What are the worst units in the game

[mrpinkpigy]

I am have been playing on and of for almost 2 years know and I have always had the question of which is the worst unit in the game. For it to be the worst unit you have to be able to recruit in a normal multiplayer game so no peasants or bow men. That is about it also try to keep in account the price cost of each unit and how good they are.

[iceiceice]

I'm going to assume you are talking about, least useful in a competitive 1 v 1 multiplayer game on typical mainline map pool against random opponent. (And not like, campaigns or something.)

In that case I would say, worst unit is Merman hunter.

Close second is, loyalist bowman. But this depends on playstyle, that guy can sometimes be useful vs. drakes., but even there, it depends and this guy is not mandatory.

Close third is, troll. But this is probably controversial, and again depends on playstyle.

[Heindal]

Its the fly. It has one hitpoint.

But beside lame jokes. The usage of units depends on the situation. Every unit has its purpose and if its for blocking a unit only. Imho Wesnoth is very well balanced and even 0 level units can be a real advantage. I personally believe that the ruffian is the worst unit in the game, as he lacks the ranged attack of the peasant and is less flexible.

btw. the fly exists in addons .

[GL_Network]

I'd say the elvish lady. It has no attack.

Troll is actually quite good if you have terrain advantage. In flat terrain, not so much.

[tekelili]

Vs human players, Thief is the worst unit. There are several units wich basic stats are quite bad and must take adventage of a special to worth. Backstab is almost impossible to worth bad unit stats vs human (skiled) players: Usually oponent can negate its use and, when it can be used, usually implies extra resources underemployed or situations of minimal profit (use backstab implies totally ZOC target, pinned units by ZOC usually are as good as dead units).

[TheGreatRings]

I'm not a fan of ulfserkers.

They're expensive and strong enough to be annoying when facing them but too fragile to be worth their cost.

[Dixie]

I'd have gone with bowman or fencer, personally.

[tekelili]

I am just guessing, but my bet is none experencied player in competitive game vs humans would ever name ulfserker or bowman as bad units. Such players know ulfserker is abusive vs undead and bowman is only way to have effective combat vs a strong line of drake clashers.

Imo, when asked for the worst unit, one should look for a unit that removed from recuit list would barely affect perfomance from a skilled player controlling a faction.

[Gyra_Solune]

The point of the question hinges on what is useful in an MP context, and the game is fairly well balanced to where everything has a utility. In a campaign context, the exact structure of a campaign makes anything potentially useful depending on how you design it. Ruffians can be immensely useful, for example, if your only units are other level 0 units and you're facing down a lot of undead.

Every unit mentioned so far I've seen very good use for. Ulfserkers are situational but excellent in the right scenario - and the presence of one against the undead throws an enormous wrench into their strategy, since it's the only instance of a guaranteed kill if you put it against one of their key adepts. Thieves are in the running for the highest damage potential per gold cost in the game - 12-3 on a strong one at night, provided it's backstabbing, is an amazing way to cheaply take down someone, especially considering it's among the cheapest level 1 units in the game at merely 13 gold, and has higher dodge ability. It also levels up extremely quickly and gains both an enormous gain of HP, a ranged attack, and skirmisher. Trolls are solid defensive units against a wide range of standard enemies. It isn't going to take anyone down quickly but it has excellent survivability and can fortify a position immensely unless people bring out specific units, usually ranged, that are then vulnerable to cheaper orcs. Bowmen are literally just ranged spearmen, slightly weaker and more frail but for the exact same cost, which is good considering most factions have a precedent for range being more expensive than melee. They're a simple way to form a defensive line if your opponent is coming at you with mostly ranged units - the standard operation for undead and elves, or particularly bold and over-excited drake players. And mermen hunters are...a bit unfortunate. I feel they could use some work, either they need to be stronger at their range at expense of their melee, or maybe they ought to have the net on their level 1. They still have utility as aquatic harassers since the elves have no other units to deal with water, but they're definitely one of the weaker water units.

...all that said, there is one unit I've struggled to really find an apt use for outside of incredibly niche situations, and that would be the walking corpse. I can see the intent, as cheap meatshields to block more important units, with a capacity to turn those others against you, but...they're so slow, when the undead faction needs to move fast, they are like to simply end up as free XP for attacking units, and if you want to use their plague ability, you are giving it XP that would best be spent on the other units you have. The northerners have a similar unit, but the goblin does weirdly high and reliable damage, has just a bit of range coverage, and moves just that bit faster to where it doesn't get so immensely bogged down by rough terrain. I can see the utility a walking corpse has for a good player, especially if you can get a sea of them going made out of your opponent's units, but hmmmm. It's a weird gimmick unit in all my experiences.



It has a challenger though, in a mainline unit not in a faction, that I put in my own collaboration of leftovers faction era (the Black Tide thing) I made. And that would be the Fire Guardian. In literally all my experience of playing BT it's been an utter failure of a unit. It moves and dodges like a drake but has half the HP and only resists fire while having immense weaknesses to cold and arcane, does absolutely pitiful damage, being a neutral unit with 4-3 melee and 8-2 range, and costs a staggering 19 gold. I've come up with very few ways it can even possibly be useful. It MAYBE works against Woses, vaguely, en masse, even though it ironically might just die to one just as easily, since its fire capacity is the only sort of counter that the faction has. It can SORT OF put up a resistance to the likes of Mages and Burners, who could probably still get it in a 1 on 1 fight anyway with their weaker melee attacks. Possibly the only real idea I have for its usage is against the Khalifate's Naffat, since it will resist both its attacks while doing moderate damage on the counter. This is kind of interesting? Since that very faction has the preposterously cheap Mudcrawlers and the expensive but neat Giant Scorpion, who share a weird apocalyptic weakness to fire attacks. If you're set on using them, Fire Guardians have an interesting position. But to be honest, that 50% fire defense probably will not help against the Naffat, since it has more HP and does more damage. In even modestly good terrain the Guardian will likely lose straight-up. And the mudcrawlers are so slow and the Scorpions so unreliable that it's not really a good idea to hinge your plans on them, in my experience. But then, I am ranting about an UMC I made that is composed of all the units that didn't make it into the main defualt era, which only by a miracle is even remotely balanced, so heh.

[UK1]

If I might address the bit about the walking corpse and defend it. Bit of a preface: Undead is pretty much the only faction whose play style I genuinely enjoy, so I play them more often than just picking random simply because it's more enjoyable for me. Doing that has taught me several things:

1: A lot of people do not counter-recruit Undead properly. I.E. If they have Loys they'll slam HI and Mages when really they'd probably be better off going Cav/Mage/Other. And if they have Rebs, again, they'll Wose spam.

2: Their knowing you're undead isn't the end of the world for two reasons.
2A: Your main unit is the Adept and the Adept doesn't have a counter.
2B: As long as you don't do what they expect, they can't counter.

In 1v1 maps with a lot of space between villages it is very easy to fend off your opponent and force a stalemate during which you can recruit Level 0 WCs and they can choose between recruiting nothing and saving gold or recruiting level 1s and incurring upkeep inefficiencies. So you can just build up a critical mass of WCs. My favorite thing on 1v1 maps is to max out on Ghouls and Adepts (more adepts than ghouls) and then just start recruiting WC's so as to avoid upkeep. Then do an attack at D2 with Ghouls and WC's, both of whom are fearless. The poison and the meat-shielding combine to really weaken any ability to deliver a counter-attack that your DA's and remaining WC's can't easily mop up at Dusk, let alone N1.

And if they retreat in the face of your D2 assault, you get to hang onto some of their villages for two turns, get an even greater income advantage, force them to eat even more upkeep, retreat, rinse, and repeat.

It's not a fun strategy to play against and it's not the most enjoyable strategy to field as Undead, but it is certainly effective. So I think it's a bit unfair to say the WC is the worst unit in the game.

There are definitely units I would grant that title, though. I don't like Ghosts. I think they're very expensive for a unit that can't really effectively dish out any offense. I've recruited them against Knalgans simply because Knalgans don't really have a great answer to them and, yaknow, ulfs. But that's typically only if I know I'm against Knalgans in my Opening Recruit. They're too expensive to warrant skipping a recruit to get them mid-game, usually. Horsemen suffer more from the same problem. They have nice hitting power. In many ways they're similar to the Ulf in terms of how you'll use them. But they're super expensive, super luck-reliant, and typically don't last very long. It's hard to justify their purchase ever when I can get two spearmen for almost as much or a Cavalryman and have some left over to go towards... who am I kidding? Another Cavalryman.

Super surprised I'm the first player to mention Horseman, tbh.

[Gyra_Solune]

The ghost is something of a defensive concession to the faction's glass-cannon nature. It doesn't have the best offenses because it fills a role similar to the Dwarvish Guardsman, in that it's very hard to kill, especially with melee, but it instead retreats away from danger more easily in exchange for not quite lasting as long. Basically it's good at getting in the way and resisting the more common impact-heavy Skeleton counters like Trolls, Heavy Infantry, Woses, Khaiyals, and the Dwarvish Fighters. So it's sort of a defensive anti-anti-Undead unit, which cover your offensive anti-anti-Undead unit, the Adepts. Perhaps its most critical facet though is it gains possibly the most dramatic boost in power upon leveling of any unit in the game. The Wraith is amazing at holding its own while the Shadow is an absolutely devastating assassination unit.

I see where you are coming from on the WCs but in most of my experience the Undead are indeed very powerful in exchange for being very fragile. There's never really a decisive point at which you can afford to just hang back and swell your ranks with WCs because it's very easy for your opponent to absolutely wreck your units which you need to then replenish, especially on smaller maps. Plus they're so painfully slow >.<

Horsemen are difficult to use but there's no denying the absolutely enormous power they carry on top of their speed. Loyalists need every ounce of mobility they can get, and Horsemen put a ton of pressure on a retreating opponent in a way that Cavalry just can't, given a Horseman has literally twice as much offensive power (even more than that if it's daytime). They're expensive, yes, but it is hard to deny how incredibly useful of a tool they are in the right situations.

[UK1]

The ghost is something of a defensive concession to the faction's glass-cannon nature. It doesn't have the best offenses because it fills a role similar to the Dwarvish Guardsman, in that it's very hard to kill, especially with melee, but it instead retreats away from danger more easily in exchange for not quite lasting as long. Basically it's good at getting in the way and resisting the more common impact-heavy Skeleton counters like Trolls, Heavy Infantry, Woses, Khaiyals, and the Dwarvish Fighters. So it's sort of a defensive anti-anti-Undead unit, which cover your offensive anti-anti-Undead unit, the Adepts. Perhaps its most critical facet though is it gains possibly the most dramatic boost in power upon leveling of any unit in the game. The Wraith is amazing at holding its own while the Shadow is an absolutely devastating assassination unit.

I see where you are coming from on the WCs but in most of my experience the Undead are indeed very powerful in exchange for being very fragile. There's never really a decisive point at which you can afford to just hang back and swell your ranks with WCs because it's very easy for your opponent to absolutely wreck your units which you need to then replenish, especially on smaller maps. Plus they're so painfully slow >.<

Horsemen are difficult to use but there's no denying the absolutely enormous power they carry on top of their speed. Loyalists need every ounce of mobility they can get, and Horsemen put a ton of pressure on a retreating opponent in a way that Cavalry just can't, given a Horseman has literally twice as much offensive power (even more than that if it's daytime). They're expensive, yes, but it is hard to deny how incredibly useful of a tool they are in the right situations.

In 1v1 maps, plenty of them, there's a lot of open space between natural villages and you can absolutely advance at night, fall back for day. Den of Onis and Hamlets come to mind as stalemate maps. You can't "just hang back". You advance at night, push your opponent back. If they provide resistance, yeah, slaughter them. But if they play correctly and retreat, don't try to hold their villages so they can hit you at dawn. Just threaten and then fall back so they can't hit you until dusk, rinse and repeat. If you do it properly it's very effective on many 1v1 maps. On some 1v1 maps it's entirely ineffective.

As for the horseman:

Yes, but by the time you know you'll encounter that situation, who the Heck has 23 gold lying around? Please. Please 1v1 me and blow over a FIFTH of gold on a Horseman. Two points:

1: Is there ANYONE who suggests doing a horseman in the OR?

2: If you don't get a horseman in the OR, when the Hell are you going to recruit one?! When are you going to have 23 gold after your OR? You'd have to wait at least two turns to have enough money for one, maybe three depending on the map and where you're at in the game.

They're honestly not that useful. I'm not just whining about the price. I'm doing a cost/benefit analysis. They're an incredibly expensive unit for one that is soooo luck-based. They're useful exclusively for attacking and, guess what, when your opponent is defending they'll frequently put their units where they have good defense, making the Horseman pretty horrible. Unless you're hitting adepts exclusively, your horseman will be injured because retal is doubled.

The Wesnoth manual out and out says that horsemen are best for mopping up AFTER your initial assault. Which is true. But I'm not interested in paying 23 gold for a cleanup crew. It's almost a quarter of the OR.

[Gyra_Solune]

I feel like perhaps the conception that horsemen and other such units are more luck-based is odd. Perceptions of probability are indeed a weakness people have but in short, the average hit rate on open ground is 60%. In modestly good terrain most units have that dropped to 50%, which can be lowered further to 40% typically on mountains. In rare cases they'll get only a 30% chance to be hit. But the thing is like...for the vast majority of units, unless they're either notably not-dodgy like the HI, or in cases like dwarves where they are conversely extremely dodgy on mountains, they are dealing with a coin flip +/- 10%.

Units with a lot of hits have value defensively, where it is mostly valued if they do some damage - the opponent is likely to move to favored terrain for the offense so getting any damage at all is useful, and they are exceedingly unlikely to put a unit where it even has a chance of dying outright to the counterattack. But offensively, it is more valuable if a unit does all of its damage. Compare, say, a Thunderer to a Fencer. Thunderer does 18-1, which is seen as unreliable because on the defense the opponent is very likely to be left unscathed. They're relatively safe to attack even using range. A Fencer does 5-4 during day - they're not very safe to attack with melee because even if you are on 70% terrain advantage, your odds of not being hit drop to 49% by the second attack, then to 34%, then to 24%. The dodgiest unit whacking at a fencer is almost certain to take some damage, which is not very nice when you consider how flimsy those dodgy units tend to be.

But turn it on its head and the situation reverses. You want to, ideally, actually defeat an enemy unit. Then suddenly those high-damage low-hit units are more favorable because they have a higher chance of doing more damage. Against a unit in its average realm of 50% dodge, the Thunderer has a 50% chance to do its 18 damage. It also has a 50% chance to not hit, but the nature of the game means a unit is literally never assured to ever do damage to something. The fencer fares poorly in this situation, because to do its comparable 20 damage, it only has a 6% chance.

The gulf is not as wide between the Spearman and the Horseman, in terms of number of hits, but the gulf is much much wider for the Horseman in terms of damage - neutrally the Horseman is doing 18-2 to the Spearman's 7-3. The Horseman is doing over 1.5x the damage and in a format that much favors delivering all of it over just some of it. In fact I'd argue perhaps the biggest tempering of the Horseman is that it has two weaker hits over one larger hit - if it was 18-1 base it would be absolutely devastating, because even at entirely neutral times of day, it'd have an exorbitantly favorable shot of literally just killing most units outright. There's seriously only 17 level 1 units across the entire base game that cannot be instantly killed from full health by a Horseman on the offense even at dawn or dusk (and of those, three aren't even in a default faction, namely the Scorpion, Young Ogre and Orcish Leader). If the Horseman is Strong, that drops to. if I am not mistaken, 12 units (might be iffy on the Dwarvish Ulfserker and Thunderer, depending on how it's calculated and rounded). If it's daytime, that goes down to 10 (still including the Ogre and orc). If both, it's doing a grand total of 48 base offensive damage - an amount several straightforward level 3 units cannot even attain - and leaves only 7 level 1 units in the entire game that it cannot defeat: the Dwarvish Guardsman, the Wose, Heavy Infantryman, Troll Whelp, Skeleton, Skeleton Archer, and Young Ogre. Opposing traits can throw that off - particularly, if an Arif is either Strong or Resilient it'll just barely survive, Dwarvish Fighter being both I think also just barely has it edging out, along with the Drake Clasher. Of those 7 (one of which is again, not in a base faction) I think actually only the HI and a strong Guardsman can actually completely kill it on the counterattack - factoring traits the Clasher obviously could as well but why would you ever charge a Clasher what is even wrong with you

So basically yes, 23 gold is pricey, but it is for a unit that, when conditions are right, can one-shot literally all but 6 units in default (with potentially 3 more if all is well for them), with on average a 36% chance on normal flat terrain to do so, while also being incredibly fast and having the kind of HP that means even with its glass cannon nature, it can survive the retaliation from almost any unit that isn't the likes of the Clasher or Spearman. Is it risky? Of course! It is an extreme unit. But it has the capacity to do things other units simply cannot. It's incredibly useful for flank attacks or for drilling a hole through a line when supported by cavalry and spearmen respectively. Yes, spearmen tend to be safer and still do a lot of damage, but a horseman in the right place can turn the spearman's typical leaving enemy half-dead but soon to retreat into a complete defeat. The presence of one also suddenly means the enemy's top priority is getting rid of that horseman since they're literally losing a unit every turn with one around.

There is after all a strategic element to why things are placed but it amounts to, in short, that a single horseman has the offensive capacity of roughly two units in most cases. Most units take about three attacking rounds on average to defeat an enemy. Spearmen are designed to take two for most enemies - it's why they very specifically have that 7-3 attack, which is just about the optimal amount of attack power for a basic level 1 unit to have that also lends them an extreme boost come daytime. Horsemen only take one in all but a few cases, though. Any unit facing down two horsemen is in extreme trouble and even at full health has the odds against them of making it to the next turn. Having the kind of offensive power on one tile to obliterate all but the most extremely defensive units in the game is an exorbitant strategic advantage - it only makes sense that it'd be both difficult to use and expensive to initiate.

Not to mention about how excellent its promotions are. Lancers have so much offense it's almost obscene like it's no contest that they're the most powerful unit in the game, on a level 2 unit, while Knights are a very respectable safer front-line option that can both crush opposition and hold its ground. I'm not saying that Horsemen are the most amazing thing ever, because yes, their cost means you can't just throw them at people, but the Loyalists are a faction of having a rote, predictable routine but a variety of cards to play, and the Horsemen are absolutely one of their most devastating cards.

[Velensk]

Just to put in my thoughts I actually feel the horsemen are a very powerful but also very situational tool of the loyalists. Not for every game but not a bad unit by any stretch.

Horsemen let you break open your damage per hex limit and to have a killing threat that your opponent cannot as easily run away from. Loyalists don't have anything else that can do that for them. I find them useful particularly against drakes, knalgans, and rebels who aren't using multiple woses.

[Gyra_Solune]

Just to put in my thoughts I actually feel the horsemen are a very powerful but also very situational tool of the loyalists. Not for every game but not a bad unit by any stretch.

Horsemen let you break open your damage per hex limit and to have a killing threat that your opponent cannot as easily run away from. Loyalists don't have anything else that can do that for them. I find them useful particularly against drakes, knalgans, and rebels who aren't using multiple woses.

Yeah, while I agree that Spearmen are undoubtedly the more threatening thing for Drakes, there is no denying how utterly terrifying a Horseman is for them.

That is kind of the Loyalist thing. You have a good but not outstanding main unit whose only main attraction is dealing a fairly large amount of damage for its class and all the rest of your units are basically slightly worse versions of the specialists other factions have...but where they only ever have one each of a resilient tank/fast skirmisher/extreme super damager/high-accuracy guy, Loyalists have every one of them at their disposal. It's kind of a weird situation they have - where other factions very much have to have every unit of theirs knit together and working in synergy, Loyalists just call them in when there's a job they can't do with the usual infantry and then get back to work with the normal guys.