Best Unit in the Game... Any thoughts?

[bananafish]

Arco's Oreiads

best assassin type unit... if u can't seduce 'em, charm 'em... and if that doesn't work, let the (magic item) bodyguard bash 'em...

if they get found in a province w/o real troops, can single handedly take down a medium PD'd province.

can play havoc w/ an enemy's army when u 'charm' the commander and gives u an action report of the ensuing combat. and if u happen to charm his 'thug' in the army... wreaks havoc on his own army..

[Aleph]

Pound for pound:

Gold - I'll second the "quality recruitable anywhere sacreds." In particular, Mictlan with F9/W9 and Lanka with E9/N9 can be absolutely devastating from year 1 through the endgame (sure, counters will come up later on, but they are still among the best basic troops, and numbers are king in Dom 3). Jotunheim's sacreds are horrifically powerful, but they are capital only and so favor smaller game types.

Magic - Dakini. Great access to air personal enchantments, flying, blood vengeance... a hunter, forger, raider, and SC chassis for a song.

[Shovah32]

Dakini and Mandahas are both nice. Mandahas are tougher but no blood vengance.
In response to bananafish's commend on Oreiads being the best assasins i would have to say that i prefer Succubi/EA Abysian Demonbred Slayers - Succubi are powerful and can also seduce but are expensive. Demonbred Slayers are flying, can lead raiding forces of misbreds and fiends of darkness and have good stats.

[bananafish]

Oreiads are better than succubi's-

Oreiads do not bring the seduced unit back to the capital but the nearest adjacent friendly province. this is huge, since on a decent size map you don't have to spend the next couple of turns flying back into enemy territory.

If the seduction is unsuccessful, a well-equipped Oreiad can sufficiently defend herself (bottle of living water) and in the meantime attempt to charm the enemy commander... and you don't charm the mindless units-

when u start taking over enemy commanders and have them fight there own armies- can cause some serious havoc-

one caveat tho', prophet units cannot be charmed...

[thejeff]

Oreiads are worse than succubi's-


Oreiads do not bring the seduced unit back to the capital but the nearest adjacent friendly province. This means you can only use them on the front lines and not for raiding the enemy's research and casting centers.

[Endoperez]

Shouldn't Succubi have both #seduce and #succubus commands, to give you a choice between the two different forms of seduction? It could most easily be done via #shapechange into a second succubus form with the only difference being in the description and in the type of seduction available.

[bananafish]

most casting centers/research centers i know of usually has high PDs and patrollers...

which causes more disruption? capturing a research mage or capturing an outfitted combat mage?

which unit can be brought back into service quickly?

unless you are playing on a relatively small map; the oreiads are much more flexible and handy...

AND if assassinating the commander is just as good as capturing it, then the oreiad being sent to that research/casting center is just as good; b/c if u don't seduce u enter combat and effectively kill the commander or better the commander you charm takes over the province.

you can easily build and outfit enough oreiads to cause havoc on an enemy's main army than to summon 6-10 succubi's to do the job.

[PvK]

I'd prefer that bless and elephants/mammoth strategies be weaker or slower to build up, rather than making magic better in the early game.

[llamabeast]

Agreed, PvK.

Sometimes the resource system is, I think, not quite what's needed.

For example elephants presumably can't in reality be massed very quickly. You have to go find them or something. But they don't necessarily need much equipment, so they don't have very high resource costs.

In my forthcoming Tomb Kings mod, the idea is that the ancient armies in the pyramids/tombs can only be woken up slowly by the priests. The resource cost should really be pretty much zero (they were buried with their armour and weapons). I've had to give them a fairly high resource cost to stop over-fast recruiting though (perhaps the rituals of awakening need lots of, er, iron).

It would be good if you could only recruit say 2 elephants a turn. But this would be a whole extra game mechanic which might be unpleasantly messy. Just thinking aloud really...

[Saulot]

llamabeast said:
In my forthcoming Tomb Kings mod, the idea is that the ancient armies in the pyramids/tombs can only be woken up slowly by the priests. The resource cost should really be pretty much zero (they were buried with their armour and weapons). I've had to give them a fairly high resource cost to stop over-fast recruiting though (perhaps the rituals of awakening need lots of, er, iron).

Perhaps you could use a summon system instead? Though that scales inaccurately with gold/resources/supplies game options.

llamabeast said:
It would be good if you could only recruit say 2 elephants a turn. But this would be a whole extra game mechanic which might be unpleasantly messy. Just thinking aloud really...

Hm... that would be good. But it really changes the whole game dynamic. Perhaps a game option request? (Though that might be more trouble than it's worth to the devs.) (Also, I realize I'm a little request-happy, and I'm certainly not trying to be pushy or subtly complaining about what is so far available, which is considerable).