King's Bounty Unit Analysis Extra: Turn Order Tiers and Damage Types

To provide a convenient reference point, I've collated all (regular) units' Initiative and Speed tiers together into this post, in no small part because it makes it easier to see how important a given Initiative shift is. How important is getting Dark Commander 3, for example?

Since Initiative has priority over everything else, this is structured to make Initiative the main category, and then exact Speed is a sub-category. Realistically, I ought to do something like order the lists by Level since that factors in too, but that's a lot of manual effort to cover a somewhat more niche consideration.

I'm not going to be adding much color commentary to this -most of the interesting elements are fairly self-evident.

Initiative: 7
Speed 9: Archdemons

Speed 8: Black Dragons

Speed 7: Emerald Green Dragons

Speed 5: Ancient Vampires (Bat form)

Speed 2: Necromancers

Initiative: 6
Speed 7: Bone Dragons, Red Dragons

Speed 5: Horsemen, Lake Fairies

Speed 4: Cursed Ghosts, Vampires (Bat form), Lake Dragonflies

Speed 3: Furious Goblins, Veteran Orcs, Scoffer Imps, Fire Spiders, Royal Snakes, Devilfish, Berserkers

Speed 2: Ancient Vampires (Human form), Cannoneers, Hunters, Demoness

Initiative: 5
Speed 5: Griffins

Speed 4: Sprites, Werewolf Elves (Wolf form), Black Unicorns, Cerberi, Imps

Speed 3: Shaman, Fire Dragonflies, Evil Beholders

Speed 2: Vampires (Human form), Marauders, Inquisitors, Archmages, Alchemists, Werewolf Elves (Elf form), Elves, Snakes, Sea Dogs

Speed 1: Giants

Initiative: 4
Speed 5: Unicorns

Speed 4: Ghosts

Speed 3: Undead Spiders, Guardsmen, Dryads, Demons, Venomous Spiders, Hyenas, Pirates, Beholders, Thorn Warriors

Speed 2: Skeleton Archers, Robbers, Bowmen, Priests, Dwarves, Orcs, Goblins, Catapults, Polar Bears, Swamp Snakes

Initiative: 3
Speed 3: Swordsmen, Wolves, Barbarians

Speed 2: Skeletons, Black Knights, Peasants, Knights, Miners, Ogres, Ancient Bears

Initiative: 2
Speed 3: Cave Spiders, Thorn Hunters

Speed 2: Zombies, Treants, Druids, Bears

Initiative: 1
Speed 2: Decaying Zombies, Cyclops

Speed 1: Ancient Treants, Royal Thorns

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Additionally, here's units by primary damage type contribution:

Physical (65)

Magic (13)




Poison (7)

Fire (3)


Notice that there's only three units in the entire game with sustained Fire damage. Five if you count Imps and Scoffer Imps, which is not an unreasonable position given the player actually does often end battles in 2-4 turns, making their 2 Fireball charges less limited than you might think, but I'm still excluding them from this list since in longer battles they aren't sustained Fire damage.