Troops

Strength, counters, speed and training cost for every unit. Health is always three times strength, counter bonuses multiply by 1.5 per tier, and speed drops as tiers rise.

Guardsmen11 lines · 32 unitsSpecialists12 lines · 33 unitsEngineer Corps3 lines · 9 unitsMonsters4 lines · 28 unitsMercenaries52 units · hired, housed by Authority

Health is 3x Strength for guardsmen, specialists and monsters; 6x for engineer corps. Counter bonuses multiply by 1.5 per tier within a line. Speed drops as tier rises. Initiative is 10 on every unit. Specialists double their Strength in battle against another player. Engineer corps hit fortifications 20x harder and gain +5 initiative in a siege. Monsters are grouped by race: each race is a ladder of seven creatures, tiers III to IX. Monsters use Dominion instead of Leadership and train with Silver plus Dragon Coins.

Commonly believed

Specialists have no business in an attack on an epic.

Only while you are small. Under guard 5 there is too little Leadership to field them and Aydae's guardsmen bonus is worth more than the extra layer. From guard 5, or once S5 opens, they belong in the stack: their counters against monsters are weaker than a guardsman's but they are not nothing, and every extra layer buys the guardsmen behind it another round of swings. It is also why a bonus over the whole army beats one over guardsmen alone — most of what an army hits with is specialists and monsters, not guardsmen.

Never take siege engines on a raid, a heroic or an epic.

Per point of Leadership and per coin spent, a catapult's base strength is close to a guardsman or specialist one tier below it. What it lacks is a counter worth having — and so does a flying stack against everything in a vault that is not mounted. Against an epic they are useful precisely because they are expendable: they take the first blow and the rest of the army does not. The real cost is the marching speed.