Dark Side Unit Analysis Part 2: Demons

As always, to save some space here's the effects of the Demon Ability:

50% Fire resistance, -25% Ice resistance. Fights in volcanic terrain increase Defense by 50%, while fights in snowy terrain decrease Defense by 50%. Assorted spell immunities.

So no actual change from Warriors of the North. (Well, unless there's specific immunities removed or added that I haven't noticed)

Ardent has been replaced by...

Frenzy
This unit accumulates Frenzy points in combat. (+10-16 when attacking an enemy, even with a Talent. +8-12 if using a non-attacking Talent. +4-6 for taking damage) Every 10 Frenzy points raises Attack and Defense by 10% of their base stats, and every point is also a 2% chance per 'roll' for a Talent's duration to be reduced by 1 turn. A successful such roll reduces Frenzy by 5, and such rolls cannot be performed when below 5 Frenzy. Only 100 Frenzy points can be stored at most.

... a much more interesting mechanic, albeit one obviously based on Adrenaline. It even includes that, where Orcs in Dark Side ignore charges/reloading entirely, all Demons have switched over purely to a reloading system to go with Frenzy's mechanics. Generally Talents that used to be charge-based now merely have an unusually high reload time, which isn't even as high as it seems due to the reload mechanic.

Also note that the reload reduction mechanic is a series of separate rolls. It's not 'you have 30 Frenzy, so you have a 60% chance of hurrying the Talent one turn and a 40% chance of nothing happening'. No, in that scenario you have an about 50% chance that it will be lowered by one turn, poor odds of it being lowered by 2 turns, and horrible odds of it being lowered by 3 turns. As such, it's possible for even a reload of 9 to end up being completely reloaded in one turn if you have 60 Frenzy, it's just unlikely.

Also notable is that the game's process for handling units with multiple Talents is different from what you might expect. The game picks at random out of the Talents that are on cooldown, and once it's selected a Talent it keeps rerolling the cooldown reduction until a roll fails, or Frenzy is below 5, or that Talent is fully reloaded. Only once it's done rolling on a given Talent does it move on to rolling for other Talents. As such, Frenzy cooldown reductions pretty much never produce even reductions of cooldowns across multiple Talents.

As a concrete example, say you have a Demon-the-unit with 100 Frenzy points and all three Talents have managed to be at exactly 8 turns of cooldown when Frenzy starts its reloading process. What will happen is that one of the three Talents gets picked, then definitely gets its cooldown completely erased, and now your Demon has 60 Frenzy and two Talents that need reloading, and one will be picked and have at least 3 turns of its cooldown erased, and only once this second Talent is done with rolling reduction attempts will the third Talent finally get the dregs of Frenzy-boosting and probably only benefit a little; in the most extreme case of the second Talent also getting fully reloaded, the third Talent has a 60% chance of getting no benefit at all, and can at most get its cooldown halved.

So if your intuitive expectation is that Frenzy will on average reduce Talents relatively evenly... nope. Also note that this means that if you'd like a particular Talent accelerated any, you really should avoid using other Talents, especially if they have long reloads; having a Demoness use Long Attack isn't too harmful to the odds of Charm or Infernal Exchange getting boosted, while having an Archdemon summon a Volcano is going to seriously reduce the odds of their Summon Demons Talent getting hurried.

One last point: the Frenzy reloading effect only kicks in the first time a unit's turn rolls around in a round. Demons and Executioners don't get multiple shots at reload acceleration via Demon Rage activating, most notably.

Demons... actually care about Morale! Specifically...

-5 Morale for Light Human presence in allies.
-5 Morale for Light Elven presence in allies.
-5 Morale for Light Dwarven presence in allies.

... they have the standard hostility to the core Light races.

Interestingly, they also have a commented-out -2 from Dark Elven presence.

Though the way Dark Side constructs itself, the new Demon hostilities don't really matter that much. There's very, very few opportunities for you to acquire the Light versions of units (Mostly you can get them from unit-spawning Wanderer Scrolls), and the ready access to Dark versions of these units gives you little incentive to care about the Light versions anyway, so whatever.

Demons still don't have a mono-racial Morale bonus, note. It can be easy to get mixed up thanks to Dark Side providing so many ways to bolster the Morale of your Dark forces, including notably the Titles system offering such opportunities now, (Titles existed in Warriors of the North, but they didn't do anything) but they still lack the Morale bonus for mono-species.

Oh, and of course all Demons have Of The Dark listed, though it still doesn't actually do anything.


Demon
Level: 4
Hiring Cost: 666
Leadership: 300
Attack/Defense: 30 / 30
Initiative/Speed: 4 / 3
Health: 240
Damage (Default): 21-27 Physical

Damage (Domination): 28-35 Physical
Resistances: 10% Physical, 50% Fire, -25% Ice
Talents: Running (Reload: 8. +2 Action Points), Bloody Pentagram (Reload: 8. Creates a 7-tile circle that lasts for 2 turns, in which all friendly Demons below Level 5 gain +2 to Morale and Initiative. The pentagram vanishes after 2 turns), Summon Demons (Reload: 8. Summons to an adjacent tile a stack of Demon units chosen from any of those below Level 4, plus Demonesses are possible even though they're Level 4. The Leadership of the new stack will be 90 per head in the summoning stack)
Abilities: Of The Dark, Demon, Furious (Never 'runs out' of retaliations), Domination (Calls the Domination attack against units that are Levels 1-3), Demon Rage (If currently out of AP, taking damage has a 50% chance of granting 1 AP and immediately providing another turn. Counterattacks from enemies don't count), Frenzy

Note that while the game says Bloody Pentagram provides a lesser benefit to non-Demon Dark allies, it... just doesn't work on non-Demons at all. Alas.

Mostly Demons have been overhauled by Frenzy's mechanics, and of course the new spread-out Morale layout means +2 Morale isn't as powerful as it used to be anyway. Nonetheless, having all their Talents Frenzy-reloading is incredible, and since Frenzy builds when taking damage Demons can be utterly amazing when thrown into a brawl and dogpiled on. Which is how you want to use them anyway!

This is particularly relevant to Neoline's very early game, as she gets a Demon early enough it's borderline invincible for a while, but once you reach the point of not caring about Grand Strategian they can return in prominence anew too.

It's also worth pointing out that only Summon Demons actually ends the Demon's turn, so a Demon can generate 24-36 Frenzy points on the very first turn by Running, slapping down a Bloody Pentagram, and then Summoning Demons, bolstering their stats and giving them good odds of getting some reloads in right away!

On a different note, Demons provide an opportunity to talk about a mechanic new to Dark Side: Prisoner conversion.

Once you've got access to Rage, you can convert Prisoners into Undead or Demon units by talking to Blackie. (Or whatever you've named him in your run) This costs some Gold in addition to Prisoners, but less than it would cost you to purchase the unit directly, and you don't have to deal with limited troop stocks or the randomization of troop stocks: you always get the same list of four Demons and four Undead in every run and so long as you've got Prisoners and Gold you can keep making as many as you like of any given unit type. You can generate units in batches of 10, 50, or 100, which is convenient as your Leadership rises, though I would've liked a 20 or 30 option. Note however that if you try to generate units such that you'd end up over your Leadership, the attempt will be rejected -and, weirdly enough, even units stuffed into your Reserves will count. You can work around this by shunting units into a Castle and then generating copies before grabbing the units in the Castle, but in the field it can be a really annoying limitation.

Each set of options comes in four 'tiers': a basic unit that only costs 1 Prisoner per head, a heavier unit that burns somewhat more Prisoners, an even heavier unit that burns a lot of Prisoners, and an ultimate unit that burns the most Prisoners. Demons-the-unit are Demons-the-species' fourth-tier option. The utility of this is a bit questionable in practice, as the point at which you have consistent enough access to the kinds of Prisoner quantities necessary to fund Demons is more or less the point at which you start getting shop access to Demons. (And it takes a long time for Prisoners to stop being an at least somewhat precious resource) Still, it's an option, and late in the game when you're rolling in Prisoners it can be nice to skip returning to the shop and just doing a field conversion for faster turnaround.

Cerberus

Level: 3

Hiring Cost: 210

Leadership: 90

Attack/Defense: 18 / 18

Initiative/Speed: 5 / 4

Health: 90

Damage: 9-11 Physical

Resistances: 50% Fire, -25% Ice

Talents: Leap! (Reload: 5. Charges an infinite distance in a straight line to do 12 Physical damage to a single enemy. Three-headed does not trigger)

Abilities: Of the Dark, Demon, Three-headed (In addition to the primary target, melee attacks strike at the tiles to the side. Still no friendly fire risk), Frenzy

Cerberi are, unfortunately, one of the few Demon units that's basically been flatly nerfed by Dark Side. Leap being reloading/assisted by Frenzy isn't terribly useful (Even if it does mean they can technically do pseudo-No Retaliation unlimitedly), as their primary value is Three-headed, and Ardent was a lot more synergistic with Three-headed then Frenzy is. With Ardent, you could potentially do stuff like wipe out multiple stacks at once and get a bunch of Attack boosts out of it. Frenzy doesn't trigger its attack value per target: Cerberi aren't good at building Frenzy. Demons-the-unit are, thanks to Furious and Demonic Fury and their Talent spam.

So basically their core issue of 'Demons-the-unit tend to fill the same role better' achieves its ultimate form in Dark Side.

One point in their favor: you can get Cerberus supplies early in the game. It takes longer for Demons-the-unit to start being offered in shops. As such, while they'll generally be shunted aside by Demons-the-unit once you have access to them, there is a period of the game you might actually decide to use them. The prior games were a lot more guilty of that just not happening.

Cerberi are the third-tier option for converting Prisoners into Demon troops, incidentally. I think they're the worst option for doing so, since going up to Demons is only a modest increase in Prisoner cost while giving you a much better unit, or you could burn Prisoners on Imps or Scoffer Imps for better Prisoner efficiency while still getting plenty good units, and meanwhile Cerberi are shop-accessible and Gold is always less valuable than Prisoners. But it is an option if you care.

It's also interesting in that it's the only Prisoner-conversion option that doesn't produce a humanoid unit. Even though Demons have other humanoid units, like Demonesses. I'm curious as to why they break from the pattern.

Demoness

Level: 4

Hiring Cost: 500

Leadership: 160

Attack/Defense: 26 / 24

Initiative/Speed: 6 / 2

Health: 100

Damage: 10-18 Physical

Resistances: 50% Fire, -25% Ice

Talents: Long Attack (Reload: 2. Attacks an enemy 1 tile apart through a free space for 10-18 Physical damage, with no retaliation), Charm (Reload: 3. Attempts to take control of an enemy humanoid troop, which can be adjacent or one tile away. If the target stack is 128 Leadership per Demoness or less, the attempt will succeed, lasting for 2 turns. If they're above that but otherwise valid, the Demoness instead does 10-18 Physical damage to the target with no chance for retaliation), Infernal Exchange (Reload: 4. Swaps the positions of any two units)

Abilities: Of The Dark, Demon, Beauty (30% chance to evade attacks from male humanoids), Frenzy

All their Talents have gained exactly one turn of duration. This is basically just partially offsetting Frenzy speeding everything up: in practice, Demonesses have basically been flatly improved by Dark Side. They're quite good at building Frenzy without getting hurt, too, thanks to their stack of Talents.

I sometimes will use Infernal Exchange in a situation it has little utility in for Frenzy boosting, if they have nothing better to do, in fact.

A subtle point is that you'll realistically eventually max Connoisseur of Beauty and so get a 20% Leadership discount on them, further improving them in player hands. In the late game Demonesses can be startlingly effective, particularly for Neoline; she starts the game with a Weapon that discounts Demons by 10% in general, her Lord Skill provides further Leadership reduction (And Leadership reductions stack favorably), and she gets a Medal that bolsters the damage of Demons, Executioners, and Demonesses. The final result is she can field hilariously oversized Demoness stacks (With luck with other gear, potentially more than twice as many as their Leadership should allow!) that hit shockingly hard even considering how oversized the stack ends up being.

Though it is worth explicitly noting that Neoline's Medal for Damage-boosting only applies to their base attack. It doesn't boost their damage with Long Attack or Charm, which can take some getting used to. This also applies to Executioner's with Execution, but Execution's Damage advantage over their base attack is high enough that even with the Medal maxed it still hits harder, where for Demonesses Long Attack and Charm at base have identical damage to their base attack.

For Daert and Bagyr Demonesses don't end up so ridiculous in the late game, but they still end up potentially quite useful, and in particular Dark Side is probably the best game in the series for trying to leverage Charm as a mind control effect. After all, the Leadership reductions don't change the per-head Leadership limit on Charm's effectiveness; your oversized stacks will be able to take control of stacks above your Leadership, so the AI pulling ahead of you on typical Leadership scores doesn't render it largely irrelevant.

It also helps that Dark Side is heavily biased toward having you fight Humans, Dwarves, and Elves, all of which are dominated by male humanoids. You'll still have battlegroups where Charm can't do anything, but they're a lot rarer in Dark Side than in prior entries, further bolstering the utility of Demonesses in Dark Side.

Archdemon

Level: 5

Hiring Cost: 6666

Leadership: 1500

Attack/Defense: 66 / 66

Initiative/Speed: 8 / 9

Health: 666

Damage: 66-99 Physical

Resistances: 50% Magic, 80% Fire, -25% Ice

Talents: Fire Rain (Reload: 6. All units in an arbitrarily designated 7-tile circle take 25-35 Fire damage and 25-35 Physical damage, with each target having a 10% chance of Burning), Volcano (Reload: 6. Spawns a Volcano with 100 Health per casting Archdemon. This Volcano is a friendly object and will attempt to hit enemies within two riles of it with a Rain of Fire or a Fireball), Summon Demons (Reload: 8. Generates in target adjacent open tile a random Demon unit below Level 5 with a Leadership equal to 450 per Archdemon in the casting stack. The Demon stack won't be under player control)

Abilities: Of the Dark, Demon, Teleportation (Movement ignores all intervening obstacles. Additionally, when performing a melee attack the Archdemon has a 50% chance of returning to its original location, in which case the target fails to retaliate), Persistence of Mind (Immunity to mental effects), Power Over Fire (80% Fire resistance and cannot be Burned. Additionally, enemies that strike them in melee become Burned), Restoration (Purges all negative status effects at the start of its turn), Frenzy

They've had Teleportation buffed, gained a good chunk of Magic resistance, had their Leadership reduced a little, and acquired three new Talents. (Though one is just stolen from Demons) And also had their cost bumped up for Number of the Beast reasons. They also are supposed to have Persistence of Mind now, but... don't. This hurts them less than some of the other units this has happened to given Restoration already makes them immune to a number of mental effects and being Level 5 protects them from plenty too, but still. Similarly, Power Over Fire is supposed to punish melee attacks now, but doesn't, though a player can easily fail to notice given their fantastic ability to contribute without getting into melee in the first place.

On the bad news front, they've lost 100 Health (So they're Number Of The Beast again), had their minimum roll lowered about 20 points (Also invoking the Number), lost their 20% Physical resistance, and lost Sunder. Additionally, Boiling Lava has been lost in favor of their new Talents, and while the new Talents are quite good, Boiling Lava was also quite good.

Also, Fire Rain is less good than it ought to be, both not actually having the ability to Burn enemies like it's supposed to, and rather oddly ignoring Attack/Defense modification. On a unit with 66 Attack. Yeah, that's a lot of damage potential being lost.

The Volcano is also less good than it's supposed to be, though less so. It has 50% resistance to Poison and Fire damage, 45 (!) base Defense, 2 Initiative, and it scales its strength with your Archdemon count... but the scaling is that it behaves as per the Summon Volcano Spell but with the stack's headcount substituting for Intellect (Which will generally work out to much worse than if they used your Intellect score, especially for Daert), and the Volcano is supposed to cast Level 3 Rain of Fire and Fireballs but is bugged to cast them at Level 1. (The Volcano itself is otherwise as per the Level 2 Volcano Spell) It's still a very good distraction, but much less lethal than it's really intended to be.

Overall, though, Archdemons in Dark Side are the best iteration of Archdemons in the series, able to provide distractions wherever you need them, repeatedly, tossing in chipping damage to bolster their Frenzy numbers, and able to pop in and finish off stacks as the battle wears on. The potential for them to get lucky and avoid a retaliation also extends their utility, among other points making the hits to their durability on average less significant than they look -if they attack in melee and don't get hit back, that's naturally less damage than a Warriors of the North Archdemon would take if hitting a Physical attacker.

It's worth noting that the 'enemy fails to retaliate' roll doesn't require that the Archdemon is going to zip back to another tile. You can teleport adjacent to a unit, then issue an attack, and you still have a 50% chance of the Archdemon's target failing to retaliate. You just won't have the Archdemon teleport somewhere else afterward.

Daert particularly appreciates the changes to Archdemons; Archdemons have always been the best unit for ensuring your Spellslinging gets to go before the enemies move, but in prior entries Archdemons were designed to get into the thick of things instead of contributing from a distance. Even in Warriors of the North, they only got one Boiling Lava use before they had to switch to punching things or collecting chests or just failing to contribute anything of use. In Dark Side, Archdemons can contribute damage/Rage-building with Fire Rain, pop up near key targets to drop a disposable meatshield as a distraction, and freely place Volcanoes as a distraction. That last one is surprisingly significant; the AI is bizarrely obsessive about tearing down your Volcanoes, and in fact every time I've seen the AI have the option of attacking a real unit or a Volcano they always went for the Volcano. The Volcano can't take much damage even though its Health scales with the Archdemon stack size, frequently being one-shotted even by relatively weak attackers, but that's fine if eg you're using it to distract the single biggest enemy stack to buy time for percentile damage to wear them down, that kind of thing.

As such, Archdemons are one of the best units for Daert, and if you're playing to win they should be acquired in any Daert run as soon as you have access to stocks of them.

They're still useful for Neoline and Bagyr, mind, but it's much less dramatic, and I tend to prefer other units when playing them.

Interestingly, there's (inactive) code for straight-up giving Archdemons a ranged attack! A... really gimmicky one that does multiple damage types and tries to Burn/Freeze/Poison/Stun the victim at poor odds, much like Pokémon's Tri Attack, but still, it's interesting they considered making them a ranged attacker at all.

Imp

Level: 2

Hiring Cost: 80

Leadership: 40

Attack/Defense: 16 / 12

Initiative/Speed: 5 / 4

Health: 32

Damage: 3-6 Physical

Resistances: 50% Fire, -25% Ice

Talents: Fireball*2 (Reload: 8. Throws a fireball at an enemy target in the distance, doing 3-6 Fire damage to the target and 30% of that to all adjacent units. Each unit has a 15% chance of Burning. Like normal ranged attacks, cannot be activated if an enemy is adjacent to the Imp)

Abilities: Of The Dark, Demon, Fire Thrower (Fireball has two separate instances), Strike and Return (Returns to its original position after performing a melee attack), No Retaliation, Frenzy

The only changes made are the standard: Of The Dark, Frenzy, Talents reload now, etc. The only notable point here is that instead of having one Talent with 2 charges, they have two Talents that each reload at the kind of rate found on most Talents that used to be single-charge. (eg Running)

In practical terms, Imps can very nearly function as a true ranged unit now. You'll slip in some amount of Strike and Return hits, but it's not unusual for Frenzy reloading to get one or both Fireballs reloaded by turn 4 so that they end up spending more time tossing Fireballs than on melee hits even in longer battles. It's a really interesting and powerful dynamic, particularly since they get to keep their full mobility of 4 Speed, making them one of the most mobile ranged attackers in the series. If you use that Speed properly, it's fairly easy to advance while tossing Fireballs, make a safe melee attack or two, and then back away from advancing melee while tossing newly-reloaded Fireballs, up until your enemies are dead or there's nowhere to retreat to. This obviously works best against slower groups of units, preferably with you slowing them down still further.

For whatever reason, Imps also tend to generate a lot of Rage with their Fireballs. Since Dark Side's Rage is really powerful, this is a much more significant advantage than it would be in prior games, and I frequently find myself continuing to run Imps for a while even after I've gotten a hold of units I consider to be more useful combatants as a result. And that's not even touching on how they're good at spreading Burns and the occasional Bleeding, meaning they're disproportionately useful against densely-packed oversized stacks. Percentile damage gets weakened by being a smaller stack, yes, but the fact that it's percentile damage still means it ends up being a lot.

Imps are all-around fantastic in Dark Side, a versatile and flexible unit who only really suffers if you try to bring them up against Red Dragons, Black Dragons, or the handful of Demon battlegroups of the game. And they're still serviceable in those cases, just not amazing.

Imps are also your first-tier option for converting Prisoners into Demons, and thus are your best option if your priority is trying to get the Rage Medal as fast as possible. Least Prisoner wastage, after all. They're also a really good unit in general, so I very consistently run Imps in my army, no matter the character, until at least I've maxed the Medal; +15 Rage where the 'burden' is keeping myself supplied with a great unit? Sign me up!

Scoffer Imp

Level: 2

Hiring Cost: 120

Leadership: 60

Attack/Defense: 16 / 16

Initiative/Speed: 6 / 3

Health: 52

Damage: 4-7 Physical

Resistances: 50% Fire, -25% Ice

Talents: Fireball*2 (Reload: 8. Throws a fireball at an enemy target in the distance, doing 4-7 Fire damage to the target and 30% of that to all adjacent units. Each unit has a 15% chance of Burning. Like normal ranged attacks, cannot be activated if an enemy is adjacent to the Scoffer Imp), Sneer (Reload: 4. Targets a single enemy below Level 5 which hasn't moved yet. The unit attempts to target the Scoffer Imp with a basic attack, ignoring all other units)

Abilities: Of The Dark, Demon, Fire Thrower (Fireball has two separate instances), Strike and Return (Returns to its original position after performing a melee attack), No retaliation, Frenzy

Same basic deal as Imps, except Scoffer Imps have Sneer... which hasn't had its reload delayed any, so you can expect to usually get to use it more often than before, thanks to Frenzy.

Sneer, quite inexplicably, no longer pays attention to immunity to mental effects, making it drastically more reliable. It works on Plants, droids, and the Undead, where those used to all be immune -and even units that actually have the Persistence of Mind Ability aren't immune!

Like Imps, Scoffer Imps can very nearly function as a true ranged unit now. Since using Sneer generates Frenzy, Scoffer Imps are even less likely to end up spending a turn on a melee attack than Imps, though in exchange they're clunkier to use as a highly-mobile ranged attacker thanks to their lesser Speed.

The other big thing Scoffer Imps have over Imps is that their Initiative advantage matters quite a lot for a large portion of the game. It's not until you get something like Onslaught 3 and Foresight 2 (Or vice-versa) that you basically stop caring about the Scoffer Imp Initiative advantage, so unless you luck very early on into some of the Items that boost Demon Initiative this is a fairly big point in their favor.

The other flaw they have compared to Imps, however, is that Scoffer Imps have noticeably worse damage. 4-7 damage as opposed to 3-6 simply fails to make up for the fact that you can field 50% more Imps than Scoffer Imps. If you're going to field only one of the two, Imps are generally the better choice, bar maybe that Daert might prefer Scoffer Imps since he cares less about the damage output of his units than about their Initiative and special effects like Sneer.

Scoffer Imps are the last Demon you can turn Prisoners into, and are the second-tier one. I often run Scoffer Imps alongside Imps and generate both out of Prisoners, though this is strictly sub-optimal and Scoffer Imps are high enough Leadership it can be awkward to actually implement. But it's relatively convenient and perfectly doable, particularly if you don't care about trying to funnel Prisoners into the Undead for the Mana Medal.


Executioner
Level: 4
Hiring Cost: 1600
Leadership: 360
Attack/Defense: 40 / 30
Initiative/Speed: 5 / 2
Health: 280
Damage (Default): 24-26 Physical

Damage (Domination): 32-34 Physical
Resistances: 10% Physical, 50% Fire, -25% Ice
Talents: Running (Reload: 8. +2 Action Points), Execution (Reload: 1. Melee attack that does 36-39 Physical damage to a single target. If the target stack is finished off by Execution, all enemies suffer -1 Initiative for this turn and the next, and furthermore enemies below Level 5 have a 50% chance of becoming Afraid)
Abilities: Of the Dark, Demon, Furious (Never 'runs out' of retaliations), Domination (Calls the Domination attack against units that are Levels 1-3), Demonic Fury (If currently out of AP, taking damage has a 50% chance of granting 1 AP and immediately providing another turn. Counterattacks from enemies don't count), Terrify (Enemies below Level 4 attacking the Executioner have a 30% chance of suffering Fear, unless the attacker is immune to mental effects), Frenzy

Now Running is a slow reload, Terrify activates more generally... and Frenzy is a thing. No other changes for Dark Side, not even delaying Execution's reload by a turn or anything.

Since it's stronger than their regular attack, you should seriously consider using Execution whenever instead of trying to save it for finishing off a stack. Quite often your failure to save it won't cost you anything thanks to Frenzy mechanics.

That said, this is probably actually the low point for Executioners. In raw terms it's a pure improvement over Armored Princess, and heavily weighted toward improvement over Warriors of the North, but in Dark Side Demons-the-unit fill a similar role and tend to fill it better. This is compounded by accessibility issues; if you can get a hold of Executioners really early, they can be a very impressive unit just due to being high Leadership for the time and all, but generally you won't have smooth store access until so far into the game that this scenario is no longer relevant. It's possible to enter Atrixus, thus adding it to your list of teleport options, and then teleport somewhere before you can be jumped by the battlegroup meant to keep you out before you're powerful enough for the area, and then you might get lucky by having a free friendly Executioner stack lying around or Executioners in a shop, but since each teleport to somewhere other than Whitehill or the Shelter costs you a chunk of Gold it's undesirable to treat Atrixus like a regular shop area until quite late in the game regardless.

As such, Executioners tend to be shunted aside by Demons where in prior games they often were the one pushing Demons aside.

Eh. Not a big deal.


Flame Elemental
Level: 1
Hiring Cost: 40
Leadership: 15
Attack/Defense: 6 / 6
Initiative/Speed: 5 / 2
Health: 16
Damage: 1-3 Physical
Resistances: 80% Fire, -25% Ice
Talents: Ring of Fire (Reload: 4. Does 1-2 Fire damage to all adjacent units, with each unit having a 20% chance of becoming Burned), Affinity For Fire (Reload: 9. Immediately teleports adjacent to a currently Burning unit. Does not end the turn)
Abilities: Of the Dark, Demon, Fire Elemental (Immunity to mental effects, Fire resistance cannot be below 80%, immunity to Burn, melee attacks performed by it have a 50% chance to Burn the target, and when attacked in melee it always Burns its attacker), Soars, Frenzy

Flame Elementals are one of two new Demon units in Dark Side, which is notable given that Demons have been minimally affected over the previous two games, with only one new unit per se (Well, and Chaos Dragons) and minimal changes to existing units throughout.

Alas, they're a... somewhat lazy Ghost reworking. They made the Ghost transparent, slapped a silly number of fire sprites onto various parts of it, and... yeah. (Flame Elementals in the field even use the Ghost scream when they spot you!) You can see the Ghost graphic's outline directly when highlighting them, for example, though bizarrely Flame Elementals actually leave a corpse, which just seems strange for a thing that's supposed to be a floating blob of fire. Even their UI graphic is actually reusing a character portrait from Warriors of the North, rather than making a new graphic for the Flame Elemental. Dark Side is a massive project that I suspect got rushed quite badly, but it's still painful how slipshod the Flame Elemental is.

It's not even a good or interesting unit, unfortunately, and it's particularly hampered by the twin facts that

A: It's not a desirable unit from the player's perspective

and B: Dark Side hates having you face hostile Demons, so you'll almost never fight them.

Which makes their existence bordering on a technicality, to boot.

Ouch.

When you do fight them, they're hampered by the fact that, like so many non-ranged non-flying units in the series, they get confused and just Defend if they're completely surrounded by friendlies, even if they could use Affinity For Fire to teleport right into your midst. Also the fact that they're slow and weak and just kinda terrible in general. That doesn't help.

The kicker is that they do Physical damage instead of the Fire damage you'd expect them to do. Fire damage remains sufficiently rare on units in Dark Side that if they did it I'd at least consider using them sometimes, such as breaking them out for a Plant-heavy battlegroup. But with being Yet Another 2-Speed Melee Physical Damage unit with awful stats and eeeeh Abilities and Talents... no thanks.

I'm not entirely sure what Dark Side's devs were thinking with the Flame Elemental, honestly. If it had been used as your basic Prisoner conversion option, I would've assumed they were trying to make the basic Prisoner conversion option a bad unit that tends to suffer casualties, which would've made some sense. As-is, I really don't get it.

A strange point is that 'under the hood' Flame Elementals are technically not considered to be Soaring units, instead having the hidden ghost movement type used by eg Pirate Ghosts. For many purposes this distinction doesn't matter, but then you get stuff like Talents that perform worse against Soaring units and surprise! Flame Elementals don't actually count!

Another bit of 'under the hood' weirdness is that for some reason their mechanic of Burning attackers checks if the attacker is a Flame Elemental, and if they are then the Burn is only a 50% chance instead of guaranteed... even though Flame Elementals are immune to Burn and so it's actually never going to happen.


Blood Priestess
Level: 3
Hiring Cost: 315
Leadership: 100
Attack/Defense: 16 / 15
Initiative/Speed: 6 / 2
Health: 66
Damage: 4-13 Physical
Resistances: 10% Physical, 50% Fire, -25% Ice
Talents: Long Attack (Reload: 1. Does 4-13 Physical damage to a single target enemy 1 tile away, with no chance of retaliation), Old Wounds (Reload: 4. An arbitrary enemy target is inflicted with Bleeding for 3 turns), Sacrifice (Reload: 3. One unit is sacrificed to bolster another, 30 Leadership worth per Blood Priestess using Sacrifice, with only 80% of the Health being transferred to the second unit. Neither target can be the caster. The damage is Astral)

Abilities: Of the Dark, Demon, Armored (10% Physical resistance), Blood Priestess (15% chance to inflict Bleeding on base attack and Long Attack), Beautiful (30% chance for male humanoids to Miss when attacking the Blood Priestess), Frenzy

The other new Demon unit, and the far more interesting and useful one... if obnoxiously random and with a really painful design. Why is a 'blood priestess' dressed like a hooker? No, scratch that, a hooker wouldn't wear this because her clothes wouldn't actually stay on at all. Argh. I'd be fine with this, but she's a Blood Priestess! Demonesses are very transparently succubi, just with a more 'generic' name for some reason, but the Blood Priestess is pretty obviously building on cultists who use blood sacrifice to call up summons and the like. The hookerific outfit is badly out of place.

Still, as a unit I quite like the Blood Priestess.

Notice that Sacrifice actually operates on a Leadership limit, and it's a really low Leadership limit. Early in the game, it's actually really impractical to use Sacrifice at all. Later on it's quite nice having Sacrifice from a unit, both because it means you don't have to find the Spell version and because it frees up Spell turns and Mana for other things, which can greatly simplify logistics. And Blood Priestesses are useful enough units in their own right, so it's not a huge burden.

Also note that the Blood Priestess' version of Sacrifice can be used on summoned units, making it fairly trivial to use any ol' fight to Sacrifice up more units: just use Call of Nature, or have a Demon summon up more Demons, or whatever, and get to sacrificing via Blood Priestess. Another advantage it has over the Spell is that you can use Undead as fodder for non-Undead and vice-versa; grab a Necromancer stack and have it start animating the dead late in a battle and you've got Sacrifice fodder for anything.

Once you've got access to Blood Priestesses from shops, you can basically ignore shop limits on any unit type you've gotten access to. (Exception: Spell-immune units are not valid targets) Even if your Blood Priestesses are, themselves, running out in shops, you just split them into two smaller stacks and have them bolster each other with Sacrifice! And remember: Demons and Archdemons both have reloading summoning Talents while Sacrifice itself is reloading, so if you can keep enemies stalled you can use a single battle to generate basically arbitrary numbers of units at once.

The one -fairly irritating- flaw with Blood Priestess Sacrifice is that the game doesn't tell you what the result is going to be the way the Spell does. You have to calculate it yourself, which makes it really easy to accidentally push a unit over your Leadership by just a little and have it start rampaging.

Aside the abusability of Sacrifice, though, Blood Priestesses are also a surprisingly decent combatant for being Yet Another 2-Speed Melee attacker, particularly for Neoline in the late game for most of the same reasons as Demonesses. (Neoline doesn't boost Blood Priestess Damage the way she boosts Demoness damage, hence 'most') Old Wounds lets them contribute right on the very first turn, and if you remember to save Spellslinging and/or Rage activation until after Old Wounds is up it can act as a defacto multiplier to their damage effectiveness (Remember: Bleeding lowers the max Health of the victim), while Long Attack lets them contribute hits without tripping counterattacks, and thanks to Frenzy it's not unusual for them to be able to spam it turn after turn. Against slower targets, particularly ones you further slow down, this can allow them to keep contributing in safety. And when you're really early in the game as Neoline, Blood Priestesses are actually just durable enough to get away with some facetanking without casualties resulting.

The one fairly irritating flaw with Blood Priestesses is that their damage range is very wide, making them very unreliable. If you're lucky enough to get Dark Bless really early on (Unlikely, but I've had it happen), you can offset this smoothly, but if you don't have it... they're prone to ending up in situations where they could have rolled high and wiped out a stack or weakened it enough its retaliation didn't cause casualties, but instead they roll low and take moderate casualties. This is aggravating enough I personally tend to stop using them past the early game, even once Connoisseur of Beauty has bolstered their relevance, but my experience is most people are a bit more tolerant of RNG being irritating so hey if you want to keep using them into the midgame feel free.

Minor oddity; I've struckthrough the Armored Ability name, because 'under the hood' Blood Priestesses don't have the Armored tag.  This means the Corrosion Spell can't target them, even though the in-game information indicates it should be able to.

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Next time, we wrap up the core Dark races with the Undead.