June 29th, 2020, 12:39
(This post was last modified: June 29th, 2020, 12:42 by Seravy.)
Posts: 10,492
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Joined: Aug 2015
Let me think...
Life/Death - this isn't so great. The two share the weakness of being bad at countering flying units. You also can't heal your undead. However you have crazy economy, especially with Cult Leader. Death gives you low cost or free units while life+dark rituals boost income sky high. Life buffs can negate the low resistance weakness of Death creatures.
Life/Sorcery - this is the king of unit buffing and artifact creation. As soon as you get your hands on some heroes, you're powerful. Prayer+Blur combines for massive global damage reduction. Vulnerable to dispelling, especially if you fail to get Spell Lock, but taking Artificer can make up for it. I'd say it's in the top 3 two realm combinations. Lack of good summons, while you have the best casting skill buildup capability can be a pain if you for some reason, can't or don't want to rely on buffs.
This also works best for peace strategies, with Altar of Peace, Sanctify, and Aura of Majesty, then win in the endgame with Spell of Mastery or Time Stop.
Life/Nature - This gets you absolutely crazy city economy with stream of life, gaia's blessing, prosperity, etc and later the Life globals. You also get both realms that directly buff unit defense and get both good support for normal units and summoned creatures. You are generally safe from nasty enemy effects as you can protect cities and units both (Herb Mastery, Consecration, Gaia's Blessing) so if you plan for an economy based victory with SoM or simply outnumbering everyone else with very rare creatures, this can work.
Life/Chaos - This has good lategame synergy but early game is quite weak. You get doom mastery plus chaos surge, on top of the life globals that buff units. You get all the economy boosting and enemy economy reducing globals, so with Runemaster to guarantee more and harder to dispel enchantments, you can swim in resources which you watch everyone else getting covered by volcanoes and lose the game without having to lift a finger. And in case you prefer fighting, your armies are pretty much unstoppable thanks to the military globals. If that's not good enough, you also get the ability to both directly damage enemy units very well and be good at healing your own. The only problem is the lack of early game.
Nature/Death - this is very very powerful in the early game as you play the two best early realms. Nature magic can heal undead. Survival Instiinct buffs undead. Overall this is less about synergy and more about getting the most out of your early game. Death and Nature share a lot of strengths and weaknesses so this isn't a very special combination.
Nature/Chaos - Survival instinct buffs your chaos chanelled units. Regenerating creatures are great paired with powerful direct damage spells as you can kill the enemy without losing units. You can raise volcano then change the ores into adamantium. You can raise volcano and change terrain to turn tundra into grasslands. You can learn the world destroying chaos globals while not being affected by them which allows you to trade them away to multiply the effect - so you can be the laughing party while the rest of the world destroys each other. (Gaia's Blessing cleans up your land and Herb Mastery protects from Meteor damage on units.)
Nature/Sorcery - This has too much synergy in fact. You get flight and web so not only can you fly but also prevent enemies from flying and hitting you at the same time. You can summon powerful creatures then protect them with invisibility or magic immunity. Your heroes are as good as Life/Sorcery except you can make regeneration items instead of Life buffs so they get active later but are all that much more effective. You get all the good combat summons and very good overland summons that cover pretty much every possible use case so Conjurer is best used here. You can use Call Lightning while your army is invisible or too fast to reach/teleporting/immune to magic.
Death/Sorcery - Mind Storm reduces resistance by 5. Your combat spell toolbox is about the best, Sorcery giving early defense ignoring damage while Death gives save or die effects. Death pretty much entirely negates Sorcery's disadvantages of being weak early, having no good summons, or not detecting invisible units.
Death/Chaos - Haven't played this much but I think the idea here is Death giving you a strong early game that you can transition into a strong late game using Chaos. You're pretty much unstoppable if you want to attack something past midgame, it's yours. Chaneller can work wonders here.
Chaos/Sorcery - Used to be my favorite. It's the slowest to start working unfortunately, but if you made it to rares, you win. You have combos like Magic Immunity+Magic Vortex, or Invisibility+Flame Strike spam, or Mind Storm+Disintegrate. If that hasn't already won then you can cast Power Link AND Armageddon then thrown out a Time Stop or Doomsaday on top of that. You can put Haste on Hydras and Great Drakes. This literally has the most and best combos among the (already powerful by themselves) late game spells. If you can get the Illusionist hero and give her gear to survive a turn in combat, she can pretty much win you all fights on turn one if you give her a Haste+4xApocalypse (or Flame Strike or Doom Bolt) weapon by casting those spells 5 times in one turn before the rest of your army finishes anything capable of surviving all of that.
Oh and you have Aura of Majesty to force the AI to overlook your Armageddon.
