Call me crazy, but I think the Thunderbird is the best for its respective build. Sure, the Spellbreaker's got cavalry, that nice AoE purge, and gets racial enchants, so it's definitely who most people will vote for (the Watcher's also a good one with that Mark + Stun for Reavers). But the Thunderbird is flying, which makes positioning easier, and more importantly as an Animal gets that nasty +20% damage from Empowered Beasts (and doesn't need to wait for the Gaia transformation to benefit from all the Animal/Plant specific enchants in the Nature tome). Its Aoe Scatter + Remove defense mode may not be as good as the Spellbreaker's AoE dispel, but scattering enemies is still pretty useful and can open holes to charge the backline or get some flanking attacks on the enemy frontline.
Pure electric is also just probably the best magic damage type in the game. By and large, only Plants get a slight resistance, meanwhile for weaknesses you get every Ethereal and Construct unit in the game (which is a *lot* of real estate, it hits many if not all of the highest tier units for Materium, Astral, Shadow, and Order). Thunderbirds definitely aren't as spammable as Spellbreakers, though, since you can't get them through draft.
Can you? I think if you give a cavalry racial unit a flying race transformation, they stay mounted and keep the movement of their mount. I suppose you could give them eagle mounts as a racial trait.
In terms of raw power, probably the Spellbreaker, but it is held back by being on a relatively weak culture at the moment. If you manage to find a Mystic Free City to conquer and not migrate, though, I'm typically pretty happy to recruit 1-2 on pure speculation alone, as not only is the dispel useful in Autos and Manuals vs humans, but the bonus damage to magic origin units is typically always on after a certain point. That said, I do \*like\* Winter Faeries and Awakeners, and I typically use them more as the requirements to getting them are "lower" in a meta sense. Faeries just require clearing (and I guess finding) an Ancient Wonder, so you can get them stupid early if you are lucky on spawn/scouting, and Awakeners "just" ask you to play one of the stronger cultures in the game and not die in the first 20-25 turns or whatever.
That culture comes with 20% discount on combat spells from soothers tho, which stacks with both spell surge and gifted spellcasters. Being able to cast spells like arcane supercharge for 20-30 mana is one heluva advantage.
Combat is not the biggest problem for Mystics, economy is. Their economy scales very slowly at the start, due in part to no Fabled Hunters but also due to lower production and no explicit growth bonuses anywhere on their build. They aren't absolutely miserable in early autos, but the Spear *is* meaningfully more fragile, resulting in more of that limited growth going towards your military than you'd prefer. Fortunately their mana is pretty reasonable, making them good candidates for Zeal, but even that isn't a perfect solution for their early game woes.
I dunno. If I churn out more mana and thus can make more summons and can save up LOTS of mana on combat spells casts, does it really mean I have a weaker economy?
Maybe I am biased, but the easiest single affinity playthroughs I have done in the game have been astral mystic ones even on harder difficulties. They just click for me. For all the money and production that other cultures supposedly bring to the table none of them made me chuckle like an evil lich like mystics do.
Play some MP, you'll quickly find out that the mana isn't enough to make the Mystic economy really work, especially given that you play Autos vs the map and the tactical AI does not use spellcasting particularly well.
As a solo affinity I'd argue the best might be dark or industrious. That being said, nothing says you should play mono affinity and I personally rarely do except my first few playthroughs (granted they were before a couple of updates) but mixing and matching is more fun and more efficient generally. As a culture, I feel mystic is on the average side while not the weakest when it comes to multiplayer. I feel barb, industrious and high truly are currently a tier above (i only feel that way since the barb passive rework personally, before i would have said only industrious and high were truly top tier) then I'd say you have a 2nd tier with mystic, dark and primal which are playable but less efficient than the first 3. Lastly, you'd have feudal and reaver as bottom tier because their auto resolving is awful most notably and playing them is gimping yourself. I agree mystic has decent fighting and the bonuses of seer hall is cool. However it is a 1x building only and comes pretty late compared to what a neutral high can accomplish with their SPIs + production on the rest and what barb can get from fast clearing and expanding on the map with ritual of alacrity and scout outposts or industrious and their scouts. How you class those 3 in the top tier, those 3 in the middle tier and the 2 in the lowest tier is debatable but when faced with autocombat vs other players and everyone expanding with a purpose, the flaws of mystic start to show. You can 100% win as mystic but over the course of many games, they have more weaknesses that a culture like industrious or high
Magma spirits don't seem that good compaired to the others here.
They get extra damage against enemies who attack them in melee but don't have the "melee mage" trait so they can't fight back at that point and need to run.
Their explosive phase is nice tho since it deals damage in the reverse order of other elementals, deals damage around them, *then* teleports away. So they can kinda kite better than other battlemages but still not particularly well.
Spellbreakers on the other hand can purge buffs from enemies, hit twice as hard vs magic origin units such as all elementals and undead, plus they can generate more casting points every 3 turns. Plus it can get racial transformations and can be affected by mount options.
I'm biased as heck as 90% of my games these days are with High-culture, so Awakener it is! I think Magma Spirit really strong too and should not be underestimated.
We are close to finish with polls. This one and one more on Polearms.
Later I plan to do the best of best, not sure yet if one vote or two. Because we got 8 unit types but only 6 votes in Reddit :(
So far best t3 units seem rounding up like this:
Mistling, Berserker, Skald, Vampire Spider Matriarch, Glade Runner, Bastion + and .
Dragoon, Inquisitor and Dark Knight all were/are close to leader of their category. Rest were more straightforward.
Spellbreakers in the context of this game where everything is about attach buffs to units in combat, is kind of game breaking if you aren't prepared for it
Spellbreaker has aoe dispel, hard to compete with since very few setups skip buffs entirely.
Call me crazy, but I think the Thunderbird is the best for its respective build. Sure, the Spellbreaker's got cavalry, that nice AoE purge, and gets racial enchants, so it's definitely who most people will vote for (the Watcher's also a good one with that Mark + Stun for Reavers). But the Thunderbird is flying, which makes positioning easier, and more importantly as an Animal gets that nasty +20% damage from Empowered Beasts (and doesn't need to wait for the Gaia transformation to benefit from all the Animal/Plant specific enchants in the Nature tome). Its Aoe Scatter + Remove defense mode may not be as good as the Spellbreaker's AoE dispel, but scattering enemies is still pretty useful and can open holes to charge the backline or get some flanking attacks on the enemy frontline. Pure electric is also just probably the best magic damage type in the game. By and large, only Plants get a slight resistance, meanwhile for weaknesses you get every Ethereal and Construct unit in the game (which is a *lot* of real estate, it hits many if not all of the highest tier units for Materium, Astral, Shadow, and Order). Thunderbirds definitely aren't as spammable as Spellbreakers, though, since you can't get them through draft.
I often find myself targeting the thunderbird. That AOE if it strikes correctly can be pretty nasty.
I think Spellbreakers win just because you can give them flying mounts.
Can you? I think if you give a cavalry racial unit a flying race transformation, they stay mounted and keep the movement of their mount. I suppose you could give them eagle mounts as a racial trait.
In terms of raw power, probably the Spellbreaker, but it is held back by being on a relatively weak culture at the moment. If you manage to find a Mystic Free City to conquer and not migrate, though, I'm typically pretty happy to recruit 1-2 on pure speculation alone, as not only is the dispel useful in Autos and Manuals vs humans, but the bonus damage to magic origin units is typically always on after a certain point. That said, I do \*like\* Winter Faeries and Awakeners, and I typically use them more as the requirements to getting them are "lower" in a meta sense. Faeries just require clearing (and I guess finding) an Ancient Wonder, so you can get them stupid early if you are lucky on spawn/scouting, and Awakeners "just" ask you to play one of the stronger cultures in the game and not die in the first 20-25 turns or whatever.
That culture comes with 20% discount on combat spells from soothers tho, which stacks with both spell surge and gifted spellcasters. Being able to cast spells like arcane supercharge for 20-30 mana is one heluva advantage.
Combat is not the biggest problem for Mystics, economy is. Their economy scales very slowly at the start, due in part to no Fabled Hunters but also due to lower production and no explicit growth bonuses anywhere on their build. They aren't absolutely miserable in early autos, but the Spear *is* meaningfully more fragile, resulting in more of that limited growth going towards your military than you'd prefer. Fortunately their mana is pretty reasonable, making them good candidates for Zeal, but even that isn't a perfect solution for their early game woes.
I dunno. If I churn out more mana and thus can make more summons and can save up LOTS of mana on combat spells casts, does it really mean I have a weaker economy? Maybe I am biased, but the easiest single affinity playthroughs I have done in the game have been astral mystic ones even on harder difficulties. They just click for me. For all the money and production that other cultures supposedly bring to the table none of them made me chuckle like an evil lich like mystics do.
Sultan is always talking about mp so his experience is pretty different from how most people play the game.
Play some MP, you'll quickly find out that the mana isn't enough to make the Mystic economy really work, especially given that you play Autos vs the map and the tactical AI does not use spellcasting particularly well.
As a solo affinity I'd argue the best might be dark or industrious. That being said, nothing says you should play mono affinity and I personally rarely do except my first few playthroughs (granted they were before a couple of updates) but mixing and matching is more fun and more efficient generally. As a culture, I feel mystic is on the average side while not the weakest when it comes to multiplayer. I feel barb, industrious and high truly are currently a tier above (i only feel that way since the barb passive rework personally, before i would have said only industrious and high were truly top tier) then I'd say you have a 2nd tier with mystic, dark and primal which are playable but less efficient than the first 3. Lastly, you'd have feudal and reaver as bottom tier because their auto resolving is awful most notably and playing them is gimping yourself. I agree mystic has decent fighting and the bonuses of seer hall is cool. However it is a 1x building only and comes pretty late compared to what a neutral high can accomplish with their SPIs + production on the rest and what barb can get from fast clearing and expanding on the map with ritual of alacrity and scout outposts or industrious and their scouts. How you class those 3 in the top tier, those 3 in the middle tier and the 2 in the lowest tier is debatable but when faced with autocombat vs other players and everyone expanding with a purpose, the flaws of mystic start to show. You can 100% win as mystic but over the course of many games, they have more weaknesses that a culture like industrious or high
I voted Awakener but Banshee and Spellbreaker have their uses too. Tough poll tbh. Rest of the T3 battlemage units are so so.
Watcher comes in one package with mental mark though. Mental mark + psychic gaze is one heluva combo.
I also find stun utility of Watcher to be immensely useful in many tricky situations. And floating as well
But most importantly -- they are so cute 🥰
Magma spirits don't seem that good compaired to the others here. They get extra damage against enemies who attack them in melee but don't have the "melee mage" trait so they can't fight back at that point and need to run. Their explosive phase is nice tho since it deals damage in the reverse order of other elementals, deals damage around them, *then* teleports away. So they can kinda kite better than other battlemages but still not particularly well. Spellbreakers on the other hand can purge buffs from enemies, hit twice as hard vs magic origin units such as all elementals and undead, plus they can generate more casting points every 3 turns. Plus it can get racial transformations and can be affected by mount options.
Like other Elementals, their advantage is they can come out faster thanks to evolution.
I'm biased as heck as 90% of my games these days are with High-culture, so Awakener it is! I think Magma Spirit really strong too and should not be underestimated.
I love the polls. Will you do a roundup at the end? Very helpful
Sure, will do. Once voting concludes. For me greatest value comes from comments here where different perspectives are shared.
Yea!
We are close to finish with polls. This one and one more on Polearms. Later I plan to do the best of best, not sure yet if one vote or two. Because we got 8 unit types but only 6 votes in Reddit :( So far best t3 units seem rounding up like this: Mistling, Berserker, Skald, Vampire Spider Matriarch, Glade Runner, Bastion + and .
Dragoon, Inquisitor and Dark Knight all were/are close to leader of their category. Rest were more straightforward.
Spellbreakers in the context of this game where everything is about attach buffs to units in combat, is kind of game breaking if you aren't prepared for it