Drakes vs Random, initial recruit

[psychic]

I absolutely have no idea how your reply answers my question It was absolutely stupid of me to pick an argument with a noob. A good lesson learnt and there will be no further replies to you.

Psychic searches frantically through the thread for the quotes...Searches again...Psychic is confused and thinks deeply "oh right these quotes are not even in this thread" and finally concludes "moron does not even know where to reply for a thread after 700 posts, what a waste"

paradisecity by ud i meant the whole faction, so ghouls and bats are included and all these are beyond their support role,

hm, i have no idea what you mean by this, so ill just call you a noob and not think about it

Yay jackpot psychic finds this quote in the thread. The answer for this is: just because you did not have the intellectual capacity to understand something(for which first of all you need to read the previous posts to know what the discussion was about), dont call the poster a noob.

@ paradisecity

However, bats are a small threat, not enough to warrant creating a specific unit to counter them. A glider has marksman, which is about as useful as magical (seeing as you would be attacking the bat). The typical drake mobility also limits the bat's threat of stealing villages, so if you effectively ZoC off the bats you shouldn't have to worry about bats too much.

[/quote]
Bats are a real big threat, trust me on this after a few battles i have had with good ud players. You dont want to waste 2 L1 units to ZOC a L0, it will significantly affect your capabilities elsewhere. Anyway whether bats are a threat or not is a separate discussion.
And even for your ghoul scenario, it frankly depends on the prioty of the target in the battle field on whom to use the burner, since the burner is like a mage. If i go into details further this will also go off the topic.

Finally on whether augur will be a good initial recruit against UD. Augur undeniably is the only unit in the entire drake arsenal with magical attack/poison stopper/+4 healer and capable of become a full healer(within a short amount of time which is not that relevant). Due to the high mobility the healer can "travel" along with the main fighting force providing heals during the retreating phase, which on an average is about 4 turns in a 8 turn cycle = 16 hp.

The most important point most people miss is the strategic use like i have mentioned above, purely on a tactical fight scenario it might be beaten as a finisher by the scout(which i still contest, but it is irrelevant to what i am trying to tell). I see a lot of strategic situations which can only be performed with the abilities of a unit such as augur which no other unit in the drake arsenal has. I think this has made my argument clearer

[Pentarctagon]

Psychic searches frantically through the thread for the quotes...Searches again...Psychic is confused and thinks deeply "oh right these quotes are not even in this thread" and finally concludes "moron does not even know where to reply for a thread after 700 posts, what a waste"

i had a feeling that you would dodge the question instead of actually responding to it .

Yay jackpot psychic finds this quote in the thread. The answer for this is: just because you did not have the intellectual capacity to understand something(for which first of all you need to read the previous posts to know what the discussion was about), dont call the poster a noob.

yay, hypocrisy is just hilarious...
also, is your default setting to just assume that since ppl don't completely agree with what you are saying to assume that they are morons and haven't even read the thread or do you just think that you're that much smarter than the rest of us?

[ParadiseCity]

paradisecity by ud i meant the whole faction, so ghouls and bats are included and all these are beyond their support role,

hm, i have no idea what you mean by this, so ill just call you a noob and not think about it

Yay jackpot psychic finds this quote in the thread. The answer for this is: just because you did not have the intellectual capacity to understand something(for which first of all you need to read the previous posts to know what the discussion was about), dont call the poster a noob.

Do you know what sarcasm is?

However, bats are a small threat, not enough to warrant creating a specific unit to counter them. A glider has marksman, which is about as useful as magical (seeing as you would be attacking the bat). The typical drake mobility also limits the bat's threat of stealing villages, so if you effectively ZoC off the bats you shouldn't have to worry about bats too much.

Bats are a real big threat, trust me on this after a few battles i have had with good ud players. You dont want to waste 2 L1 units to ZOC a L0, it will significantly affect your capabilities elsewhere. Anyway whether bats are a threat or not is a separate discussion.
And even for your ghoul scenario, it frankly depends on the prioty of the target in the battle field on whom to use the burner, since the burner is like a mage. If i go into details further this will also go off the topic.

Finally on whether augur will be a good initial recruit against UD. Augur undeniably is the only unit in the entire drake arsenal with magical attack/poison stopper/+4 healer and capable of become a full healer(within a short amount of time which is not that relevant). Due to the high mobility the healer can "travel" along with the main fighting force providing heals during the retreating phase, which on an average is about 4 turns in a 8 turn cycle = 16 hp.

The most important point most people miss is the strategic use like i have mentioned above, purely on a tactical fight scenario it might be beaten as a finisher by the scout(which i still contest, but it is irrelevant to what i am trying to tell). I see a lot of strategic situations which can only be performed with the abilities of a unit such as augur which no other unit in the drake arsenal has. I think this has made my argument clearer

Well of course, I never said that augurs were useless v. undead, i merely said that they were not an optimal first recruit, which you have yet to disprove. You are arguing about it more like you are attacking with a full force, at day, after a significant amount of playtime has elapsed. Under that circumstance, it would be a decent choice to have an augur in your ranks.

However, when you are either attacking or defending in the beginning of the game, support units such as augurs are much less useful because there are less units to support:
-If defending, you have enough villages to heal any unit poisoned by the ghoul that might be there. In addition, since you have little units there to begin with, an extra fighter will have a greater effect than it will when you have a full army.
-If attacking, you will again be served better by an extra attacking unit rather than by a support one, since you have so few units.

And in terms of bats, I never suggested leaving your lines to ZoC one. What I did suggest is that you use ZoC to stop them from getting to your villages.

[Yoyobuae]

Anyway, whether augurs are good initial recruit vs Undead or not is irrelevant most of the time, because chances are you're facing a Random faction, you don't know if the opponent got Undead. Which is the whole point of this thread, until it went off topic.

[Velensk]

Of course, but you should never discount the possibility that a random opponent might be undead when planning. A random opponent can only be one of six factions. The idea is to get a recruit which can be quickly adapted to whatever foe it turns out to be without much difficulty. It might be that your recruit was a poor choice for attacking or defending the first night but in these cases you can always just not attack or give land as needed and take it back later. However if your entire recruit is ill-suited to your opponent such adaption will not be easy or uncostly.

This taken into account as a whole makes it relevant to consider if augers are useful against all factions (including undead) and I would certainly agree with anyone who says that the answer is yes. Although money is frequently better spent elsewhere it won't hurt you too much to invest in an auger even if your opponent turns out to be undead because at the very least augers can nullify poison damage.

[Euthanatos93]

you guys need to take this into a game to actually compare e-peens instead of just describing them on the forums =)

[Tonepoet]

I've kinda mentioned this before but I feel it may've been glanced over the first time. There are only two primarily ranged oriented units in the Drake faction, the Saurian Augur and the Drake Burner. This means if you want to invest into ranged attackers at all, which is generally a pretty wise idea for balancing out an initial recruit, you have to pick between one or the other.

The problem herein lies that each unit is somewhat inoptimal at certain match-ups, because their primary attack is somewhat crippled against some, if not all of the units. For the Burner, it faces greatly reduced damage against the likes of both Drake Fighters and Drake Clashers. It has some utility in killing saurians but is largely inefficient at this job when compared to the alternatives. The Augur on the other hand cannot use its primary attack against any unit in the Undead faction effectively but can use secondary characteristics to its advantage: most particularly its healing is awesome against poison, as Velsenek has just mentioned, although the impact damage and pierce resistance could theoretically be helpful too if you find yourself facing "swarms of Skeletal Archers omg!"

When all of this is put into consideration they're more or less equivalent to one another in terms of preparedness, serving only secondary utility against one of the six factions. What isn't equivalent however, is their price. Unless you're willing to argue that the Burner is more effective against Drakes than the Augur is against undead, the cheapness of the Augur makes it the preferable choice. This is because if you get the faction the Augur is ill suited for, you have more money to reinvest into getting the proper units. If you get the Burner and end up facing Drakes though, you can't just suddenly ask for a 5 gold refund to go towards an Augur and are therefore especially disadvantaged in this matchup in comparison.

The only other good option is no primarily ranged geared units until the opponent's faction is known. It could work out quite nicely by eliminating the chance of a mispick, although ranged units are usually quite important in all fights and 5/6 times you'd probably be shooting yourself in the foot by not having an Augur around to play that vital role. Why yes, I suppose you could go with a fourth choice and buy one of each to cover every base, but it doubles your odds at having bought a rather ineffectual unit to one in three so I find this inadvisable too.

If you do decide to go the no ranged unit route for this reason, it might be interesting to note that the price of four Drake Fighters plus two Drake Gliders comes out to exactly 100 gold. This might be a tad unbalanced of a recruit in terms of damage type based strategy but on the other hand, it also allows for quite a large bit of mobility. Not only is this a defacto trademark trait of the faction but this virtually unmatchable speed and agility could also be leveraged to help you avoid disadvantaged combat until you have enough gold to make up for the missing links. Just a thought.

[ParadiseCity]

Ok, well as I believe Euthantos suggested (if I interpreted "e-peens" correctly), Psychic and I went in-game and discussed the topic. We came to the eventual conclusion that while an augur would be an ok recruit for an aggressive player, that we simply need to agree to disagree on a more defensive playstyle.

If you do decide to go the no ranged unit route for this reason, it might be interesting to note that the price of four Drake Fighters plus two Drake Gliders comes out to exactly 100 gold. This might be a tad unbalanced of a recruit in terms of damage type based strategy but on the other hand, it also allows for quite a large bit of mobility. Not only is this a defacto trademark trait of the faction but this virtually unmatchable speed and agility could also be leveraged to help you avoid disadvantaged combat until you have enough gold to make up for the missing links. Just a thought.

Actually, that is pretty much the strategy that I use . Never noticed that 100 gold thing either.

[siowy]

Tonepoet wrote:
If you do decide to go the no ranged unit route for this reason, it might be interesting to note that the price of four Drake Fighters plus two Drake Gliders comes out to exactly 100 gold. This might be a tad unbalanced of a recruit in terms of damage type based strategy but on the other hand, it also allows for quite a large bit of mobility. Not only is this a defacto trademark trait of the faction but this virtually unmatchable speed and agility could also be leveraged to help you avoid disadvantaged combat until you have enough gold to make up for the missing links. Just a thought.

initial recruit 5 drake fighters ftw. together they can blow good fire

[Eskon]

I'd have to agree that not being able to recruit their ranged specialist units in the initial recruit without running risk of them being out-countered is not a significant disadvantage. Fighters and gliders are quite versatile, and both are equipped with respectable ranged attacks which are also fire (so a skeleton rush is quite likely to fail against them with or without a burner).

The main risk of going with Fighter/Glider all out is facing a drake equipped "properly", i. e. clashers; they kick the asses of either (this is part of what makes me always recruit at least one clasher in a drake initial recruit). Thankfully, clashers are quite slow, making an all-clasher recruit unworkable.

[Cackfiend]

My Drake vs Random recruit was generally:

Clasher
Fighter
Skirm
Augur


Skirms always have a use vs no matter what matchup, and are very easy to level. The only problem with this recruit is if you're player 2 on one of the small maps you run the risk of P1 grunt rush where you will most likely die vs any skilled player.


Drakes have no staple units... Undead have DA, Elves have Fighters, Loys have Spearmen, Dwarves have Fighters, and Orcs have Grunts... all are a safe bet vs random

[Zorro]

hi


I think the drakes are starting to recruit against their main danger is that the spears piercing weapon and even if he knows not the opposing faction.
My recruitment is rather the skirmishers for speed and try to have the initiative, clashers to defend the day and hope to survive the next two days against a regulatory assault on the part of loyalists, and augurs.
if the opponent does not then loyalist, then adapt their recruitment.