Armored Princess Unit Analysis Part 7: Neutral Animals

I'm still breaking up Neutral into 2 posts, naturally.

There's more effects in Armored Princess that target 'beasts', such as the Orc Hunter's Hunter Ability, and it's a... pretty random list. For reference, the units classed as such are: Lake Dragonflies, Fire Dragonflies, Unicorns, Black Unicorns, Werewolf Elves in wolf form, regular Wolves, Hyenas, Bears, Ancient Bears, Polar Bears, Snakes, Swamp Snakes, Royal Snakes, Griffins, and Royal Griffins. (Not Angelic Guard, oddly)

Neutral of course remains indifferent to racial Morale.

Bear

Level: 3

Hiring Cost: 160

Leadership: 70

Attack/Defense: 14 / 16

Initiative/Speed: 2 / 2

Health: 60

Damage: 7-10 Physical

Resistances: -10% Fire

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

Abilities: Brutality (Doubles Attack for the next attack or until 2 turns have passed pretty much anytime damage is suffered), Hibernation (If the Bear fails to take any action on its turn, such as by Waiting without moving, it falls asleep. On its next turn, the 'top' member of the stack heals to full, and the turn after that they get an actual turn)

It's technically lost Critical Attack. Technically. That's just a consequence of Armored Princess having the UI now include critical hit rate, though.

Bears themselves aren't much different than in The Legend, context-wise. They're still a 2-Speed Running melee unit with no utility effects, which can dish out fairly impressive damage and take fairly impressive damage, but takes casualties in the process and is overall inferior to Ancient Bears and Polar Bears. In theory Paladins having Resurrection-the-Skill gives them a bump up in potential, but Bears are at their most viable early in the game, long before you've got any chance of getting a hold of Resurrection ranks, and there's so many other units that honestly benefit more from Resurrection anyway. I guess it's worth mentioning that they benefit from the Orc Tracker's Speed boost? But so do a fair few other units that are still probably more nifty to utilize.

Ancient Bear

Level: 3

Hiring Cost: 240

Leadership: 80

Attack/Defense: 18 / 20

Initiative/Speed: 3 / 2

Health: 70

Damage: 9-12 Physical

Resistances: 10% Physical, -10% Fire

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

Abilities: Brutality (Doubles Attack for the next attack or until 2 turns have passed pretty much anytime damage is suffered), Hibernation (If the Ancient Bear fails to take any action on its turn, such as by Waiting without moving, it falls asleep. On its next turn, the 'top' member of the stack heals to full, and the turn after that they get an actual turn)

Just like Bears, they've technically lost Critical Attack, but whatever.

Unlike Bears, they've also lost their weird, hidden Defense boost in snowy environments. It's not missed.

Polar Bear

Level: 4

Hiring Cost: 540

Leadership: 150

Attack/Defense: 22 / 26

Initiative/Speed: 4 / 2

Health: 130

Damage: 12-22 Physical

Resistances: 10% Physical, -10% Fire

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

Abilities: Brutality (Doubles Attack for the next attack or until 2 turns have passed pretty much anytime damage is suffered), Hibernation (If the Polar Bear fails to take any action on its turn, such as by Waiting without moving, it falls asleep. On its next turn, the 'top' member of the stack heals to full, and the turn after that they get an actual turn), Resistant to Cold (Takes 25% less damage from 'cold' damage sources, cannot be Frozen, and snowy battlefields increase Defense by 50%)

Like the Bear and Ancient Bear, 'Critical Attack' is technically gone, but it doesn't mean anything. They've also randomly picked up 10 extra Health, which makes the best bear even more superior to its fellow bears. Resistant to Cold more or less balances out from a Mage perspective, as while Higher Magic's reworking means you'll almost never want to use Ice Snake anyway, Geyser has been substantially buffed in Armored Princess, helping keep it relevant for much of the game, at least prior to acquiring eg Black Hole.

So yeah, overall basically the same. There is the very narrow consideration that your own Polar Bears have a slightly worse matchup against Bowmen now that AI Bowmen get Flaming Arrows, but honestly probably a more relevant point is how their slight Fire weakness makes them that little bit more susceptible to Burn, since it's now percentile.

Cave Spider

Level: 1

Hiring Cost: 24

Leadership: 14

Attack/Defense: 4 / 4

Initiative/Speed: 2 / 3

Health: 14

Damage: 2-4 Physical

Resistances: 20% Physical, -10% Fire

Talents: Web (Charge: 1. Ensnares an adjacent target below Level 5 with a web for 2 turns, preventing the unit from leaving its current tile or using Talents that involve moving)

Abilities: Underground (+50% Attack in underground combat), Stone Skin (20% Physical resistance)

It's hard to tell, but they have a new graphic. Smaller eyes and stuff. Redder legs. Etc.

Oh, and they're even worse as units now, because Web fails against Level 5 units now.

I have no idea why the developers decided to make an already-awful unit even worse.

Venomous Spider

Level: 1

Hiring Cost: 20

Leadership: 12

Attack/Defense: 5 / 1

Initiative/Speed: 4 / 3

Health: 12

Damage: 2-3 Poison

Resistances: 80% Poison, -10% Fire

Talents: None

Abilities: Venomous (50% chance for melee attacks to Poison for 3 turns), Immune to Poison (80% Poison resistance, cannot be Poisoned)

+2 Health. Still one of the worst units in the game, though at least unlike Cave Spiders they're not being made even worse.

Fire Spider

Level: 2

Hiring Cost: 60

Leadership: 30

Attack/Defense: 12 / 12

Initiative/Speed: 6 / 3

Health: 30

Damage: 4-5 Fire

Resistances: 50% Poison, 25% Fire

Talents: Web (Charge: 2. Ensnares an adjacent target below Level 5 with a web for 2 turns, preventing the unit from leaving its current tile or using Talents that involve moving)

Abilities: Poison Protection (50% Poison resistance), Fire Resistance (25% Fire resistance), Persistence of Mind (Immunity to mental effects), Flaming (Melee attackers always Burn, if possible)

Their melee has switched to Fire from Physical and they've picked up Flaming, as well as +3 to Health. Fire Spiders were already the best Spider, but now they're even better! (Except for Web no longer working on Level 5 enemies) I especially like Flaming for how it's a very distinctive Ability, even as I hate fighting it. It does bother me that Flaming is one more reason to avoid using proper melee units in a game that already discourages such, but it's still something that makes the Fire Spider interesting instead of merely a superior version of the other spiders.

Its simultaneous resistance to Poison and Fire damage also means it's a fairly notable unit for the fact that it resists both primary sources of percentile damage, making outsized stacks of Fire Spiders unusually threatening in Armored Princess. Most units can be fairly readily torn down to more manageable numbers by Poisoning and/or Burning them. Fire Spiders you'll ideally need to hit with Ball of Lightning to wear them down swiftly.

Note that Flaming doesn't trigger on counterattacks. It's okay to eg leave a Cyclops in their strike zone if you don't expect the attack itself to be inflicting casualties. On the other hand, many Talents will still trigger it, including area-of-effect ones! So too does the Cerberus' Three-Headed Ability trigger a Burn regardless of what the original target is. Even the Assassin's Backstab counts as a melee attack for this purpose! As such, Fire Spiders can be shockingly punishing for a melee-focused force, even if it's normally a force that can arrange for zero casualties. Note that reach attacks like the snake series of units have don't actually trigger Flaming, regardless of what you might intuitively expect.

Also interesting is that if a unit has at least 80% Fire resistance, it ignores Flaming. That is, if you have the ability to equip Items for a total of +30 to Fire resistance, then you can be having units with a natural 50% Fire resistance (eg Demons) ignore Flaming entirely. This is a bit limited given you have to find Items that provide Fire resistance and not many do; it's entirely possible for a run to end up not finding any before it's cleared out all the Fire Spiders in the world. But if you do get the option, it's nice to know it exists.

I personally don't tend to use the Fire Spider, but it's certainly got potential, especially if you're playing a Paladin anyway and so will eventually want a 'disposable' suicide attacker of some kind.

Snake

Level: 1

Hiring Cost: 70

Leadership: 30

Attack/Defense: 14 / 8

Initiative/Speed: 5 / 2

Health: 30

Damage: 3-6 Physical

Resistances: 50% Poison

Talents: Strike (Reload: 1. Attacks a single target across an empty tile, doing 4-7 Physical damage and Stunning the target)

Abilities: Poison Protection (50% Poison resistance)

+2 Health. Also, Lunge has been renamed to Strike for whatever reason. I think Lunge made more sense, but sure, whatever. I'm perfectly happy to see Snakes buffed a little, though they didn't really need it. To be fair, Armored Princess seems to have buffed Health in general, possibly to try to reduce the power of spells, which were very dominating back in The Legend.

A more significant point, particularly extremely early in Orcs on the March, is that Orc Trackers are a reliable way of boosting their Speed. 3 Speed is huge when you've got Strike, letting Snakes contribute significantly without having to risk taking any damage, so long as you're okay with them attacking every other turn. This was already an option in The Legend through Snake Boots, but there was no guarantee you'd actually get them in a run, let alone early enough to seriously pay off -plus, you can absolutely stack them with Orc Trackers if you're lucky enough to get them that early. 4 Speed Snakes is astonishingly good for a good chunk of the early game, and even later in the game they're still usable so long as your supply of Orc Trackers remains usable. If you're taking advantage of the Military Academy system, you can upgrade regular Orcs into Orc Trackers, so that's less on the whims of the RNG than it first sounds.

Swamp Snake

Level: 2

Hiring Cost: 60

Leadership: 28

Attack/Defense: 12 / 8

Initiative/Speed: 4 / 2

Health: 28

Damage: 3-5 Poison

Resistances: 80% Poison

Talents: Strike (Reload: 1. Attacks a single target across an empty tile for 4-6 Poison damage, and Poisons the target)

Abilities: Venomous (30% chance for melee attacks to Poison for 3 turns), Immune to Poison (80% Poison resistance, cannot be Poisoned)

+3 Health. Uh. Yay? That doesn't really address the Swamp Snake's actual problems (Which can be summarized as: Royal Snakes exist), but it's... something? I'd really have liked something to actually set them apart from Royal Snakes, personally. 

Trackers bolstering their Speed does give you more cause to consider using them, particularly at the beginning of the game when your troop options are so limited you might genuinely lack better choices, but their core problems remain, and in fact Armored Princess has arguably made it worse: since Poisoning does percentile damage now, the hypothetical utility Swamp Snakes offer against Physically-resistant units is even less relevant than it was in The Legend, since in the early stages of more difficult battles most of the damage will be done through Poisoning damage whether you're talking a Swamp Snake or Royal Snake.

Royal Snake

Level: 3

Hiring Cost: 220

Leadership: 60

Attack/Defense: 18 / 18

Initiative/Speed: 6 / 3

Health: 64

Damage: 6-10 Physical

Resistances: 10% Physical, 80% Poison

Talents: Strike (Reload: 1. Attacks a single target across an empty tile for 8-11 Physical damage, and Poisons the target)

Abilities: No retaliation, Venomous (30% chance for melee attacks to Poison for 3 turns), Immune to Poison (80% Poison resistance, cannot be Poisoned)

+12 Health. That's a roughly 20% increase! That aside, they're unchanged, but that's just fine, they were great back in The Legend anyway. They are less notably amazing an Initiative tier, with many units they used to tie with or beat having jumped ahead of them and new units existing above them as well, but honestly they're overall even more amazing since Orc Trackers provide a reliable means to get their Speed up and now Poisoning targets will rapidly wear them down with percentile damage, letting them incidentally work around serious Physical resistance on eg Knights. There's better units for reliably inflicting percentile damage effects, but Royal Snakes remain a nice mix of positive qualities.

Truthfully, the main strike against them is that Grand Strategy discourages risking any casualties at all for a while, and Royal Snakes were, in The Legend, better as a low casualty unit than as a no casualty unit, since it's impractical to actually keep them from taking any hits at all in most battles. At the very beginning of the game, they're durable enough to tank the occasional hit without risking a casualty, but it doesn't take long for such scrapes to be basically guaranteed to be costing you a step toward Grand Strategy.

Of course, once you have Grand Strategy maxed, this stops being an issue and they become a very solid choice once again.

Wolf

Level: 2

Hiring Cost: 60

Leadership: 30

Attack/Defense: 10 / 6

Initiative/Speed: 5 / 3

Health: 24

Damage: 3-6 Physical

Resistances: -10% Fire

Talents: Wolf Cry (Charge: 1. All enemy Humans, Elves, and Dwarves of Level 1-2 are hit with Fear, and additionally have a 50% chance of skipping their next turn entirely)

Abilities: Night Sight (+50% Attack at night and/or in underground battles), Rabid (10% chance to inflict Frenzy for 1 turn on melee attacks against units of Levels 1-3. Frenzied units are hostile to all units, but the effect ends after the first time they attack something)

+9 Health, and Frenzy has been renamed to Rabid, which is admittedly less confusing than having Frenzy inflict Frenzy without the base unit having the Frenzy it's inflicting with its Frenzy. Now Rabid inflicts Frenzy and there's no linguistic confusion. They still suffer from being basically flatly worse than wolf-form Werewolf Elves, but they're less thoroughly awful. I respect the attempt, anyway.

It does also technically help that the Tolerance Skill doesn't exist anymore and so if you want, for some reason, to combine Demons with Wolf Cry/Rabid/etc, then Wolves are your only option for avoiding Morale problems. This is pretty narrow and I can't think of a reason why you would want to combine Wolves with Demons in particular, but it's there.

Probably a bigger help is the Orc Tracker's presence in conjunction with Armored Princess making Elves dislike Orcs, as while Werewolf Elves in wolf form benefit from the Orc Tracker's passive Speed boost just like Wolves the Werewolf Elves will have their Morale suffer from the Orc Tracker presence where Wolves will be perfectly content. 

Hyena

Level: 2

Hiring Cost: 40

Leadership: 20

Attack/Defense: 12 / 14

Initiative/Speed: 6 / 3

Health: 18

Damage: 3-4 Physical

Resistances: -10% Fire

Talents: Preparation (Reload: 1. The Hyena's next attack automatically crits. Does not end the turn)

Abilities: Night Sight (+50% Attack at night and/or in underground combat), Scavenger (Can move up to 2 tiles beyond current movement range, if there's a corpse to move to)

+2 Initiative, +4 Attack and +6 Defense, and +4 Health. That does a lot to make them useful, and indeed I've made use of them on occasion when playing Armored Princess, unlike The Legend, where I only used them out of curiosity. Scavenger's mechanics haven't changed any that I've noticed, which is a bit unfortunate, and they're undesirable early in the game when you're still working on Grand Strategy ranks, but these caveats don't cancel out the boost in their actual utility.

They're yet another unit that benefits from the Orc Tracker, as well, so that's a relatively stealthy boost to their utility, and of course Paladins can get away with using them fairly cavalierly.

It's also worth pointing out that their effectiveness is a bit more stable than in The Legend, as well, since critical hits no longer have their damage modifier scaled by your Rage percentage. In practice this is probably a bit of a stealth buff to them, as back in The Legend the Warrior was the only class that could realistically find itself routinely at/near max Rage, and while Rage is easier to come by in Armored Princess it's also entirely possible to burn through it rapidly. (Particularly if you're a Mage, somewhat weirdly) As such, Preparation being a consistent 150%-of-max-roll damage hit is probably an overall increase in their expected/typical damage.

Devilfish

Level: 1

Hiring Cost: 20

Leadership: 12

Attack/Defense: 6 / 4

Initiative/Speed: 7 / 3

Health: 10

Damage: 1-3 Physical

Resistances: 20% Fire

Talents: None

Abilities: Marine (+2 Morale in naval combat), Fire Resistance (20% Fire resistance), Night Sight (+50% Attack at night and/or underground), Terrible (30% chance for melee attacks to inflict Fear for 2 turns on the target. Only works against units below Level 4. Victims will fail to retaliate against an attack that inflicts Fear), Fish Bite (Enemies struck in melee have +40% crit chance for 4 turns. Droids are immune to this effect)

Fish Bite has replaced Critical Attack (Which is to say they've gained a new Ability in actual fact, same situation as bears 'losing' Critical Attack), they've gained even more Initiative (+1), and... that's it. And Fish Bite just makes them worse units. 'kay.

Their new Initiative tier is actually pretty amazing, admittedly. There's precious few units that go before them normally, particularly early in the game when most of the units that beat them out just plain don't exist. If you're dead-set on always getting the first move in a turn, Devilfish can fill a valuable role for a decent chunk of the game, assuming you don't luck into Snake Boots such that Royal Snakes are better. They're also one of the stronger examples of a unit that significantly benefits from the Paladin's Resurrection Skill, as you're not reliant on pure luck to avoid offensive action costing you money, making it easier to justify going for melee attacks while hoping for such Fear triggers.

Devilfish are a particularly unintuitive example of the series not considering a unit to be animals; they won't get Initiative from having a blue baby dragon, for example, nor do Orc Trackers passively boost their Speed, even though they're presented as regular (albeit vicious) fish. Which is pretty unfortunate for Devilfish, given a blue dragon is really the best choice and brings Royal Snakes to equal to Devilfish in Initiative; 7 Initiative and 3 Speed is really good, but for the player Royal Snakes probably are at least those values while having really desirable qualities like (reliable) No Enemy Retaliation. This doesn't completely obviate Devilfish utility, but... ouch.

Lake Dragonfly

Level: 1

Hiring Cost: 12

Leadership: 9

Attack/Defense: 3 / 1

Initiative/Speed: 6 / 4

Health: 7

Damage: 1-3 Poison

Resistances: 30% Magic

Talents: None

Abilities: Soaring, Weakness (Melee attacks have a 30% chance to inflict Weakness on the target for 1 turn), Magic Resistance (30% Magic resistance), Paralyzes (Melee attacks have a chance of taking away the target's entire supply of Action Points. This chance is 50/40/30/20/10% against Level 1/2/3/4/5 creatures)

+1 Health, and they've picked up Paralyzes. This... mostly serves to make them obnoxious to fight, as relying on a glass cannon that lacks No Retaliation is a pretty terrible idea for the player if you're not providing it significant support. It would be pretty cool if the game had a buff to just give any random unit No Retaliation temporarily, but as-is, it just means enemy Lake Dragonflies can randomly be even more annoying. The obvious exception is of course if you're playing a Paladin they can be okay, but Paralyzes isn't reliable enough to really make them all that appealing compared to several of the other 'good with Skill Resurrection' units.

Fire Dragonfly

Level: 1

Hiring Cost: 14

Leadership: 10

Attack/Defense: 4 / 1

Initiative/Speed: 5 / 3

Health: 8

Damage: 2-3 Fire

Resistances: 30% Fire

Talents: Haste (Reload: 1. Doubles Action Points, using supply at activation. Does not end the turn)

Abilities: Soaring, Fire Resistance (+30% Fire resistance)

+1 to Leadership cost, +1 to minimum damage, +2 to Health, +1 to attack. That's a good 33% increase in overall durability, and more consistently good damage as well as slightly higher damage in general. The bump up in their Leadership cost partially offsets these boosts, but I'm overall fine with that, as it means enemy Dragonfly stacks aren't too horribly difficult to smite compared to The Legend.

Context-wise, they've been hurt a bit by the new Fire damage units: in The Legend, they were one of three units that did Fire damage with its primary attack. (Not counting summons) The other two were dragons, and thus weren't accessible to the player until quite late in the game, ensuring the Fire Dragonfly had a niche in at least non-Mage armies. In Orcs on the March, they're one of six Fire damage units, and all the new Fire damage units are low-to-middling Leadership, meaning Fire Dragonflies no longer have a monopoly on early-to-midgame Fire damage. Plus, Thorns aren't anywhere near as common an early-game opponent, so early Fire damage isn't even as useful to the player anyway.

The overall result is that even though they're overall a better unit if you just compare statlines between the games, you're actually a lot less likely to use them in real terms. That's a bit sad, and it's particularly striking how Fire Dragonflies weren't given a notable new Ability in the way Lake Dragonflies were. Paralyzes isn't that good, but it's a pretty clear attempt to give the Lake Dragonfly something unique to justify using it over other units. The Fire Dragonfly has... its Haste Talent, I guess?

It's also worth pointing out they're actually less of a hurdle to Mages than in The Legend, for the same basic reason as Demons: your best/most spammable Spells are no longer dominated by Fire Spells.

------------------------

I sort of wish Armored Princess had done a bit more to make animals distinctive, give them something that helps justify using them in spite of their propensity for being fairly generic melee lacking No Retaliation etc, but it's certainly nice to see a pretty consistent attempt to make them more relevant, given how serious their problems were in The Legend.

Next time, we wrap up Neutral with the Neutral Sapients.