YMMV / Age of Wonders 4

• Accidental Innuendo: Like with the High Men being renamed to Archons in the previous games possibly to avoid sounding like a term for a certain female body part, some fans jokingly speculate that the reason why the Devious Watchers Society Trait was renamed to Shadow Walkers (until being changed back to the former again in the Wyvern patch) is also because of awkward raunchy jokes, implying that the race with the trait in question is a bunch of peeping Toms.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • The T1 Tome of Warding is a fairly popular early pick for its ability to keep units alive, especially against non-physical damage, as well as a dependable shield summon that is both decently tough and punchy for its tier. Apart from the aforementioned summon, Warding's spells include one that cleanses a unit of debuffs and makes it invulnerable for a turn once per battle, an enchantment that makes support units boost the resistance of friendlies, a transformation that grants a race bonus resistance to the three elemental damage types and a cool electric visual effect, and a spell that grants a unit a protective field that has a chance to stun attackers.
  • The Skald, a T3 support unit from the T2 Tome of Revelry, was considered this in previous patches due to one of their abilities that provides an area-of-effect buff that hastens friendly units, greatly increasing their speed in combat, as well as being one of the few support units that can actually perform decently as a combatant. Nowadays, while they are still one of the better support units, their damage was slightly reduced and they give 2x regeneration instead of 1x regeneration and hastened, which makes them better healers, but the loss of hastened makes them a far less important pick than they used to be, especially for non-mounted melee armies.
  • Tome of Amplification was very much this prior to the Golem Patch, even with some small nerfs in the earlier Watcher Patch. Now, it is still a strong pick, but ever since certain further nerfs and being moved from being a T2 Tome to a T3, it is less of an absolute must-have than it used to be. Its racial transformation, Astral Blood, stacks Fortune on all units that have it when their owner casts a spell (it used to trigger on both friendly and enemy spells), and Amplify Minds (increases research output of city at the cost of some happiness) is not as important as it used to be due to being acquired much later than before, at a point where research focused cities will often have so much output that +20 on each city is not as big of a deal. Moreover, the Spell Amplification hero skill that the Tome gives, which increases damage dealt by the user's spells, no longer stacks.
  • Prior to the Watcher Update, the T3 Tome of Sanctuary was a strong must-have for many builds even if they do not delve heavily into Order affinity, due to its namesake special province improvement acting as a second spelljammer that also blocked pillaging, making it especially painful to invade cities with both a Sanctuary and regular spelljammer. The research options provided by the Tome were also fairly useful and powerful in the right hands, such as an enchantment that causes fallen melee and skirmisher units to instantly self-revive in a temporarily unkillable state on their first death, a powerful healing/cleansing spell that pairs well with said enchantment, and a transformation that adds a hefty spirit and status resistance boost to its user's race. Though Watcher update did not touch any of the aforementioned research options, it did heavily nerf the Sanctuary improvement by removing its spell and pillage blocking effects and making it simply extend the number of turns needed to pillage the provinces of its parent city instead, as well as adding an affinity requirement to it and other T3 Tomes so that builds with no prior points in their respective affinities cannot just dip into them with little to no effort.
  • Barbarian, High and Industrious are generally considered to be the three strongest Cultures in multiplayer, especially in regards to getting a strong early game that can translate into a more powerful position in the mid and late game. Barbarians can make use of outposts providing Ritual of Alacrity for very fast early game marauder-clearing, though their early units and melee heroes are not as powerful as they used to be after their combat specialty got reworked from guaranteed extra damage on first melee hit to extra damage on critical hits. Industrious makes use of prospecting, higher production output, and cheaper town halls to quickly build up their cities and equip their heroes. Meanwhile, High factions that stay neutral for the early game can also grow their cities and produce buildings faster as long as they maintain high stability in their cities, and their cultural special province improvement is a research post, which lets them get academies and scholars' guilds quicker even if they did not grab a tome that also gives a special research post.
  • Strong Mystic builds are almost always led by a Wizard King (for extra mana income, casting points, and double spellcasting when the leader participates in a fight), have the Arcane Focus and Keen Sighted racial traits (both improving magic ranged attacks), have some combination of Gifted Casters (more casting points and cheaper spells), Powerful Evokers (battle mages and supports provide bonus casting points during fights and have +1 recruit rank) or Mana Addicts (all units gain lifesteal when spells are cast, and battle mages/supports gain +1 recruit rank), and start with the Tome of Evocation (which has a unit enchantment that adds extra shock damage to magic ranged attacks and gives them a chance to cause additional Damage Over Time).
  • The Tome of Alchemy is proving to be a popular pick in multiplayer due to being one of the few sources of aoe and free action status effect dispels in the game, as well as giving an early game special research post for players who did not pick High Culture or Tome of Cryomancy/Faith. Other Tomes that are seeing use more often in recent patches for their aoe cleanses are the Tome of Fertility and Tome of Souls, though being at T2 instead of T1 (in the case of Souls, it used to be T1 until its place was swapped with Necromancy) means it takes at least a bit longer to acquire them.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Mage Banes are Mythic-type astral sea monsters that disable all combat casting as long as they're alive, making them the terror of any casting-heavy faction build. They're just tanky enough that getting rid of them is difficult with most early units, and they have a melee attack that deals a good amount of bonus random-element damage, making them hit a lot harder than what the deceptively low number (which only lists the physical portion) of their base damage suggests.
  • Golden Golems are, as of the "Golem Update", the last kind of Golem to still retain full status effect immunity from previous patches, which — combined with their sheer health, defense and resistance, the Reinforced (+4 defense vs physical ranged) passive and further buffs to these via applying bolstered defense/resistance or the Warding Metals enchantment (which can affect any Construct, even Mythic ones) from Tome of the Dreadnought — turns them into absolute tanks that can shrug off turn after turn of most kinds of focus fire and get close enough to disable most of the army of a player unfortunate enough to fight multiple of them. Only a few sources of damage, such as heroes with crafted T4 lightning weapons with Construct Slayer, or Shrines of Smiting with 5x strengthened and the max damage bonus from accompanying faithful units, can deal sufficient damage quickly enough to be a concern for these towering constructs.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Prior to the Watcher Update, builds that revolved around massing physical archer units (categorized as simply "Ranged", as opposed to Skirmisher, Battle Mage or Support, the other shooty unit types) with little to no frontline were considered very powerful overall, especially in short 1v1 multiplayer matches that can be easily ended by a rush, due to the inherent advantages of ranged combat over melee coupled with their higher enchantment and overall buff potential compared to any other unit type. High Culture was especially adept at it due to the damage, range and accuracy bonus they provide to Awakened Ranged units and a hero skill that grants those same units a passive that grant a guaranteed stacking evasion debuff to enemies, as well as the overall cost efficiency of their cultural archer unit. The Watcher Update seems to have largely reduced the oppressive dominance of "rainbow" Ranged builds by toning down the damage of most arrow enchantments and High's Awakened bonuses and hero skills, as well as reworking the way research works, making it more difficult and impractical to collect all the arrow enchantment Tomes and research every single one of said enchantments.
  • Also prior to Watcher and related to the above: Critical Hit chance stacking via enchantments, transformations and hero skills. Amassing a disproportionately high crit chance massively increased the damage potential of all units (as crits deal extra damage and never miss), and also countered fumble chance from low morale. After complaints, the devs decided to bring back Planetfall's crit cap system (which prevents crit chances from going over hit chances, i.e. a 100% crit chance drops down to 5% if the hit chance is 5%), realizing that omitting it this time around was making shooting builds too broken.
  • Hero doomstacks have always been a particularly strong strategy throughout the series, but earlier patches of this game made them notoriously easier to achieve, as heroes were not merely slowly acquired over time, but could be acquired any time as long as the player had enough gold to purchase them, and the hero cap was a soft cap tied to number of cities, so it was not too uncommon of a strategy for hyper-optimizers to almost entirely neglect recruiting or summoning regular units in the early game and then found 3-4 cities asap, go slightly over the cap with 4-6 heroes and just put all of them together into a single stack to minmax their XP gains. Fortunately, in the wolf patch, the hero cap was reverted back to a hard cap that was tied to time rather than cities, and can only be increased early by spending a hefty amount of imperium for it, drastically slowing the rate at which players could acquire new cities or empire development perks.
  • Industrious is already one of the most economically-robust cultures in the game, but leading them with a Dragon Lord takes it to another level. The "Dragon Hoard" passive of Dragon Lords grants them extra gold income for each unequipped item in their inventory, and combined with the chance to get extra items from prospecting, that bonus income does not take too long to pile up. Combined with the Artifact Hoarders society trait, the Industrious Dragon player not only has a few more items in their inventory from the get-go, they can even get extra mana from their items, and can get even more items from clearing infestations and ancient wonders, and it only gets better from there when you add Ruthless Raiders (more bonus gold from winning fights and two more extra starting items). Then comes the Golem update introducing the item forge, enabling you to melt down lower tier items to create higher tier items with a greater gold/mana value. The Reclaimers society trait grants you an item forge at the start of the game, as well as additional sources of the forge resource by clearing infestations and ancient wonders, and even by pillaging enemy provinces during war; allowing you to build lots of new items without needing to sacrifice too much of your existing hoard.
  • Spelljammers prior to Golem Update were almost always banned in multiplayer games due to the sheer defence advantage and anti-fun nature of blocking all enemy spells within a city domain, as well as not being too difficult or time-consuming to acquire, especially if its user can get a level 3 town hall early. Thankfully, they were nerfed to only block strategic spells, and merely double the casting point cost of enemy tactical combat spells.
  • Ever since the Primal Fury DLC launched, the Stormbringer unit from Tome of the Stormborne has been considered this by many, especially in the multiplayer community. As a racial T4 Skirmisher, not only does the Stormbringer have quite robust stats that can be further boosted by racial transformations, they also ignore opportunity attacks and get innate 5 hexes of movement in combat without needing the Athletics form trait or the Naga Transformation bundled in the same tome. The speed bonus and ability to ignore attacks of opportunity are typically kept in check in Skirmishers of lower tiers due to their relative frailty and/or their ranged attack being on a cooldown or not so powerful on its own, but the Stormbringer gets the best combination of high base damage, no cooldown, and a line aoe that lets them hit further than their deceiving base range of 3 hexes. Even without Hastened or range increases, Stormbringers effectively have an engagement distance of 10 hexes (5 movement + range 3 attack + line aoe hitting 2 hexes after the target unit or hex) that lets them effectively always fight on their own terms. Coupled with a combat spell from the same tome that applies huge lightning weakness to all enemies for effectively the entirety of most battles, and the other more useful bonuses from Naga Transformation such as the Slip Away passive that gives Stormbringers an extra life in each battle, late game MP quickly devolves into "bring your own Stormbringer monostacks or die".
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • As usual for the series, dedicated naval units suffer from Crippling Overspecialization; they have no ability to assist armies or sieges on land, and don't do anything on the water that flying, floating or embarked land units can't already do. This issue led to the city-constructed ram and ballista warships being removed from the game in the late-2023 Golem update, making embarked land units the player's primary navy.
  • Shadow Tomes were considered this by a decent number of the community at launch. The undead half of the Tomes are too reliant on the heavily restrictive Souls resource exclusive to them, which is very difficult and slow to amass compared to the often high Soul cost of many units and spells from those Tomes, and the other half of the Tomes are considered fairly underwhelming in general, such as the Tome of the Doomherald, which focuses heavily on lowering enemy's morale, but can be easily countered by stacking crit chance independently of morale through the Fortune buff and/or Overwhelm Tactics anyway. Fortunately, the undead Shadow Tomes received some much needed buffs (especially to soul economy and soul cost for spells) in the Wyvern patch, and Doomherald was found to have great synergy with the Order Tome of Subjugation, while critical hit builds received varying degrees of nerfs in the Wyvern and Watcher updates.
  • The T1 Tome of the Horde used to be an incredible must-have, especially for rush builds, due to the sheer power it gave to T1 units and even to heroes and some high-tier units. Since then, however, it has been heavily nerfed, its damage boost transformation that shrunk units and increased the model count of non-hero ones only gives evasion instead of damage to heroes now, the Blaze of the Horde spell that used to be a notorious insta-kill on enemy heroes now scales off of friendlies adjacent to the target instead of how many units the user has in the entire battle, and the Houndmaster that was effectively two units in one slot and contributed greatly to the aforementioned spell got a severe health decrease to reflect said "two-in-one slot" nature, with both the master and hound becoming even more fragile than the average T1 scout or archer.
  • Mythic units are arguably considered this by most people in singleplayer due to the supposed higher power ceiling of units that can get enchantments, but this is often not seen as the case by some people in multiplayer, as even large FFA matches tend not to drag on to the point that non-Mythic units can get just about every single compatible enchantment and transformation, and Mythic units tend to be stronger than usual right out of the box.
  • The Reaper, prior to the Wolf Patch, was widely considered to be one of the most underwhelming T5 units in the game. As with all T5 units, they are Mythic, which greatly reduces their enchantment synergies, and their damage output for their tier was rather anemic, on top of having a not-too-insignificant soul upkeep and not just mana and imperium, their greatest contribution to any army was merely a small buff to damage and resistance for other undead units in the same stack. Come the patch, and Reapers are now more of a proper powerhouse in their own right, its main attack now deals a hefty mix of physical and cold damage and bypasses half of an enemy's defenses and resistances, its instant death ability is now single action, giving it a longer threat distance, and on top of retaining the Greater Corpse Consumption ability, it now automatically heals and gains a strengthened stack each time an enemy unit that is not a tactical summon, tower or siege-exclusive is killed.
• Tainted by the Preview:
  • Like Age of Wonders 3 before it, Age of Wonders 4 quickly attracted a fiery debate over its faction customization — specifically, how "forms" (whether you look like an elf, dwarf, etc.) are a cosmetic choice. Defenders of the change enjoy the freedom of creation it provides, allowing players to craft unique and unusual races and play around with stock fantasy tropes. Detractors insist that making racial appearance cosmetic removes the uniqueness of the races, encourages meta-motivated choices, or simply enables combinations that don't make sense.
  • The absence of spells and units analogous to the Ensemble Dark Horse Dreadnought class at launch was met with disappointment from fans more familiar with Age of Wonders 3, who dislike the return to godlike High Fantasy wizards and firmly believe that Muggles Do It Better. Fortunately, the announcement of the planned Empires & Ashes expansion^*(In which "players fuse magic and steel to unleash devastating war machines to drive the Godir back into the Astral Sea".) calmed their protests.
    • Unfortunately, the proper reveal of the content for Empires & Ashes was met with further divisiveness, specifically on the gameplay mechanics of the new culture in the expansion. Some people who felt like the base game cultures were not impactful enough on a faction's playstyle approve that the Reavers seem to have a stronger gameplay impact and identity, while others felt disappointed that they are either inconsistent with the other cultures, some of their mechanics should have been society traits, that they step on the toes of Dark and Barbarian too much by being better geared towards an aggressive playstyle, and/or that the mechanics make it difficult to roleplay them as anything other than Evil Colonialists.
  • Some fans were understandably disappointed that flavor text quotes for units do not make a return in the game, though flavor text still appears with spell tomes, magic materials and ancient wonder sites.
• That One Level:
  • As far as tactical battle maps go, the Golden Ziggurat-type ancient wonders (often going by names such as "Altar of the Ancients") can be quite difficult to clear, especially if your army is heavily reliant on non-lightning magical damage (especially spirit, which ethereal units have extra resistance to) and does not have enough high tier units and/or high level heroes. The stack that guards Golden Ziggurats is usually comprised of many high-tier ethereal monsters, potentially having two Lost Wizards and two Mage Banes which have powerful randomized abilities and block your spells while alive, respectively, and are further assisted by reinforcements that are summoned into the battle in pairs every two turns. These reinforcements are randomized and based on map seed, if you are lucky, they could just be a couple of Flow Serpents, if you are particularly unlucky, they could be more Mage Banes. Alternatively, the Golden Ziggurat may be guarded by a Fire and Ice Dragon, which are not quite as scary as the ethereal monsters with reinforcements, but if you trigger the Draconic Rage ability of the Ice Dragon and do not kill it quickly enough, there is a chance each turn for any of your units to be Frozen.
  • In the case of full-blown scenarios, the fourth and fifth story realms can be quite brutal depending on your build. First off, unlike in the previous three story realms where easy, normal and hard are exactly what they say on the tin, the difficulty levels on story 4 and 5 are one level higher than listed, so easy becomes normal, the original normal becomes hard, and hard becomes brutal or very hard. Secondly, the most powerful AI faction on each respective story realm (Meandor for story 4 and Turiel Tolarim for story 5) starts with huge armies, Hard-Coded Hostility, plenty of tomes and spells already researched, and are poised to make their way to a magic victory relatively quickly, making it a race against time to either beat the main quest in story 4 or try and get your own magic victory quicker in either or both story realms. The Watcher update changed the rules of the magic victory, lessening the danger of the AI rushing for it, but the factions in question are still very powerful.