and to ensure you get the best from it, here are some of the greatest empire skills of all.

10 Fruitful Integration

The Rank 1 Nature affinity skill can be extremely effective early on, allowing you to found new cities or absorb free cities one turn sooner. It then also provides all those cities with one bonus population after they’re established. Together, these effects can greatly speed up your empire’s growth if you focus on expanding outward rather than upward.

Unfortunately, every empire in Age of Wonders 4 is limited by a city cap, so you won’t be able to colonize indefinitely. Be sure to pick up the general empire skill that gives +1 city cap, and consider using the Adept Settlers trait to make the most of this skill.

9 Lure of the Horde

The Rank 4 Chaos affinity skill is great for building up large armies of lower-tier units. After winning a battle, you’ll have a 50% chance to instantly spawn a new Tier 1 or 2 unit that your cities can produce. This can synergize well with other Tier 1 bonuses from Chaos affinity, such as Spawnkin.

While 50% chance isn’t ideal, this skill’s biggest downside is actually the fact that you might get Tier 2 units. They’re stronger than Tier 1 units on paper, but Chaos affinity spells and improvements can provide tons of bonuses specifically for Tier 1 units. Making the best of this skill can take some luck, then.

8 House Levies

The Rank 8 Order affinity skill is perfect for empires that prefer vassalization over conquest or absorption. It reduces the cooldown of Rally of the Lieges from 15 turns to ten, and also reduces the gold cost to recruit those units by 50%.

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Some of the most powerful units in the game can be obtained by annexing Ancient Wonders and then recruiting their units during Rally of the Lieges. However, you’ll need at least one vassal to effectively participate, and recruiting units also requires using special recruitment points. These can be increased by vassalizing more city states and annexing more ancient wonders.

7 Exalted by Shadows

The Rank 7 Shadow affinity skill simply gives all your heroes +100% experience from all sources. Heroes are more than simply the most powerful units in Age of Wonders 4, they’re also required for founding new outposts or cities as well as launching sieges of enemy cities.Since heroes can level up many more times than other units, and acquire much more powerful abilities, focusing on their growth can be a particularly effective strategy.

It’s really too bad that this is a Shadow affinity skill. Dark culture overall has some of the weakest bonuses, and there’s not a lot of synergy between Shadow tomes unless you’re playing as evil frostlings.

6 Consolidated Industry

The Rank 2 Materium affinity skill gets more powerful as your cities grow and develop. Province improvements get +1 City Stability for every adjacent improvement of the same type, so you’ll need to plan your city development with some care. Cluster several different kinds of improvements around each other for maximum effect.

Many factions in the game typically focus on a few province improvement types, such as farms with Order affinity or quarries with Materium affinity. You can get tons of bonuses for clustering these provinces around each other and special province improvements later, making this skill powerful for just about any empire. It doesn’t have the overall potential of some abilities, however.

5 Druidic Empire

The Rank 10 Nature affinity skill gives a vast boost to your population growth rate, cutting the amount of food required for it by 50%. Nature affinity by itself gives lots of bonus food, so by the time you can actually unlock this skill, it will have a tremendous impact for sure.

This skill is best obtained as early as possible, because all cities in Age of Wonders 4 have population limits. The soft cap for this is that cities may only have a limited number of provinces to expand into. The hard cap is 30 population, so eventually all cities must stop growing even if they have available space.

4 Ingredient Experimentation

The Rank 7 Astral affinity skill scales ridiculously well, giving your throne city +15 Knowledge for each magic material within your empire. This bonus is extremely useful, whether you have just one material at the very start or 30 materials in the late-game. That’s because this skill stacks based on total magic materials, and not the number of different kinds.

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This skill can be overpowered to the point of being broken, if you have enough magic materials (magic being a formidable force in the game) in your domain. Given the randomly generated nature of realms, that won’t always be possible, but even a few magic materials can greatly enhance your research with this skill.

3 Martial Ancestry

The Rank 10 Materium affinity skill gives a more powerful bonus the more formidable your units are. With their upkeep reduced by 10% per rank of each individual unit, recruits only get the basic 10% discount, while legendary units get a whopping 60% off. This applies to both gold and mana costs.

Being able to field more than twice as many legendary units is almost unfair, especially considering that they could be magical or non-magical in nature and their costs would still be reduced regardless. This skill is particularly effective when blended with an Order faction for further upkeep cost reductions.

2 Knightly Orders

The Rank 10 Order affinity skill has by far the most diverse benefits of all. That’s because each type of unit gets their own special, extraordinary buff once they reach legendary rank. Mythic units get the best buff of any type from this skill, gaining 10% bonus damage and 6 vitality restored per turn for each unit killed in combat.

Unfortunately, as diverse and powerful as these buffs are, your units still have to reach legendary rank just to unlock them. This skill only really helps much later in the game, making it ideal for closing out any final conquests but offering nothing before then.

1 Rite of Possession

The Rank 10 Chaos affinity skill is just brutal, instantly giving you an mighty Tier 5 Balor at the cost of -1 population to your throne city. This Mythic unit is ludicrously strong, as evidenced by being one of just four Tier 5 units in the whole game. Along with fantastic physical and fire AOE attacks, Balor also erupts in a fiery explosion when/if it dies. Balor’s greatest effect of all is Power from Slaughter, granting it +1 hit point and +1% damage output permanently whenever it defeats an enemy. Losing just one population is easily worth having such a terrifying unit to command.

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