A dictatorial civilization where the strong and ruthless dominate the weak. They use forbidden magics to maintain control and weaken their enemies. Their unique buildings increase Knowledge income and allow you to ignore the consequences of low City Stability.

Dark culture gains extra income from keeping enemy heroes in their prisons and crypts and cultural units specialize in inflicting negative status effects and exploiting them with Cull the Weak. They also start with a slight negative alignment making them inclined towards evil game play but you can easily overcome this if you prefer to play a good aligned Dark Culture.

Dark culture is all about preying on the weak, capturing or killing enemy heroes and gaining knowledge through any means. Necromancy is not inherently part of the Dark Culture but they do work well with necromancy tomes and raising undead if you choose to pursue that line of research.

The defining characteristic of Dark culture. Ranged and Magic attacks from your cultural units have a high chance of inflicting the Weakened debuff to their targets. Your melee culture units do more damage to units that have been weakened and will trigger a small self heal.

Tip: In combat, you ideally want to start by weakening your opponent’s units either through your ranged attacks or spells like Baneful Curse. Then attack with your melee units for the damage bonus and self heal. Weakened units will also do less damage to your units.

Dark culture begins with two points of Shadow Affinity which helps you advance along the Shadow path of the Empire Skills.

Tip: The Shadow path provides perks that increase knowledge gain, provide new uses for Whispering Stones, reduce upkeep for magic origin units (including undead), level up your heroes faster and even allow your units to regenerate hit points while in hostile domain.

Dark culture starts with a slight negative alignment making them lean slightly towards evil.

Tip: This can easily be overcome if you want to play a good aligned dark culture by making good choices during game events or by selecting a positive alignment Society Trait such as Keepers of Knowledge.

This tome is available to rulers with the Dark culture from the start of the game. The spells specialize in negative status effects:

• Baneful Curse - This applies weakened which can set up Cull the Weak
  
• Ice Shackles - Frost damage and inflicts Slowed (reduces retaliations)
  
• Brand of Wrath - By default only your cultural units have the Cull the Weak ability. This spell gives Cull the Weak to all units in your empire.

Tip: Baneful Curse will make sure your enemy is both Weakened and less resistant to your unit's attacks, a great way to start any battle. Ice Shackles can provide some extra damage and inflict slowed so your enemy will not be able to retaliate when your melee units attack them. Band of Wrath will be very important later on if you decide to use Undead units or any units unlocked by tomes that are not members of your race.

Dark Forge (Mine)

• Provides Draft and Gold income and additional Draft per adjacent Quarry or Mine
  
• Unit Deployment Location
  
• Requires Town Hall 2

Tip: Special Province Improvements can be placed on any owned province regardless of what improvement is currently there. For example, the Dark Forge does not necessarily have to be placed on an existing Mine, it can replace any improvement.

• Outrider (Scout) - The Dark culture scout gains the Infiltrate ability which increases their vision range in hostile territory. They also can not be detected in forest, mountain and swamp terrain.
  
• Pursuer (Ranged) - Can inflict Weakened through the Cull the Weak ability and have the option of becoming mounted cavalry if you select the Mount Masters form trait or a unique mount type.
  
• Dark Warrior (Shock) - Charge Strike does bonus damage if you move before attacking in addition to canceling the unit's defense mode and removing its ability to retaliate. They gain even more bonus damage if you attack a weakened unit due to Cull the Weak.
  
• Warlock (Battle Mage) - Sundering Curse can not miss and will always inflict Weakened and Sundered Defense & Resistance but requires a full action. Weakening Bolts is a base magic attack that has a high chance to inflict Weakened for when your Curse is on cool down. Both attacks do Frost damage.
  
• Night Guard (Polearm) - At the end of this unit’s turn all adjacent enemies have a high chance of receiving Sundered Defense & Resistance. Also benefits from Cull the Weak.
  
• Dark Knight (Shock) - Just like with the Dark Warrior, Charge Strike does bonus damage if you move before attacking in addition to canceling the unit's defense mode and removing its ability to retaliate. They gain even more bonus damage if you attack a weakened unit due to Cull the Weak. They also have the Dark Surge ability which can not miss and does Frost damage in a cone, doing double damage to units with any negative status effect (including Weakened).

Tip: Ideally you want to use your Night Guard to Sunder Defense & Resistance, use your Pursuer and Warlock to inflict Weakened on as many targets as possible so they do less damage to your units, and use your Dark Warriors and Knights charge attack to cancel enemy Defensive Mode and Retaliation, while gaining temporary hit points and doing extra damage from Cull the Weak against those already Weakened targets.

The unique city structures available to Dark culture increase Knowledge income compared to the basic structure they replace and in some cases increase the knowledge gained from heroes in your prison and the mana gained from heroes in your crypt in addition to what the base Prison and Crypt structures provide.

• Experimentation Chambers - Dark culture version of the Vendor, adds knowledge income in addition to gold.
  
• Underground Laboratory - Dark culture version of the Market, adds knowledge income in addition to gold.
  
• Interrogation Dungeon - Dark culture version of the Tavern, adds knowledge income and increases knowledge generated per hero in the prison.
  
• Ritual Mausoleum - Dark culture version of the Bathhouse, adds mana income and increases mana generated per hero in the crypt.
  
• Dread Spire (Town Hall 2) - Prevents income penalty from low stability.
  
• Overlord’s Tower - Prevents provinces from breaking away due to low stability.

Tip: As you can see, many of these buildings add extra Knowledge compared to the buildings they replace as well as some extra mana to pay for enchantments or upkeep on magic origin units which includes undead. It's important to remember that the Underground Laboratory and Interrogation Dungeon can be built in each of your cities which means that leaving heroes in your prison and crypt can generate lots of knowledge and mana which increases further each time you build more of these structures in your cities. Of course the trade off is not getting the gold and items you would get from selling the remains or granting freedom but that is a small price to pay. Dark culture also has two buildings that negate the consequences of having low stability - your people may be unhappy but you don't have to worry about it so let your cities grow as large as you can especially if you're going for Expansion victory!

One of the best things about AoW4 is that there are so many different ways to build great empires. This is just a sample to give you an idea of a good build with some synergy but always make your own choices and pick whatever sounds most fun to you!

The focus of our strategy will be

• Gain as many vassals as possible and collect lots of resources from them
  
• Weaken and lower the morale of our enemies
  
• Gain lots of Knowledge and lead armies of powerful undead

Ogrekin (pick anything you like)

• Arctic Adaptation - Many of the Shadow tomes and SPI gain benefits from snow and ice so starting in and being able to terraform to Arctic terrain works very well for Dark culture.
  
• Nightmare Mounts - All of our cavalry units (and our ruler) will have some extra HP but more importantly, Intimidation Aura and Vicious Killer traits which will help our plan to lower enemy morale.
  
• Adaptable - I use this trait on most of my builds because all units get stronger as they level up and gaining those levels faster makes our armies stronger.

• Keepers of Knowledge - Unlocking new research and tomes improves our standing with Free Cities and Empires and increases our knowledge for having open borders with them while giving us vision and even more Knowledge from every Vassal with one of our Whispering Stones!
  
• Silver Tongued - Allows us to make completely one sided deals with our vassals where we get more resources from them without having to pay anything for them! It also gives us an extra scout to explore the map and find those potential vassals faster. As if that's not enough, we also get an extra Whispering Stone which we need to make those Free Cities into our Vassals and the ability to use our Whispering Stones to get tribute from other empire's vassals.

Tip: With this setup we will start the game with two Shadow tree perks already unlocked. This is nice because we can use the Imperium that we would have spent on these perks for other things like founding cities. Imperium is a very important resource and hard to come by so getting two perks for free is great.

For this build we will start with the Tome of Cryomancey. This tome gives us access to the School of Cryomancy, a powerful SPI that grants Knowledge and Mana for every adjacent snow or ice Provence. This works very well with our Arctic Adaptation start!

Dark culture is all about applying afflictions and this tome adds another one to our arsenal - Frozen! Frost Arrows, White Witch and Ice Coffin are all great options to Freeze an enemy unit and remember, your Dark Knight's Dark Surge ability does more damage to units suffering from any affliction, not just Weakened.

Tip: You don't have to stay with all Shadow tomes exclusively. You can create all sorts of powerful builds by mixing in other affinities which also unlocks perks from those empire skill trees but for simplicity, this build is going all in on Shadow.

Tyra Voidherald
Champion - Death Knight - Tyrant’s Sword and Shield

Champion helps our plan to gain vassals and it’s also the only way for our Ruler to have the Cull the Weakness culture trait as all the other ruler types are not members of our culture. We can also use the Decisive Command ability for some nice tactical tricks like having our Warlocks move, regain their action points and then use their full action Curse all in the same turn or do the same with our Dark Knights moving and then still being able to use Dark Surge. We also want to spread the Weakness affliction and lower the morale of our enemies. Death Knights can apply Weakness with their Curse and the Tyrant Shield gives us Intimidation Aura while still allowing us to use our special Nightmare mounts. You will probably replace the Tyrant Shield with something better very early but that's ok because you will still have Intimidation Aura from the Nightmare mount. A lance is another good option if you prefer.

Fearmonger would probably be the best match thematically. Collector has good rewards and is pretty easy to accomplish.

Sinister Spy (pick anything you like)
This only matters if you plan to play against this empire as an AI opponent.


Free Cities - Get your two starting scouts out exploring quickly to find Gold Wonders and make contact with Free Cities and start handing out Whispering Stones. As soon as a Free City reaches Vassal level, pass that Whispering Stone on to a new Free City. You want to convert as many Free Cities into vassals as you can before other empires beat you to them. Don't forget you can pick up an extra Whispering Stone in the General empire skill tree (for a total of 3) and you can give Whispering Stones to the Vassals of other empires to collect tribute from them as well! Most importantly, always check the Cooperation screen for each Free City! The Silver Tongued trait lets us make free deals with each vassal. Don't forget to use it! Also, keep in mind that as much as we want to gain Vassals to make use of the Silver Tongued trait, if you do end up in a war with a Free City that's not a bad thing because they will regularly send a war party to attack you which gives you the opportunity to add more heroes to your prison or crypt! Join us or don't, we benefit either way!

Combat - Always try to spread the Weakness affliction as much as possible either from your culture units, spells or Death Knight Curse. In addition, we want to lower enemy moral as much as possible from spells, Nightmare Mounts or traits like Intimidating Aura. This makes the enemy more likely to Fumble their attacks and possibly Rout (run away). Tome of the Doomherald gives lots of buffs and benefits from attacking units with low morale.

Necromancy - While not inherently part of the Dark Culture, the Tome of Necromancy will be our second tome after Cryomancy and revolves around summoning or raising increasingly more powerful undead. You can easily amass huge undead legions to throw at your enemies!

Victory- Our Dark Culture build is very good at gaining Knowledge, especially as we pick up perks from the Shadow empire skill tree. We get knowledge from killing heroes, knowledge from keeping them in our prison or crypt, knowledge from free Cooperation deals with Free Cities, knowledge from having Open Borders, knowledge from unique City Structures and SPI like the School of Cryomancey.... you get the idea. All of this can help you research tomes very quickly unlocking increasingly more powerful undead as well as unlocking the Bind Gold Wonder and Age of Shadow spells required to achieve the Magic Victory. Of course you will need to clear a few Gold Wonders as well. If we can't manage to get enough Gold Wonders, Expansion Victory is an option since we don't have to deal with city stability penalties and of course we could always conquer the world with our undead legions for a Military victory!