I found this with the Wayback Engine on the Dancing Thief, and I don't think it's preserved on any current site, so I'm reposting it here. This guide predates the Stormheim units, and apparently was written around the time of the DLR 1.01 patch, so I'd appreciate any input by veteran Warlords if they agree or disagree with HydroJackson's assessment, and why.

This analysis is VERY old and out of date.

Some of the units mentioned here are useful and still widely used but not many.

KGB

TC if you're still around maybe I can discuss about what I believe are the units that are considered good

Hey, yeah I'm still around, and I'd absolutely be interested. I keep getting sidetracked by life, but one thing I'd like to do is a sort of player's guide for all Warlords 3 units, that explains which units are best to use, and why those that aren't worthwhile to include in a custom set don't cut it.

And that, in turn, could be used as a starting point for a balancing mod.

So to my memory, these are all the units I believe seen competitive use and are thus probably cream of the crop. I got to apologize if I get some of them wrong but maybe someone else can jump in and correct me if I'm wrong.
I'll add commentary on the units but I feel like some of them are fairly self-explantory - if a unit is here and it provides a Bonus/Malus then you can probably assume it basically has the best practical stat loadout.

1T

So before I begin, I want to say deciding on your 1T units in your army set is honestly one of the more interesting parts of army building - it certainly feels a bit more richly nuanced compared to certain slots like Ally 3 and 4 for sure.

I think 1T units can roughly be divided into a handful of categories - Scouting (high move / view), Archery, Banding (for cheap stacks) and utility. Sometimes they intersect.

Archery
Archers
Halfing
Elven Archers

These guys are arranged in order to cost and they don't quite scale linearly in terms of how much of an improvement you get over how much gold you have to pay for the better quality ones - Archers are stupidly cost effective at 40 gold while Elven Archers cost a whooping 350 gold. It really does depends a lot on playstyle.

Banding
Peasant
Gnome
Goblins

The dynamic between banding units is that the more banding a particular unit has, the more potential in bigger stacks but consequentially that also means they take more turns to "ramp up" and are also very heavily influenced by unlucky losses.

Peasants are notable because they're hilariously dirt cheap. Gnome and Goblins double as scout due to their Move Bonus and high view range. I prefer the former because they have 3 Hits (as opposed to 2).

Giant Rat*

Special mention to the Giant Rat - it's not a unit you use in Regs, but it makes pretty much the perfect Mercs1 since they're dirt cheap and can just infuse your army periodically with a threatening stack once you drop an Elven Cav on the

Scout
Rover***
Vampire Bat

If I'm not wrong I believe the Rover is considered pretty darn OP and a lot of the meta at one point just consisted of Rovers bushwacking each other. It doesn't have enough Missiles to be considered a dedicated Archery unit for taking out fliers so it can't replicate that role but it's honestly surprising how often that +1 Missile just sucker punch things that are significantly higher value than it.

Vampire Bats, introduced in SH, is kinda a bastard child of Giant Bats and Gnolls and kind of supercedes them both IMO. I don't think they were super common but they did see some use.

Utility
Banshees

Curse a bit of a niche ability but these guys are surprisingly bang for their buck.

Dwarven Runners
Kinda solely because of their 4 Hits on a 1T unit to soak Archery.

Straw Golem*

I actually can't quite remember if this one actually showed up more than I'm remembering.

2T

From here on I won't really categorize them any more because I think building your set is a bit more of a overall thing.

Giant Bees

These guys are like the defacto units for poison strategies I believe, you get a stack of them and send them at your enemies to really annoy the hell out of them.

Elven Cavalry

These guys might be one of the best bonus units in the game due to their cost efficiency. Morale +2 is a good bonus, they're fast so they can reinforce stacks real easy and a whole bunch neutral army sets seem to have these guys in them meaning you get a lot of free ones from capturing neutrals.

Pegacentaur
This is a really solid combat unit if you're going for an air-heavy army composition, though I think mostly in the Ally slot.

Gladiators
Very solid Assassin unit in both regular combat and cheap assassination, kinda supercedes Gnoll crossbows IMO

Basilisk / Cockatrice
Basilisk is basically a balance fix for Cockatrice. They're the defacto Para units

Marksmen

Dark Pegasi
Malus unit, like Pegacentaur, really good for air-heavy army comps

3T
Battering Ram / Siege Engine

These are the De Facto Siege units for the game... outside of Thieves I guess. You never need more than +4 Siege which is why Siege Engines used to be the default pre-SH, but SH adds Battering Rams who are great for armies that need to be a bit faster.

Roc Rider
These is a niche Siege unit for air-heavy army comps.

Moonguard
Big Archery units.

Black Rider
Malus unit that's surprisingly combat competent on Fields - essentially the most common terrain type

Hobgoblin
Used for its 4 Hits, not really a Malus unit, though that Chaos+1 is a nice icing on the cake.

Gnoll Cavalry
Basically the best all-rounder Assassination unit in the game - Fast, competent at regular combat so enemies can't just chaff their way through them and Assassin + 4 is just a minor stepdown from the more specialized Assassin

Cyclops
These guys are pretty competitive with Elephants as a Trample unit I think, with a lot less raw power but coming in at 3T (instead of 4) and 4 Hits to soak Archery.

4T
Lamia****

IIRC, due to statistics, this is a completely OP Ally 3. Unless you want to be a cool rebel, you put a Lamia in Ally 3 slot.

Balrog
Chimera
A smaller Black Dragon and Blue Dragon respectively

Elephants
Used to be the De Facto trample meat unit. Just really nice combat stats all around

Archons*
These guys usually only show up summoned by a Priest rather than an actual army slot, though sometimes being put in Ally4 just so you can adjust its combat order

5T
Red / Green Drags
The Malus Dragons, I believe Green tends to be more common. Usually the Ally 7 slot.

Black Drags
De Facto Ally 4 slot, best Combat dragon (IIRC Acid is better than Lightning mathematically I think, unless your opponent runs around with a lot of 1 Hit units)

There are a few units you are missing that are widely used

5 turn units
Brass/Bronze Dragons - Cheaper army set cost than Red/Green
Gold Dragons - Ally 4 to get +5 Morale in hero stacks
Undead Dragons - Used on the undead dragon neutral map. They are very strong with combined with Shaman's Evil Eye spell for 100% curse and immunity to trample.

4 turn units
Iron Golem - Best trample unit in the game

3 turn units
Unicorn - Used on maps with free Unicorn production
Giants / Minotaurs - For their +2 Chaos. Mostly used in sets that have Mercs

2 turn units
Royal Guard - With many players using Rams, this unit lets you get +4 fortify in cities.

There are quite a few other units neither of us mentioned. But they are situational depending on the game type (teleport vs no-teleport, 1 army start vs 2000 point army start etc) where they can shine.


KGB

Ooh, thanks for the assistance

KGB wrote:

Are these guys especially good in Mercs for a specific reason

Thanks for the feedback! I'm wondering why the shortcomings of the majority of regular DLR units wasn't addressed with some sort of unofficial balancing patch. Presumably, creating new units instead had no compatibility issues when you're playing with people who only used the regular game?

About scouting, one thing that surprised me in the DLR 1.01 patch notes is how Goblins got a huge increase in view range, from 3 to 6, but all other scouting units were left completely untouched in that regard. SH added a bunch of additional units with high view range, like rovers and outriders, and those became the de facto scouting units instead.

I've found one mention somewhere that Cockatrices were banned from multi-player. I assume because of their huge movement speed; how useful is 'paralyze' as an ability, considering it only comes into play if you lose the combat?

Banding units, and Peasants especially, seem really under-costed compared to other 1-turn crossbow fodder units like light & heavy infantry, pikemen, dwarf infantry, etc. I assume you just used those as garrisons in cities, where it will be pretty rare that they don't get their full banding bonus, at least on the first battle.

Gold/Silver Dragons: Are Silver Dragons as useless as they seem to me in comparison to Golds, or is there a good reason why you'd make the tradeoff for slightly higher movement?

It's also interesting to read how the distribution of neutral units on the map sometimes influence which units you want to include in your set.

How much impact do summoning spells have? I've seen the Priest/Archon/ally4 combination mentioned before, are there any other particularly useful summoned units that you don't necessarily have to include in your army list to make good use of?

Hannibal Rex wrote:


Correct. A fair number of players who played online (or PBEM) also played solo games especially campaigns so you didn't want to change how those played.

The other thing is that the game did not check that all sides used the same armies. By that I mean if I changed my Elf Calf to be 9/2 and yours was left at 5/1 the game would still let us play against each other and on battles on my machine they'd be done at 9/2 and on yours at 5/1. When I created the KHeroes and made some revisions is when players found this out as not everyone updated at the same time so they had mismatched heroes. So later on when I did the final version I added a '4' to the name so that players would know immediately if they had a mismatch.

Hannibal Rex wrote:


Only Steve knows why they got that change. 1.01 came VERY soon after the initial 1.0 release (I suspect most players never had 1.00 unless they bought on day 1). Players soon realized the value of the view range and Goblins were everywhere in games for that scouting and movement bonus. When SH was being put together players wanted a variety of 1 turn units that could be used as scouts that did other things (like Rover with +1 missiles, gnomes with banding etc).

Hannibal Rex wrote:


They were banned due to a bug I discovered. It was possible for them to get infinite movement so that's why they were banned. With their 50 moves, if you moved them into the water when they were low on moves and had a boat type with a higher movement than they had left (the better boat types) and then came back out of the water there was a bug that would give them +50 moves and you could repeat this infinitely often as long as you had a unit to group them with in the water when they ran low on moves. So you could not go infinite on turn 1 but by turn 8-9 if you spread out some scout units to the ports you could effectively move around forever razing things.


Hannibal Rex wrote:


The only 1 turn unit skills that have any value are archery, assassination and curse. The rest don't matter (other than for scout vs scout battles). The reason for this is because any halfway decent stack (never mind a strong hero stack) will make the fight -3 against those 1 turn units so they all fight at strength 1 anyway. Even hits don't matter much because Trample just wipes them out.

Hannibal Rex wrote:


Silver are useless. The only place I've ever seen them used is in 1-4 army starts where you might get 3 or 4 of them to start and can race them to neutrals. It's happens very infrequently and isn't really that much better than Golds.

Hannibal Rex wrote:


Some neutral maps have a TON of good production on them (Red Dragons, Undead Dragons, Elf Archers, Unicorns, Siege Engines etc). Knowing that affects the set choice because free production is huge early on before you have a lot of money. Other maps are very poor so it's hard to afford good units and on those you may want to instead rely on allies or mercs for your better units.

Hannibal Rex wrote:


The only unit I see that gets summoned and you want to place in your fight order is Archons. Everything else (including Necromancy units) is pretty much throwaway so it doesn't matter much if it fights up front and is killed because you will be summoning more (usually your game plan revolves around that mass summoning if you are going that route).

KGB

Hannibal Rex wrote:

How did you manage to retrieve it from the Wayback Engine? Using the yuku link in that site I can only get like one page worth of topics in General