Mono affinity is honestly a horribly suboptimal way to play any of them and I don't know why so many people have culture and tomes mixed in their heads. You can play Dark culture with zero Dark tomes. But yeah, mono Dark is one of the worst.
Negating stability penalties is pretty strong if you lean into it, you can just avoid any kind of stability buildings and use things like Awakened Tools and Amplified Minds with no repercussions, which I highly recommend using if you go dark. It's near free +20 prod, draft and research in all cities. It also has good synergies with Nature since you don't need to keep up your stability with pop growth. Your lategame eco will suck compared to max stability builds with Convents and Tome of Paradise but you have a pretty powerful midgame where you should press your advantage. Note that you may and probably should transition to high stability in the lategame yourself.
in terms of units, I honestly think Dark Knights are one of the strongest units in the game for their tier, the 36 damage aoe is ridiculous and easy to enable with Baneful Hex if nothing else. You lower tiers are more awkward, but i like Pursuers for their ability to apply lots of Weaken stacks. Warriors are tricky to use but can be strong when used well.
Stacking Weaken is very powerful in itself for up to -50% enemy unit damage, you probably want to get more things that allow your negative effects to go through through such as Condemn and Sunder Armour/Resistance, so tomes like Scrying or Inquisition synergise well with Dark.
Lack of heals can be easily covered by grabbing a tome which grants you a healer (Nymphs are good if you do the status resist debuff strategy), or even getting a trait like Ritual Cannibals. And in all honesty if you abuse the meta things like combat summon spam you don't need heals that much.
Dark affinity has a lot of random mismatched stuff but a lot of it is actually good/decent. Death magic has hilarious synergy with spamming combat summons so that you don't run out of CP, -20% magic origin unit upkeep is very good if you use any. +100% hero xp is amazing but kind of comes too late to matter unfortunately unless you go pure Dark maybe. +mana and research from hero kills and captured cities is pretty good for AI stomping on a big FFA map, it's kind of "win more" type of abilities though which I don't really like. Then again tons of people simp for the Chaos tree, where most abilities after the first 4 are the same kind of "win more". So idk.
Negating stability penalties is pretty strong if you lean into it, you can just avoid any kind of stability buildings and use things like Awakened Tools and Amplified Minds with no repercussions, which I highly recommend using if you go dark. It's near free +20 prod, draft and research in all cities. It also has good synergies with Nature since you don't need to keep up your stability with pop growth. Your lategame eco will suck compared to max stability builds with Convents and Tome of Paradise but you have a pretty powerful midgame where you should press your advantage. Note that you may and probably should transition to high stability in the lategame yourself.
in terms of units, I honestly think Dark Knights are one of the strongest units in the game for their tier, the 36 damage aoe is ridiculous and easy to enable with Baneful Hex if nothing else. You lower tiers are more awkward, but i like Pursuers for their ability to apply lots of Weaken stacks. Warriors are tricky to use but can be strong when used well.
Stacking Weaken is very powerful in itself for up to -50% enemy unit damage, you probably want to get more things that allow your negative effects to go through through such as Condemn and Sunder Armour/Resistance, so tomes like Scrying or Inquisition synergise well with Dark.
Lack of heals can be easily covered by grabbing a tome which grants you a healer (Nymphs are good if you do the status resist debuff strategy), or even getting a trait like Ritual Cannibals. And in all honesty if you abuse the meta things like combat summon spam you don't need heals that much.
Dark affinity has a lot of random mismatched stuff but a lot of it is actually good/decent. Death magic has hilarious synergy with spamming combat summons so that you don't run out of CP, -20% magic origin unit upkeep is very good if you use any. +100% hero xp is amazing but kind of comes too late to matter unfortunately unless you go pure Dark maybe. +mana and research from hero kills and captured cities is pretty good for AI stomping on a big FFA map, it's kind of "win more" type of abilities though which I don't really like. Then again tons of people simp for the Chaos tree, where most abilities after the first 4 are the same kind of "win more". So idk.
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