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Age of Wonders 4likes to give its playersa variety of viable play styles. For instance, how can a player with a few remote cities and a vast number of vassals protect their empire or build a large army all at once? The answer is by using a special mechanic called the Rally of the Lieges.
If players are building alliances instead of building cities, or if they’re spending their time exploring ancient wonders instead of fighting enemy factions, they can still build powerful armies thanks to the Rally of the Lieges that takes place every 15 turns inAge of Wonders 4. This alternative to building armies at home can be an effective way to build instant armies ready to take on unexpected threats or reinforce important heroes.
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How to Get Recruitment Points and Units
When players start the game, they won’t have access to the Rally of the Lieges. The 15-turn timer will go off on schedule,but until players have vassalsor annexed ancient wonders, the game won’t mention it, and the rally menu will be blank.
When a rally begins, and players can do something about it, the way to check on what units are available and how many recruitment points they have is to bring up the Rally of the Lieges menu. This menu is the last button in the upper-left corner of the map, and its icon is a trumpet with a banner.
Both recruitment points and available units come from the same sources. Each unit has a gold cost and a recruitment point cost, and players must be able to afford both to hire a new unit.Higher-tier units cost more of both resources, and the list automatically sorts the available units from most to least powerful. Players can only recruit each unit once, but access to a unit refreshes when a new Rally of the Lieges begins (assuming players still have access to the same vassals and ancient wonders).
When players pay the regular gold cost, the selected units will appear in the capital 2 turns later. However, players can also pay half the cost and let one of their vassals control the new unit instead. This is useful if the vassal is on the front lines of a war, but keep in mind thatall a vassal’s units disband(aside from their leader) when players integrate them.
Players can also pay a large sum to Muster the Lieges, which cuts the wait time until the next rally in half. The cost of doing so depends on how much time is left, but players can only Muster once per rally.
Something else to note is that the available points and units don’t update until a new rally begins. If players integrate a vassal, they can still recruit that vassal’s units until the next rally (integrated cities don’t contribute to the rallyno matter how players got them). The recruitment point max updates every turn, but the current recruitment points only reset when the next rally starts.
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Rally of the Lieges and Ancient Wonders
Ancient wonders deserve special mention. Once players clear an ancient wonder,they can annex them into their empire, either with a neighboring city or by building an outpost nearby and using the work camp structure to annex the wonder’s province. Doing this will add more recruitment points to the player’s total and add special monster units to the Rally of the Lieges recruitment pool. These units tend to be more powerful than normal rally units and can include tier 5 units like dragons and balors.
On the other hand, ancient wonders produce fewer recruitment points than high-level vassals. Players who want an instant army of endgame monsters should either annex a lot of ancient wonders or keep a few vassals around to generate enough points for each rally.
Rallies and Order Empires
The Order branch of the Empire Development skill tree is especially helpful when it comes to the Rally of the Lieges. Most of the skills in this branchhave to do with free cities, vassals, or the rally. The following abilities are the most relevant:
The Order skills that deal with vassals can also help boost the Rally of the Lieges indirectly.Vassals with better relationshipscontribute more recruitment points and better units to the rally.
Age of Wonders 4is available now on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.
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