How to play - Undead vs Drakes - Huumy

[Huumy]

Undead vs Drakes

At day drakes are these all powerful dragons who blast trough your pathetic pile of bones and old women in gowns. At night your adepts need to swing their hands a bit and all drakes fall before them.

Units you are using:
---> Skeletons: Have one, they are really good vs saurians and decent vs everything else.
---> Dark Adepts: These are your damage dealers keep them safe, if they die last you have done something right.
---> Bats: Have 1 bat or ghost around for scouting and finishing units. Bat is the cheaper and faster recruit. Bad side is almost any drake unit can kill them if lucky.
---> Walking corpses: Have one with your bigger army. Drakes with maximum 40% defense are easy to transform into zombies. Drake zombies have more health and resistances and better movement.
---> Skeleton archer: The meat of your army. They do decent damage, take some beating and shoot back if they are being burned.
---> Ghoul: Only useful if you want to use poison. I would recruit maximum 2.
---> Ghost: Have 1 bat or ghost around for scouting and finishing units. Ghost is the more expensive recruit but it does more damage and can take few hits more.

Basic flow of the game:
Attack at night retreat during day. Both faction deal high damage to eachother, so make sure the fighting starts way you want. In short this matchup is usually all about when to fight and where to fight the big battles.

When fighting:
---> Avoid fights if you can't win them. Even if you need to sacrifice a unit.
---> Protect your adepts.
---> Stay on good terrain, drakes have much harder time killing you.
---> As slower faction you need to attack earlier and retreat earlier.

Leveling units:
1.Skeleton archer: Better meatshield with good damage.
2.Dark adepts: More damage, not so easily killed by skirimishers.
3.Rest of your units.
What units you don't want your opponent to level.
1.Drake Burner: it will have crazy damage, or same old with leadership.
2.Drake Fighter: Better melee and ranged damage.
3.Drake Clasher: lvl 2 thrasher gets impact attack, dealing lot of melee damage to both adepts and skeletons.
4.Other units.

[Yoyobuae]

I've seen two basic recruit styles used by Undead vs Drake.

One is heavy on ghosts/adepts with the occasional bat. Like this they are quite speedy (66% of adepts are quick and ghosts naturally have good movepoints/movetype). At nights ghost can attack drakes with impunity pretty much (burners would take too much retaliation trying to kill them). Meanwhile ghost can continually drain HP to keep them alive.

It's pretty annoying to fight this kind of recruit as drakes. The solution I have so far is skirmishers. Ghost have a hard time killing them or draining them (arcane resistance). More importantly, they can ignore the ZoC and go kill adepts as daytime approaches, which is really bad for undead.

The other recruit is depends largely in skel archers for defense. This makes the undead army far slower, though. So drakes will most likely simply stay out of range, then pounce on them as daytime approaches. I find gliders pretty useful for "kicking their ass" (although skels don't exactly have one ). Again, skirmishers can be used to squeeze thru the ZoC and hurt those adepts for free.

So yeah, I can see the importance of that single axe skeleton. Or else, skirmishers can become a problem.

[Doc Paterson]

This is not particularly useful, but I just want to point out that it's not "Undeads," it's "Undead." For example, "An army of undead crashed my party." It's a plural term. Seems most non-native English speakers on the server call them Undeads, which always makes me smile a little.

[Rigor]

UD vs drakes is always a bit like roulette. this being said, there are many ways how to kill either drakes or ud, but some (most) times it all just depends on the adepts in the game. since you want to make this a how to thread ill give u another strategy i found quite devastating:

for a long game, recruit mainly ghouls, adepts and bats. you can ask slowthinker about that one. the ghouls take all the damage, and can be used as a sacrifice during daytime while defending, and de-facto to survive the day. while drakes are busy killing one or two ghouls, this will mean 1 or 2 turns no other targets. and then, you have your night again. in the same time you can start flanking your opponent with bats so that he will lose even more precious daytime in order to hunt down lousy lvl0's. during all these sacrifices you build up an adept army with some defender-ghouls, and some other units that should help you, such as archers, 2 zombies, maybe one skeleton or ghost, and try to get the other guy into a nasty situatuion where one unit cant defend a village vs 1 adept.

[hhyloc]

....
What units you don't want your opponent to level.
1.Drake Burner: it will have crazy damage, or same old with leadership.
2.Drake Fighter: Better melee and ranged damage.
5.Other units.

I think you should list 'Drake Clasher' as second importance, right after 'Drake Burner' since if your enemy managed to level the Clasher to the Thrasher, the Thrasher will murder both your Dark Adepts and your Skeletons (Skeleton and Skeleton Archer) since it have a devasting impact attack (10-3) and have a good resistance to blade. At day it'll murder Dark Adepts (8x4 + 25% = 40 ) and crush Skeleton to dust with (10x3 +25% = 38). Even at night it still kick Dark Adepts' and Skeletons' asses with (8x4 - 25% = 24) and (10x3 - 25% = 22).
Maybe you should list it at second after the Burner, I could be wrong though... .

[5dPZ]

UD vs drakes is always a bit like roulette. this being said, there are many ways how to kill either drakes or ud, but some (most) times it all just depends on the adepts in the game.

2nd this statement from Rigor. Basic UD strat in this match up is using Ghoul/S.Archer for defence, depending number of enemy fightesr/burners (i.e use S.archer vs burner, and ghoul vs figher) if they are equal, then use S.archer anyways; DA is the main force for offence, complimented by Skeletons, S.archers and WCs.

I will quote myself for a discussion why DA, more precisely, why the luck of DA is the center for this match up; why a 2/2 hit or 2/2 miss matters more in UD vs Drake than UD vs all other factions.

DA 2/2 hit is much more devastating to drakes than to any other factions. Why?
1. The most obvious -50% cold resist
2. Drakes got low def, max 40%. that means after a 2/2 hit with DA, due to their cold weakness, the unit is weakened so much that UD player can pick up the kill pretty safely with a non-magical unit such as skeletons. Whereas vs elves, for example, UD would secure a 60% def elf kill with yet another DA. Thus, two 2/2 DA hit means two dead drakes, whereas vs elves, for say, would only mean 1 unit loss (maybe even less for dwarves).
3. Drakes are expensive, so less in number compare with any other factions. Losing 1 unit weakens it more than other factions, compared with 14g in loyal/elves etc. So once a couple 2/2 DA hits, each means a loss of unit, it's hard to pull an effective counter attack, even during days.

Let's say during Dawn, 1 round of 4 DAs all hitting 2/2 (yes, i know he is lucky, but..) would means game over for drakes (even followed by 2 day turns), but would be less devastating for a loyalist player. It is a comparison of losing 4 drakes (68g) vs 2 spearmen (28g). For a 120g worth of army, drake now only has 60g to counter attack (about 3-4 drakes), where as loyalist has 90+g to counter (equiv of 4 spearmen and 2 mages), so the counter strength is much different after the unlucky turn.

By the way, undead is usually given the option to offense at Dawn, because if the drake player leaves a huge distance between the drake army and undead army, the day turn 1 offensive won't be effective if UD player decide to fall back more. All I am saying is that IF the undead player decides to fight AND gets lucky, he could win the game by waste away a very significant portion of the drake army. However, if he makes the same decision vs loyalist, then he would still be much likely to lose even he got the same amount of luck.

[Rigor]

gamble-gamble...

[Yoyobuae]

@Doc Paterson: well, this "non-native English speaker" did the same mistake.

On topic: Ok, now I'm convinced. Skirmishers are a critical unit for drakes in this match-up. If undead will continually use their s.archer/ghost/ghouls ZoC and resistances to make a hard to break ZoC wall, then skirmishers are the perfect solution, just ignore ZoC and hit the adepts anyway.

It's a suicide mission, but they'll get to hit adepts first. With enough skirms one adept can die on first attack. With a bit of luck, enough of the skirms survive the turn to attack again and kill another adept. Then daytime comes and drakes take over, and against a reduced adept force they'll have a much easier time.

[5dPZ]

On topic: Ok, now I'm convinced. Skirmishers are a critical unit for drakes in this match-up. If undead will continually use their s.archer/ghost/ghouls ZoC and resistances to make a hard to break ZoC wall, then skirmishers are the perfect solution, just ignore ZoC and hit the adepts anyway.

It's a suicide mission, but they'll get to hit adepts first. With enough skirms one adept can die on first attack. With a bit of luck, enough of the skirms survive the turn to attack again and kill another adept. Then daytime comes and drakes take over, and against a reduced adept force they'll have a much easier time.

Not really on-topic since this is Undead vs Drake discussion not the other way around.

[Yoyobuae]

Well, start making Drake vs ... topics already.

[Rigor]

http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=29313

this must be something for u guys

[Huumy]

This is not particularly useful, but I just want to point out that it's not "Undeads," it's "Undead." For example, "An army of undead crashed my party." It's a plural term. Seems most non-native English speakers on the server call them Undeads, which always makes me smile a little.

Thank you for correcting, I'll edit all the "undeads" to "undead".

For Rigor and Yoyobuae thank you for the extra strategies. I haven't seen too much of ghost usage in this matchup but I'll have to try it. I normally use mass skeleton archers and adepts vs undead because it have worked great so far. Tho I'm not expert on this matchup .

I think you should list 'Drake Clasher' as second importance, right after 'Drake Burner' since if your enemy managed to level the Clasher to the Thrasher, the Thrasher will murder both your Dark Adepts and your Skeletons (Skeleton and Skeleton Archer) since it have a devasting impact attack (10-3) and have a good resistance to blade. At day it'll murder Dark Adepts (8x4 + 25% = 40 ) and crush Skeleton to dust with (10x3 +25% = 38). Even at night it still kick Dark Adepts' and Skeletons' asses with (8x4 - 25% = 24) and (10x3 - 25% = 22).

I forgot the impact attack, I'll add this. Only bad thing compared to other drakes trasher has is bad movement so it's more difficult to retreat.

On topic: Ok, now I'm convinced. Skirmishers are a critical unit for drakes in this match-up. If undead will continually use their s.archer/ghost/ghouls ZoC and resistances to make a hard to break ZoC wall, then skirmishers are the perfect solution, just ignore ZoC and hit the adepts anyway.

It's a suicide mission, but they'll get to hit adepts first. With enough skirms one adept can die on first attack. With a bit of luck, enough of the skirms survive the turn to attack again and kill another adept. Then daytime comes and drakes take over, and against a reduced adept force they'll have a much easier time.

That's why it's important to group your units so that not too many skirimishers can attack your adepts.


ps. how to add text (some1 wrote:) at the start of the quote?

[monochromatic]

You spelled lvl 2 clasher as trasher

[hhyloc]

You spelled lvl 2 clasher as trasher

The 'Trasher' actually sound great

ps. how to add text (some1 wrote:) at the start of the quote?

You can do that by replace the first quote with quote="someoneblahblahblah"

[Huumy]

You can do that by replace the first quote with quote="someoneblahblahblah"

Thank you.

You spelled lvl 2 clasher as trasher

Made me laugh fixed it now.