Vine Ogres, worthwhile?

[Shangrila00]

So I found an animists hut, which can produce 50% more vine ogres per casting, on top of the helmet that boosts vines. So, woo hoo? Vine Ogres are now cheap as hell, but the stats are not particularly exciting. Particularly not as MA Mictlan with sacred national nature summons, but how useful are vine ogres in general? Worth summoning, with or without animists? What do you do with them? Are 3 vine ogres better than the 1-2 sacred jaguars with a duel bless that I could otherwise get for 2 N?

[tratorix]

Vine Ogres are good chaff. They're cheap, mindless so they don't rout and have lots of HP. They're good at drawing fire from enemy spellcasters, saving your better units from death and tying up the enemy to keep them from getting to your spellcasters. Basically they occupy a completely different niche from jaguars. Just don't expect them to ever actually kill anything.

[TigerBlood]

They are mindless, poison immune, sacks of hit points.

They work best when buffed. Nature provides a lot of usful buffs for them, like regeneration, though other paths can make them fairly effective in numbers.

With 45 hp,they are decent blocking units. They will probably be attacked in preference to your jaguars. If you script a force, you can easily force melee or archers to target the vine ogres in preference to other normal units, allowing your jaguars to flank or surround an enemy squad when they hit the wall of vine ogres. This kind of basic tactic works best when the VO are heavily buffed.

Like undead units, they can also be used to compliment poison using units at no risk of banishment. Such as creatures with a poison cloud (eg. Monster Toad), or creatures that have a poisonous ranged/area attacks (Amphiptere, Bog Beasts, Breath of the Dragon, Snake Bladder Stick).

Their use does depend on what else you have available though.

[Soyweiser]

iirc having high hp and larger than normal size (3) they get targetted by the target monsters command. (If you have no larger/more hp units). This can prevent them from targetting your commanders if these have above average size and hp. (If you are playing Lanka for example, and don't use the normal size 3 apes units that much). (They also have access to dark vines which are better, but lets disregard that ).

So basically, they are shields/decoys. They lack the protection to be real tanks. (but there are spells that help them with that of course).

[Shangrila00]

Hmm, MA Mictlan does have good use for decoys against fire/attack large, what with their size 4 couatls and no national unit larger than size 2. But while they have double the hp, vine ogres are only size 3. Spells should definitely get drawn in by the much higher hp concentration, but does fire large target based on hp or just size?

[Soyweiser]

Couatls definitely get hit first. I abused this to great effect in one game. He had clumped all his mages next to the Couatls, just when I had enough research to sabbath commune thunderstrike.