King's Bounty Unit Analysis Part 8: Neutral Sapients

Now we move on to humans, dragons, plants, D&D refugees, Heroes of Might and Magic refugees, and also a one-eyed rock. I've gone with calling this section 'sapients' because it works reasonably accurately -only Thorn Hunters and Thorn Warriors are ambiguous, with every other unit type being definitely an intelligent creature capable of communicating with humanoid creatures, if a bit awkwardly in some cases.

... okay, Beholders aren't really proven in that regard, but I didn't feel comfortable lumping them in with the animals. The game doesn't classify them as an animal, itself.


Pirate
Level: 2
Hiring Cost: 50
Leadership: 25
Attack/Defense: 8 / 4
Initiative/Speed: 4 / 3
Health: 20
Damage: 3-5 Physical
Resistances: Generic.
Talents: None
Abilities: Gold Hunter (+10% Gold from overworld loot), Marine (+2 Morale on naval battlefields)

Pirates are a surprisingly generic fast melee unit. Ultimately, they're are just kind of forgettable. The fact that they have Marine would be notable if Morale worked like it does in the Heroes of Might and Magic games (Where positive Morale gives a chance of a second turn, while negative Morale gives a chance of missing a turn), but again the AI doesn't interact with Morale and even if it did Morale's stat modifications aren't terribly interesting. Even the crit modification isn't notable, since unit crit chance varies by a fairly wide margin anyway. I do approve of The Legend moving away from the Heroes model of Morale, as it's a really swingy form of randomness, but Morale is sadly a bit underwhelming in The Legend, especially on units with low Attack and Defense, such as Pirates. It's more meaningful on player units, later in the game, but it's still kind of boring even when it matters.

In the end, the main flaw with Pirates is that Sea Dogs largely outclass them. The Legend even ensures you'll get Hordes of Sea Dogs, so it's not like you'll fall back on Pirates by virtue of running out of Sea Dogs, not past the very early game.

As enemies, Pirates are just a particularly uninteresting 3-Speed melee unit. You'll generally have more problems from eg Swordsmen.

Though do note that Pirates -as well as Sea Dogs- are treated as humans for several purposes, such as Wolf Cry. It's... a bit erratic of a list... but it's a nice touch.

Also note that Gold Hunter is... kind of inane. The in-game description might lead one to expect it to provide more gold from combat winnings, but what it actually does is make it so that loot sources on the overworld will provide 10% more gold if you have a Gold Hunter in your army. (By 'loot sources', I mean not only the obvious treasure chests, but also anything else searchable, like tree stumps, skeletons, etc) Specifically overworld examples; chests found in combat aren't boosted, even if the Pirate is the one to open the chest. As such, strictly speaking it's optimal to have a Pirate (Or Sea Dog) in your army at all times when you're wandering the overworld. Notably, it applies even if they're in Reserves, and doesn't care about the size of the stack; you can literally hire 1 Pirate, stick them in Reserves (As soon as you have Reserves, anyway), and ignore them for the rest of the game to get free gold without impinging on your army formation at all.

In The Legend, where you don't start the game with Reserves slots, it can be viewed as a more concrete benefit to buying the Reserves Skill, but in later games you just start with Reserves and technically should hire a single Pirate as soon as you can and just stick them into a Reserves slot. The later games have enough of an early-game gold shortage this is, unfortunately, genuinely probably the correct thing to do in them, at least on higher difficulties; The Legend is sufficiently easygoing of a game that a little extra gold from chests is extremely unlikely to matter at all, even up on Impossible.

I'm not a fan of Gold Hunter's design, though.

Sea Dog

Level: 3

Hiring Cost: 100

Leadership: 40

Attack/Defense: 18 / 10

Initiative/Speed: 5 / 2

Health: 34

Damage: 5-7 Physical

Resistances: Generic.

Talents: Fury Attack (Reload: 1. Simultaneously attacks not only the target but also enemies to the side for 5-7 Physical damage. No friendly fire risk), Running (Charge: 1. +2 Action Points)

Abilities: Gold Hunter (+10% Gold from overworld loot), Marine (+2 Morale on naval battlefields)

Notably, Sea Dogs are actually superior on the Leadership-to-Health ratio, compared to Pirates, (85% to a Pirate's 80%) The only significant advantage Pirates have is greater general mobility -and I frame it as 'general mobility' because Pirates and Sea Dogs will generally make first contact with enemy forces on the same turn, assuming a headlong charge, thanks to Running on Sea Dogs.

It's also worth commentary that Rina in human form raises both their Speeds by 1. Pirates having a Speed advantage gets substantially eroded in its value if you're running with Rina. The Jackboots are an extra layer of issue there, being Boots that provide extra Gold from battles while boosting the Speed of criminals, and there's very few Boots that are good, with most of the competition being a bit specialized. (eg the Pilgrim Boots are primarily worth using if you're using Royal Thorns or Giants, Snake Boots only do anything if you're running a snake, etc) Since the Jackboots are reasonably common -I've had multiple runs get 1 Jackboot near the beginning of the game, followed by a second pair more in the midgame- this is definitely worth noting when comparing Pirates and Sea Dogs. And since both Rina and Mirabella both have a Boots slot, running a Companion that incentivizes using Pirates often means you'll be running the Jackboots anyway, even if you've got some other useful Boots. Or Jackboots*2. At that point Pirates having 1 Speed is a 25% Speed advantage instead of a 50% advantage.

Fury Attack is of course the big reason to use Sea Dogs, and it's worth commentary that the only competition for this kind of strike zone is Cerberi and the Phoenix. It's a very nice strike zone if you're intending to use Sea Dogs as a melee meatshield, such as backing them with Glot's Armor, as enemies will tend to naturally clump into a formation that maximizes its effectiveness if no other unit is around. It's also useful as a pseudo-No Retaliation, as you can eg do damage on a dangerously oversized stack without them retaliating by targeting an adjacent unit that's much weaker, or even will be struck down entirely. Now, it's strictly inferior to Knight's Circle Attack, but Knights don't get Speed-boosting support, demand the dubious choice of dumping Runes into Training 3, and honestly it's somewhat rare for AI units to organize in a way that lets Circle Attack strike 2-3 units without letting Fury Attack do the same.

Sea Dogs are also one of the cooler units to take advantage of Time Back with: Run in to do a Fury Attack (Presumably into a mob), then Time Back, giving you back Running and letting you Fury Attack next turn as well. Sea Dogs are also low enough Level that Resurrecting them is fairly practical -only the Warrior will really struggle to get to Order 2.

As enemies, Sea Dogs aren't so notable. For one thing, the AI is obsessive about using Fury Attack with no regard to whether it'll hit multiple units or not, and since its damage is identical to their base attack and Talents can't crit (yet) this means their actual average damage output is lower than it should be for their numbers. For another, 2 Speed Running is generally easier to stall than a flat 3 Speed, since you can Trap them on the first turn and then hit them with a -1 Speed effect to cripple them, where 3 Speed requires constant Trapping or harsher Speed penalties. (eg Slow 2) If you're like me, they may feel more threatening than they are by virtue of ignoring them while focusing on the real problems leading to them being the thing that survives long enough to be in your army's face, but that's a bit of an illusion.

Unless you're super-reliant on Level 1 Blind or something, I guess.

Barbarian

Level: 2

Hiring Cost: 60

Leadership: 35

Attack/Defense: 10 / 8

Initiative/Speed: 3 / 3

Health: 30

Damage: 4-6 Physical

Resistances: Generic.

Talents: Berserker (Charge: 1. For 3 turns, the Barbarian has doubled Attack, Initiative, and crit chance, halved Defense, and goes out of control, providing immunity to mental effects)

Abilities: Resistant to Cold (Takes 25% less damage from 'cold' damage sources, cannot be Frozen, and snowy battlefields increase Defense by 50%)

Barbarians are a bit of an odd unit. They're a fairly generic melee unit, only really notable for their cold resistance -which can muck up your plans due to Freeze immunity- and the potential immunity to mental effects. Basically, if you're going to stall them without ever letting them into striking distance of your troops, then they're just a generic 3 Speed melee unit of no real note. About their most significant quality is that normally you move from Fireball nuking to Ice Snake nuking, and they're resistant enough to cold damage that Ice Snake does worse damage. (And you can't Freeze them anyway) But if you do let them get into reach, you may find yourself struggling to deal with them, depending on your tools available. (pssst: Blind works on them, even at Level 1)

Like Hyenas using Preparation, AI Barbarians prefer to activate Berserker and then move, if a target is in range. This is... less exploitable than with Preparation, since Berserker lasts 3 turns and doubles their Initiative, meaning it's entirely possible to have everything go before them, bait them into a Trap, and then the next turn rolls around and they promptly attack you before any of your stuff moves.

As player units, Barbarians are... still a really generic melee unit. And, somewhat surprisingly, one with very little support from gear and so on. So they'll frequently be overshadowed by eg Royal Snakes, which are amazing even before Snake Boots or Frog Form Feanora but also benefit from both of those.

Berserker

Level: 2

Hiring Cost: 70

Leadership: 35

Attack/Defense: 20 / 4

Initiative/Speed: 6 / 3

Health: 30

Damage: 4-6 Physical

Resistances: Generic

Talents: Running (Charge: 1. +2 Action Points)

Abilities: Berserk (Unit is never under Hero control, and is immune to mental effects), Resistant to Cold (Takes 25% less damage from 'cold' damage sources, cannot be Frozen, and snowy battlefields increase Defense by 50%)

Berserkers are weird, in that there is absolutely no reason to use Barbarians over them unless you actually care about carefully managing the battlefield, at least in the early game. Which you usually should, but if you were just going to charge your melee in anyway, then Berserkers are Barbarians but throwing in Running and costing only slightly more while also shrugging off various special effects all the time.

In fact, if you compare their base stats, a Berserker's base stats are identical to a Berserking Barbarian's.

Of course, in the long haul things increasingly favor Barbarians. Berserker-the-Talent doesn't simply add 10 Attack and 3 Initiative, it doubles current values, which means as your Attack rises Berserking Barbarians actually pull noticeably ahead of Barbarian's in damage, and if you've got any Initiative-boosting effects the Barbarians will instantly spike to 8 or more Initiative ie going before everything that isn't a boss, high end Gremlin, or itself benefiting from Initiative boosters. Amusingly, Berserkers end up better able to tank hits, since the stat modification point applies to Barbarians halving their Defense too, though overall Defense is a lower priority/less important stat so it still overall favors Barbarians: the harder you hit, the less damage you're going to take from retaliations/attacks made after you've hit the enemy. As such, Attack directly does Defense's job, but overall better.

So in the long haul, the primary point in Berserker's favor is that they've got Running. Which is hampered by AI stupidity... okay, and the fact that they're fully immune to mental effects.

Griffin

Level: 3

Hiring Cost: 260

Leadership: 80

Attack/Defense: 18 / 18

Initiative/Speed: 5 / 5

Health: 90

Damage: 5-10 Physical

Resistances: 10% Physical, 20% Magic

Talents: Separation (Charge: 1. Stack splits in half, shunting half its numbers into a new stack directly adjacent. This new stack cannot use Separation, interrupts the previous stack's turn, and is considered a new unit in most every respect, having its full supply of Action Points and being unaffected by any effects lingering on the spawning stack. This does not end the turn of the 'originator' stack)

Abilities: Flight, Furious (Retaliations never 'run out'), Magic Resistance (+20% Magic resistance)

Separation is a very odd Talent. There's the turn interruption element, there's the fact that this is the only 'summon' in the game where the new stack isn't treated as a summon in any way (This is more important in later games, but still relevant), and it's the only 'summon' in The Legend that doesn't end the summoner's turn. This gives Griffins an exceptional functional range, actually greater than Archdemons, as they can travel 4 tiles, Separate and drop the new stack 1 tile ahead, and then that stack will have 5 Speed, for a total reach of 10! They also 'double-dip' on Speed boosters, so they don't really have competition. As such, Griffins are one of the better units in the game for ensuring you get chests, especially if you're backing them with Initiative boosters. (Onslaught 3 ensures they go ahead of all unboosted enemy unis, for example)

Griffins themselves are surprisingly durable, being one of a handful of units with more HP than Leadership, and then they have a minor Physical resistance and a slightly greater Magic resistance. This combines nicely with Furious to make them into a unit that's startlingly effective at murdering enemy armies by being dogpiled, especially since there's a surprising amount of Griffin support -special mention goes to a Regalia that reduces their Leadership requirements by 30%- to make them even more effective if you want to go that route. (And find the stuff, of course) They're not quite convenient for early-game Resurrection -a Paladin would have to rush for Order Magic 2- which is a bit disappointing, but overall they're a surprisingly effective unit. Their main flaws are that their damage is fairly poor for the Leadership (Guardsmen, at 50 Leadership, have better minimum damage and 80% the maximum damage before counting Smashing Blow, while Dwarves-the-unit are the same Leadership as Griffins, have nearly twice the minimum damage and 20% more maximum damage, as a couple comparisons), and that Split is largely un-synergistic with their 'get into the midst of the enemy and murder them by letting them dogpile you' tactic. It does mean they can single-handedly dogpile ranged units and thus force a melee attack (Which will of course be retaliated against) in situations other fast fliers wouldn't be able to do so, but in most situations you'd rather they just be one big stack Furiousing at enemies.

Probably their best-case scenario is managing to get into the face of multiple ranged units in a situation where those units can't actually get out of melee with them. This... is a somewhat rare situation. The Legend leans heavily toward melee units making up enemy battlegroups, with generally no more than 20% of the forces being ranged units. This is mostly nice, since it makes it possible to keep casualties down with good play, but it does hamper the appeal of Griffins a bit. In practice it tends to lean toward them being frustrating to fight, since the player's army may well be 4 or even 5 ranged stacks.

Speaking of: as enemies, Griffins are erratic/awkwardly placed in the design space. 'Erratic', because Griffins are not terribly coherent in their use of Split. Sometimes they'll Split immediately and then move. Sometimes they'll fly out, and only start Splitting once they reach your forces. Sometimes they'll fly most of the way, Split, and have the new stack fly the rest of the way. Which one they do is a big factor in how problematic they are, and it also depends on your own army makeup/strategy: a Mage who flings Fireballs/Ice Snakes/Fire Rains tends to be happiest when Griffins Split immediately, resulting in the Griffins foolishly allowing the splash damage to get more overall damage, whereas a Warrior's more army-focused setup is usually happier with the Griffins doing the fly partway out and then Split thing, since it lets them start cutting down the first wave and then the second wave arrives.

'Awkwardly placed in the design space' in that Griffins punish a strategy that's already generally poor play on the player's part: the generic melee mob that relies on dogpiling to minimize retaliations. Generally the player should be focusing on No Retaliation melee and/or ranged attackers and/or Talent-based units, and the only part of this Griffins are particularly problematic for is the ranged-heavy mob. I can imagine that some players are nudged away from such melee mobs by Griffins existing, but I suspect most players figure out fairly quickly that such melee mobs are undesirable -not to mention boring. In conjunction with the 'they'd be great against ranged mobs... which the AI rarely uses...' issue, Griffins are in this awkward space of being really amazing at things that good play largely avoids cropping up, from both ends.

It's a bit sad, because I think Griffins are very well-designed in and of themselves, but the larger design space kind of undermines them. They'd be pretty darn good in something more like a competitive strategy game format, or if The Legend had found some way to make it so that 'takes casualties as part of doing its job' wasn't so thoroughly undesirable a feature for player forces, but alas, you're going to have to wait until later games for that.

Beholder

Level: 3

Hiring Cost: 460

Leadership: 140

Attack/Defense: 20 / 24

Initiative/Speed: 4 / 3

Health: 50

Damage: 5-12 Magical

Resistances: Generic.

Talents: None

Abilities: Soaring, Archer (Range: 6), No Melee Penalty, Paralyzing Ray (Ranged attack has a chance to put target to Sleep for one turn. The lower the target's level, the higher the chance of Sleep), Underground (+50% Attack in underground battles), Immune to Mind Spells (Immunity to mental effects)

Hey, remember how Miners don't have Night Sight the way they claim but do get +50% Attack underground? Yeah, here's that as an explicitly listed in-game Ability. So... uh... why doesn't the Miner have this listed instead? It's weird.

Anyway, Beholders are a bit of an odd unit, in that they're really, really good in certain matchups, such as allowing you to keep massive stacks of Devilfish disabled indefinitely while chipping them down, but outside these matchups they're kind of eh. Being a 3-Speed ranged unit with standard range is pretty nice, at least.

I'd actually never noticed they're not listed as Physical/Magical prior to drawing up this post. I'd assumed, given their melee attack animation is a bite, that they were, but... nope. I've even confirmed this in-game -their melee damage is the same against, say, Ghosts, as their ranged damage. (Thanks in part to No Melee Penalty, of course)

Paralyzing Ray's exact chances are: 100% against Level 1 targets, 50% against Level 2 targets, 25% against Level 3 targets, 10% against Level 4 targets, and Level 5 targets are simply immune. (Internally, Level 1 units don't involve behind-the-scenes 'dice rolling' -they just automatically fall asleep) It also never works against units immune to mental effects.

Paralyzing Ray is also odd in that it induces Sleep on the target, but unlike the Sleep induced by every other effect in the game, this Sleep isn't cleared if the target suffers damage. I'm not entirely sure why the game didn't give it its own status effect -I spent a while convinced that Bears waking up when injured was some weird exception, rather than Paralyzing Ray's behavior being the weird exception. A bit of unnecessary confusion there. This applies to Evil Beholders as well, just to be clear.

Ultimately, the main issue with Beholders is actually their lack of support. There's no gear, Skills, Companions, or unit Abilities/Talents that particularly incentivize using Beholders over your other options, which means that as your Hero levels up and finds useful gear Beholders will increasingly pale in comparison to these better-supported units. The fact that Evil Beholders largely outclass them doesn't exactly help, either.

As enemies, Beholders are surprisingly forgettable, unless your army is made heavily of low-level units susceptible to Paralyzing Ray. (Which is unlikely outside of gimmick runs) Their damage is surprisingly poor (Notice that they're nearly twice the Leadership of a Griffin, have only slightly over twice the damage, and I already covered how Griffins have poor damage), they have shockingly awful Health (Only slightly higher than 33% of their Leadership!), and their only special trick to watch out for -Paralyzing Ray- will never crop up if you're using any number of really good units and even a good number of not-very-good units, as immunity to mental effects is actually a fairly common effect to be thrown in on units.

I'm not sure why Beholders (and Evil Beholders) are immune to mental effects. Is it narratively driven, a less powerful variation on how D&D Beholders are more-or-less magic-immune? Is it driven by game design considerations, so that Beholder mirror matches don't have to worry about one getting lucky and ending up Sleep-locking the other? (Which would be incredibly frustrating) Is there some Heroes of Might and Magic game-based reasons I'm not aware of? (I'm primarily familiar with the 3rd game)

Oh well.

Design-wise, Beholders look... okay. I don't think the 'skin' looks that great, to be honest, even though I like the shape. Luckily, the devs apparently agree with me, because Armored Princess promptly reskins both them and Evil Beholders!

Evil Beholder

Level: 4

Hiring Cost: 620

Leadership: 180

Attack/Defense: 22 / 28

Initiative/Speed: 5 / 3

Health: 70

Damage: 8-15 Magical

Resistances: Generic.

Talents: Mind Control (Charge: 1. Mind controls a single unit -enemy or ally- and directs it to attack a specific target, which it will burn its entire movement to approach even if it can't actually make an attack on it. This can only be used on units that haven't moved yet. Invalid against Level 5 units, unit Immune to Mind Spells, and can only control up to 180 Leadership per Evil Beholder)

Abilities: Soaring, Archer (Range: 7), No Melee Penalty, Paralyzing Ray (Ranged attack has a chance to put target to Sleep for one turn. The lower the target's level, the higher the chance of Sleep), Underground (+50% Attack in underground combat), Immune to Mind Spells (Immunity to mental effects)

A bizarre quirk of Mind Control is that the unit taking damage immediately ends the control -even if the damage is Poisoning or Burning. As such, if you've been spraying Fireballs or whatever, make sure to pay attention before using Mind Control, as otherwise you'll just be granting an enemy unit its turn out of order!

A particularly frustrating aspect of how Mind Control works is that it works differently in the enemy's hands than in yours. The description I gave is how it works for the player. The AI can do stuff like Mind Control your Royal Snakes and then direct them to back up and Lunge at one of your units, making it far more problematic in enemy hands than it is useful in yours. And since Evil Beholders can only Mind Control stacks smaller than their own, AI Evil Beholders are a lot more consistent at getting the opportunity to pull off a Mind Control in the first place -you'll usually need to inflict a lot of damage before any of your enemies are valid to Mind Control. And if you could inflict that much damage, the Mind Control will often be more like a minor bonus than anything significantly useful. So Mind Control is actually largely a trait that can make Evil Beholders incredibly frustrating to fight if you're using any units that aren't immune to mental effects, rather than a trait that's particularly relevant in the player's hands. Especially since the game doesn't like giving you Evil Beholders early enough in the game for you to be liable to be going up against 'match' fights as a regular, reasonably challenging sort of fight.

Still, if you were considering using Beholders anyway, Evil Beholders largely outclass them. So basically see my description of Beholders, and just keep in mind Evil Beholders' 5 Initiative puts them ahead of a bunch of units.

Cyclops

Level: 5

Hiring Cost: 5000

Leadership: 1400

Attack/Defense: 40 / 47

Initiative/Speed: 1 / 2

Health: 520

Damage (Ranged): 50-60 Physical

Damage (Melee): 70-80 Physical

Resistances: 30% Physical, 60% Poison, 30% Fire

Talents: Stun (Charge: 1. Does 60-70 Physical damage to an adjacent enemy and Stuns them), Push (Reload: 2. Pushes an adjacent enemy one tile away and does 80-100 Physical damage in the process. The target can't retaliate)

Abilities: Archer, Sniper (Unlimited range), Stone (30%/60%/30% Physical/Poison/Fire resistance. Immunity to mental effects is thrown in. The Cyclops is an inorganic unit, rendering it impossible to heal but immune to Plague etc), No Melee Penalty

Cyclops are our first example of a ranged unit that actually hits harder in melee than at range. No, I'm not talking about the Talents; yeah, they hit harder than its ranged attack, too, but I actually mean the raw melee damage is more than 33% stronger than throwing a rock. And note that Stun is actually weaker than their melee attack.

Stun has the odd quality that it won't provoke a retaliation if the target is successfully Stunned, but will if they aren't. The main point I'm aware of this mattering on is that Level 5 units are immune to Stunning. I'm not sure if anything else is or not. As such, a Cyclops can use Stun to make a free melee attack (While also lowering Initiative and Speed and denying Talent access) unless the target is a Level 5 unit. The game itself doesn't properly convey this: it will normally tell you that the target will get to retaliate when targeting Stun, no acknowledgment that the vast majority of units actually won't get to retaliate. It's one of the more frustrating learning curve issues in a game that's mostly very good about communicating information to the player, as the game doesn't mention anywhere that you can't Stun Level 5 units and, again, the game doesn't actually account for whether the Stun will block a retaliation when predicting retaliation or lack thereof. As such, a player learning the game may well be really confused as to what's going on with Stun on several levels.

Anyway, Cyclops are one of the most unusual units in the game on a number of levels, and one the game likes to use as a kind of mini-boss. You might intuitively expect that you should close to melee against the Cyclops, but not only does it hit harder in melee but its two Talents still (Usually) prevent the target from retaliating! Cyclops also will shrug off a lot of 'easy buttons', thanks to their resistance to all non-Magic damage and immunity to assorted effects. If you've lucked into a Lightning scroll, they're a lot more manageable, but that's really about it. You might think running a Magic damage-heavy army might avail you, but the fact is that Magic damage units tend to be relatively lackluster in damage output, so the Cyclops' sheer bulk and solid fighting ability will usually render this less-than-effective.

As units on your side, they're not nearly so noteworthy, as a ranged unit that's difficult to kill isn't so useful when you're usually in control of the battlefield enough to keep the heat off your ranged units in the first place, while the Cyclops' damage output is actually rather lackluster for its Leadership. An equivalent Leadership in Thorn Hunters would, ignoring Attack and Defense for a second, do 175-350 with its ranged attack, when at optimum range. The Cyclops has a massive Attack advantage, of course, but the absolute most extreme scenario with Attack/Defense is where the Cyclops is at the Attack benefit cap and the Thorn Hunter is somehow at the opposite end, in which case the Cyclops would be doing 150-180 damage while the Thorn Hunters did 58-116. That's unrealistically extreme circumstances, and the Thorn Hunters aren't doing joke damage compared to the Cyclops. More realistically, the Thorn Hunters are just plain doing more damage until they start suffering casualties.

Similarly, the Cyclops being a Sniper isn't that useful to the player. Most battles are a melee-heavy enemy force trying to charge straight at the player's forces, with light support from ranged attackers, and the player eventually gets Tactics, allowing them to substantially sidestep range as a limitation. Unlimited range is useful, but not that useful for the player. Nor is their suite of immunities relevant in most fights; most battles are against foes with no access to Plague, mental effects, etc. Then their awful Initiative means they only contribute their damage late in the turn, when The Legend is a game where early damage output effectively acts as a boost to defense, because dead units don't do damage! Indeed, their immunity to healing makes them less effective than some lower durability unit at absorbing punishment without suffering casualties, a point that's only rarely a real flaw in AI hands.

Of course, part of the problem is that the game doesn't like to give the player access to them early on. If you could expect to get Cyclops pretty much the instant you had the minimum Leadership for 1, they'd be awesome for being able to tank huge amounts of damage without costing the player any gold, while still contributing with ranged firepower et al. In actuality, you're normally going to be waiting a while to get a hold of any of them, and by the time they show up you've got the Leadership for multiple of them, and by extension your battles are big enough they don't really expect to shrug off more than two or three attacks without suffering casualties.

That said, they do have a notable niche of being a ranged attacker that can double as the melee meatshield once enemies close. They have problems in that role, and I'm really quite glad the later games bolster them dramatically (For all that it makes them even more frustrating as enemies!), but it's a reasonably unique niche if you're looking for a reason to justify using a cool unit. They're also notable for being one of a handful of ways to directly manipulate enemy position in The Legend, with Push potentially buying your forces another turn when used on slow units (That you're slowing further) or on units you manage to Shock as well. Or you can shove an uncooperative enemy onto a Trap they bypassed. Or shove them out of a chokepoint, letting you set a Trap to hold up the entire enemy army for another turn. Push has a lot of utility, and for the moment it's nearly unique.

For the moment, Cyclops are most notable for functioning as early game miniboss fights, but they're still a unique unit that isn't displaced by any other unit, so they're better off than, say, Pirates.

A minor aside: Cyclops, like Undead, don't have the 'real' immunity to mental effects Ability. Most mental effects respect Stone, but not at all; you can Fear a Cyclops, for example!

Emerald Green Dragon

Level: 5

Hiring Cost: 9000

Leadership: 1600

Attack/Defense: 43 / 49

Initiative/Speed: 7 / 6

Health: 700

Damage (Standard): 80-110 Physical

Damage (Hates Giants): 160-220

Resistances: 10% Physical, 30% Magic, 50% Fire

Talents: Target Capture (Reload; 2. Targets an enemy 1 empty tile away, dragging them adjacent and doing 130 Physical damage per Emerald Green Dragon in the attacking stack. The target doesn't get to retaliate, and will eg set off traps it's been pulled into), Mana Source (Reload: 3. Inflicts 50-70 Magic damage on all adjacent enemy units, granting the owning Hero Mana based on the damage done)

Abilities: Flight, Hates Giants (Calls the Hates Giants attack against Giants, and -1 Morale if Giants are in the army), Fire Protection (50% Fire resistance), Magic Resistance (30% Magic resistance), Immune to Mind Spells (Immunity to mental effects)

Mana Source generates 1 Mana for every 100 damage done. By the time you can get them yourself, they're generally generating at least 2 Mana per target in reach, which is pretty solid.

Anyway, Emerald Green Dragons are usually going to be the first dragon you see -there's one in the tutorial, and you should always do the tutorial in every King's Bounty game, because you get free stuff out of it, including Runes- and are pretty representative of the general pattern: immunity to mental effects, Level 5, able to potentially kill entire armies singlehandedly by flying around out of reach of enemies and abusing reloading Talents that don't let the enemy retaliate, and a nice array of resistances. Though Emerald Green Dragons are the only one that lacks a breath weapon, instead slamming face-first into their enemies for their basic attack. It's honestly one of my favorite attack animations in the game, some weird combination of goofy and awesome. I've always wondered about the thought process.

Emerald Green Dragons are also one of the better examples of how high Leadership troops tend to be more fragile and less lethal than they first seem. Per head, Emerald Green Dragons handily outclass eg Peasants, but for the Leadership they're a lot less impressive, with less than 50% of their Leadership in Health and their Damage being way worse than, say, a Pirate's, for the Leadership. They've got high Attack and Defense, but this doesn't help against Spells and Rage attacks, and even against units the outer limits of Attack/Defense modification are lower than you might think. Since Defense can only push attackers down to 33% of base damage, the fact that Emerald Green Dragons have less than half the Health per Leadership than Peasants means the overall durability is still not great. They've got their resistances, but their strongest one -Fire- is also their most situational one for unit combat. It's easy to be all impressed and excited by Emerald Green Dragons, but often they'll turn out to be disappointing, especially since the player's rising Attack and Defense increasingly biases them toward units whose base stats are middle-low. This is exacerbated by the fact that the player will likely have fought and stomped a number of oversized Emerald Green Dragon stacks by the time they get access to a source of them, and if you're not actually checking Leadership totals it's easy to end up with a distorted idea of how large you can expect your stacks of them to be.

Emerald Green Dragons are useful, don't get me wrong, but sending them into a straight fight is prone to ending up with them instantly suffering a casualty from a single enemy attack. (In part because you won't get access to Emerald Green Dragons until the elflands... if they showed up earlier, it would be more realistic to Heal off damage) Their utility comes a lot more from their exceptional mobility (Among other points, they can be used to manipulate AI forces, delaying them reaching the rest of your forces), ability to generate Mana unlimitedly, and ability to use their Talents to dish out free damage. In a straight combat, they are... lacking, however.

As enemies Emerald Green Dragons are... well, annoying, but not necessarily threatening. If you're big on Spell nuking and your best offense is Fire based, they can be problematic, and they're mobile enough that a lot of times they can fly out and Target Capture one of your units on the first turn, which can be frustrating given their 7 Initiative with 6 Speed requires specialized measures to go before, but unless you're fighting a group seriously outside your Leadership they're actually not that hard to rapidly tear down. The main frustrating element is that they're immune to a lot of lockdown tricks, which limits your ability to ignore them while you focus on other stacks or the like. Still, the net result will often be merely that you take some difficult-to-avoid casualties, not that you lose the battle or even suffer severe losses.

Unless, of course, you're trying to fight a battlegroup significantly outside your expected range. Then Emerald Green Dragons are going to arrive and murder your army before you have much opportunity to do anything. Generic 2 Speed melee can be stalled substantially and worn down before they ever get a chance to do damage, allowing the player to take on massively outsized stacks. Lower Level stacks can be Blinded, or Feared, even if they're ranged attackers, again opening the way to winning a fight you're not 'supposed' to win. Emerald Green Dragons are too high Level, have mental immunities, too much Speed, and flight capacity, making it borderline impossible to stall them long enough to wear them down to a reasonable level. This is true of all the dragons, too, I just didn't comment on it with Bone Dragons because they're usually mixed in with other Undead and so it's often possible to simply focus on the Bone Dragons and then commence the usual stall tactics on the other forces. Emerald Green Dragons are far more likely to be mixed in with other dragons or some other unit types that render it unrealistic to fight massively oversized battlegroups.

And since dragons primarily show up in the late game, where stacks so large the player can never match their size are increasingly normal, this means most of the time you encounter Emerald Green Dragons they actually will be a pretty serious problem.

It makes it all the more stark how underwhelming in the player's hands they are.

Red Dragon

Level: 5

Hiring Cost: 12000

Leadership: 2000

Attack/Defense: 53 / 53

Initiative/Speed: 6 / 7

Health: 770

Damage: 100-120 Fire

Resistances: 10% Physical, 30% Magic, 80% Fire

Talents: Fire Flow (Reload: 2. 100-140 Fire damage to all targets in a straight line that extends infinitely. 50% chance to Burn each target)

Abilities: Flight, Dragon Breath (Melee attack also hits 1 tile beyond the target. This includes retaliations), Immune to Fire (80% Fire resistance and cannot be Burned), Magic Resistance (30% Magic resistance), Immune to Mind Spells (Immunity to mental effects)

By far the most notable point about Fire Flow is that the AI has actual coding to use it intelligently. Most similarly physics-y Talents, the AI will either notice you're lined up with their current position and use it without moving, or fail to use it at all. Red Dragons will actually fly out to somewhere to Fire Flow your forces, and are pretty reliable about catching multiple units if you make that even slightly possible for them to do. As such, Red Dragons are basically impossible to prevent from doing at least some damage unless you're in a position to wipe out the stack before it moves. Their resistances make this fairly impractical to achieve via Spells (Poison Skull is the only Poison damage Spell, and its damage is wildly swingy and not that great even on a high roll), and Rage just doesn't ever reach a scale that has it competitive in the late game, so it comes down to your units. And the units that can outspeed Red Dragons mostly aren't very good at dishing out lots of damage to Red Dragons...

Ultimately, Red Dragons tend to fail to stick in the mind because Black Dragons are, in most respects, the same thing but better, with the only major caveat being that Fire Flow actually enhances the Red Dragon's strike distance where Power of Fire actually has a slightly worse strike zone than a regular attack. (Because you can't Power of Fire units at the very edge of your range, but you can regular attack them -not even counting Dragon Breath here, which adds another tile of potential reach) Nonetheless, Red Dragons can be plenty problematic for many of the same reasons as Emerald Green Dragons, but more so, because they have even better Fire resistance, better reach, and their primary attack being Fire damage is basically an advantage outright, as Fire resistance is rare and in fact dragons themselves make up the majority of the units where Fire is their strongest resistance. (That is: Cyclops resist Fire, but less than they resist Poison and just as much as Physical, so Fire is actually one of the better attack tools against them. Horsemen and Knights both resist Fire, but they resist Physical just as much, so Emerald Green Dragons aren't better off than Red Dragons in that matchup)

As player units, Red Dragons are another unit hampered by the fact that you tend to not get them until the late game. They're actually a pretty cool, useful unit, easier to kite enemies with than an Emerald Green Dragon (Fire Flow doesn't require Wait shenanigans to avoid taking damage) and able to use Dragon Breath to contribute against larger stacks by attacking adjacent weaker stacks, but... the point at which the game is willing to give them to you is also the point where a lot of your foes are Demons or dragons, and so heavily Fire resistant. They're further hampered by the fact that you'll get Black Dragons at about the same time, and indeed in a given run you might actually find yourself with Black Dragon access first, and Black Dragons tend to just outperform them. You can use the two together, of course, but they're not terribly synergistic, so... that doesn't help Red Dragons much.

They're better off in later games, but... not a lot, not until Dark Side. It's a bit odd, honestly.

Black Dragon

Level: 5

Hiring Cost: 15000

Leadership: 2500

Attack/Defense: 56 / 56

Initiative/Speed: 7 / 8

Health: 800

Damage: 110-130 Fire

Resistances: 15% Physical, 80% Magic, 80% Fire

Talents: Power of Fire (Reload: 2. The Black Dragon flies to a target destination, inflicting 110-140 Fire damage to all units it flies over along the way. This is based on their current Action Points; if the Black Dragon is faster than usual, it can cover more ground, if it's slower than usual, it can't cover as much ground)

Abilities: Flight, Dragon Breath (Melee attack also hits 1 tile beyond the target. This includes retaliations), Immune to Fire (80% Fire resistance and cannot be Burned), Magic Immunity (80% Magic resistance and most Spells can't affect the unit), Immune to Mind Spells (Immunity to mental effects), Dragon Power (-1 Initiative to all enemy units below Level 5)

Black Dragons hearken back to the original King's Bounty, where Dragons were a single unit type that was completely immune to magic, which was both a huge advantage and also actually a disadvantage. By a similar token, Black Dragons are (mostly) immune to Spells, which is tremendously useful and yet also creates big problems for them.

Unfortunately, in The Legend Black Dragons are far, far more frustrating as enemies than useful as allies. Spell immunity is only an advantage when facing a Hero, doing a Keeper fight, or when using an effect with friendly fire -and the ultimate example of the last, Armageddon, ignores Spell immunity. So no, you're not going to take a Black Dragon stack alone into a Keeper fight and just Armageddon everything out of existence with no casualties. Their Fire resistance isn't any help either, as Armageddon does Astral damage, which nothing in The Legend resists. They're definitely one of the best units for Keeper fights -for one thing, their massive Magic resistance means they can shrug off Evil Gremlin retaliations, and Gremlins can't touch them otherwise due to their Spell immunity- but you're probably mostly done with Keeper fights by the time you've got access to them. (Well, done with the actually challenging ones, anyway: you may still be Suppressing Jackboots in the endgame, but you don't need Black Dragons to trivialize those)

Meanwhile, as enemies they can't be nuked down unless you're willing to take severe casualties because you're using Armageddon, you can't do anything to slow them down or weaken them (Except, surprisingly, hit them with Plague) bar a few Talent-based examples (They're not protected against Freeze, for example), and the only regular damage type they don't resist at all is Poison, which is somewhat difficult to properly exploit with units. Sleem's Poison Spit is utterly inadequate by the time Black Dragons are showing up, and... well, Cloud of Poison actually has the potential to do insane damage to them, but it's difficult to arrange to use it properly against so mobile a unit.

The fact that they're so fast and Fly of course further restricts your ability to deal with them. Traps actually ignore Spell immunity, but you have to be really good at predicting where they're going to choose to land to actually take advantage thanks to the high Speed and Flight. Thanks to Dragon Breath you can't even protect a key unit by surrounding it, as they'll just choose to attack through your other units. Being Level 5 closes off some of the few tools their other protections don't cover (eg Snakes and Cyclops can't Stun them), and even Dragon Power contributes to them being a pain, defacto meaning that in many matchups they basically have 1 more Initiative than their already unbeaten 7. Only Archdemons will go before them without support, and even units that can beat them with support need more than the numbers would imply; Dark Commander 2's +1 to Undead Initiative brings Necromancers and Ancient Vampire Bats to ahead of Black Dragons... or it would, if it weren't for Dragon Power beating them back down to 7 Initiative, where they lose turn order on Speed.

Thankfully, The Legend reserves the vast majority of its Black Dragon fights for entirely optional areas. You'll need to fight some of them throughout the game, but if you really just hate fighting them, you can mostly skip the process.

It's just really disappointing when you realize they're not very good in your hands, though, when comparing against how amazing of enemies they make.

Thorn Warrior

Level: 1

Hiring Cost: 10

Leadership: 8

Attack/Defense: 4 / 3

Initiative/Speed: 4 / 3

Health: 8

Damage: 1-3 Physical

Resistances: 50% Poison, -100% Fire

Talents: Sowing (Charge: 1. Spawns a Thorn Warrior or Hunter from an adjacent corpse, destroying the corpse, whose Leadership is 2-4 per Thorn in the spawning stack)

Abilities: Plant (+100% vulnerability to Fire, +50% resistance to Poison, immunity to mental effects, assorted secondary implications), Eyeless (Immunity to Blind, Precision, and Shroud. Also can detect invisible creatures)

I've never seen Eyeless providing awareness of invisible creatures in action, and have no idea how it works, or if it works. The Legend has enough weird bugs, odd behavior, and factually incorrect tooltips I wouldn't be surprised at all if it doesn't work that way. It would also be really niche, since Invisibility occurs exclusively as a Spell, one which is fairly dubious if you're not using it to break the game. I'm not sure any enemy Hero even has Invisibility in their Spell list, either.

And note that in the case of Thorn Warriors, only the Blind immunity and the ability to see Invisible units actually apply.

Note that Thorn Warriors -and also Thorn Hunters- can be acquired via Thorn Sprouts. Also note that it's of questionable utility. While the exact number of Thorns a Sprout generates is random, I've never seen a given Sprout generate more than 9 at once. Thorn Sprouts are 130 Gold. Thorn Hunters and Warriors are 10 Gold a head. A Thorn Sprout thus needs to generate 13 Thorns to break even. I like to use Thorn Sprouts early in the game, purely because the game throws tons of them at you for free, but since Trade 3 exists I'm arguably wasting money -it would be more efficient to get Trade 3, sell the Sprouts, and buy the Thorns directly. You certainly shouldn't be buying the Sprouts when they're offered in stores, as that's just a clear waste of money.

I can't really recommend placing Thorn Warriors in your army directly. Melee glass cannons that lack No Retaliation or Talents for approximating that effect are generally dubious choices for the player, but in the case of Thorn Warriors the big issue is that they can be generated by Thorn Hunters and Royal Thorns in an actually disposable form. Generated Thorn Warriors are incredibly useful, but ones taking up a slot in your army are generally only worth considering if you've lucked into the Crown of Black Thorns. (Which doubles Thorn damage output, and for a long time that can lead to Thorn Warriors one shotting entire enemy stacks on a high roll/crit) And are actually wearing it, obviously.

As enemies, Thorn Warriors are primarily notable for making the early game easier, especially for Mages, who get to drop Fireballs on them for massive damage. They do hit hard if they reach your forces, but in the early game you're usually going to be fighting Match or weaker forces, thanks to the rapid leveling, comparatively high effectiveness of Banners, and abundance of enemies to choose from, so it's generally pretty easy to inflict severe damage before they close. They'll also get distracted by corpses if you finish off other units, spending time Sowing instead of charging, and this usually doesn't help the AI forces.

Later in the game, Thorn Warrior stacks tend to remain non-notable... unless you've gotten comfy with abusing Blind to let you take on overlarge battlegroups and totally forgotten that Thorn Warriors are, in fact, immune to Blind. Then they can take a manageable challenge and turn it into 'oh god, they just killed one of my stacks in one hit! I can't stop them!' Especially since being Plants makes them immune to mental effects. They're actually weirdly difficult to stop with special effects for a Level 1 unit, it's just easily overlooked because they're usually so easy to kill you don't need any such shenanigans.

Thorn Hunter

Level: 1

Hiring Cost: 10

Leadership: 8

Attack/Defense: 4 / 1

Initiative/Speed: 2 / 3

Health: 5

Damage: 1-2 Physical

Resistances: 50% Poison, -100% Fire

Talents: Sowing (Charge: 1. Spawns a Thorn Warrior or Hunter from an adjacent corpse, destroying the corpse, whose Leadership is 2-4 per Thorn in the spawning stack)

Abilities: Archer (Range: 4), Plant (+100% vulnerability to Fire, +50% resistance to Poison, immunity to mental effects, assorted secondary implications), Eyeless (Immunity to Blind, Precision, and Shroud. Also can detect invisible creatures), No Melee Penalty

Thorn Hunters are painfully short-ranged, but fairly mobile for a ranged attacker. I particularly appreciate how they help tutorial Heroes of Might and Magic players on the fact that The Legend allows units to move about and performed ranged attacks etc; in the Heroes of Might and Magic games, a unit's turn occurs in one single click, and anything that can't be expressed in one click is just invalid. So melee units can charge up and attack, but ranged units can't walk back from the enemy and then fire. Since a lot of people who were first interested in The Legend were probably interested in no small part in another Heroes of Might and Magic sort of game, having an implicit tutorial on this mechanical difference is much appreciated, and it happens so smoothly most players probably never had it cross their mind the game was teaching them anything at all: you just get into one of your early fights, Thorn Hunters walk toward you, they fire, and tada, you've learned something important.

Sowing is by far the Thorn Hunter's most notable trick; they're a ranged attacker that can make their own meatshield! Early in the game, it's pretty normal to be able to wipe out an entire stack in a turn or two without necessarily being able to trivialize the entire battlegroup, so the need for a corpse isn't actually that notable a limitation. Around the point where the need for a corpse is becoming genuinely constrictive, the game starts giving the player access to Royal Thorns, and you really should be running Royal Thorns over Thorn Hunters, just for the fact that they can generate Thorns for free, unlimitedly, rendering burning troop slots on such hideously wasteful. Royal Thorn Germination's high roll produces just under 80% of the Royal Thorn's Leadership. Why burn a slot on 100% Thorn Hunter Leadership when you could have 100% Royal Thorn Leadership and potentially also 80% Thorn Hunter Leadership, for free? And that's if Royal Thorns get only one opportunity to use Germination.

As enemies, Thorn Hunters are primarily notable for being the main early game enemy that can actually attack at a distance. In AI hands Sowing is usually just distracting the enemy from doing something actually impactful, and the AI is not prone to using Wait, which means even if the player is using a melee-centric force what'll often happen is the Thorn Hunters roll up and fire a shot for half damage on the first turn (Since they have such poor range), even if they could potentially have gotten a full damage shot. 

Royal Thorn

Level: 4

Hiring Cost: 600

Leadership: 380

Attack/Defense: 30 / 30

Initiative/Speed: 2 / 1

Health: 280

Damage Ranged): 20-30 Physical

Damage (Melee): 30-40 Physical

Resistances: 50% Poison, -100% Fire

Talents: Germination (Reload: 3. Spawns a Thorn Warrior or Hunter in an adjacent tile, type randomly chosen, whose Leadership is 150-300 per Royal Thorn in the spawning stack)

Abilities: Archer (Range: 6), Plant (+100% vulnerability to Fire, +50% resistance to Poison, immunity to mental effects, assorted secondary implications), Eyeless (Immunity to Blind, Precision, and Shroud. Also can detect invisible creatures)

Yes, Royal Thorns have the standard range while being basically a turret. They're really here to generate Thorns. Shooting things is just something they do while waiting for Germination to reload.

Your first experience with a Royal Thorn has good odds of being basically a miniboss fight (Kind of like the Demons Zerock will throw you against), if you choose to deal with the Thorn quest with violence. This one early Royal Thorn is a nifty encounter that helps introduce the player to units that can spawn other units, but in a way that's unlikely to be overwhelming. The Mage can rip off a good chunk of the Royal Thorn's health in the first turn with a Fireball, and the worse-case scenario for the Warrior and Paladin is learning a lesson in how the battle estimates aren't an absolute rule of thumb. (But really, you'll probably win the fight, perhaps having started out freaking out a bit)

Alas, the hype you might experience at using such a cool unit will take a long time to pay off. You can potentially get a source as early as the Isles of Freedom, but it's entirely possible you won't see any until you reach the elflands. Unlike, say, a bunch of the Elf units, they absolutely remain relevant -even if they do tend to be a bit dubious when fighting dragons- but it's a pretty darn long time to wait, and by that point you've probably got an army you're reasonably happy with and trying to squeeze in Royal Thorns will be a bit of a pain.

Still, Royal Thorns are a pretty darn decent unit just for being able to generate fast, disposable meatshields that do decent damage. This is particularly true if you've lucked into the Crown of Black Thorns, but the damage isn't even necessary. Critically, the Royal Thorn takes Sowing on Thorn Warriors and Thorn Hunters and makes it a lot less of a gimmick: generate a disposable meatshield, have it die, generate a new disposable meatshield which uses Sowing on the old one. Tada! Now Sowing doesn't require you actually finish off an enemy stack or lose a 'real' stack, making it far more relevant in the tougher fights. This is an incredible tool for stalling enemies, and a Royal Thorn can, almost by itself, grant you the ability to take on shockingly big groups of generic melee units. (ie ones that lack ranged Talents and don't have special mobility) This is partially dependent on map type, but conveniently enough the further you get into the game the more battlefields trend toward being 'complex' battlefields with chokepoints and the like instead of the flat, empty battlefields so common at the beginning of the game.

They're a bit fragile, and are a dubious idea in Keeper fights (Even though their generated Thorns can distract Evil Gremlins, who are very fond of Dooming and then Sheeping them) thanks to being weak to Fireball and horribly late in the turn order and also Keeper battlefields are often designed so you can't really stall the entire enemy army at one specific part of the map, and overall it's really, really nice that Armored Princess immediately improves them, but they're serviceable units with a cool dynamic and no real competition for the moment: nothing else in the game can repeatedly summon minions, and only Demons-the-unit and in certain situations Necromancers can summon summons that can summon more summons.

As enemies later in the game, Royal Thorns are... er... well, for a Mage they tend to be a joke. Dropping Fireballs on them will often incidentally destroy their summoned Thorns, making them burning a turn on Germination actually a good thing from the Mage's perspective, since it means they're not taking potshots at your army ie they're not costing you Gold, and honestly even Warriors and Paladins don't tend to be impressed. I've already covered how the AI using Sowing often is better from the player's perspective than the units attacking, and this often hampers AI Royal Thorns, as often they'll burn their turn on summoning, and then their summons will waste their own turn on summoning, which the player is able to trivialize with splash damage (eg Imps, Red/Black Dragons) or just ignore them because the AI has no concept of chokepoints and doesn't build its armies to take advantage of chokepoints anyway (As covered before, AI forces are only very rarely ranged-heavy) and their Leadership is so low it's not like they're a threat on the basis of damage. It's a good thing most players will be introduced to Royal Thorns as an early miniboss, because otherwise they might encounter them in the late game, stomp them easily, and come away with the mistaken impression they're a terrible unit and ignore them.

Which, mind can still happen to players who take the peaceful route for the Quest...

Still, I think Royal Thorns are one of the cooler units in The Legend overall, which is particularly nice since they're original to The Legend, and on various levels are exactly the kind of concept the classic Heroes of Might and Magic series honestly basically couldn't entertain at all due to their engine mechanics. The Thorn family as a whole makes for a nice introduction to how The Legend isn't just fanboying the Heroes of Might and Magic games, helping players who are familiar with that series to see the changes not as 'they changed it now it sucks' but as 'they changed it to pave the way for cool ideas and clever "patches" to old, problematic ideas: I look forward to more'. So it's really nice that Thorns are focused on fairly heavily in the early game -and yet if you want you can focus elsewhere. The game doesn't force you on the topic, so if you're put off by these newfangled Original Unit Do Not Steal plant monsters, you can just revel in the glory of a Heroes-esque game by focusing on fighting the bandits and so on.

It's all really well-done stuff.

It's also worth commentary that Royal Thorns being a Plant and thus barred from Resurrection is, to my mind, a nice touch in their case. It helps put limiters on how abusable their unit spawning is, in addition to being flavorful. It's always nice to see flavor and game design intersect so well.

A weirder point is that Royal Thorns secretly have the very bizarre quality of actually hitting harder in melee than at range, with a base damage of 30-40; that's 1/3rd to 1/2 stronger than their ranged attack! There's enough problems with trying to use them as melee combatants you're not liable to lean on this, and when fighting them it's not going to stop you from using summons to distract them and whatnot, but it can sometimes be useful to know about it; say you mass-Hasted your army and notice your Royal Thorn's ranged damage on a close enemy is high enough to potentially wipe out the stack, but isn't guaranteed. Since their melee low roll is equal to their ranged high roll, in such a case the melee attack will assure you wipe the stack, which can be really important if that stack has Talents that don't care about stack size.

I'm not sure why they didn't already have No Melee Penalty listed. The series defaults to listing No Melee Penalty whenever a ranged unit's melee attack is at least as strong as its ranged attack. Why not in this case? At least later entries list them with No Melee Penalty, even if that's still misleading.

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Neutral as a whole is, unfortunately, a bit of a damper on the racial Morale mechanics. In the Heroes of Might and Magic games, factional Morale imposes a penalty for every faction your army includes, which discourages mixing armies unless you've got Morale boosters or some other mechanic is in play. (eg the Elemental Conflux has many units that ignore Morale, all the Undead units ignore Morale, and some neutral units ignore Morale, so you can mix Mummies into an Undead army without a problem and the like) This discourages simply cherrypicking the 'best' units from a wide variety of factions, especially since the highest general Morale bonus you can achieve is +4 (+3 from the Leadership Skill and +1 from including Angels/Archangels in your army), which can only keep you out of negative Morale out to a limit of 5 different factions. (And if any of them is Undead, then you're limited to 4 factions) In a game where your army size is 7 units. So yeah, you can't cherry-pick all the Level 7 units.

By contrast, in The Legend racial Morale is restricted to Elves, Dwarves, and Orcs getting mono-racial bonuses and the assorted Morale penalties for different races being using alongside each other. Even aside the fact that most of these penalties can be removed by Tolerance (Only the Elf/Dwarf tension is impossible to erase, which is a fairly minor point since only Cannoneers and Alchemists are all that useful of Dwarf units and they don't have any obvious synergy with any Elven units anyway), this means that if you're mixing races at all, there's no reason to not go whole hog on cherrypicking. It doesn't help that all three races with mono-racial Morale bonuses are only given to the player in full relatively late in the plot. The overall result is that the player tends to just mix in really good Neutral units instead of being bothered by the racial mechanic.

To be fair, most of the Neutral units are pretty eh, but I can still point to, for instance, Snakes and especially Royal Snakes largely pushing aside Robbers and Marauders. Why field these Human units that penalize other Human units and will get upset if you include a lucky early-game Skeleton Archer find if you can field Royal Snakes instead with no possibility of a Morale penalty? And this kind of thing crops up all over the place: if you want a Magic damage ranged attacker for your Demon army, that doesn't mean you go 'but Archmages and Priests and Inquisitors and Druids dislike Demons, oh no', it means you field Evil Beholders. If you want a lightning-fast melee fighter, you've got a bevy of Neutral options. If you want a summoner for disposable meatshields, the Thorn family has you covered. There's very few situations where you'll find yourself going 'I want X and Y, but racial tension makes that problematic to have together'.

Later King's Bounty games make the racial tension more substantial, with more cases of racial tension than just 'Undead and Demons bother people oh and Elves and Dwarves dislike each other' and overall tending to increase the penalties involved, but it doesn't really fix the core problem that the racial Morale mechanics are pretty ignorable, certainly not the part where Neutral is a major contributor to the problem. There's some stabs at ideas possibly intended to offset that -Lizardmen getting along poorly with Dragons, for example- and to their credit the later games add very few new Neutral units, so they're mostly not making the Neutral part of the problem worse.

Still, Neutral's existence and sheer size helps highlight the flaws with the attempts at racial tension. Note that in Heroes of Might and Magic 3's base game, there's only 6 Neutral units, 4 of which are just combat summons rather than 'proper' units. That's fewer than any one town type, and 2 of them are actually semi-attached to one of the town types anyway! The expansions have 15 Neutral units instead, which is just over 2 town types, but that's still a small number compared to 9 factions with 7 unit types apiece, and several of these new Neutral units are really meant to be a part of specific campaign scenarios, not designed for general play: only 9-ish are designed for general map design.

By contrast, in The Legend Neutral is 29 units, Dwarves are 5 units, Demons are 6 units, Orcs are 7 units, Elves are 11-and-a-half units (Werewolf Elves), Humans are 11 units, and Undead are 12-and-two-halves units. (The Vampire and Ancient Vampire changing form) That's a total of around 52 non-Neutral units. So Neutral makes up more than a third of all unit types in the game!

As such, even if non-Neutrals basically all hated all non-Neutrals, it would still be a surprisingly ignorable mechanic, even before you get into the fact that minor penalties to Attack, Defense, and crit chance are just not as big a deal as the Heroes' series 'chance to miss a turn entirely'. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of the way RNG is used for Morale in the Heroes' games, but the actual benefits/penalties are so huge it's obviously worth pursuing getting at least +1 Morale and negative Morale should always be avoided if at all possible. Whereas in The Legend Morale can be glossed over a fair amount, especially on units who you don't expect to be getting attacked much and who don't contribute primarily through attacking or through damaging Talents. (eg summoners, Inquisitors tossing out Holy Anger and Resurrection more than fighting, etc)

This is one of my few pain-points with the King's Bounty series' design; that racial tension technically exists as a mechanic, but largely doesn't matter, and no game really works on addressing this in a substantive way.

I like a lot of Neutral units individually, but I'm not so much a fan of Neutral as a holistic concept, in other words.

Next time, we cover an extra: Gremlins.