AoW4 Factions, 27

AoW4 has managed the odd feat, unequaled since City of Heroes, of inspiring me to not just write up a character bio but constantly create new factions and give them all more or less whimsical flavor text. So here they are, one by one:

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Normally I stick with one, maybe two race transformations. Originally I thought you could only have one, then I wanted to preserve each faction's individual flavor. But once I'd written these guys' "you are the clay" blurb, body modding seemed to come naturally.

 

Architect factions accumulate economic bonuses by building monuments. While they do require a heavy workforce investment, they're basically freebies otherwise. Monument mood/food bonus grows and pacifies your cities, affinity bonuses allow you to rocket up through research to top-tier units, affinity unit bonuses make your armies into steamrollers. Compared to this, even the dragons' overpowered hoard bonus was merely economic in nature. Just reinforces my impression that AoW4 has reached the end of its basic skill/class system's malleability and is now just piling on overpowered bonuses to market DLCs as cheats. Case-in-point: The Shaper's Touch buff, which originally beefed up Materium's golems and such as a tougher front line, now combines with the new Geomantic Crystallization transformation to turn all your units into constantly regenerating terminators, which adds its own damage bonus as a cherry on top. 

Still, I won't pretend I haven't enjoyed playing yet another hermit race. When I saw the word "architects" in the culture window I immediately remembered I haven't made enough dwarven factions, and these guys are the dorfiest dorfs that ever dorfed a dorf. Stone, forging, prickly, greedy, sure, pile it on. But what can I say, I do love a turtle strat.