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Dev Diary #46 - Archon Prophecy: Tomes (Part 2)

Hello again!
My name is Luis, senior designer at Triumph Studios, and as promised, this week I will be telling you about the Tome of the Revenant and the Tome of the Archon, which are new Tier 4 tomes in the Archon Prophecy expansion coming out on the 12th of August.

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Tome of the Archon​

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The Tome of the Archon is a pure Order Tier 4 tome whose spells evoke Archonic magic of purity and rebirth. Through its power you will be able to field the mighty Titan and summon the ancient Astra to smite your enemies.

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The Titan is an Archon Tier 4 Mythic of tremendous power and with the capability to redeem the souls of its enemies. Its Sunburst ability deals Fire and Radiant damage, burns and blinds in an area. Mend the Weak heals as a free action, with its effect doubled when cast on units close to death.
Its Rite of Atonement ability makes it so that upon killing an enemy, their soul reforms and transforms into a Tier 1 Lesser Light Spirit, a new support elemental unit of Order affinity added in the free patch coming together with this expansion. If they survive until the end of battle you can purchase them for a mana cost as their Tier 3 evolved form, the Light Spirit.

The Titan is unlocked for draft in the city with the construction of the tome’s Archon Gate which serves as a Teleporter Special Province Improvement that grants high Stability to the city.

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The Astra is a summonable Tier 5 Mythic unit. It is a leader among the Archons, its Archonic Leadership granting all Celestial units in the army with power and protection. Wielding a fiery sword, it burns and condemns those who oppose it. Divine Sundering, a 2-hex cone single action ability, then can be used to deal extra damage to any condemned unit as well as sundering the defenses of those hit.

It also has two protective abilities in the form of Angelic Grace and Holy Aura. The first is a support ability that heals and grants a stack of Grace to all friendly units in a 2-hex radius. Holy Aura is a passive halo around the unit that protects friendly units from status effects and damages adjacent enemies with Spirit damage.

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The unit enchantment Holy Aura grants a part of the Astra’s power to your melee units, giving them the same effect of protection to friendly units and damage to your foes.

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The tome provides a Minor Transformation, Pure Soul. This transformation gives your units some self purification capabilities, cleansing negative status effects at the start of the turn and if the negative status effect removed has a counter effect that is positive, the unit will gain a stack of it. For example if a unit with this transformation is Slowed, at the start of its turn it would be removed and would gain Haste in its place.

Other Spells and Unlocks:
Celestial Guardians
targets a friendly army on the world map and grants their stack leader a buff that adds two extra archon celestial Tier 3 units to the next combat they join.

Ascended Rebirth brings back the spirit of a fallen friendly unit back to combat in the form of a Vigil (a Tier 3 Battle Mage) it also heals all friendly units in a large radius for 20 Hit Points.

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Tome of the Revenant​


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The Tome of the Revenant is a Shadow and Order affinity Tier 4 tome that gives you access to Revenant units - Archons that became corrupt and have risen as Undead. There’s two new units here, the Undead Titan and the Fallen Angel:

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The corrupt version of the Titan, the Undead Titan is in many ways an opposite to its celestial version. The Dreadburst ability, a corrupted version of the Titan's Sunburst, inflicts Remorse and Decaying. Additionally, the Undead Titan possesses two skeleton-summoning abilities. Conjure Skeleton is a low-cooldown, free-cast ability that summons a single skeleton, and its passive ability, Rite of Undeath, further bolsters its undead ranks by converting any unit it slays into a skeleton.

This unit can be accessed by building a special province improvement: the Necropolis. This improvement grants the drafting of the Undead Titan, all the Tier 1 Skeleton units and the Corrupt Soul. It additionally provides a Soul income to your city to help fuel this tome’s units and spells.

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The Fallen Angel, is a summonable Tier 5 unit in the Tome of the Revenant. This corrupt angel has access to powerful magics: Ray of Corruption, a long and wide beam attack of revenant magic that weakens, demoralizes and then replenishes the health of the Fallen Angel.
Dark Temptation reveals hidden knowledge to enemy units in an attempt to convert and dominate them to the angel’s side.


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Undead Resentment is a unit enchantment that uses the Revenant’s past Archonic knowledge to grant all undead units protection from the Archon’s radiant fire. The enchantment increases Spirit and Fire resistance and also grants Vicious Killer meaning your units are better at demoralizing their foes in battle! This comes at the cost of Souls for each enchanted unit so make sure your economy can handle it.

Other Spells and Unlocks:
The spell Unholy Champion is a combat buff that greatly bolsters a unit's damage, grants them Undying, reviving them after 2 turns of being dead in combat, and Armor of Despair which grants defensive stats against the attacks of demoralized units.

This ties to our other spell in the tome, a world map spell called Revenant Whispers. When cast on an enemy army, these enemies become demoralized and any combat initiated against them will summon 3 Skeletons empowered with the effects of Unholy Champion on the side of the attacker.

To further boost your undead, the Chamber of the Rite is a city structure that makes all undead units produced in a city to gain Natural Regeneration, increasing their regeneration both in the World Map and in combat.

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I had a lot of fun designing and testing these tomes and hope you get to enjoy them when the Archon Prophecy expansion comes out on the 12th of August! Look forward to next week where we will have Alex telling us about the art for the Archon Prophecy expansion!

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Looks good! Hopefully not too overpowered.
Nitpicks: Some names are a bit too bland/generic. How about, instead of "Undead Titan", we go with "Revenant Titan"? Feels more punchy. Similar for "Fallen Angel"
 
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Awesome as always, just don't forget to add those swords as weapons for Giant rulers. (club and axe are good and all, but come on we need swords for giants)
 
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All of the Tomes you've shown off look amazing, as do the units! I couldn't be more excited for this DLC.

Something that would be really awesome to see though would be if the Titan's swords become available as a weapon for Giant Kings and the wings of the Astra and Fallen Angel become available for the Eldritch Scion as both lack customisation options quite severely.
Absolutely this
 
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WoW! THIS! <3
this is what the undead should be like and Wightborn
black hoods, skin and bones, I hope Wightborn has also been improved in appearance
I beg you, these colors are much cooler than purple :3
 
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How would you all feel about having the fallen angel's damage channels be spirit/frost/blight instead of just spirit/frost? For one, it would be spirit mixed with death damage, and for another, I feel spirit/frost could be reserved for a future tome/unit/culture that does "lunar" damage as a counterpart to radiant's solar fire/spirit damage.
Is there any unit in the game that has 3 damage channels?
 
The Fallen Angel looks really cool! (the Astra too of course, but I've already seen it)

Interesting that there won't be a major transformation to make our faction into actual Archons, just some minor transformations and echantmentd to approximaate it. But on the other hand it makes sense because only humans being able to ascend into becoming true Archons was a big part of the lore of the older games and giving a literal "Archon" transformation to everyone would have cheapened that. Plus I guess it would have overlapped with the angelic major transformation anyway, so this is a much better way.
 
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Is it possible to rename the fallen angel to "Lost Astra"? I don't see an officially named Angel counterpart, and calling it "Lost Astra" connects it thematically with the Lost Wizard related units and the Astra unit as well.

But its a minor nitpick, everything shown is pretty cool to see. The Revenant subfaction of Undead is a genius twist on the holy undead/resistant undead concepts, and would love to see more expansion on them in the future.
 
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Is it possible to rename the fallen angel to "Lost Astra"? I don't see an officially named Angel counterpart, and calling it "Lost Astra" connects it thematically with the Lost Wizard related units and the Astra unit as well.

But its a minor nitpick, everything shown is pretty cool to see. The Revenant subfaction of Undead is a genius twist on the holy undead/resistant undead concepts, and would love to see more expansion on them in the future.
It's a guy.
 
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I like Astra, but I would like her more if her face wasn't covered by the golden circles. I would like to see angels like the ones in AOW2, of course, with the graphics of AOW4. Anyways, this is looking great.
 
So the female angels are called "astra" and the males just "angel"? It'd be easier to call them both the same thing.
Astra was her name on AoW1, in AoW2 its "Angel" and in AoW3 "Archangel"

In contrast AoW2 had Dark Angel and AoW3 Fallen angel, both very cute women

AoW4 Fallen angel being a guy is a big departure, he look less like the old games evil angels and more like the Dread Reaper unit, unlike the actual Reaper unit of the base game incidentally.
 
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Astra was her name on AoW1, in AoW2 its "Angel" and in AoW3 "Archangel"

In contrast AoW2 had Dark Angel and AoW3 Fallen angel, both very cute women

AoW4 Fallen angel being a guy is a big departure, he look less like the old game Dark angels and more like the Dread Reaper unit, incidentally unlike the actual Reaper unit of Vanilla.
He looks like a drug Lord. And Undead titan is a punk in his bodyguard team.

Like it though. Also, reminds me of Darksiders 2, partially.
 
Is it possible to rename the fallen angel to "Lost Astra"? I don't see an officially named Angel counterpart, and calling it "Lost Astra" connects it thematically with the Lost Wizard related units and the Astra unit as well.
It might not be specifically a fallen Astra. There are multiple kinds of angel in this new expansion, so the unit, while roughly equivalent to the Astra, might have once been another type of angel. Or it's how all fallen angelic beings end up like.
 
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Titan a t4.....DISSAPOINTED. I was expecting a bigger role for such an iconic unit. Heck it's face is on the dlc.

Also please give that Paladin a glowing badass sword, a cool mount or something it's just so bland and generic.

Anyway I'm hyped as hell. LET"S GO!
 
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I'm extremely hyped! I already thought the Paladin was super cool, and now there's the Titan—and especially Astra, the angel! I've always been a fan of the Order Affinity, and I can't wait to lead the new units into battle! As always, amazing work and a huge thank you to the developers!
 
Astra was her name on AoW1, in AoW2 its "Angel" and in AoW3 "Archangel"

In contrast AoW2 had Dark Angel and AoW3 Fallen angel, both very cute women

AoW4 Fallen angel being a guy is a big departure, he look less like the old games evil angels and more like the Dread Reaper unit, unlike the actual Reaper unit of the base game incidentally.
Astra means stars in latin, so it could be more of a term than actual name. (same way as angel is a term)
Imo Lost/Fallen Astra would fit quite well.
 
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Titan a t4.....DISSAPOINTED. I was expecting a bigger role for such an iconic unit. Heck it's face is on the dlc.

Also please give that Paladin a glowing badass sword, a cool mount or something it's just so bland and generic.

Anyway I'm hyped as hell. LET"S GO!
Shining sword will be due to enchantments

They are also optional cavalry.
 
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