Armored Princess Unit Analysis Part 6: Undead


To save some space, here's what the Undead Ability does:

50% Poison resistance. +50% to Attack at night and underground. +1 Morale in 'cemetery' battlefields. Immunity to Mind spells, among other immunities. +2 Morale from Plague. (This is functionally +1, since it still imposes a -1 penalty for being a negative effect)

Now Undead are made happy by Plague, making mono-Undead backed by a Necromancer instantly infecting everyone even better of a strategy. Neat. Otherwise the Undead Ability is unchanged. Though of course now AI Undead actually get Morale from their haunted shipwrecks and whatnot.

Racial relationships are unchanged entirely: the Undead don't care.


Zombie
Level: 2
Hiring Cost: 60
Leadership: 30
Attack/Defense: 9 / 13
Initiative/Speed: 2 / 2
Health: 36
Damage: 3-4 Physical
Resistances: 50% Poison, -10% Fire
Talents: Running (Charge: 1. +2 Action Points), Pass (Charge: 1. Grants a single ally the Zombie's remaining Action Points. If the target has already ended its turn, it gets a new turn)
Abilities: Undead

+6 Health, -1 to max damage, and they've gained Pass. Overall a big boost in relevance and distinctiveness, even if the damage loss hurts a bit. Worth noting is that this adds another unit to the previously-minuscule list of units whose Health is actually greater than their Leadership, making them one of the toughest units to burn down with pure Spell damage. They've also stolen the Decaying Zombie's old graphic.

The usual use of Pass is to Run, walk three steps forward, and then Pass to give a ranged or Talent-oriented unit another turn. Or Pass to another melee unit that's already in reach of an enemy, that works too. This both describes the typical best way to use it as a player, and also what the AI generally does with Pass. Notably, Pass makes the Zombie's awful Initiative actually useful, since it's less of a nuisance to pass out second turns if you're going after the beneficiary anyway. You can also just save Pass for later in a battle, since its effectiveness is unrelated to the stack's size, meaning even if the Zombie stack is missing most of its numbers it can contribute significantly by Passing to a larger stack, but dishing out damage as soon as you can is almost always the smarter thing to do.

In addition to the Paladin's Resurrection-the-Skill, another point making Zombies more viable as a pure melee meatshield is the introduction of the Eviln Spell. It's honestly an overly-expensive, not-very-effective Spell, but it provides percentile resurrections to Undead so units like the Zombie that inevitably take casualties can actually avoid draining your Gold with the help of Eviln. This is particularly worth noting for the Warrior: the Mage is too busy burning their Mana on nuke Spells, while the Paladin would really rather just lean on Resurrection-the-Skill to handle casualties, but the Warrior often ends up with more Mana than she really knows what to do with and her unique Skills not only don't prevent casualties but her Orcs on the March-added Skill is all about letting your humanoid troops get dogpiled and yet counterattack every time, which Zombies are one of the more decent humanoid troops for such a plan even before Eviln-derived resurrections come into play.


Decaying Zombie
Level: 2
Hiring Cost: 80
Leadership: 40
Attack/Defense: 13 / 15
Initiative/Speed: 1 / 2
Health: 48
Damage: 5-6 Physical
Resistances: 50% Poison, -10% Fire
Talents: Running (Charge: 1. +2 Action Points), Pass (Charge: 1. Grants a single ally the Decaying Zombie's remaining Action Points. If the target has already ended its turn, it gets a new turn)
Abilities: Undead, Decay (When the entire stack is destroyed, all adjacent units are infected with Plague)

-1 to max Damage, +8 to Health, and they've picked up Pass. Also, they've picked up a nice new graphic, now that Zombies have stolen their old nice graphic. I'm perfectly happy with this shift overall, even if it makes it a bit confusing to go between the games.

Same basic description as with Zombies, just Decaying Zombies are overall higher in quality. Decay is still borderline-useless from the player's perspective as far as stacks-you-brought-into-battle goes, even if it's marginally helped by the Paladin's Resurrection Skill, as it's perfectly able to bring entire stacks back from the dead. Not a lot else to comment.


Undead Spider
Level: 1
Hiring Cost: 15
Leadership: 13
Attack/Defense: 4 / 2
Initiative/Speed: 6 / 3
Health: 13
Damage: 2-3 Poison
Resistances: 50% Poison, -10% Fire
Talents: None
Abilities: Undead, Cursed (50% chance to Curse enemies in melee)

+2 Initiative and they technically lost Night Sight. Since it didn't do anything in The Legend anyway, this is just more accurate, not a nerf.

6 Initiative isn't even as high as you might think in Armored Princess, though, so... they're still very underwhelming.


Skeleton
Level: 1
Hiring Cost: 20
Leadership: 12
Attack/Defense: 3 / 2
Initiative/Speed: 3 / 2
Health: 14
Damage: 2-3 Physical
Resistances: 50% Poison, -10% Fire
Talents: Running (Charge: 1. +2 Action Points), Sow Bones (Charge: 1. Generates three randomly placed Skeleton pseudo-corpses), Bone Gate (Reload: 2. Teleports to a chosen Skeleton corpse or pseudo-corpse, leaving behind a pseudo-corpse where it teleported from. Attack is increased by 10 but Defense is reduced to 1 until next turn, and after teleportation only one AP remains)
Abilities: Undead, Bone (Arrow attacks do only 30% damage)

+2 Health, and the addition of Sow Bones and Bone Gate.

Skeletons are dramatically more useful/threatening, just from Sow Bones and Bone Gate, though annoyingly the mechanics of Sow Bones and Bone Gate mean they tend to be more threatening in AI hands than useful in player hands -the AI is perfectly able to have multiple 'full-sized' stacks of a single unit type, unlike the player. With a single Skeleton Sowing Bones, it's entirely possible to have none of the bone piles end up in a useful position. With three of them, it's basically impossible to avoid one of them being a threat, not to mention one Skeleton can Sow Bones and then a different one immediately Bone Gate. (Though the AI usually doesn't do this)

I use 'pseudo-corpses' to refer to the piles Sow Bones creates and Bone Gate leaves behind because they don't count as a corpse for any other purpose. Necromancers can't reanimate them, Marauders can't dig around in them for money, etc. It's really weird and unintuitive, even if I understand the motive.

Do note that Sowing Bones and then Bone Gating isn't necessarily any faster than some of the more consistently useful melee out there like Vampires, though.


Ghost
Level: 3
Hiring Cost: 160
Leadership: 80
Attack/Defense: 18 / 13
Initiative/Speed: 4 / 4
Health: 40
Damage: 4-8 Physical
Resistances: 50% Physical, 50% Poison
Talents: None
Abilities: Undead, Soaring, Phantom (50% Physical resistance, and can pass through normally-impassible terrain of all kinds, and also Chests. But not other battlefield objects or enemy units), Soul Draining (Leeches for 30% of damage dealt. This can generate additional Ghosts. Undead, Plants, and inorganic units like Cyclops and Gremlin Towers can't be leeched from)

No change.

Even the larger context shifting doesn't have much of an impact on their utility or how you deal with them.

Cursed Ghost
Level: 3
Hiring Cost: 280
Leadership: 130
Attack/Defense: 21 / 17
Initiative/Speed: 6 / 4
Health: 60
Damage: 6-9 Physical
Resistances: 50% Physical, 50% Poison
Talents: Scream (Reload: 4. All units of Levels 1-3 in a 2-tile area around the Cursed Ghost are pushed back. Those enemies that aren't immune to mental effects take damage, too. Its base damage is 6-9 Physical and it does halved damage to non-adjacent units)
Abilities: Undead, Soaring, Phantom (50% Physical resistance, and can pass through normally-impassible terrain of all kinds, and also Chests. But not other battlefield objects or enemy units), Soul Draining (Leeches for 50% of damage dealt. This can generate additional Cursed Ghosts. Undead, Plants, and inorganic units like Cyclops and Gremlin Towers can't be leeched from)

No change whatsoever, which is fine by me.

Like with Ghosts, context hasn't changed enough to really shift how you use or fight them either.

Vampire (Human form)
Level: 3
Hiring Cost: 160
Leadership: 80
Attack/Defense: 20 / 20
Initiative/Speed: 5 / 2
Health: 70
Damage: 6-12 Physical
Resistances: 50% Poison, -10% Fire
Talents: Transformation (Reload: 1. Changes forms)
Abilities: Undead, Regeneration ('Top' member of the stack heals all damage at the start of the unit's turn), No retaliation (Enemies do not retaliate in melee)

+20 HP. That's all. It's definitely appreciated, as Vampires could be a bit frustratingly fragile in spite of their bat form being able to outright undo casualties, but the overall play is largely the same.

Vampire (Bat form)
Level: 3
Leadership: 80
Attack/Defense: 20 / 15
Initiative/Speed: 6 / 4
Health: 50
Damage: 5-8 Physical
Resistances: 50% Poison, -10% Fire
Talents: Transformation (Reload: 1)
Abilities: Undead, No Retaliation (Enemies don't retaliate against melee attacks), Soaring, Drain Life (When attacking organic targets, damage is converted to health, and can even undo casualties)

+10 Health over The Legend, a 25% increase to their overall durability. This actually means transforming into a bat is slightly more of a drop in relative durability than in The Legend (In The Legend, Bat Form had 75% of the Health of human form; 75% of 70 would be 52.5, 2.5 more points than Bat Form actually has), so you might want to be a little slower to switch to Bat Form than in The Legend, but the boost definitely makes it a lot more practical to leverage Drain Life to tank without casualties.

Ancient Vampire (Human form)
Level: 4
Hiring Cost: 460
Leadership: 180
Attack/Defense: 25 / 25
Initiative/Speed: 6 / 2
Health: 140
Damage: 10-18 Physical
Resistances: 50% Poison
Talents: Transformation (Reload: 1. Changes forms)
Abilities: Undead, Regeneration ('Top' unit restores missing HP at the beginning of the unit's turn), No retaliation (Enemies can't retaliate in melee), Death's Deception (Critical hits against the Ancient Vampire instead Miss, doing no damage at all)

+30 Health. No change otherwise.

While the actual number is larger, the impact compared to a Vampire's Health boost is actually smaller; 20 added to 50 is close to a 50% increase. 30 added to 110 is, well, less than a 30% increase. Where with Vampires I actually noticed the shift in durability between games just playing them, with Ancient Vampires I was legitimately surprised to realize Armored Princess buffed them in drawing up these posts.

Death's Deception also has a lower impact on enemy Ancient Vampires than in The Legend, since Rage attacks are far more viable. This is a particularly huge relief to the Warrior, who back in The Legend was likely to have lots of Rage and thus get more crits than the others while having nothing competent to work around Death's Deception in the late-game. Soul Draining didn't work on Undead, for one thing. In fact, this is probably the low point of the entire series for Ancient Vampires.

Ancient Vampire (Bat form)
Level: 4
Leadership: 180
Attack/Defense: 25 / 20
Initiative/Speed: 7 / 5
Health: 100
Damage: 8-12 Physical
Resistances: 50% Poison
Talents: Transformation (Reload: 1. Switches to humanoid form)
Abilities: Undead, No Retaliation, Drain Life (When attacking organic targets, damage is converted to health, and can even undo casualties)

+10 Health, which is unsurprising.

Their Initiative tier not changing means they're actually less useful now, since eg Archdemons have jumped up, there's now multiple units that share their Initiative/Speed tier without needing to transform (eg Unicorns), etc. No longer does Dark Commander Power of Darkness 2 jump them ahead of Archdemons, you'll need rank 3 for that. Aside that point, they haven't really changed much.

Black Knight
Level: 4
Hiring Cost: 1000
Leadership: 150
Attack/Defense: 28 / 28
Initiative/Speed: 5 / 2
Health: 160
Damage: 12-16 Physical
Resistances: 30% Physical, 50% Poison
Talents: Running (Charge: 1. +2 Action Points)
Abilities: Undead, Steel Armor (30% Physical resistance), Dark Commander (+1 Morale to allied Undead), Rising Fury (Each time the Black Knight does damage, its base Damage and its crit chance rise by 3 and 3% respectively, to a max of 15/15%), Mastery (Each time the Black Knight takes damage, its Defense rises by 30%, to a maximum of 90% above base)

+3 to Attack and Defense, +2 to Initiative, and they've picked up Mastery. Black Knights were already a good unit, but now they're even better! Also Rising Anger got renamed and they've picked up a new graphic, though it's subtle enough I actually hadn't noticed until I was assembling these posts.

Also, for reference, Rising Fury's crit max is double their base crit chance.

It wasn't precisely unusual in The Legend for Black Knights to be the last enemy stack standing in an enemy force, but it's practically a given in Armored Princess thanks to Mastery. The Initiative boost is also surprisingly huge, leapfrogging them past a much larger portion of the rest of the game than you might expect.

On the other hand, percentile damage makes it a lot easier to wear them down, and for a Mage Spell damage was always the best way to take them out quickly, while Rage has become much more viable in Armored Princess, and Rage and Spell damage don't care about Mastery. It might require a bit of a shift in your overall approach to the game, but once you've made that shift enemy Black Knights aren't actually that different nor that much more problematic compared against The Legend.

Your own Black Knights are far more useful compared to The Legend, and are one of the best beneficiaries for Eviln-derived resurrections, since they outright improve their stats over the course of combat. That low Initiative was frustratingly impairing in The Legend even with Dark Commander maxed, whereas in Armored Princess if you max out Power of Darkness your Black Knights are going ahead of all but a very small pool of units; only 10 units are in the 7 Initiative or higher range, and Sea Dogs are the same Speed and a lower Level than Black Knights, so it's actually only 9 units that will go ahead of max Power of Darkness Black Knights. This isn't even getting into how the game outright provides special Item support for Black Knights if you bother to take Moro Dark and get him fully purged of darkness.

Bone Dragon
Level: 5
Hiring Cost: 3200
Leadership: 1300
Attack/Defense: 53 / 53
Initiative/Speed: 6 / 7
Health: 790
Damage: 50-80 Poison
Resistances: 10% Physical, 50% Poison
Talents: Poison Cloud (Reload: 2. 60-80 Poison damage to all adjacent targets, with a 90% chance to Poison units hit. Units don't retaliate), Gobble Corpse (Charge: 1. Converts an adjacent humanoid corpse into a charge of Spit Skeleton), Spit Skeleton (Charge: 0. Produces a stack of Skeletons or Skeleton Archers in a chosen tile adjacent to the Bone Dragon, whose Leadership is 50%, rounding up, of the Bone Dragon's Leadership at the time it used Gobble Corpse)
Abilities: Undead, Bone (Takes only 30% damage from arrows), Flight, Poison Breath (50% chance to Poison with melee attacks)

+10 to Attack and Defense, +15 to maximum damage, a small Physical resistance quietly tossed in, +190 HP, and they've picked up Gobble Corpse/Spit Skeleton. They also have picked up Poison Breath -no, really. Bone Dragons didn't have a Poison chance on their regular attack in The Legend! Anyway, Bone Dragons were decent units in The Legend, but I definitely agree they were a bit frail, especially given they were an ultimate dragon unit, so this is nice to see.

That said, I'm not sure I've ever seen the AI use Gobble Corpse, and it's not all that useful in player hands either unless you or the enemy is actually summoning disposable units that will die much sooner than the battle as a whole will be over. It's more an Undead-themed gimmick than a real expansion on the Bone Dragon's utility, and in particular Bone Dragons are still hampered by the fact that they use Poison damage attacks. The stats help, and Mage runs in particular mostly won't do what they could do in The Legend of incidentally wiping out all the Bone Dragon stacks before they get a chance to move... but while Bone Dragons have a relatively significant set of boons in the transition, they don't actually bring Bone Dragons into greater prominence in the end.

Gobble Corpse/Spit Skeleton itself is very unwieldy, taking a three full turns to seriously pay off; you have to spend a turn on consuming a corpse, then another turn on spitting up the skeletons, and then only on the third turn will the resulting skeleton get to actually act. This is part of why you really need to be using a summon-stall strategy for it to have much of a chance of being useful. It also only works on a fairly limited list of units, including that you can't use Undead bodies even if it seems like it should be an option. Its mechanics are also pretty silly, in that if, say, you had 20 Bone Dragons gobble a corpse, then lose all but 1 Bone Dragon, they'd still spit up 13,000~ Leadership of Skeletons or Skeleton Archers. Also, they specifically spit up Skeleton Archers if the corpse was an archer of some kind; it's not random. So if you want to give it a whirl, and would prefer Skeleton Archers, target an archer corpse.

Skeleton Archer
Level: 1
Hiring Cost: 24
Leadership: 14
Attack/Defense: 3 / 2
Initiative/Speed: 4 / 2
Health: 10
Damage (Ranged): 2-3 Physical
Damage (Melee): 1-2 Physical
Resistances: 50% Poison, -10% Fire
Talents: Poison Arrow (Charge: 1. Ranged attack that does 2-3 Poison damage and Poisons the target), Black Arrow (Charge: 1. Ranged attack that does 3-4 Magic damage and removes a single positive effect from the target)
Abilities: Undead, Archer (Range: 5), Bone (Arrow attacks do only 30% damage)

+2 Health, just like the Skeleton. That's it. To be fair, they don't need much else. They were already decent enough in the original game, and a 25% increase in their overall durability is plenty significant.

Their utility has dropped a bit with no Undead Lina equivalent and with Dragon Arrows having been made less ridiculous, though, and arguably these losses more than offset the Health gain from the player's perspective. They're also unappealing in the early game, unlike in The Legend, because their frailty means that if basically anything attacks them at all they instantly take a casualty and cost you a step in Grand Strategy. More rugged ranged attackers are usually better for the early game as a result, which means basically any other ranged attacker.

Still, they're solid enough in damage output, and you've got some new tools for babysitting/supporting them, like Eviln.

Necromancer
Level: 4
Hiring Cost: 1000
Leadership: 200
Attack/Defense: 30 / 30
Initiative/Speed: 7 / 2
Health: 140
Damage (Ranged): 8-12 Magic
Damage (Melee): 4-6 Physical
Resistances: 50% Poison, 10% Magic
Talents: Magic Lock (Charge: 1. A single enemy unit has all its Talents blocked off for 2 turns), Raise Undead (Charges: 3. Raises a corpse as 120 Leadership per Necromancer in the casting stack, with the new stack size unable to exceed the size of the corpse's original unit), Plague (Charge: 1. Infects every unit on the battlefield with Plague)
Abilities: Undead, Cloud of Darkness (Range: 6. Splash attack that always Curses hit units, doing 50% of base damage to all units adjacent to the primary target)

Literally the only change to Necromancers is that they got a new skin. They're less purple, looking more like a human being who spends a lot of time shut in rather than like a weird mutant or something. Which hey, fair enough! Necromancers were already an excellent unit, tremendously good and useful without being broken or badly designed as an opponent.

Of course, with Plague now bolstering Undead effectiveness, they've actually been de-facto buffed. This also has the secondary consequence that where in The Legend fielding Necromancers alongside Demons was basically indistinguishable from fielding them alongside Undead, in Armored Princess it's overall more desirable to field them alongside Undead. Further note that Plague is functionally protective against Morale penalties: since it's still considered to be a negative effect even on Undead, just offsetting the -1 with a +2, Undead under Plague are actually impossible to be made unhappy without something like Curse being added in, since the negative effect stacking is limited to -2 Morale and the Plague bonus cancels that out by itself. On top of all that, now that Rage is actually reasonably viable even into the endgame (And not just through percentile damage that doesn't care about Plague), Plaguing everything is more widely useful and in particular is less biased toward just assisting Mages.

Magic Lock is also effectively more significant, as while Magic Shackles has had a Leadership limit added, Magic Lock has not. No longer can Magic Lock basically be rendered irrelevant by Level 3 Magic Shackles! Plus Armored Princess just has a good number of units whose significance is focused on their Talents, where those were rarities in The Legend.

Pirate Ghost
Level: 3
Hiring Cost: 300
Leadership: 50
Attack/Defense: 12 / 15
Initiative/Speed: 4 / 3
Health: 30
Damage: 5-8 Magic
Resistances: 50% Physical, 50% Poison, -30% Magic, -30% Fire
Talents: Lucky Strike (Reload: 2. Strikes an enemy and any units to the side, with a base damage of 5-8 Astral. 50% chance of only doing 10% damage, but 50% of the damage that would have been done is delivered to the owner as Gold)
Abilities: Treasure Hunter (Drawn to chests, automatically traveling an infinite distance to them if there's an available route. If there are none, attempts to dig them up), Avarice (5% of Gold earned from combat is lost), Marine (+1 Morale in naval combat), Vulnerable (-30% Magic and Fire resistance), Vindictive (Doubled damage against Pirates, Sea Dogs, Swordsmen, and Guardsmen), Undead, Phantom (50% Physical resistance, and can pass through impassable terrain)

The only new Undead unit in Orcs on the March, and another new example of a unit that doesn't leave a corpse when slain. (Which isn't surprising, given the precedent set by Ghosts and Cursed Ghosts) Also note that while they're not listed with Soaring, in practice they seem to have Soaring, able to walk right over Traps without triggering them and with a Giant's Earthquake doing no damage to them. I'd assume Phantom just had Soaring secretly rolled in, but Armored Princess adds another Phantom that is not immune to Traps. This is pretty counter-intuitive given that on the visual level Pirate Ghosts are just... The Legend's Pirate graphic made translucent, including walking everywhere. They didn't make it float a few inches above the ground or anything. So this is just confusing.

Pirate Ghosts are actually not that good in combat, though, primarily useful for harvesting Gold and chests. If you want their combat utility, Ghosts and Cursed Ghosts cleanly beat them out with the exception that their damage isn't Magical and this can give the Pirate Ghosts an edge against other Phantoms, Knights, etc. I'm not a fan of this dynamic: I'm okay with how some units provide a small edge in Gold generation, such as Marauders, while being not-that-great of units, because it requires some actual skill to come out ahead in Gold costs instead of falling behind due to taking casualties that better units would've avoided. Pirate Ghosts instead are not pulling their weight in real fights, but can be straight-up exploited to generate infinite resources so long as you have patience and something like Jackboots to let you initiate a fight that won't end until you want it to end. (Just leave a Friendly Gremlin alive and keep killing whatever it spawns) Lucky Strike's gold generation is genuinely sad if you're not actively exploiting it: a stack of nearly 100 Pirate Ghosts can easily provide less gold than it costs to hire one Pirate Ghost off a given Lucky Strike, when they're quite likely to suffer multiple casualties from the retaliation against Physical attackers! So if you don't eg exploit a Friendly Gremlin to give you infinite safe grinding, adding Pirate Ghosts to your army is a poor way to raise gold intake, probably actively behind just using a better-contributing, less casualty-prone unit in the slot.

The digging-up portion of Treasure Hunter is a mechanic I honestly am not sure on the details of. I know it happens sometimes, but all I really know is that the chest contents follow the same rules as chests generated by the Treasure Searcher Rage move. The travel portion is more straightforwardly obvious; it's an automatic collection that ends the Pirate Ghost's turn. Be careful with the Treasure Searcher Rage move when Pirate Ghosts are on the field: it's easy to get in the habit of just digging up chests that are 'safe' in or behind your lines and ending up with a Pirate Ghost suddenly in your midst that's stolen your loot to boot.

Also note that Pirate Ghosts being uncontrollably drawn infinite distances to chests only applies to AI Pirate Ghosts. Your own Pirate Ghosts remain fully under your control, and can't teleport to chests, for better and worse. The chest-digging mechanic also works differently in your own hands, with the attempted digging able to happen at the very start of a fight, even if a chest is already present. So... Treasure Hunter's description is reasonably accurate to AI Pirate Ghosts, but tremendously misleading about Pirate Ghosts in your hands.

Oddly, unlike all other Undead at this point, Pirate Ghosts have the 'real' Persistence of Mind Ability in addition to the Undead quality, so for example they're actually immune to Magic Shackles.

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Overall Undead haven't changed too much from The Legend, but that's okay because the units that most needed support got help (Except for Undead Spiders for some reason) and Undead were already overall one of the better unit sets in The Legend.

Next time, we get started on Neutral with the Neutral animals.

Comments

  1. Zombie's Pass is Renunciation in Russian.

    Undead Spider is actually just Dead Spider in Russian. And it had poison damage in the Legend as well.

    Vampire(Bat) got +10 hp to the end result of 50.

    Rising Fury is one more example of an ability randomly changing name between games in English version. I think I'll stop mentioning every single of them.

    Gobble Corpses is Spit Skeletons in Russian.

    Pirate Ghost's Lucky Strike (Test of Luck in Russian) have the same damage as the base attack (5-8).

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    1. Corrected Vampire Bat Health and Lucky Strike's damage. (I honestly don't know why I thought Lucky Strike's base damage was worse than their regular attack)

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    2. A little story I originally wanted to put in my previous post.
      As you noticed, Pirate Ghost is kind of ...weird unit. Actually, it barely got into the game. To be precise, most of the devs had not approved the concept, thus it was supposed to be discarded, only for a certain person saying "I already integrated it in the game by myself because I can".
      It was the same guy who created the reworked orks :)

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    3. Well... that explains why it feels like a hacked-together unit I'd expect to see in a mod -as in, Red Sands has original units that feel less hacked-together than Pirate Ghosts. Because it basically is, just technically included in the official product.

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  2. Another note on Undead Spider - all Undead have Night Sight as part of 'Undead' ability. Spider's second one did nothing.

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    1. Wait, really? Huh. I'll test that first -among other points I don't recall if I've tested using the Guard Droid light beam Talent on Undead Spiders in particular- but that is a typical fantasy thing, and it might explain why I've had Undead have statlines I couldn't make sense of...

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  3. Just like Elf-the-unit with his Aiming, Undead Spider actually have disabled Web talent in every single game.
    And the Spider didn't switch to "an inferior damage type" - it had poison in the Legend, it has poison in AP and will have poison in later games.

    Ghost has 50% physical resistance, not 30%. And it leeches for 30% of damage dealt, not 50%. Both are true for all the games.

    Cursed Ghost leeches for 50%, not 30%. Did you accidentally switched their numbers? You made it look as if upgraded Ghost is worse at Soul Draining than the basic one.
    Scream deals physical damage, as always.

    You are wrong about Bone Dragon's Poison Breath being interface update - it's a genuinely new feature.
    I wrote before that 'Gobble Corpse' is 'Spit Skeletons' in Russian. 'facepalm' It's, of course, are two different talents. I forgot how it works and was confused by you description. Speaking of it - you wrote as if it's a single talent that just turn a corpse into Skeletons in a single action, which is not true. How it actually works:
    'Gobble Corpse' destroys selected humanoid corpse and activates another Bone Dragon talent, the one that is 'Spit Skeletons' in Russian. It consumes Bone Dragon action, so you can't create Skeletons the same turn your Dragon got a dinner.
    'Spit Skeletons' has 1 charge. When used it spawns near the Dragon a player-controlled stack of Skeletons* with leadership equal to 50% of what Bone Dragons had at the moment of eating corpse(!). Yes, even if 10 Dragons will eat a corpse of a single peasant, and then 9 dragons will die, the last one still can spit over five hundreds of skeletons. Somehow. Also, this talent is affected by hero 'Summoner' skill.
    Finally, Skeletons can only act starting from the next turn after being spat. So if, for example, you'll get a corpse and start all this clumbersome eating stuff at the very first turn, your Skeletons will only do something from turn 3. And you wasted two Bone Dragon turns for this.
    I'm not a fan of this talent, as you can guess.

    * If eaten corpse belonged to any archer unit, Skeleton Archers will be spawned instead.

    Skeleton Archer still has melee damage of 1-2.

    Necromancer melee damage is the expected 4-6.

    Ghost Pirate is rather ...murky... unit. My limited testing capabilities (I have only saves with where Gremlins/Baal are the only available fights) don't help ether. In this tests Ghost Pirate always spawned a chest. He even blocked one of Baal's summon tiles with one.
    It looks like them running towards a chest is a hidden talent with 3 turn reload, through I'm not sure if AI can use it more than once. It will no work properly in player hands if made visible - upon activation Ghost Pirate will just turn towards the chest and end his turn, even through log will say about chest being opened by Ghost Pirate. AI uses special hidden marks on all tiles surrounding chests to move.
    Sorry, but it seems the only concrete info I can give you is that Ghost Pirate's created chest is spawned at random tile and is exact copy of ones digged up by the pet Dragon.

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    1. Gotten to most of these, but still need to double-check the Bone Dragon stuff.

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    2. Alright, got around to properly testing Gobble Corpse/Spit Skeleton (Could've sworn I did this before, but clearly not), and yeah, it's... unwieldy. Updated the post appropriately.

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