Dark Side Unit Analysis 5.2: More Neutral Sapients

Yeah, we're still on this. The Neutral Sapients post has always been a bit unwieldy, but Dark Side has a surprising number of new ones, on top of Neutral always having been the single largest category.

Amazon
Level: 4
Hiring Cost: 1100
Leadership: 180
Attack/Defense: 29 / 25
Initiative/Speed: 7 / 5
Health: 150
Damage: 12-18 Physical
Resistances: Generic
Talents: Rope Dart (Reload: 1. A single target enemy below Level 5 that is 2-5 clear tiles away is pulled 1 tile closer and takes 10-14 Physical damage with no chance to retaliate), Support (Reload: 3. Select an arbitrary ally. For the next 3 turns, the Amazon will automatically fire for 6-8 Physical damage on any units the targeted ally attacks without consuming its turn. Each time this effect triggers, its duration is reduced by 1)
Abilities: Shooter (Range: Hard 7), Claustrophobic (Attack is halved in underground battles), Retreat (The Amazon has a flat 30% chance to evade melee attacks. If this evasion triggers, the Amazon bounces back one tile and retaliates against her attacker. Additionally, the Amazon's 'standard' retaliation is an attempt to retreat 1 tile and retaliate with her ranged attack if possible)

Retreat is possibly the most blatantly buggy, ill-coded thing I've seen in the entirety of the series.

See, as far as I can tell, Retreat is a wacky special-casing effect whereby the Amazon's standard retaliation is 100% suppressed, and what the game actually does is determine whether she should retaliate, and if so she immediately takes an extra turn out of order to 'retaliate'. Amazon 'retaliations' can trigger Demonic Fury (Potentially allowing an Executioner to attack an absurd number of times when charging into a mob of Amazons), and this is true even if they're forced to hold still and perform a melee retaliation. Worse, they can even retaliate against area-of-effect melee attacks like Fury Attack that weren't aimed at them, so long as they were caught in the effect! Similarly, Orc Veteran's Counter-attack can't actually trigger on Amazons, even if you corner them, and an Archdemon who successfully rolls to teleport away without being counterattacked will actually be counterattacked before he gets to teleport. In fact, if you're paying close attention when an Amazon performs their melee retaliation, you can see the game clearly ignoring standard retaliation behavior: normally when a unit provokes a retaliation, their respective turn order/team control tags go away all the way from the attacker's move+attack starting up through to the defender's retaliation completing. When an Amazon 'retaliates' in melee, her attacker's tag and her tag will reappear for a split second before she attacks. (Curiously, her ranged 'retaliation' keeps the tags hidden for the whole period. I guess they paid more attention to the ranged retaliation behavior?)

Depending on what forces you're using, this distinction may fail to crop up at any point in a run, but if it does crop up it's hilarious-slash-horrifying, depending in part on what your forces specifically are.

The Evasion portion of Retreat also, as I laid out in the Ability description, is only able to trigger if the tile she'll 'bounce' into is clear. It's actually pretty rare to see it trigger in practice, due to how narrow the circumstances it can trigger in are. I actually like it, as it's an Evasion mechanic that can be bypassed with tactics and not-completely-arbitrary army composition, but it seems a bit of an odd choice, given the King's Bounty games have always been fairly hostile to the player using straight melee while enemy instances of such have mostly been the lowest-threat foes. Adding in an additional punishment to such seems unnecessary, and indeed one of the big points in Dark Side's favor is that it does a lot to make straight melee more acceptable for the player to make us of, so such a punishment also seems a bit out of line with Dark Side's design philosophy.

Another tangle of bugs connected to Retreat is that the Amazon is, for most purposes, effectively a No Melee Penalty unit; the in-game damage display is actually pointing at their melee attack, but normally this has the stats of their ranged attack for some reason. (So they end up correctly displaying their ranged attack anyway; yes, Dark Side is so buggy it sometimes arrives at roughly correct behavior via bugs layered atop bugs!) The only time they use their intended melee damage is if they get attacked in melee and can't retreat to use their ranged attack. In this narrow situation, they'll retaliate with a base of 6-9 Physical damage. (ie half their ranged damage)

As we covered back on the Orc Scout, Support's behavior is pretty weird too. This includes that though the Amazon's attack is susceptible to Bone's damage reduction, shots fired from Support bypass this.

Oh, and their Claustrophobic does nothing. You can be forgiven for overlooking this, though; enemy Amazons never show up underground, and Dark Side stacks almost all possible underground battles earlier than you're liable to get access to Amazons, making this bug practically a technicality.

An element of their behavior I'm not sure whether it's another bug or an awesome bit of attention to detail is that they're susceptible to Beauty Misses, and can even be Charmed by Demonesses and I would assume Dryads. Stealthy lesbianism mechanics or poor coding? No idea!

AI-wise, Amazons have the really noteworthy quirk of being one of those rare units that 'understands' moving and then using a fixed-angle ranged attack Talent. (Rope Dart) This stands out because Rope Dart is basically just the Guard Droid's Harpoon Talent, just with less pulling ability, and yet Guard Droids still don't understand they can use Harpoon after a move. In practice this is mostly a flaw, as Rope Dart is weaker than their normal ranged attack and the AI has no idea how to make use of the pulling effect per se. They'll occasionally luck into dragging one of your units into a Trap if you're careless, basically.

They also, completely unmentioned, have a hard range limit of seven, similar to eg Throwing Axemen, instead of the usual 'half damage beyond this range'. This is easily overlooked since they're so mobile, but it's one more oddity they have, and it's an oddity that makes them less appealing.

An additional issue that's easily overlooked is that they're not properly tagged as a ranged unit or archer by the game. This means they can't benefit from Precision even though they really ought to be able to, and that you can't gift them Dragon Arrows -even though they're explicitly coded to support Dragon Arrows otherwise. Oops.

Amazons also have the dubious honor of having uniquely awful sound tuning. There's other examples of units that can be obnoxiously more noisy than everything else -Wolves and Werewolf Elves in wolf form have always been guilty of this with their 'hover over' animation involving a moderately loud howl, and in Dark Side Orcs and Veteran Orcs both have an annoyingly loud laugh they play when they use their potion Talent and when they land a finishing blow. Amazons? They play an annoyingly loud set of sounds constantly in their idle animation. It's a bit of a blessing they're only found on Amazonia as enemies and are of questionable utility in player hands, really.

I do think they're an interesting unit idea as far as their capabilities, but the implementation is awful.

In their favor, Amazons are a bizarrely tough ranged unit, with a decent Leadership-to-Health ratio backed by their Evasion Ability, and since they're female units they'll also benefit from Connoisseur of Beauty. Their damage potential is also fairly solid if Support is leveraged to its fullest effect. It's just... they're incredibly buggy, and usage of them is actually fairly boring and straightforward.

Dragon Rider
Level: 5
Hiring Cost: 100,000
Leadership: 1500
Attack/Defense: 64 / 64
Initiative/Speed: 6 / 7
Health: 900
Damage: 100-110 Fire
Resistances: 10% Physical, 50% Magic, 80% Fire
Talents: Dive (Reload: 1. The Dragon Rider lands in an arbitrary chosen open tile. All grounded enemies take Physical damage, starting from a base of 80-100 and losing 10% of the damage per tile away from the impact point), Summon Dragons (Charge: 1. Summons 600 Leadership per Dragon Rider plus 40% of the the Hero's Leadership worth of a randomly chosen dragon type to any arbitrary open tile. These dragons can be Ice, Emerald Green, Red, or Black. They get to take their turn the same round they are summoned)
Abilities: Of The Dark, Flight, Breathes Fire (Attacks hit the target beyond the initial enemy and have a 50% chance of Burning each victim), Fire Immunity (80% Fire resistance and cannot be burned), Magic Resistance (50% Magic resistance and immune to Spells), Dragon Guardian (Allied dragons get +1 Morale)

Yes, that is a hundred thousand Gold for a single Dragon Rider. The closest competition previously was Rune Mages at 15,000 Gold, which was bonkers and still less than a fifth what a single Dragon Rider costs. This is also misleading in actual play, as you have to give a Princess or Fake Princess to Oncalogon for each Dragon Rider you want added to his shop. While you get a few Princesses from plot events, if you want any kind of mass-production you'll need to pay even more Gold into purchasing Fake Princesses galore.

I strongly suspect the original intention was for there to be an Of The Light Dragon Rider in addition to the Of The Dark Dragon Rider, as their portrait graphic is very evil-looking (Note the dragon's eyes being red dots inside black) and the color scheme has nothing to do with the in-game color scheme. The black underbelly? More a pale orange in the battle model. The riding princess? Pure white, no significant color to her outfit, certainly not the red highlights. Etc.

Mechanically, Dragon Riders also have two major unlisted qualities: first of all, they've completely impossible to heal, undo casualties on, or add to their numbers except via actual shop-based purchases. (Even Neoline's Recruiter will refuse to give you more Dragon Riders) Secondly, even though they don't have the Magic Immunity Ability, they're actually Spell-immune. (Me shoving Spell immunity onto Magic Resistance's description is not from the in-game description)

I like how Dive is a callback to Dragon Dive in Armored Princess, even if the actual animation looks... very awkward. Mechanically, note that Dragon Dive is basically the Giant's (classic) Earthquake; even though the in-game description doesn't mention this, and even the damage predictor will give you damage numbers for Flying enemies, it will actually do no damage whatsoever to Flying enemies. (And does only 30% damage to Soaring enemies)

Summon Dragons is the big reason to consider using Dragon Riders: it's actually a tremendous pain to have Dragon Riders up to your actual Leadership value (They're hideously expensive and further limited by the princess mechanic), but they can still pull their weight even down around 20% of your Leadership because their summon amount scales substantially with your Leadership and free dragons is pretty bonkers.

The mechanics of Summon Dragons' scaling are weird and have some unusual implications. First of all, their value is 'frontloaded'; say you have 15,000 Leadership, enough to lead 10 Dragon Riders. (Ignoring relevant Leadership cost reductions) If you hire one Dragon Rider, she'll summon 6,600 Leadership of dragons. If you then hire nine more, this will bring you to 12,000 Leadership of dragons being summoned; less than double the original number even though you have ten times as many Dragon Riders.

An extension of all this is that there's actually reason to consider splitting the stacks; two separate 1-member Dragon Rider stacks will generate 1200+80% of your Leadership, where one stack of 2 members will generate 1200+40% of your Leadership. This is particularly worth keeping in mind in the portion of the game where your Leadership can't support more than 5 Dragon Riders; if you can get the princesses and scrape up the gold for two Dragon Riders when you only have 3000 or so Leadership anyway, sacrificing an entire stack of some other unit to split your Dragon Riders is probably an overall improvement to your fighting strength.

Note that the number tuning on Summon Dragons is such that at base a full Dragon Rider stack that exactly matches your Leadership will summon 80% of your Leadership in dragons. If you have Connoisseur of Beauty maxed (And aren't Neoline), they will summon 100% of your Leadership in dragons, making them obviously superior to slotting in a random dragon directly -especially since their summoned dragons have the unusual behavior of getting a turn on the turn they were summoned! And if you are Neoline with your Skill tree maxed on top of Connoisseur of Beauty, they summon more than 120% of your (monstrously high!) Leadership.

On a different note, Summon Dragons has a completely unmentioned quality where its summon chances are tilted based on what kind of battlefield you're summoning in. By default the chance is equal (Aside a should-be-irrelevant fallback mechanic of summoning 1 Red Dragon if there's somehow not enough Leadership to summon any of the dragons), but Red and Black Dragons both have higher odds of appearing in volcanic battlefields and lower odds of showing up in snowy battlefields, Ice Dragons have higher odds of appearing in snow battlefields and lower odds of showing up in volcanic or underground battlefields (They have Claustrophobic, remember?), while Emerald Green Dragons have higher odds of appearing in forested battlefields and lower odds of appearing in volcanic battlefields.

Dragon Riders are very silly-powerful if you stick them out. Their insane price isn't even as much of a hurdle as you might expect late in a run; a run ends up with absurd amounts of gold lying around by the time it's in endgame.

I tend to have fun with Dragon Riders for a bit and then lose interest in them due to their sheer brokenness making things boring, unfortunately.

As enemies... is irrelevant, because Dragon Riders are never found on enemies in actual play. Strangely, there's a Hero who's Scouting information claims they have Dragon Riders, but when you actually fight them there's no Dragon Riders. As such, while Dragon Riders would hypothetically be pretty maddening in enemy hands, it doesn't matter.

Spy
Level: 2
Hiring Cost: 100
Leadership: 55
Attack/Defense: 10 / 16
Initiative/Speed: 3 / 2
Health: 45
Damage: 2-4 Physical
Resistances: 10% Physical, 10% Poison, 10% Magic, 10% Fire, 10% Ice
Talents: Fury Attack (Reload: 1. Attacks an enemy and both enemies to one side for 2-4 Physical damage. No friendly fire), Transformation (Reload: 3. The Spy turns into a little girl that's completely safe from harm, but which cannot directly attack. This form can set bombs on enemies. The transformation ends after the first of these bombs goes off)
Abilities: Night Vision (+50% Attack in underground and/or nighttime battles), Persistence of Mind (Immunity to mental effects), Known Enemy (Every attack made against a unit type increases the Spy's crit chance against that unit type by 20. This bonus is reset when a critical hit is made against the unit type)

The Spy in this form isn't a terrible unit, but it's not particularly great. That's not much of a problem because this form isn't the actual point of the Spy.

Spy (Girl)
Level: 2
Leadership: 55
Attack/Defense: 1 / 16
Initiative/Speed: 3 / 3
Health: 45
Damage: 0 Physical
Resistances: Generic
Talents: Transformation (Reload: 3. Manually returns to the bodybuilder form)
Abilities: Unarmed (Cannot perform normal attacks), Bomber (Attaches bombs to adjacent enemies instead of a normal attack. These bombs do 1-3 Physical damage per girl at attach time when they activate, hitting the unit and all adjacent units. Any such bomb activating reverts the Spy to their bodybuilder form), Invulnerable (Nothing can do damage to this unit), Night Vision (+50% Attack in underground and/or nighttime battles), Persistence of Mind (Immunity to mental effects), Known Enemy (Every attack made against a unit type increases the Spy's crit chance against that unit type by 20. This bonus is reset when a critical hit is made against the unit type)

This is.

Note that in this form the Spy can activate Traps, taking no damage but still losing their Action Points. This can be useful for 'mineclearing' if your own Traps from Trapper and Preparations are proving inconvenient.

The bombs they set are pretty literally just Kamikaze-the-Spell, but as an effect a unit can employ, for reference.

The Spy is a bizarre gimmick unit that is flagrantly overpowered if you're willing to mess around with the girl form's shenanigans. About the only reason it's not a massive gamebreaker problem is that the time it takes to get the Spy in range of enemies to start setting bombs and then wait for the bombs to go off is such a long wait before you get any kind of payoff that in real terms it's not worth the hassle. An army that includes Spies will almost always take longer to win a fight than one that replaces Spies with some other unit that isn't broken but deals good damage right away.

As far as abusive shenanigans goes, note that Level 3 Time Shift can be used to delay the bomb explosions. As such, you could, for example, field only Spies, go into girl form, set bombs on everything while they patiently wait for you to go back to muscleman form while using Time Shift to delay the initial explosions so you stay transformed long enough to set all the bombs, etc. It would be a slow way of doing things, but against plenty of formations it would be a way to kill very large enemy groups with no casualties.

Again, though; there's not really any reason to bother. Dark Side's difficulty tuning simply doesn't lead to situations in which the Spy is worth abusing, particularly since the hoops you have to jump through to unlock it in the first place mean that the portion of the game you'd be most likely to want to employ such abuses (Because you have limited Gold and the early game is fairly challenging) is also the portion you can't possibly have it.

As with Dragon Riders, you'll never see Spies in enemy hands, which is good because the invulnerable child form can actually stall forever, and having to let enemy Spies plant and detonate a bomb on your forces before you could start hurting them would be infuriating.

In summary: I kinda wish the Spy wasn't in the game at all.

Oh, and as bonus jank: they have the weird thing of claiming to have Night Sight but actually only getting an Attack underground, and Known Enemy is so badly bugged on them it simply doesn't work. Even if it wasn't bugged, it would still be janky, because transformation clears Known Enemy bonuses by default and the Spy has no special coding to escape this. As such, it wouldn't meaningfully exist on the girl form regardless, and the strongman form would lose any bonuses it had when transforming.

Metamorph
Level: 2
Hiring Cost: 100
Leadership: 50
Attack/Defense: 18 / 10
Initiative/Speed: 7 / 2
Health: 30
Damage: 2-4 Physical
Resistances: 10% Physical, 10% Poison, 10% Magic, 10% Fire, 10% Ice
Talents: Transformation (Reload: 2. Becomes a target arbitrary male humanoid unit that's below Level 5, purging all current effects and continuing its turn afterward. Not all units are eligible)
Abilities: Metamorph (+1 Morale), Daring (Scoring a critical hit increases Attack by 2 for the rest of a battle, to a max of +20 total), Nimble (Flat 20% chance for attacks to Miss the unit), Restoration (Purges all negative effects at the beginning of its turn)

The Metamorph is very buggy, its name in-game is often 'Metamorth', and it's just not worth the amount of work that goes into unlocking it and then making its shop source a Horde. Transformation also completely fails to mention that it's limited to male humanoids for its targets, contributing to the Metamorph being lackluster. Transformation claims that the Leadership will be the same after it transforms, but what I've seen is more like 40% of the Metamorph's Leadership post-transformation, and weirder yet when I finished a battle with the Metamorph transformed it inexplicably had 100-ish more Metamorphs than it had started the battle with. Among other odd results in regards to Leadership amounts or unit headcounts.

Also, the Transformation itself has other bugginess. For one thing, transforming can inexplicably trigger Transmute, even though nothing is dying. For another, while transformed the Metamorph's new form mechanically has a debuff that's important to the game tracking properly which unit is the Metamorph and all... a debuff you can dispel. This, unsurprisingly, has janky results if you do it, so... please don't?

It's sort of interesting exactly what happens if you do Dispel the debuff, in that apparently what the game is doing when the Metamorph transforms is shoving it into a tile off the battlefield, hiding it, skipping its turn, and generating as a new unit the unit it's ostensibly becoming. Dispelling the debuff can produce results like enemy ranged units attacking what looks like empty air outside the battleground, while the combat log informs you that Metamorphs got attacked and took damage. Note that you still won't be able to target these invisible Metamorphs. But seriously, you shouldn't do this, all the effects of it are pretty purely negative for the player.

If you want to use the Metamorph as a melee unit that ignores negative status effects (ie ignoring its transformation gimmick), it's not so bad, but it's also not anywhere near as good as Archdemons, and you should have access to them before you have access to the Metamorph. So... it's really difficult to justify actually using the Metamorph, period, in no small part due to the glitchiness, made worse by how tremendous of a pain it is to unlock it and make your supplies of it actually large enough to suit your Leadership. You can't properly complete the Metamorph Quest until you've got reasonably free reign of Atrixus, which is endgame material!

Note that while Daring will announce that it's triggered when a crit happens, their Attack won't actually rise. So that's another strike against them.

As with the Dragon Rider and Spy, the Metamorph is never seen in enemy hands. Well. I seem to recall fighting Metamorphs in a Keeper battle, but whatever. It'll never crop up in normal battles, for sure. So like the Spy, it might as well not exist.

Barbarian
Level: 2
Hiring Cost: 60
Leadership: 35
Attack/Defense: 10 / 8
Initiative/Speed: 5 / 3
Health: 30
Damage: 4-6 Physical
Resistances: Generic.
Talents: Berserker (Charge: 1. For 3 turns, the Barbarian has doubled Attack, Initiative, and crit chance, halved Defense, and goes out of control. This provides protection against mental effects as well. Does not end the Barbarian's turn)
Abilities: Hardened (+10% Ice resistance, and +50% Defense in snowy terrain), Vengeful (Once more than half the stack has died, the stack always crits)

Compared to Armored Princess, all that's happened is that they've replaced Resistant to Cold with Hardened (But inexplicably not gotten the Ice resistance they're supposed to have) and added in Vengeful.

I strongly suspect their information got ported and then nobody really paid attention to them, given among other points they lack the Ice resistance they should have.

Vikings-the-unit will generally be more useful, but Barbarians do at least have the advantage of being Neutral, where Vikings-the-faction impose (minor) Morale penalties on most Of The Dark units. So that's... something. I guess.

...

Honestly, not really. The only reason I can really imagine using Barbarians is because you haven't found Vikings as yet.

To be fair, the primary role barbarians serve in Dark Side is to act as the filthy barbarous males rebelling against their Amazon overlords: you'll almost never see them outside of Amazonia, and same for Raging Barbarians. Speaking of...

Berserker Raging Barbarian
Level: 2
Hiring Cost: 70
Leadership: 35
Attack/Defense: 20 / 4
Initiative/Speed: 6 / 3
Health: 30
Damage: 4-6 Physical
Resistances: Generic
Talents: Running (Charge: 1. +2 Action Points)
Abilities: Berserker (Unit is never under Hero control, and is immune to mental effects), Hardened (10% Ice resistance, and snowy battlefields increase Defense by 50%), Vengeful (Always crits when below 50% of original stack size)

Compared to their Armored Princess days, all that's changed is that Resistant to Cold has become Hardened... only they don't actually have the Ice resistance it should provide, so they're actually flatly worse than they were in Armored Princess. That and they've gotten a name change so there's not two Berserker units in the game.

As with the Barbarian, I suspect their data got ported with little double-checking.

I have difficulty imagining justifying using Raging Barbarians when the Berserker basically flatly invalidates them (You actually have control over Berserkers if you want control, and can go Berserk for even more stats, not to mention the shield bash and their growing resistances), with the only flaw being that Vikings are disliked by most Of The Dark forces. They're only a little disliked, at that, for the most part, so it barely matters.

I really don't get why Dark Side did this.

Robber
Level: 1
Hiring Cost: 50
Leadership: 20
Attack/Defense: 10 / 6
Initiative/Speed: 4 / 2
Health: 20
Damage: 2-4 Physical
Resistances: Generic.
Talents: Swift Stroke (Reload: 1. Attacks across an empty tile for 3-4 Physical damage, with no risk of retaliation), Greed (Charge: 1. Instantly teleports the Robber adjacent to a chosen chest. Does not end the turn or consume AP)
Abilities: Robber (Allied Humans of Level 1-2 that lack Robber suffer -1 to Morale), Greedy (+10 Morale for the rest of the battle after finishing off a stack)

They've lost their Human Abilities as well as their Trap protection.

Oh, and become Neutral instead of Human. Can't forget that. The curious thing is, there's a Dark Robber graphic! Take a look:

Pretty bleh, but a strong indication that switching Robbers to Neutral was a relatively late decision.

Robber's in-game description says they make 'humanoid' troops unhappy, suggesting it would make eg Elves unhappy, but the only 'change' is that the list has been expanded to include the Traitor versions of the affected Human troops.

I've already covered how in previous games the Robber struggles to justify itself over the Marauder, which struggles to justify itself over the snakes, particularly Royal Snakes, and none of that has changed. It's actually really unfortunate timing that Dark Side did shunt Robbers and Marauders into Neutral, because Dark Side has such extensive Traitor Human support that if Robbers and Marauders were still Human units I'd probably actually use them in Dark Side! As-is... missed opportunity, game. Alas.

Oh, and a bug/oversight shared with Marauders: the Robber Ability doesn't affect Witch Hunters/Mage Killers, even though they're now Level 2 Humans. Oops.

Marauder
Level: 2
Hiring Cost: 80
Leadership: 30
Attack/Defense: 12 / 8
Initiative/Speed: 6 / 2
Health: 30
Damage: 3-6 Physical
Resistances: Generic.
Talents: Swift Stroke (Reload: 1. Attacks across an empty tile for 3-6 Physical damage, with no risk of retaliation), Search (Charges: 2. Destroys a corpse the Marauder is standing on, and gives the owner Gold), Running (Charge: 1. +2 Action Points)
Abilities: Robber (Allied Humans of Level 1-2 that lack Robber suffer -1 to Morale), Greedy (+10 Morale for the rest of the battle after finishing off a stack)

Same story as Robbers: no more Human Abilities, no more Light Steps, and now they're Neutral. This includes that there's a Dark Marauder graphic in the files:



There's two things worth pointing out here: first of all, this looks pretty darn snazzy, and it's too bad it didn't make it into the actual game. Secondly, this UI graphic is still depicting them wielding the flail-things from The Legend, and not the knives Marauders have been wielding since Armored Princess, suggesting this may well be a direct edit of the Marauder UI graphic, rather than something made based on a Dark Marauder in-game model.

Not really anything to say I didn't cover with Robbers.

Guard Droid
Level: 4
Hiring Cost: 300
Leadership: 120
Attack/Defense: 25 / 25
Initiative/Speed: 6 / 3
Health: 100
Damage: 12 Physical
Resistances: 20% Physical, 80% Poison, -50% Magic
Talents: Harpoon (Reload: 1. Targets an enemy who is 2-5 tiles away in a straight line with no intervening obstacles. Drags it adjacent to the Guard Droid and attacks it for 10-14 Physical damage with no chance to counterattack)
Abilities: Shock (Basic melee attack has a 30% chance to Shock enemies), Mechanical (80% Poison resistance, -50% Magic resistance, cannot be Poisoned, Morale never changes, immune to Mind effects, cannot be healed or resurrected by most effects), Armor (20% Physical resistance), Eyeless (Immunity to Blind and Precision. Also can detect invisible creatures), Engineer's Accuracy (Unit never Misses)

Lost Beam of Light (It's worth mentioning Beam of Light was actually added by Orcs on the March), oh and BECAME NEUTRAL. Bizarrely, there's a Dark portrait...


... in the files and everything! In fact there's a Quest involving getting a Droid's help, which seems rather likely to have been intended to be how you'd get access to Dark Droids, or something in that vein.

Oh, and Mechanical doesn't seem to actually provide Poisoning immunity anymore. Have a screenshot:


Probably a bug. Dark Side has a lot of bugs like this. Surprisingly, Mechanical does block basically all mental effects.

Also missing from Mechanical: it claims that allied Dwarves and Zwergr will get +1 Morale from Mechanical presence, but... no such thing happens. Oops.

Also, they no longer list Engineer's Accuracy, but I'm still listing it because the functionality invisibly remains: they don't miss.

The fact that they're Neutral is actually overall inconvenient, as while Zwerg don't have as much support in Dark Side as the other Dark races, they still have overall more significant support than they've had in prior games. It's not like being Neutral gives Guard Droids particularly greater ability to mesh with armies; Droids themselves have always ignored Morale penalties (So you were able to freely mix them with Undead and Demons, who bothered Dwarves but didn't care themselves), and historically Elves are the only race that Dwarves pissed off. So all you've gained is the ability to combine them with Elves effortlessly. Hooray?

I've personally never given Guard Droids much of a whirl in Dark Side. They're primarily meant to operate alongside Dwarves/Zwergr, and in Dark Side those are pretty underwhelming, and if I want a unit with good Physical and Poison resistance that's melee and comparatively weak to Magic and capable of shrugging off casualties with some support, Ghosts or Cursed Ghosts fill that niche while being better-supported and accessible from earlier 100% reliably. Harpoon is the main point in their favor -and to be fair, Dark Side is the most Trapiriffic game in the series, so that's non-trivial.

Feel free to give 'em a shot yourself, is what I'm saying, but don't be surprised if they fail to impress.

Repair Droid
Level: 3
Hiring Cost: 250
Leadership: 80
Attack/Defense: 10 / 25
Initiative/Speed: 4 / 5
Health: 64
Damage (Ranged): 5-8 Physical

Damage (Melee): 10 Physical
Resistances: 20% Physical, 80% Poison, -50% Magic
Talents: Repair (Reload: 3. Heals and resurrects an adjacent Mechanical unit for 44 HP per Repair Droid in the healing stack)
Abilities: Flight, Archer (Range: 5), No Melee Penalty (Sort of), Mechanical (80% Poison resistance, -50% Magic resistance, cannot be Poisoned, Morale never changes, immune to mental effects, cannot be healed or resurrected by most effects), Armored (20% Physical resistance), Eyeless (Immunity to Blind and Precision. Also can detect invisible creatures)

Repair has actually been boosted 10%, but since there's no longer a Neatness/Artifactor boost, it's actually behind in practice, except on enemies of course oh and NOW THEY'RE NEUTRAL JUST LIKE GUARD DROIDS.


So too do they have a Dark portrait. It's even one that actually makes the model look different, instead of just the background!

Incidentally, AI Repair Droids will almost never use Repair on allies. As in, I've seen it happen once.

Like Guard Droids, Repair Droids suffer some from being intended to be used alongside Dwarves/Zwergr when that race is pretty bad in Dark Side, and the switch to Neutral is overall inconvenient. Unlike Guard Droids, Repair Droids don't actually have clean competition; there's still no Flying ranged unit to push them aside, and that's a useful set of qualities.

I personally don't use them in Dark Side, as battles tend to be over quick enough I'd rather have more lethal ranged attackers, but you might find they're worth a whirl. And if you're fielding them anyway, then hey, maybe you'll find Guard Droids worth the bother too.

Also, they continue to have the strange behavior of their melee damage being secretly both non-random and higher than their ranged damage. As Dark Side has overhauled crits, there's now not even a qualifier of 'fixed aside crits'. So keep that in mind when using or fighting them.

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Next time, we move on to the Light races. And their Dark counterparts, because that's a thing in Dark Side.