• We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.

Dev Diary #27: Primal Fury: Tomes

1.png


Hello, my name is Luis and I am the main gameplay designer for Primal Fury. Today I will be going over the two new tomes you can unlock in this new content pack, and what they provide.

Watch the latest Primal Fury First Look Dev Stream as we share more details about the tomes.

The two new tomes are the Tome of the Fey Mists and the Tome of the Stormborne. They are Tier II and Tier IV respectively and both have the Astral and Nature affinity.

Tome of Fey Mists​

2.png


The Tome of Fey Mists is all about placing otherworldly mists into the world around you so that they can protect and enhance your units.
These mists make your units hard to hit and, with the fey touched transformation, grant them random positive status effects as well!

Spells like Lingering Mists can place a Misty effect for 3 turns on a target province that reduces vision ranges for units in the affected province, while also making them invisible to perceive by units outside and inside the Misty effect.
3.png
4.png


Provinces affected by this Misty state create mist clouds in combat, which apply a new status effect called Clinging Mist to all units ending their turn in the mist, enemies included.

Clinging Mists increases evasion to all attacks, including melee, by 20% and potentially stacking up to 3 times. The effect is countered by the Marked status effect, so factions like the Reavers have a few tools to counter this.
5.png


Fey Embrace allows you to place these mist clouds on a location of your choosing during combat, allowing for greater control of who gets Clinging Mist, as well as giving two random positive status effects to units.
6.png


And Staves of Mist grants your support units the Fey Blessing ability. This is a free action ability that heals 10 Temporary Hit Points, grants a stack of clinging mist and gives them a random positive status effect.
This is also the hero skill ability granted by this tome.
7.png


Now, with all these mists going around you don’t really want your enemies to benefit from them. That’s when Feytouched comes in. This minor transformation lets you avoid the penalties to vision granted by Misty and the accuracy penalties of Clinging Mist.
8.png
9.png


This transformation also gives a new passive, which all Fey now have by default, called Fey Guile. This new passive grants units that end their turn on mist clouds or on obscuring obstacles (like trees and bushes), a random positive status effect.
10.png


This tome contains a new Fey unit, a strategic summon called the Mistling. This unit is a Tier III skirmisher and was partly designed as a counterpart to the Gremlin.
11.png


While the Gremlin unit teleports to a random position when attacked, the Mistling has Misty Strike, a single melee attack that teleports it 3 hexes away from its target after attacking. This makes it great for the hit and run tactics skirmisher units excel at.
12.png


Their other ability is Fey Trick. It deals Physical, Blight and Lightning damage as well as having a base 90% chance of applying a random negative status condition to the enemy it hits.
13.png


On top of this, the Mistling’s Trail of Mists ability creates a mist cloud below themselves at the end of their turn, which triggers their Fey Guile ability to gain a random positive status.
14.png



Last thing I want to mention from this tome is the Special Province Improvement, Feywater Pond, which when built grants +3 Mana per adjacent Forester as well as covering the whole domain of the city in which it is built on with the Misty effect. Here’s what it looks like:
15.png


Tome of the Stormborne​

16.png


The second and final tome in this content pack is all about storms, lightning and harnessing the storm’s power over the sea.

Lightning Storm is a combat spell that uses the power of the storm to place the Wet condition on all units in combat and then deals deadly lightning strikes to enemies!
17.png


You can also place Wet on all units in a province with Downpour. It applies downpouring to a province for 3 turns as well as turning that province into a Swamp.
18.png


Downpouring gives all units in the province Wet and Slowed in combat, reducing their lightning resistance and their movement. Though Amphibious and Water Moving units are not affected by this.
19.png


Which brings us to the Major Transformation of this tome, the Naga Form:
20.png


This new transformation makes all racial units embrace their serpentine side, with a transformation that for the first time removes a part of a unit's body and then replaces it with something else, in this case a coiling naga tail.

This transformation gives a lot of benefits:
  • Fast Movement in combat and in the world map.
  • Immunity to the Electrified status effect.
  • Amphibious movement for entering water faster without slowing down or embarking on a transport.
  • Slip Away, which once per combat revives them immediately after they go down.
  • Blight and Lightning resistances.

The downside being that riding a mount without legs is a hard endeavor, so cavalry units lose their mount. Heroes and Leaders affected by this transformation also lose their Mount and Leg slots.
21.png



Bounty of the Sea and Stormport are economic research skills made to work on coastal cities.
The first is a Sustained City Spell that doubles the resources from Coastal Province Improvements, which makes it an ideal spell for cities with a lot of coastal sectors.
22.png


The second is a city structure that rewards having multiple coastal cities. Stormport grants a flat mana gain plus extra mana and gold for each stormport built in cities with a coastal province.
23.png


This tome also unlocks a new racial skirmisher Tier IV unit, the Stormbringer.
24.png


It is a potent skirmisher specialized in hitting multiple targets and applying Electrified. Its Storm Strikes ability not only deals damage to the target but can also hit up to two other units for 20% of the damage dealt and it has a base 90% chance to apply Electrified to all those it hits.
25.png


The Stormbringer can also throw its storm trident, which hits up to 3 units in a line and guarantees they receive a stack of electrified while dealing a decent chunk of damage from a distance.
26.png


Being in the same tome as the Naga Form Major Transformation this unit was made with it in mind, and art did a fantastic job with it!
27.png


And we don’t want the heroes to lose out on the fun of striking multiple enemies, so the Hero Skill Arcing Weapons allows a Warfare Hero to apply the bouncing strikes from Storm Strikes to all melee and physical ranged base abilities.
28.png



And with that we went over all the things the new tomes unlock. I hope you enjoyed the dive into these new tomes and are excited to try them out when this content pack releases on the 27th of February!

Join us next week as our art director Rich takes us over the art for Primal Fury.

Don't forget to
Wishlist the Primal Fury Content Pack!

Be the first to get information about Primal Fury:
 
Last edited:
  • 30Like
  • 23Love
  • 3
  • 1
Reactions:
Tomes are my favorite aspect of variety in Age of Wonders 4 and I'm always hoping to get more of them. I really appreciate the complete breakdown of the Tomes line by line as well. These both seem excellent for build variety. I particularly like how Naga Form can reward non-mounted, non-flying play. And just as I LOVE the way some units become mounted with the right society traits, I love that I can now make mounted units un-mounted. I would really enjoy more things like this.

Overall, I've never been happier with the ongoing development of a game.

I do have a question. It seems that elephants and mastodons reduce the model number in squads down to 2, which makes sense as the models are so big. It's also a pretty strong buff. I was curious how that interacts with Spawnlings and Supergrowth? Both say they adjust the model number in their descriptions, but previously neither one impacted the size of the mounts. Will I be able to make 1-model squads with Supergrowth? can I have 3 elephants no matter the size of the mount with Spawnlings?

Thank you.

Edit: One more question, actually. Could you give information on the frequency of spawning for the Spirit Dens? It was a concern I had they would end up limited for the faction and whether through bad luck or the spawn rate the people playing the livestream seem to have trouble finding more.
 
Last edited:
  • 2Like
  • 1Love
Reactions:
The Naga transformation is absolutely brilliant visually.

Now that it is possible, I wonder if a form trait that simply dismounts all units (the opposite of Mount Masters) but gives another benefit would be viable.
 
  • 9Like
  • 2Love
  • 2
Reactions:
Thanks for second stream!
Awesome work, сan't wait!
Lizard man from DD with snake head + naga transformation OH MY.....!
I pray you, remove the double tail when transforming into Naga

+maybe add more terrain effects in future.
 
Last edited:
  • 1Like
Reactions:
I love the visual of those mists!

I also like that these newer transformations don't seem to override as much of our faction design as the original ones.
 
  • 3Like
  • 1
Reactions:
I like the fact that a water tome is being introduced, but am disappointed that it's missing some major things I expected, especially (1). I'm hoping that a future tome might introduce these in the future.

(1) Way to summon lesser tide spirits (this remains the only level 1 spirit that can't be naturally summoned)
(2) A water wave spell that does damage and has a chance to stun or knock the units it hits backwards (I'd be fine with either effect)
(3) Strategic spells for actually controlling the seas (i.e., freezing an army that is embarked for one turn; chance to drown units over water that don't have flying, etc.)
 
  • 4Like
Reactions:
So what would happen to something like a Knight or Dark Knight under the naga transformation? They just keep using lances, but on foot?
Yup! Seems that way. Would be pretty unique. And you mentioning shock units make me imagine War Breeds with this transformation.
 
Yup! Seems that way. Would be pretty unique. And you mentioning shock units make me imagine War Breeds with this transformation.

I guess that's okay. In theory they would just lose movement. Hopefully they keep their heavy charge even while on foot. It would be a shame if the transformation ended up reducing them to just being 'worse berserkers'.
 
I guess that's okay. In theory they would just lose movement. Hopefully they keep their heavy charge even while on foot. It would be a shame if the transformation ended up reducing them to just being 'worse berserkers'.
Actually Nagas get Fast Movement, which is the space speed as any given mount. So for them it shouldn't impact their mobility at all, unless you had a mount that provided other benefits... but if you gave your race a mount trait why in God's name are you taking Naga transformation?
 
  • 2Like
Reactions:
I don't like the high speed of the Naga transformation. If anything, I'd rather it slowed units down. The unit speeds in general are so cookie cutter. I'd love to see MUCH more variety. Big, hulking melee units should be slowed down. Heavy and Light cav sped up, but different. I know, I know, too late in the game for that to change.

I kinda like the Mistling unit. Looking forward to trying it out.
 
  • 3Like
  • 2
  • 1
Reactions:
I like the fact that a water tome is being introduced, but am disappointed that it's missing some major things I expected, especially (1). I'm hoping that a future tome might introduce these in the future.

(1) Way to summon lesser tide spirits (this remains the only level 1 spirit that can't be naturally summoned)
(2) A water wave spell that does damage and has a chance to stun or knock the units it hits backwards (I'd be fine with either effect)
(3) Strategic spells for actually controlling the seas (i.e., freezing an army that is embarked for one turn; chance to drown units over water that don't have flying, etc.)

I do really hope that, if there's a second season of DLC, one of them will be dedicated to water (more water tomes, water creatures, locations, and perhaps a water-based culture)
 
  • 1
Reactions:
Great Work from the Art and Design Team on the new Tomes .

Could you tell us if there is a interaction between Naga Transformation and the Athletic Form Trait? Both give Fast Movement, so do you stay at 40 Movements...or do you get Flash Snakes with 48 Movement?

Best regards
 
  • 1
  • 1Like
Reactions: