If you can handle the upkeep, Tiara’s Priests are excellent. Their healing seems weak but it persists over time for the whole battle and in the longer tougher fights, that can be huge. They also have an answer to resurrecting units in their starting abilities. After an initial round of HoT casting they can dedicate themselves to damage and their white damage is quite strong. So just at hiring, I consider them a decent but expensive unit that is worth getting if you can afford it. They do tend to work best with high Armor frontlines that don’t need a lot of hp healing.
But then, they get really excellent upgrade options (most of the time) - they can get Cleanse, which is massive for the toughest battles. They can get Aonir’s Smile which lets you convert other units to white damage for the battle, which can be very useful. Also at level 15 they can get a +10 White Damage upgrade which is LOL.
I feel like Cleanse is probably easy to miss, but is one of the most all-around useful abilities in the game. Ideally every stack would have at least one unit that has a lot of focus with Cleanse.
If you aren’t doing one of the difficult starts its also worth pointing out that it is trivially easy to unlock Tiara’s Priests before going south into the undead swamp where their spell that gives white damage and 50% black damage resist is incredibly OP. Let alone cleanse which others have espoused the value of. Though endgame you just use a bunch of units with no-counter, 3 attacks and 20+ movement, you can kill the last boss before he moves every time, though this is just a balance issue. But you’ve got to make it to the endgame.
This one is huge because then you don’t have to enchant your units with Holy Weapons every time you fight undead and remove it when you fight Purity units. If you give a unit the glyph (or a weapon in the case of apprentices or heroes) that converts their damage to death damage, then you can easily switch back and forth depending on the battle. Because no unit is resistant to both death and white damage at the same time, you’ll always have what you need to win a battle.
Aren’t purity units resistant to both white and death? IIRC it’s fairly low, not even 50%, but still.
Also, sometimes I’d prefer physical or elemental damage if the target has high willpower but low armor. Though, typically that’s only the case for squishy casters anyway, so it’s not a huge deal.
Hmmm, maybe they are? I need to check. In any case, most units aren’t resistant to both. In my most recent game it didn’t much matter because I also had an alchemist unit that had the -100% physical resist flask skill. My first apprentice also had it. That alone trivialized most fights. Alchemists can get some crazy good flask abilities.
One thing that is great is about this game is illustrated by the last few posts: what we are all talking about here are ways the game allows the player to expand their “tactical toolbox” of options to handle various battles. There are a LOT of ways (many asymmetric) to boost units, adapt to various situations, etc., and many of these will fundamentally change the progress and outcome of battles. Also, some of them are just fun ™. It’s an excellent system for tactical combat and for giving players options to optimize/customize for battles.
Yes yes yes. I am approaching a successful conclusion to my second full playthrough and I can see that I have used only a few of the many available tactical options. In my first, as Artificier, I heavily relied on stacks with one or two huge tanks up front - golems - equipped with vampiric glyphs that regenerated their HP. That worked very well, albeit with a big mana budget burden.
In my second game, as Alchemist, I have each of my heroes / apprentices equipped with a trinket that gives eagle flight (bonus range) and all my stacks are set up with 3 ranged units that I buff this way whilst a couple of tanks block incoming. Also very effective.
I am yet to try, for examples -
Stacks built around boosting a specific damage type
Stacks built around status effects and damage over time
Reincarnating units (my current playthrough Hero can do it, but I am yet to let anything die)
Stacks build around sapping morale / will
. . . and more, many more I am sure
Next game, Necro, maybe start as close as possible to Orc city so I can use their units to build a willpower malusing stack as a complement to undead stacks . . .
Was this before the patch that nerfed (most) vampiric effects to only work on mortal units? That happened halfway through my artificer run and I discovered that I seemed to almost exclusively be fighting demons, fantasticals, and undead. :/
Lol, before and after. Whilst I love that Spellforce allows some incredibly strong combos, I did not mind that the vampire glyphs were reduced in effectiveness. With a pair of golems with 100% lifestyle working on all enemies, battles were reduced to a no to low risk procedure, and I would prefer a bit more challenge. That said . . . time to go up a difficulty level if I can write things like that I guess! :-P
Just wanted to say I played my first game with a War Troll and they are pure slabs of beefy beefiness. It is entirely possible that the words “Sends in the Trolls!” were shouted multiple times during this playthrough. I admit nothing.
Yes I did Orgash fairly early due to doing Lytra’s quest and got an Orc Barracks in the midgame and just recruited the War Trolls. The extension was a bit pricey on the dots but the War Trolls are worth it.
How do you find they compare to paladins (from the human barracks, also pricey on the dots) and keepers (I always ended up parking a lodge in sevenkeeps)?
I’ve never used a Paladin as just looking at the stats I prefer Keepers plus Keepers are way easier to get for me (I tend to focus on making cities happy). On the other hand, Keepers have high upkeep so I tend to only acquire a small number of them.
As for War Troll vs. Keeper, well the War Troll is definitely a more durable tank, and just a stronger combatant overall. I feel like War Trolls easily justify their upkeep.
The thing paladins have is Defy Death, which can be pretty handy. But other than that they’re weaker than Keepers, and also T3 upkeep.
What I like about Keepers is that they tend to fill the heavy cavalry role (duh): if you get the “heavy charge” upgrade (I think it’s usually available at level 5?) then they can really slam their targets pretty hard–it matters less that they only get one attack (when running across the map) because it’s so strong, and then the enemy only gets one retaliate. They can also get Unstoppable and a couple other neat abilities.
They also do very well in autoresolve–when I’d get that late-game tower upgrade that gives free upkeep in the domain, I’d just have a full stack of keepers running around keeping the area around the tower clear.
I got a war troll once through some event, and once or twice through the nature summon spell. I remember thinking it was definitely a solid T3 front line unit, well worth the cost, but never had the chance to really develop one and find specific tactics for it.
I also like to give them as much extra speed as possible. The further they travel with charge, the more damage they do. And if you can get nimble as well, you can flat-out kill enemy casters or archers in the back rank on the first turn. I like to give them a leech glyph to make them even harder to kill.
As Alchemist with Nature, you can craft Potions of Subjugation to enslave broken or routed units, then cast Follower spell on them to remove the Enslaved Status, making them into a full stats unit with no upkeep.
