Military Race Rankings, Part 2

[Anskiy]

Some of you might remember that I was in the process of evaluating the races by their military performance in the CoM 1 forum: https://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/show...?tid=10193 . In the wake of CoM 2 releasing, I decided to test how all the races worked militarily, using multiple warlord builds. For now, I will post a short summary of how a few races fared under a pure Life warlord:

Barbarians:

Still very good. They don't get many production buildings, and missing libraries hurts them quite a bit, but Berserkers and Gladiators are both amazing enough to make up for it, and Spellserkers are fairly sturdy spellcasters. Their high population growth and the presence of animists' guilds in their building line up also means that they actually get quite a bit of production. They do often run into resistance problems, since Berserkers' resistance is awful, Gladiators' resistance is merely acceptable, and only Spellserkers come close to having reasonable base resistance. But pathfinding, +10% to hit, and Thrown are all pretty good. Oh, and they also get Warships, allowing them to dominate the oceans, or better, play with flying Warships if the player wizard has the needed tools. Do watch out for enemies with weapon immunity though, they can't build alchemist's guilds, so their troops run into weapon immunity more often than usual.

Gnolls:

Unfortunately, Gnolls have not been improved much throughout CoM's development, and this shows. + 2 Attack and + 1 Movement simply isn't very impressive when their troops still die easily. The biggest crippling factor is that they can't build any Magic Markets, making them quite unfit for a wizard planning to do a ton of spellcasting. Their unit selection is also horribly limited. Not being able to hit flyers at all is a huge downside. The one saving grace of this race is the Wolf Riders, who can travel great distances and fight many early game armies, provided they get enough buffs. Jackal Riders have high potential, but it's not worth building Armorer's Guilds for them since they tend to die easily and those buffs are better invested into other high tier units.

Klackons:

Still the best economy race in the game, barring Dwarves on Rich minerals. Klackons get a shitton of production and very low unrest with themselves, allowing them to generate tons of cash. To compensate however, their unit lineup is thoroughly mediocre. + 2 defense is a minor bonus that doesn't really affect much, and ultimately, the way Klackons win battles is either through summons powered by quickly constructed wizard's guilds or by hurling tons of their armies. Atleast they get a decently fast unit that can hit the air with the Stag Beetle.

[Suppanut]

Barbarian could have access to magical/mithril/adamantium/oriculcum if wizard has sorcery books at least 2 (Philosopher's Stone) and also able to access resistance boost spell like resist magic too. So I think Barbarian may working well with Life-Sorcery warlord rather than pure-life warlord. While other varient of warlord builds would not help much, and may even make their situation worse in some situation too.

Gnoll has one of the most efficient early basic units in mod, but its advantage would fall short early due to poor resistance. Life-Sorcery warlord build may doing better for them but in the end their lack of magic buildings not compliment with sorcery realm. Life-Chaos and Nature-Chaos also good for them early as they could close gap for you against flyer but they would expose their disadvantage by time reach rare tier spells and not able to catch up with any other until get Blazing Eyes and Chaos Surge for jackal riders. So better find other race to serve you early before your your wolf rider get obsolete.

Klackon could doing well with many warlord build, but I think they may doing better with Chaos-Nature or Chaos-Sorcery warlord. Especially due to your reliance on hurl your force in number, something that life alone may not buff all of them for you to the end and chaos could globally buff them much better.

[Anskiy]

Yeah I definitely agree that Resist Magic is a huge help for Barbarians, especially their Berserkers. Not to mention Focus Magic is actually compatible with Thrown, and lets them hurl fairly respectable ranged damage before engaging an enemy.

Gnolls are definitely in a hard spot, they want buffs from schools like Chaos or Sorcery, but those same schools are very mana hungry and so Gnolls can't support them very well. The best hope for a Gnoll is to dismiss its settlers, capture neutrals of better races(or even steal them from other wizards) and settle them. Gnolls are okay as a captured race though because a Wolf Rider can give Pathfinding to a stack, which is fairly huge. I would still only keep 1-2 Gnoll cities around though unless they had Amplifying Towers.

Klackon is definitely not built for Life, Life wants good base troops and the Klackon army is a mediocre horde that wins through numbers, as you just said. All of the other four realms are better, if only because they can rush wizard's guilds.

[JustOneMoreTurn]

The best hope for a Gnoll is to dismiss its settlers,

You might as well make settlements with them, but don't spend extra money on them.  Later, when there are no good areas left and you have other race town that can produce settlers, you can raze and replace.

[Anskiy]

Lizardmen:

Pretty unusual Arcanus race, Lizardmen have the advantage of being able to colonize a lot of land early, thanks to waterwalking speed 2 settlers. Holding onto said land is another matter though; Lizardmen can only build swordsmen and spearmen before erecting a Fighter's Guild, and their swordsmen are fairly unexceptional. Thus they are easy prey not only for other wizards, but for various rampaging monsters as well. Their complete lack of production buildings is also a noticeable downside, they don't get the crazy breeding rates of Barbarians to compensate and it takes a while for their vital buildings to get built. Thankfully once they do have a Fighter's Guild, their army is fairly robust, if not lacking in blindspots. Their Halberdiers are fairly tough and their Javelineers are extremely versatile, being able to do decent ranged damage while also having strong melee attacks. However, the low resist of their units is quite glaring, and enemies can easily exploit it to make them impotent.

Curiously enough, they get the best defensive tank on Arcanus from their Armorer's Guild. The Dragon Turtle has a lot of defense and resistance, and also comes with a lightning breath to attack flying enemies. However their attack is far from spectacular, and they should not be used for offense. In a pinch though, they can be quite useful in repelling attackers reliant on hitting resistance, like Night Stalkers and Cockatrices.

A huge problem with the lizardmen army is that their overworld speed is slow as hell. Waterwalking lets them avoid a lot of logistical troubles other races face, but conquering targets deep in a landmass can take forever. Thankfully Carracks do speed up the lizardmen on water atleast; they are essentially a weaker but faster galley. Regardless, lizardmen should definitely use other units besides their own to speed up their conquest, be it summons, heroes, or other race's units.

[Suppanut]

Dragon Turtle is one of the best unit to use as garrison when pairing with death Wall of Shadow as it would force ai to play the game you want them to play. It also one of a few units which could take advantage of chaos realm to the fullest due to its fire immunity make it is one of a few normal units which get benefit from Inner Power (another is Golem). It is also one of a few normal units which not get exposed once has Mystic Surge put on it. Too bad that both of those realm are either non-warlord build (death not fit into any warlord gameplay, undead could not get warlord level boost) and chaos warlord build maybe powerful buff for them but may make lizardsmen even more exposure to life and sorcery spell which they usually not budge.

For warlord build that may fit them, Chaos-based warlord builds may have many suitable buff for lizardsmen (Flame Blade and javelineers, Inner Power and Mystic Surge for dragon turtle, compare to most of life buff which less useful on most of mediocre units lizardsmen offer) but Chaos Channel and Doom Mastery are very situational for them due to although it help them immune to death's save or die spell, but it make them more vulnerable to even more -save spells save-or-die from Life and Sorcery. This could easily put dragon turtle as only useful normal units under these builds unless it pair with Nature (due to survival instinct) or Sorcery (due to Resist Magic and Reinforce Magic). Chaos-Life is surprisingly less useful than it should be due to lack of cheap or mass resist buff against its newly gain weakness.

[Anskiy]

Yeah overall I think Life Warlord is actually fairly mediocre for Lizardmen, thanks to their low resist and their reliance on slow hordes of units. I would argue the best use of Lizardmen units is garrisons with Dragon Turtles, and small packs of harrassment units like Javelineers or Halberdiers. Chaos is more fitting for them, but does make them vulnerable to other curses from Life and Sorcery. Dragon Turtles being such good tanks also helps with that.

[Beorn]

Nice analysis.  Hope you keep them coming.  I especially look forward to your take on High Elves, which I have been finding very powerful.

My next to last game, I played sorcery-nature-life, used transmute to gain adamantium on arcanus, and a group of buffed elven lords were so powerful it was almost like playing paladins from the original release, they just mowed their way through the world.

And, of course, even without such a stroke of luck High Elves forester movement is incredibly useful at all stages of the game, including on the tactical map.

[Anskiy]

Thanks for the compliments Beorn! I do think the Elven unique units are quite solid, even if the race itself has some problems. Forester is also definitely a lot more useful in CoM 2, given how much of the world is covered in lush greenery.

With that said, let's look at our next race!

Orcs:

They are intended to be the "average" race of CoM, and this shows. They don't get any exciting economic or military bonuses. However, the upkeep reduction on their units is quite significant in practice. It means that they can afford to quickly build early game garrisons while still pouring money into important infrastructure. This becomes significant for fielding armies too, as Orcs can easily make larger armies that other races would struggle to pay for. Now these armies are largely nothing special, but they don't really have any crippling disadvantage either. In fact, having all the generic unit templates available is significant since it gives them a ton of flexibility.

This is the first race in the lineup to feature Magicians, so let's talk about them. Essentially, they are overpriced bowmen with lesser figures, no ranged penalties, missile immunity, a decent amount of casting skill, double the resistance, and four shots. In short, they are intended to be pure garrison/defense units, though of course more enterprising players can use them for lairs or offensive operations as well. How many of them you build - if you choose to build them at all - will heavily depend on the situation. It's good to employ a few of them in key hotspots or strategic locations, but committing too many resources to them is usually a mistake.

As for their unique units, Hordes are fairly sturdy upgrades over the Halberdiers. They are almost as cheap as them while sporting 8 figures and a large shield. In the battlefield, this translates to a lot of durability. Further, they also scale incredibly well with buffs, easily becoming monsters with a few good ones. For some reason they have one less resistance than Halberdiers though. This doesn't matter much in the long run, it just looks a bit annoying, considering that they are supposed to be the better unit.

Wyvern Riders are highly specialized units. They have good scouting vision, good speed, decent resistance and fly naturally. However, they do mediocre damage, relying on their poison to help out. The poison can make them effective on low resist units, but when it doesn't work their hits feel like inflicting scratches. It doesn't help that they have a hefty investment to them: first you need to build a Fantastic Stable, then you need to pay 150 for each rider! Ultimately, it's best to only build them sparingly, and largely use them for skirmishing than for serious assaults, unless the enemy force is vulnerable to them.

[Suppanut]

Orcs also working well with chaos-based warlord builds too. Horde is excellent under blazing eye (requires chaos channel/doom mastery) due to number of figure. It also get a lot of attack power from flame blade too although would not get as much as highmen's pikemen would due to lack of armor piercing attribute.

Wyvern Rider is lacking of combo inside warlord builds due to main damge is poison and resistance reduction is a not reliable for chaos (with warp creature + fate mastery) and but more reliable option on sorcery (mind storm) and death (black prayer) which rarely play role in warlord built

Economy of orcs is good and very versatile and could explore many option, they could working well with life, nature, and sorcery economic buff.