Thug Commanders

[Xietor]

Sleeper from Kingmaker. A thug, who with help from elephants, kills the harbinger and air elemental summoned by a mage not in the picture. Sleeper needs friends to kill stuff.







Here is an SC from Fallacy:









Here is my pretender from Alpaca. This Gorgon is a SC.

[JimMorrison]

Holy magic paths, Batman!

[Psycho]

That seraph is such a huge investment, is it worth it? I mean you could have 6 normal ones for that amount of astral gems. And what's with the huge hit points? Can you wish for that too?

[DonCorazon]

X, what turn did Fallacy go to? That seems like an incredible amount of investment in an SC - surprising you could get to that level in an MP game.

[Xietor]

Fallacy went to 108. I used the seraph to magic duel many of the ryleh starspawns, who had deadly communions. So yeah i thought it was worth it.

Basically that is what the seraph mainly did was magic duel s5 and s6 mages.

i would use the breath of winter chest piece when hunting tartarians. obviously if it had been killed it would have been a blow. but i used it judiciously. and it never hunted solo.

The Ryleh was a major enemy that game, and had little or no blood. Obviously investing so heavily in a SC against a blood race would not be wise, or necessary.

[Ironhawk]

This Seraph is absurd. It's wished for Magic Power more times than is feasible or wise. Extreme waste of resources, IMO.

[Rytek]

Originally Posted by Ylvali

My favourite thugs are the Kings of the deep with whatever gear is available and golems with stymphalian wings/boots of stone and dual shields. Big fan of harbringers too. Baalz eiru thugs are fantastic too. I also like to thug out knights of ulm and marignon just because it is thematic and fun to have heroes that are less "über".

Now is there any viable unmounted human thug chassis? I´d love to play a startegy based on ordinary human thugs. Packs of tough little heroes that you can really relate to.

The short answer is no, no viable human thug chassis. They are just too fragile. I suppose if you wanted to mess around vs the AI you could do something with MA mans Wardens. Give them E9/NX bless, or a W9,E9,N4 bless. Group them with some warden troops and a friar and you have a nasty stealth raiding group. Add in some of those stealth mothers for protection buffs for added fun. Then you can really do some funky stuff. Try a warden with a serpant dagger, vine shield, Horned helmet, chi boots--all items that you have gem income for and at const level 2. If you get some earth gems you can add bracer of protection and girdle of might.

[Xietor]

I do not think there can be hard and fast rules for every situation. This game there were reasons for the insanely high magical paths-Ryleh. And there were reasons for making him insanely tough thug(i was outnumbered by gor tartarians by about 100).

In this case this thug was a difference maker in key wars that won me a 22 player game that had many good players in it. QM said it was a waste to give a gargoyle 2 air as well. But that gargoyle fought many a war and numerous battle and was a niche thug for me. And he was alive when the game ended.

There are also advantages to having an astral mage that can cast master enslave without a communion. When you are the attacker, it is nice to get your master enslave off 1st.

All those gems do you no good if you die. How many times does someone die in a game and give you hundreds of gems? So sure, i could have sat and wished for gems over and over. But I had plenty of gems. I needed things that could fight high level communions where master enslave and arcane domination were cast more than once during the battle. So there were actually very few troops of choice that I wanted to use.

There were also other Seraphs around. I wanted my seraph to be able to kill other seraphs, tartarians, and anything else that may cross its path-and it did. Including named horrors.

[HoneyBadger]

You can also combine some "thuggish" human units with a more powerful SC as bodyguards. That's a bit more viable-although still not ideal, since the SC will be guarding and supporting the bodyguards as much as they are guarding and supporting the SC.

I made some mostly human units in Aksum that have a Deathform, in an effort to help extend human viability in the game: One turns into an etherial spirit, one turns into a were-hyena, and one turns into a zombie.

Maybe someday the berserker pelt will be modified to actually grant a second form to a human unit, in addition to berserking them? I've heard that it's not considered the best item in the world, but if it turned humans-maybe *only* humans?-into werewolves after they got killed for the first time, it would undoubtedly find a few more homes. Maybe a more powerful version might turn a human into a were bear or a were tiger (were moose?...how come we don't have any were meese in the game already?).

I don't think there are currently any forgeable items that grant shape-shifting capabilities, despite the prominence of thematic items (descriptions on units that change shape are often linked to items the unit possesses) that do so.

Another idea would be a high level forgeable item that turned a human into an Ettin as a death-form--like a weird alchemical Dr Jeckyl/Mr Hyde potion. This could possibly be an artifact?

[Xietor]

The Seraph actually did not have power wished for that much. Cannot recall if it was once or twice. It is sitting in dominion 10 with GOH up. That is why it has the high hps.