LIFE Realm

[Seravy]

Now that we addressed the problem of ores, we are back to the question : "should Tactician and Warlord stack?".

Let's try to summarize...

Pro
-Artificial restrictions are indeed annoying and should be avoided unless absolutely necessary
-Not that powerful for heroes as they can stack a lot of other great effects or abilities
-Adamant is better on normal units We fixed this problem, it's now too rare to rely on that.


Con
-Hard not to notice the parallel between this and Spellweaver+Archmage. Both are a pair of 1 and 2 cost retorts that do the same thing in a slightly different way and were designed to offer alternatives, not the ability to stack them.
-Hard to imagine picking only Warlord without tactician since once we commit to low book high retort (warlord costs 2) it's better to go all the way on that strategy.
-Stacking buffs on heroes is a problem if it happens in a reliable way in the early game and the retorts do contribute to that.
-Nothing else in the game provides a major buff to normal units in the early game.
-Encourages picking fewer books and more retorts
-Encourages using normal units instead of magic, in fact powers them up enough that winning without using magic becomes possible.
-Sapher seems to pick the retorts together a lot which is the same as what I would do for Lunatic. It's hard to argue "these retorts don't work well together" after seeing the results.
-It's actually 3 retorts stacking, as Alchemy also provides early game military benefits indirectly (you don't need the alchemist guild).
-Normal units, while not as powerful as magic and summons, are the most abundant and frequent type of unit you'll use in a game. Buffing them is a much more powerful effect than buffing other aspects of the game due to the sheer volume of impact. As the stats on the units isn't that high, and normal units tend to have increasing returns in this range of stats, the impact of the stat gain is higher than you'd expect as well. (stacking defense or attack both have increasing returns at these low values.)
-Having to choose between the retort contributes to the diversity of the game and makes it more interesting. You could either get a stronger buff for normal units only, or a less powerful buff but with the extra benefit of buffing fantastic units while being still about the same for heroes, and only spending half as many picks, instead of the less interesting "I want both, if I'm already spending 2, might as well do the full 3".

These are my current thoughts.

[Nelphine]

I don't consider tactician strong enough to make it into my current life buff stacking pure city troops game. Alchemy doesn't even make it in, bring on par with specialist, and both of those being dropped if I want myrran.

Taking warlord plus holy armor is literally better than tactician (assuming you've already chosen 3 life books for the more important life buffs), except it costs overland, and it gets you extra very rare spells.


So, for city troop games, you don't actually impact them all that much except maybe in the ultra early game - any game that expects to see the AI use a significant number of uncommons (or better) will see no impact if the combo is removed. 


Therefore, taking the combo out makes NON life city troop games harder (which is bad for diversity), doesn't impact the best city troop strategies, and badly hurts people who do want to focus almost entirely on heroes (say on advanced or lower, where they actually don't want to use summons of city troops in any offensive role.)


Therefore, I still have to vehemently say, removing the combo does not fix the problems you claim it creates. At the highest level of play it merely shifts them while denying other playstyles that might occur particularly at lower difficulties.

[Seravy]

So basically the nerf wouldn't affect Life you say, but would work for everyone else, but only Life needs the nerf and everyone else does not.

I disagree. If everyone else needs a specific 2 combo retort to play normal troops that's already very bad - assuming normal troops is an existing strategy for those realms.

But playing normal troops isn't a main strategy if you aren't playing Life. It's a means to fill out the gaps in your main strategy - provide early game options, fill garrisons, that sort of things. There are of course a few non-Life spells in the game that allow playing normal troop strategies with other realms - Chaos can do it using Doom Mastery, Chaos Channels and Flame Blade for example, there are likely others. But most realms are not about normal troops and if you can play normal troops as your main strategy in the realms not meant to do that, it shows there are problems.
Basically, if you can get normal troops to be as strong as a main strategy with other realms, AND still have 9 picks left for books or whatever your actual main strategy is, it means these retorts allow you to play two main strategies at once and be twice as powerful as intended.
Do we really need Sorcery wizards to conquer half the map in the early game using these retorts?
Do we really need Death to conquer half the map using them and the other half using their very powerful summons and undead creation, doubling their expansion potential?
Do we really need Nature to get a strong normal troop strategy going while they still invested 1 pick into buffing their summons, their actual main strategy? (Tactician)
Do we really need Chaos to get a strong early game using these retorts, then capitalize on them when reaching their doom mastery+chaos surge+warp reality combo which puts them on the same level as Life, except with the added ability to destroy anything with spells?

Another question to think about : Tactician wasn't in the original game. My design intention wasn't to add something that stacks with Warlord, there was no need as it was powerful enough, even bordering too powerful but barely on the "safe" side - quite the opposite, to provide a weaker alternative for fewer picks, that reduces the frequency of warlord usage and provides a 1 pick alternative.
I feel the opposite is happening, instead of fewer picks spent on military/early game retorts, even more are spent on it, because they stack.

Also, I still think Warlord is a horrible pick for playing heroes. It costs 2 but provides less benefit than any 2 other hero retorts, or even books, combined. Famous, Tactician, Artificer and either an extra book or a retort that helps whichever spells you use to support the heroes, is better. For example, instead of Warlord you can have 2 Sorcery which gives you +5 resistance, missile immunity, blur, and a high chance of spell lock. Or you can have 2 chaos for a chance of Chaos Channels. 2 extra books also enhances your ability to make items significantly, opening up possibilities like Wraith Form or Invisibility or Haste items.
Where Warlord is good for heroes is, it boosts your other normal troops a lot, cancelling out the disadvantage of playing heroes - having strong forces in limited locations. But cancelling out the weakness isn't really what we are after from a design viewpoint, in fact it's bad if the players can do that.

In the end, Warlord+Tactician does only two things - for any strategy that has the weakness of troop presence, or a slow early game, it cancels those weaknesses. For any strategy that is already strong at those, it amplifies that strength more than what was possible in the base game and likely more than what is desirable. Both of these are pretty much undesired effects. Obviously the retorts do the same even if you only pick one of them, but the ability to pick both pushes the game towards this unwanted direction.

[Nelphine]

Right but you miss the main point. We don't play the game to play what is intended - that's why versatility is a thing.

If I want to play nature city troops, this combo let's me do that, along with transmute. I still won't be as good as life, but I can, and even if I invert later to summons, that's still wasting 2 picks on warlord that doesn't help the main strategy.  So life is still better at the exact same strategy, and didn't pick tactician in the first place. So taking the option away from nature is meaningless - it isn't as strong as life, and it doesn't add anything to nature that nature couldn't get anyway, so the only thing it does is let nature players choose a different playstyle than expected, and still functional effectively.

That's the definition of a good choice.

The same can be said for chaos and death, as chaos actually have some city troop strategies, but not generally enough to play successfully, and death have stronger early game in the way nature does so all it does is let those 2 realms play off strategies.

Sorcery is a little more difficult to say, as they are designed as a weak early realm and don't have anything else to boost city troops. However, I don't think 'that doesn't feel great' for one realm is worth removing the option for 3 other realms, particularly when using any of those 4 realms with the combo, you're still weaker than just playing life without the combo.


So in the end, yes it balances a weakness - at great cost, that won't let you win the game any better than choosing some other strategy.

For me this is the same as sprites - it looks scary, but it's not the real culprit. Warlord by itself does everything you described and in fact that's what we wanted, and is why sorcery wizard default to warlord - to shore up early game weakness.

At the end of the day it should be prohibited for one of two reasons:

Either balance reasons because it allows winning faster than with some other strategy - this does not, you could choose a life buff city troop strategy and be better, so I don't see a balance reason to prohibit it.

Or for fun reasons - this would need to remove fun, but by definition removal of choices is removing gameplay options, so I don't see a fun gameplay reason to do.

The only place where it's reasonable to remove is for Heroes, but heroes are generally extremely overpowered, and this combo is a relatively minor piece - and for someone who likes playing dungeon crawling on normal or advanced, losing that combo is a much bigger loss for fun gameplay, and still doesn't fix anything for expert+ balance that abusing heroes in other ways can't do.

[Seravy]

Either balance reasons because it allows winning faster than with some other strategy - this does not, you could choose a life buff city troop strategy and be better, so I don't see a balance reason to prohibit it.

I definitely disagree here - Life struggles with buff costs and Tactician allows you to buff without paying a cost - I think we agreed on that previously? So it's definitely the best choice, even without considering the added bonus of being a lot stronger with heroes which Life is already great at.

I suppose you could pick a cost reduction retort instead (Specialist? Not Spellweaver as that costs 2.), but I'd say having that +1 defense on everything for free is worth more than being able to buff 10-15% more, as it improves your entire army while the cost reduction only allows you to get one or two extra "good" troops in the early game. For winning faster, what you need is a larger amount of good troops to hold onto the conquered territory, not more doomstacks - the bottleneck is the ability to hold the cities, not the ability to conquer them which even a single doomstack does at a very fast +1 city/2 turns rate, fast enough to conquer the whole plane in about 2 years.

Then there is the hero buff effect - a single hero by itself acts as an entire doomstack in most situations, if, but only if it breaches the breaking point where it can no longer be killed by damage. Tactician helps reaching that breaking point so it actually contributes more to your "doomstack produced/turn" although in a less predictable way - you might not need that +2 for your heroes in that particular game but when you do, it's several times more powerful than casting buffs cheaper would be.

So yes, picking Tactician should help you win faster more than any other retort.

Or for fun reasons - this would need to remove fun, but by definition removal of choices is removing gameplay options, so I don't see a fun gameplay reason to do.

Disagree here too - removing weaknesses and removing the need to choose between two different beneficial effects does remove fun - the decision defaulting to "both for 3 picks" further removes fun by consuming more picks, thus you end up with much less options.
Seeing a somewhat no-brainer "my army is stronger if I pick these together" choice also removes fun in my opinion - other options might be more powerful (I don't think they are but that's not the point here) but you don't need to think about them because the most trivial choice works well enough.

If I want to play nature city troops, this combo let's me do that, along with transmute. I still won't be as good as life, but I can, and even if I invert later to summons, that's still wasting 2 picks on warlord that doesn't help the main strategy. So life is still better at the exact same strategy, and didn't pick tactician in the first place. So taking the option away from nature is meaningless - it isn't as strong as life, and it doesn't add anything to nature that nature couldn't get anyway, so the only thing it does is let nature players choose a different playstyle than expected, and still functional effectively.

While I somewhat agree with this, I don't think "I suck at using magic to gain advantage so I produce stronger troops, that always works" really qualifies as a strategy we aim to have in this mod - the primary goal for the mod is to make magic the main game mechanic. If you picked 5+ Nature books, you should be winning by using the synergy between your spells and summons and your troops - something Life does by buffing but other realms do in different ways - not use those troops as replacement for magic since they work well enough on their own.
In particular, you could use transmute, ranged units with earth to mud, gnolls with web, creating regeneration items for your heroes, move 5 normal units in a stack with pathfinding spiders for very fast early expansion, regenerating lizards with regenerating units (trolls) etc. Life offers none of these and they are all powerful strategies (whether better or not is hard to judge because they don't do the same thing life buffing does, they do something completely different, that's the point of playing a different realm!).
If you are playing Nature for a "buffed normal units" strategy instead of Life, and cast nothing but Transmute, don't expect to be as good as a Life wizard who uses all their spells. You have to use the other 39 Nature spell in the game and consider their effects to be able to compare to a Life strategy.
Nature in particular is the most versatile realm that isn't as good at anything particular as the more specialized realms.

I think you compare the ability of troop buffing while completely disregarding the fact that non-Life realms also do plenty of other things Life doesn't. Obviously that will make them seem worse than Life.

For chaos I think it's about the same case as Sorcery but also Life, a mix of the two. You get a strong late game, second only to sorcery, and you get a buffed normal troop strategy second only to life - but you get both at the same time. So if those two shouldn't stack the retorts, Chaos shouldn't either.

Death, I admit, this doesn't matter for them. Death is about undead and summoning - I would never pick Warlord for that realm. If I build enough normal troops for Warlord to be worth the 2 picks, I'm likely doing something wrong as I should use undead and summons for that purpose... no warlord stack is as good as a stack of werewolves or shadow demons as a doomstck, and no warlord stack is as good for garrison as a bunch of undead due to the maintenance costs and the ability to cast Darkness. But this only proves Death isn't affected by the nerf - you don't want Warlord as Death anyway (but might want Tactician - it helps undead and heroes!).

[Nelphine]

No, life buff strategies rely on heroism. It's so much better than anything else, that everything else is flavor. So specialist is better than tactician because you can cast more heroisms that way, which lets you leave one unit in cities and effortlessly destroy entire incoming doomstacks. If heroism can't defeat it, then tactician wouldn't help you hold it anyway.

So no, tactician is not better.

And beyond the immediate start, you only need a single stack buffed with holy armor, all your defensive needs are handled by in combat heroism. So as soon as you can afford to cast 9 holy armors, you are now better than tactician. That really doesn't take that long.

I don't care if you remove the combo for my own games - it isn't ever worth using on life city buff units anymore, the reduction to 4 retorts did that.

And sure other realms can do other things - but tactician helps summons, so it helps later end units, and other realms can't win rare+ games with city units (except sorcery but that has nothing to do with city units, they do it just as easily with summons). However, warlord does not help at all with non city units, so those other realms have to give up late game 2 picks, in order to have stronger early game. Either that is a problem regardless of tactician stacking, or tactician stacking isn't an issue. Life on the other hand CAN win with a buffed city unit in late game - but they shouldn't ever choose tactician anyway, as discussed elsewhere. So yes, it is a good comparison, and I have yet to see any evidence that says any strategy that runs with tactician + warlord, wouldn't have the exact same win with just warlord and whether replaces tactician. It might make things easier, but tactician is not the issue (except possibly for strategies that win before uncommon phase, but those are such extreme rush that they're already having issues in several places, and +1 armor simply doesn't have an integral impact on that.)



The comparison of adamantium has not gone away despite what you indicated. Yes, the frequency is reduced and hopefully more balanced, but that doesn't change the raw stats. A +1 is simply not ever going to be the driver behind a winning strategy - that's why we removed giant strength and stoneskin in the first place.

I want to keep it for people who like dungeon crawling with heroes. Without concrete balance it's unbalanced (as opposed to warlord on its own), then I don't think anything is more important than the gameplay for pure hero play.

[Seravy]

all your defensive needs are handled by in combat heroism.

I don't think it is though, it does work on those stacks of 1-2 swordsmen and similar crap but fairly soon stacks of 4-5 bears and whatnot starts coming, not to mention the 9 nagas or sprites or even gargoyles.

but they shouldn't ever choose tactician anyway, as discussed elsewhere.

I still disagree, Life should never play without tactician, the buff to heroes is worth far too much, even if I  disregard the defense buff on normal units.
It's a different story if you intentionally avoid using heroes but most people don't do that.

Although the Dispel resistance on Specialist might make me reconsider but it's never "specialist vs tactician" anyway. You are good to go up to 4 "best" retorts, so you can do warlord, specialist and tactician every game and still have a retort slot for whatever is the fourth best choice.
So Tactician would need to be equal or worse than the fifth best choice to ever consider not including it. Are there at least 4 retorts that are equal or better than Tactician? (assuming Warlord and Specialist qualify, we'd need two more, but honestly I would rather see like 5+ - if we do want diversity then there should be more than "pick 4 out of best 5" choices that are worth playing.)

Tactician isn't the issue - the issue is military retorts in general. But Tactician escalates that issue, and we can discard military retorts altogether as that wouldn't be fun. (doesn't matter if adding Tactician turns a loss into a win or just makes the win easier - for most people "easier" means winning and not easier means losing. Not everyone is at the same skill level.)

except possibly for strategies that win before uncommon phase

Games are won or lost in the snowballing phase before uncommon half the time, even if the actual game is longer.

A +1 is simply not ever going to be the driver behind a winning strategy - that's why we removed giant strength and stoneskin in the first place.

No, we removed those because a +1 on a SINGLE UNIT for a HIGH COST is not a strategy whatsoever. (and paying overland skill for that is pretty much a high cost no matter what.)
More importantly, we did so because we wanted magic to be awesome and +1 is not awesome especially with a name like Giant Strength. "water flea strength" would be a more appropriate name...

I want to keep it for people who like dungeon crawling with heroes.

Warlord is horrible for heroes, that's a bad strategy. Pick 2 nature for web and earth lore instead if you want to hunt dungeons, or even better pick 3 Sorcery and make invisibility items.
Or you could pick Famous and instead of +1, get up to +5 levels. (Assuming you aren't playing Life. If you are then you're picking warlord for your normal troops anyway, heroes are just the icing. Even if you think it's the other way.)

[Seravy]

Let's try to approach from a completely different viewpoint as well.

We should definitely look at whether adding Tactician without the mutual exclusivity meets the design goal better than adding it with mutual exclusivity.

The design goals were
-Offer more diverse (retort) choices for hero builds
-Reduce the use of Warlord by enabling a less powerful 1 pick version of it that still allows spending that other pick on anything else, further increasing the diversity of the viable builds.


So pretty much increase the diversity of viable builds.

Now, from this point onwards, I'm going to go with what I consider the best choice - I won't say it's the best, there are better players out there - but my choices likely represent the average and slightly above average players more than the "best" choices, making that our most important audience to consider. It doesn't matter if the "best" choices are more diverse, if 99% of the players don't realize that and the "almost the best" options which they do recognize are are less diverse. So yes, this also will be subjective but I think represents the overall gaming experience of the average player well enough.

Listing strategies and what I'd consider the best choice for each. Green marks where allowing both retorts increases the diversity, red marks those where it reduces it. No color means the two have the same diversity. I assume the player isn't holding back and plays on the highest difficulty they are capable of beating with that strategy.

Generic Life - This always picks both retorts. They offer too much to Life magic not to. Both stack with buffs, both stack with hero buffs, Warlord offers a very strong late game benefit that definitely rivals 2 books worth of very rares, while also improving the early game which the books do not. Tactician increases the likelyhood of early heroes spiraling out of control and winning the game on their own. While Spellweaver and Specialist are good enough to compete for attention, there are 4 retort slots so picking them all is still possible. I don't think I'd pick Alchemy, Famous or Runemaster even though I otherwise could if I had one more retort slot by being forced to choose between the two military retorts.

Life heroes - Warlord reduces the weakness of the strategy while Tactician enhances the strength. Artificier is another must have retort here. Famous is not essential due to Heroism. Specialist is good but not as good as Tactician (artifacts can't be dispelled so losing buffs isn't such a big deal). High books are unnecessary, you can max this out with only 5 Life. The only thing that could compete here are books in other realms that unlock more artifact powers, but Life is self-sufficient, so that's useful but not essential either. Thus I always want both, while if they were exclusive, I'd be forced to pick which doubles the possible options plus adds another entire level of depth as there are picks left to spend that would otherwise be used up.

Life peaceful/economy - I wouldn't pick either retort. Spellweaver, Specialist, Alchemy, Cult Leader, Astrologer, or sorcery books would be my top choices for this one.

Life normal unit buff stacking - Always pick both. The point is to stack the stats on the units as high as possible. Forcing a choice would diversify.

Nature summoner - Would pick Tactician, not warlord. Warlord doesn't benefit summons in any way whatsoever, making it a waste of 2 picks. More Nature books, conjurer, and specialist allows minimalizing summoning costs, and unlike buffing or hero strategies, it's possible to summon enough things to not need to rely on stronger normal units. Even 1-2 sprites, bears or spiders can do wonders. Nature also supports city defense immensely by Earth to Mud paired with ranged units which you'd use to defend yourself anyway. Since I'd never pick Warlord anyway, stacking or not stacking makes no difference.

Nature generic - Nature relies heavily on having every spell, so this needs to be played with 10 books. That doesn't allow stacking the two retorts in the first place.

Nature normal units - This mainly relies on Transmute, warlord and tactician all to make units unstoppable. Summoning is secondary but since we don't care about our late game, we can afford also picking conjurer and specialist to have both decent summoning and combat casting potential and still max out our normal units. Since Tactician buffs the summons which I'm inevitably will be using (you don't win an early aggressive strategy on casting change terrains and gaea's blessings so nothing else to spend the overland skill on), it's mandatory, while warlord is the core of the strategy so it is as well. It is kinda the same case as Life except here Tactician is there for the summon boosting effect not the hero boosting one. I can imagine using Sage Mastery here but instead of Conjurer - if I rush the research of Transmute, I'm likely not summoning in the early game. Mutual exclusivity would require picking between going more summon heavy (tactician) or more normal unit heavy (warlord) instead of maxing out both.

Chaos global enchantments - This needs very high chaos books and Runemaster, so no room for either retort. In fact this is generally short on picks, as Runemaster+Specialist+10 books already exceeds the limit, making it a hard strategy to play.

Chaos unit buffing - I never actually played this one, but due to the weak early game I'd likely pick both retorts, plus Sage Master. Specialist is not needed - Chaos Channels can't be dispelled - but we do have a slot if we want it. Going low books is risky though, as Chaos Surge and Warp Reality, Blazing March and Doom Mastery are the core elements of the strategy. So picking both retorts would actually reduce the chance of success by reducing the late game spells. In this particular case I think enabling stacking the retort increases diversity as getting the retorts, or going high on books and only getting one are both good options. High books guarantee gargoyles, which is an acceptable replacement for the early game retort benefits. Actually... no, I would never pick Warlord for this. The risk of not getting the rare and very rare spells is too high at losing 2 additional picks and the early benefit isn't that important. Picking Tactician and Gargoyles is good enough to max out early game potential (economy should go towards magic and research, not troop production anyway). In the end I'd only ever pick Tactician, this puts it into the "not relevant" category - including warlord is always inferior.

Chaos combat spells - Chaneller is steep but this strategy doesn't rely heavily on the quality of normal units nor the high book counts. So picking the retorts for more durable units (allows more combat spells) or not picking them for more books seem equally viable. However, in this particular strategy, your magic economy is everything - so using all 4 retort slots on magic eocnomy retorts (specialist, Sage Master, Astrolger - especially good for this, Cult Leader, Archmage) is the best action, meaning you pick neither warlord nor tactician.

Sorcery peaceful - you aren't getting into wars and Sorcery relies on their late game books, so you don't want either retorts and will want to rely on Aura of Majesty. If you really want retorts, Sage Master, Specialist, Archmage, Spellweaver are your choices. Sorcery also excels at using heroes, so Tactician might be worth considering for lair hunting, but not warlord.
While the retorts do help raise military strength which helps diplomacy, charismatic is a cheaper and more powerful option for that.

Artificier strategy (any combination of realms) - you want to max out books here to enable more powerful enchantments. You cannot ever afford warlord for this, we've designed the book costs for artifacts that way.

Death anything - Cannot imagine picking warlord with this realm ever, as explained in the previous post.

Sorcery generic - I don't think this is any different from peaceful, you usually aim for that whenever able.

Sorcery aggressive - This definitely wants both retorts. Warlord is obvious, and Tactician's defense stacked with Blur is too good to pass. Late game is less important, having both retorts is affordable and still provides a high enough book count. Sorcery buffs are extremely potent on units already buffed by the retorts and blur, you can make them invincible to various types of attacks one at a time, limiting the enemy to their less effective attack types. Furthermore Sorcery disables fantastic units and buffs both in the late game, so it's capable of winning on sheer potential of building better normal units. Making the retorts mutually exclusive would require choosing either tactician (for blur) or warlord which adds diversity.

This is by no means all possible strategies in the game, but the trend seems obvious. At the very least I couldn't name any strategy whatsoever where I would consider only warlord, and only tactician, as equally good choices, while picking both is also equal or worse. If picking both is better, mutual exclusivity increases diversity by a factor of 10+ for that strategy by forcing a choice of only one and freeing up picks which can be spent on anything else.

[Bahgtru]

You're both right.
Making the two retort mutually exclusive is necessary.
It is however not enough.

[Nelphine]

Retorts better than tactician for life buffing city troop tactics:
Warlord, specialist, alchemy, astrologer, spellweaver, myrran. Recall all the discussions about exactly this topic in my barbarian thread. Omniscient can be better depending on what exact books you pick.

So tactician is generally around the 6th best pick for life city troop buff stacking.

Life hero doesn't need spellweaver but sometimes needs artificer instead, and omniscient doesn't really matter to heroes. Alchemy might also be dropped. So tactician moves to 4th or 5th (still not enough to choose it). Warlord and specialist and astrologer are still better.

Stacking the maximum is NOT the best play, by any means. Yes you can megabuff a unit through the roof, and I've done so, but you simply don't need units that are the best ever. It's always better to just reach a certain minimum and then get more units, with wider abilities for more scenarios. You can easily hit that minimum without tactician, which doesn't help with getting more units, or getting more options.

Nature normal units DOES need the combo, but it's simply not going to compare to either nature summons, or life city troops, so it doesn't matter if it stacks the combo.

Chaos normal units relies entirely on flame blade and chaos channels - you can't ever risk the rares and very rares, so the combo is affordable, and very important. Same as nature though, this is weaker than chaos summons and life city units.

Sorcery, I agree, if taking warlord, choose tactician to go with it. But similar to nature and chaos, a heavier magic sorcery game does better, and life city units are more reliable (but if sorcery can get into invisibility and magic immunity, it pays off by being stronger than life.) Also similar to life, warlord, alchemy, specialist, astrologer, myrran are all better. But due to having a harder time reaching the minimum armor you're forced to take tactician despite it being worse overall IF you plan to rely on city troops end game. However, it's perfectly viable to take the better retorts, use city troops early game via warlord, and switch to summons late game.

Artificer, I would always want warlord and tactician. Why would I make powerful items for Heroes that don't have the raw stats to survive? But I consider that a dungeon crawling strategy, so *shrug*