When to sacrifice in MP

[max_torch]

How do you decide whether or not to let your unit hold an enemy village until he dies?
Is it worth letting a a unit die just so that you can have the opportunity to kill an L2 or unit that is about to level?
What are the other situations in MP matches where it is good to sacrifice units in order to gain advantage?

Here's what I do know for sure:
-I know that if you have excess units sometimes it is worth it to sacrifice units just to make a hole in the enemy line so you can reach his leader if you can kill it.

[TheCripple]

Regarding holding a village - each turn you hold a village is basically a 6 gold advantage over your enemy. Generally speaking, this means holding for 3-4 turns pays off, depending on the unit in question. If it's something like a Walking Corpse, even 2 turns is pretty solid.

As for killing enemy units - taking out units about to level or level 2 units is quite often a good thing. Particularly if you level when killing said level 2, and make it painful to take out your units.

Other cases are if you can take out an expensive unit with a cheap unit. To use an extreme example - If I can reliably kill a griffon rider with a goblin spearman, at the cost of said goblin spearman, I'm almost always willing to do so. Yet other cases are when sacrificing one unit keeps others alive, such as when a situation has turned ugly and if you sacrifice one unit holding a village (say you've got a ghost positioned in such a way to keep a few ulfserkers away from your dark adepts) to get others behind lines and safe, or to engineer a fight elsewhere that is winnable, it could be advantageous to do so.

[Anonymissimus]

each turn you hold a village is basically a 6 gold advantage over your enemy.

Why ? Each village gives, with the usual settings (village gold 1), 1 gold per turn and negates an upkeep of one. The player holding the village gets the positive effect, the one loosing it the negative. Assuming the level sum of all non-leader units is not less than the number of villages for each of the sides, this means a gold difference of 4 per turn.

[Velensk]

Anonymissimus: In multiplayer villages are typically worth two gold per turn.

EDIT: To address the origional topic, I don't actually think there's a hard fast rule for it. 6 gold per village per turn is one way, but frequently it's worth it to keep a couple enemy units tied up and away from a different engagement even if you don't get as much income. It's just a game sense that you have to develop.

[Coffee]

Another thing to consider is time of day. If you can sacrifice a unit at a bad time of day, this can take all the enemy focus from taking good positions and you can sometimes to-and-fro later to get a stranglehold on the map.

Yet another time to sacrifice is to take out an enemy leader. Red/white mages and dark sorcerers are vulnerable to range sacrifice attacks with their low HP and high range damage dealt.

[max_torch]

Here's another - Putting a unit out for the enemies to converge on and kill but it is actually bait because your units are quick and out of sight of the enemy who is unaware. But how do you execute this whole baiting thing properly? who here has done this?
EDIT: Also, I think it might be feasible to do a suicide run tactic wherein most of your units die but you end up grabbing all or most enemy villages.