Fatiguing out and Dying to Armor Defeating Hits

When fatigued out - you take 1/6 armor defeating hits (see below) as opposed to 1/36. It is hard to overstate how significant this is. A lot of players 'end' their buff script on a big spell, such as Hell Power, or Foul Vapors. However if that fatigues out a thug - the armor defeating hits will often kill it before it wakes up.

Armor defeating hits are doubly dangerous. Not only do they lower prot by 25%, they do so when you roll low on RNG. This means you're both on a lowroll, AND at 25% reduced prot. Typically - if an enemy unit gets a lucky roll - its these hits that deal most of the damage.

And just to add insult to injury, every 10 points of fatigue also lowers your defense rolls by 1 - up to -10. This means you take more hits as well

Overinvesting

The whole point of a thug is it is supposed to be efficient. If you're investing 50 gems, that could otherwise be put towards a global, or battlefield spells, or sitesearching remotes (etc), there are often diminishing returns unless you're making a super-combatant. Worse - if you overinvest - you create a giant neon target over the thug that screams 'loot pinata' - both increasing the risk of losing it - and rewarding your opponent for killing it.

Essentially - if you have a unit that's only going to clear PD, how many gems is that 'really' worth as opposed to just recruiting a few more troops. If you are losing 15-20 gem thugs here and there, it will not take much time before the losses become crushing (especially earlygame).

Over-Aggressive Positioning

As an extension of Trap 2 - if you put a bunch of gems into a unit that can only really kill PD or unprepared forces - you generally don't want to be too aggressive as the cost of losing it is significant. Although there can be value in being aggressive and unpredictable with thugs - the gem cost of losing them is significant. The more forward positioned they are, generally the more vulnerable they are to counterthugs and opposing player tricks.

Over-Reliance

Thugs lack the siege power to knock down fort walls and generally can't 'hold' lands from players retaking them - particularly those next to a fort/palisades. Sending millions of thugs everywhere may be cool, but ultimately if you can't take forts, it's going to be a problem, and they're going to get chipped away at by counter-parties. Worse, thugs tend to be mages, so your research is falling behind when doing all this. Worse still - thugs tend to be really irritating, so if you raid someone to hell and don't finish them off, you may be in for a long and costly war. Thugs work best when doing a decisive raid right before a big army fight so they can get back to researching or join up with the main army, or when chipping at otherwise undefendable border provinces. Plinking all over the place without a clear purpose tends to be a mistake.

Ultimately, thugs (particularly light thugs and raiding thugs), are generally not a players main army - and it's important to be able to win the army fights as well as raid your opponent. Otherwise, ultimately the land thugs claim will likely be reclaimed, and when the inevitable army fight comes, there's a risk that a player over-relaint on thugs isn't ready for the big battle that may require troops and different (non-thug) magic as well. This becomes more apparent when you consider as well all the turns the thug 'isn't' researching and all the turns spent making gear for them.

Of course, there are thug lines that convert well into stackfight lines, but the basic point remains - you need to be able to win the big fight at some point as well. It's often a mistake to place all of ones eggs in the thug basket.

Heavy thugs and Supercombatants can be an exception to this general rule as they can wipe out stacks and bring a quick end to a war. However if they fail or are killed - it can also be crippling. Generally - players with no other threats to deal with can muster up some sort of response to a heavy thug or supercombatant (even if via trade) so they're still best used in conjunction with other tools.

The Defensive Onion

This is one of the core concepts of building a thug - since the DRN system tends to mean any 'one' stat even if stacked really high is unlikely to negate all attacks. The Defensive Onion is the layering of defenses to exponential effect. Essentially - defensive layers have an exponential not a liner effect.

• If a unit attacks something with a 50% chance of hitting, and the defender has another buff that reduces the hit chance by 50%, only 1/4 attacks will hit. In other words - the first buff will block '1' attack and the second buff will block '2 attacks' (and so on).

So the basic idea is you want to layer defenses. Lets take a simple example. We have a G2 mage. We give it some heavy armor (hard to hit), some reinvigoration on the bless (doesn't fatigue out), some defense on the bless (hard to hit), it casts shroud of bewilderment (hard to hit), and a fluffer casts Body Ethereal (hard to hit). Lets say each of these layers blocks 3/4 attacks. Well at that rate - only 1/256 attacks is getting through. And that's just 4 layers. Add on mirror images and some regen, and this thug becomes very hard to kill through ordinary means.

The way the DRN system works - it tends to be best to layer 'different' defenses or checks than just to force one. So high defense + high prot tends to be better than pushing the prot that little bit further.

Finally - due to armor defeating hits - prot is arguably the weakest part of the onion. Because it's so easy to buff however, it's typically the one that gets the most focus.

Some Combos (Many thanks to Soron)

• Mistform + Body Ethereal
• Protection buffs + Regen. (Often has fatigue issues with Armor Defeating Hits)
• High defense + Mirror image + Shroud of Bewilderment
• Fear + Awe

Some Important Onion Layer Spells earlygame

• Shroud Of Bewilderment / Awe (adds a layer to self)
• Body Ethereal (Adds a very powerful layer to an adjacent unit at S1
• Mistform/Mossbody (adds a very powerful layer to an adjacent unit at harder to reach paths
• Skin Spells (Barkskin/Stoneskin/Ironskin) - both self cast and on another unit
• Summon Earth Power (The ONLY source of reinvigoration through magic earlygame (soul vortex later)
• Regeneration (Hard to cast but worthwhile. Also Personal Regeneration
• Bless (Sounds dumb but a thug bless can go a long way)

Some less core but still valuable spells

• Temper Armor (Generally easily accessible)
• Furious Warriors (Not great but can help a repel thug)
• Temper Flesh / Personal Quickness / Liquid Body etc (self buffs)
• Luck (it's not awful but if your thug is risking death - something has already gone terribly wrong)
• Enlarge (rarely core but it can help a HP thug a little)
• Cold and Fire Resists (can reduce the fatigue impact of heat or cold scales).

Armor Defeating Hits

https://illwiki.com/dom5/dom6/protection

These hits ignore 25% of prot in addition to only procing on low prot rolls. They tend to do a lot of damage and misunderstanding this mechanic is one of the most frequent causes of thug death. When the defender rolls their prot roll against the attackers damage roll (2d6 exploding) if they roll a 2 – (1/36) it’s an armor defeating hit. If their fatigue is 50-99 this is 2-3 (1/12) and if immobilized (entangled or fatigue > 100) it is 2-3-4 (1/6). Then damage type modifiers (like slashing are added) – which can often stack on the damage after the armor has been reduced.

For example – a 24 Prot unit is hit by a 16 damage armor defeating slashing hit. You roll say a 3, and they roll an 8 (fairly standard). So 24 Prot – 6 = 18 prot total. And the hit deals 24 (so 6 damage) plus slashing modifier – 7 damage total.

In a thugging situation you will receive many hits. The difference between 1/36 armor defeating and 1/6 is significant.

Fatigue Management

https://illwiki.com/dom5/dom6/fatigue

Because of the effect of armor defeating hits and to a lesser extent – the lower DEF rolls of fatigued units – fatigue management is the easiest to mess up aspect of a thug. In short – the relevant aspects are

• Melee Encumbrance
• Spellcasting Encumbrance
• Any Terrain Encumbrance (e.g high cold etc)
• Any Reinvigoration or Life Drain
• Are you undead (Generally start at 0 encumbrance)

There are usually two aspects to a thug’s life cycle. The buff cycle – where it may accumulate fatigue (if it’s a mage), and the aftermath, where it tries to stay fatigue neutral or positive. Ordinarily – it is best for a thug to enter combat at low fatigue, to avoid armor defeating hits. Most thugs are fatigue neutral or positive – that is to say they don’t accumulate fatigue when they start fighting. Occasionally, they can be built to fatigue out – generally into low damage units with very high prot or in shorter fights where the battle is expected to be won before fatigue accumulates

Some Important Spells and Gear

• Twiceborn is a popular thug spell as it turns a human unit (with encumbrance) into an unencumbered wight. The wight is a good chassis for a heavy thug - and typically you thug both forms. Ordinarily - when using twiceborn, you use less items and take greater risks with the human form since it's weaker and you don't mind losing it as much - then kit out the undead form more heavily due to the reduced encumbrance and increased HP tending towards a heavy thug.
  • Earth power is a close second, being reinvigoration in spell form (allowing many units to be fatigue neutral at const 3)

• The skin spells (barkskin/Stoneskin/Ironskin), Body Ethereal, Temper Armors, Enlarge, Regeneration, Mossbody can all be painted on by fluffers. Early there’s a series of powerful self buffs (Temper Flesh, skeletal body), and lategame there’s Phoenix Pyre and Soul Vortex, the former which with positive fatigue can make a unit near invincible, the latter which is a one stop shop fatigue solution. Earth power is easy to miss (Conj3) but provides much needed reinvigoration for earth mages.

• Reinvigoration items come into their own at const 5 (boots of the messenger / amulet of reinvigoration (N), and Girdle of Might (E)). Similarly – amulet of regeneration is ‘the’ regeneration item at const5. The defensive misc items also get a notch better e.g. shock spool / dancing trident. Some items at const3 need some help but can also be quite good - bracers of protection also gets buffed by Temper Armors, so on its own it's underwhelming, but with temper armours it represents +6 head and body armor.

• At const 3 thugs can be a bit finnicky and struggle to stay fatigue positive, whilst at const5, the options tend to greatly increase. There is more variety at con7 - but const3 and const 5 are sort of the 'core' thug techs.

Usage and Risk

• Thugs can be hard to build
• A thug is a relatively high gem investment that could be spent elsewhere. Even a cheapish thug may cost 10-15 gems.
• If a thug is lost - you not only lose the gems, your opponent gains the gems
• For the amount of gems invested, thugs tend to be 'relatively' flimsy. There are a lot of good methods in magic, sometimes in just troop deployment, and in counterthugs to deal with thugs.
• A thug is a giant 'loot pinata' that invites answers. They can be countered in a number of ways - and when the pinata pops, it can be very lucrative for an opponent (and painful for you)

When using a thug or supercombatant, there tends to be some element of risk. If the opponent deploys enough mages, counterthugs or troops the unit will die. Since quite a few gems are invested in these (especially heavy thugs and supercombatants), it's important to evaluate which tiles to attack. For the purposes of this section - we will assume you know the PD type in the province (and if you don't - that can be another layer of risk).

Light thugs will tend to always have some level of risk to a PD dump of any PD type. Some are more resistant to this than others.

Edge of Territory Provinces: These tend to be the safest things for a thug to hit. Often, they're outside the range of receiving reinforcements in a single turn. As such, the attacker can be less worried about counterthugs and the like. Having scouts when raiding these is very valuable, as it lets the attacker confirm there are no reinforcements in range before deploying the thug.

The second advantage of these is unpredictability. If there's a border 3 long, it's not always obvious if a thug will attack, or where it will attack, especially if the attacker moves 2 tiles in one turn. The ability to send a thug from a fort 2 tiles away can be very powerful, and conversely, just the threat of it can be very restricting.

Tiles Adjacent to a Fort These tiles are considerably riskier to attack, as the attacker can be confident that the defender has mages (and troops) inside the fort. Of course, taking these tiles is often important staging for a war, but they carry higher risks. The other, less obvious risk, is the deeper into enemy land one goes, the less paths of retreat remain. Often this means a thug's movements can be relatively predictable.

The other problem with raiding these is they're trivial to retake. Any gold gains are likely temporary since the tile will predictably flip the next turn. Unless clearing a path (for a 2 mapmove) for a larger force, there isn't a lot of value raiding these tiles, but there is a lot of risk.

Forts and Capitals Interestingly - players often forget to patrol these early (since the mages are on research), but once pinged they're unlikely to forget again. These are hard targets, and often the goal of hitting one isn't to keep the tile, it's to constrain an opposing players movement for 1 turn when they break siege. If you can pull this off, it can allow other units to move into the cap circle with impunity or parts of the land to be 'cut off' from the main capital force for an extra turn. Since a non-stealthing unit attacking a capital will be predictable (which in turn will tend to getting caught and the thug dying), these lines tend to require Stealth or Magic Phase thugs.

When attacking these - there will always be the risk of both a mage/counterthug patrol (and immediate kill on the thug), and of large volumes of PD killing the thug/SC (dependent on how heavy it is). Although it can be rewarding (largely due to constraining opposing player moves for a turn when you move off), this tends to require quite a lot of setup - it's not especially effective to just siege for a turn and move off with no followup from other forces.

Catching Small, Targeted Forces Heavy Thugs and Supercombatants tend to shine in low-risk scenarios where they can wipe out a important (but ultimately small) force. The small force is unlikely to have answers to have answers to the thug, and the thug is able to accrue value at a respectable pace with relatively low risk. As a rule of thumb, this isn't going to be a main army, but splinter forces, reinforcement, small blocks of troops for raiding and the like.

Catching Large Forces This is mostly reserved for supercombatants and the heaviest of thugs. This tends to be high risk high reward (albeit some supercombatants are tailor made for this), but losing is generally catastrophic since you also lose all the gear your unit has. Furthermore - a skilled player moving a large force around a second nation (who has access to supercombatants) will plan for it. So for example - if you take a Musphelheim Wight Titan 20% Regen Larger Bless (dormant), it's going to be fairly obvious what you're doing and players will plan around it (that doesn't necessarily mean they can stop it - but one can fully expect them to pull out the Bag o Tricks.

Hammers and Cheap Thugs

Three features that define a lot of thug-related play are

• Hammers Dwarven Hammer
• Units with the trait Forge Bonus (reduces gem cost = to bonus) e.g. Master Smith
• To a lesser extent, the site, The Steel Ovens. This is a one per map site however so it is not reliable. It is significant enough a bonus however to mention.

The former two are reliable ways of reducing the gem cost of items. Although they reduce an item by a 'fixed' amount - the discount to gem-cost ration get better with low gem items. Let's take an extreme example to demonstrate this. A 20 gem item with a 4 gem discount is 16 gems - or a 20% discount. A 5 gem item with a 4 gem discount is 1 gem, or an 80% discount. Before discounts (and for the moment ignoring mage turns), you could make 4 items at 5 gems to one at 20. After discounts, it becomes 16/1.

The dwarvern hammer costs 15 gems. It essentially 'gains' 2 gems per turn by not spending them on items. These gems can vary in color - if you suddenly make Air items, the hammers preserve A gems, if E items, E gems, etc. It pays for itself after 7.5 turns, at which point simply having one essentially generates 2 gems per turn. Now players can overvalue these a little, not forging before having a full hammer economy - but they are generally very good value engines as the game goes on. It is (one) of the reasons why a lot of the best light thugging items are at 5 gems - the discount given by the hammer makes the thugs very cheap.

Generally - 5 gem items are sufficiently good that getting lots of them cheaply is valuable. The best of these is the Greatsword of Sharpness. With a hammer, these cost 3 gems, and can make a unit incredibly high damage and give it ARP (with a goodly bonus to atk and def). Obviously - the 2 gems saved don't care if they're saved on a 10 gem item, or a 5 gem item, but practically, the former will use up a players gems quite quickly when the latter will be much closer to a players gem income (-3 per turn per item as opposed to -8 per turn per item). Also - if spending 'all' the gems and mage turns don't matter, 3 items at 5 gems is generally going to be significantly better than 1 10 gem item. In terms of increasing unit DPS - the Greatsword of Sharpness outperforms a lot of the more expensive options in the general case.

Carrying a gem or two on a thug

This is one of the most overlooked things in thug building. Holding a gem or two can completely reshape a thug. Whether it be a N1 mage casting Personal Regeneration, or an E1 mage casting Summon Earthpower to gain E2 access, lower the fatigue of future E spells AND gain reinvigoration, a G1 mage casting Shroud of Bewilderment or an A1 mage casting Personal Mistform, a lot of lines get considerably better with a single gem used. There are thug builds that are only viable when carrying a gem.

Generally however since gems are expensive, this is reserved for multiplicative spells like the above - which add additional layers of defense. It's generally a little wasteful to spend a gem on an additive bonus. Some lines can have scouts trail behind thugs slowly feeding them gems as required for this purpose.

Some Common Important Traits

Thugs with stealth are considerably more survivable than ones without. Similarly - if a unit like a scout can carry a stealth item (Con5 G3 and Con7 G2), it can swap it onto a thug so it can stealth away after an attack.

On a similar note, thugs with magic phase attacks can pick their targets very cleanly, and can also be hard to pin down. Magic phasing in then stealthing away can be very hard to predict and deal with.

Morale Mechanics and Thugs

TODO - ideally get someone else to write this because god knows I can't manage self-routing on my thugs

Add mechanics here

Add example here (Orains)

Add self deprecating joke here

Armor Defeating Hits

https://illwiki.com/dom5/dom6/protection

These hits ignore 25% of prot in addition to only procing on low prot rolls. They tend to do a lot of damage and misunderstanding this mechanic is one of the most frequent causes of thug death. When the defender rolls their prot roll against the attackers damage roll (2d6 exploding) if they roll a 2 – (1/36) it’s an armor defeating hit. If their fatigue is 50-99 this is 2-3 (1/12) and if immobilized (entangled or fatigue > 100) it is 2-3-4 (1/6). Then damage type modifiers (like slashing are added) – which can often stack on the damage after the armor has been reduced. For example – a 24 Prot unit is hit by a 16 damage armor defeating slashing hit. You roll say a 3, and they roll an 8 (fairly standard). So 24 Prot – 6 = 18 prot total. And the hit deals 24 (so 6 damage) plus slashing modifier – 7 damage total. In a thugging situation you will receive many hits. The difference between 1/36 armor defeating and 1/6 is significant.

Plink Damage

Every now and then a hit will get through. Most thugs need some way to regenerate damage once hit. Since a thug will absorb lots of attacks, there will be lots of chances for a highroll. Generally – a few will occur so a thug needs a plan for this

Dealing Damage

A thug needs a way to kill things. This is rarely a complicated problem but it is potentially forgettable so I’ll mention it here. Most thugs want some form of light AOE attack.

Lategame Magical Thugs

The two (arguably 3) big spells for lategame thugs are Soul Vortex (fatigue, hp regen and damage), Phoenix Pyre (Not Dying), and Invulnerability (less important but you reach it en-route to the above two). In the late game - there is an increasing volume of mage thugs (Vampires - Phoenix Pyre Golems, Teleporting Giants). These are sort of the core spells that hold those engines together.

D3 (or D2 with gems) is arguably the only 'needed' aspect. Soul vortex in particular enables a great deal of thugging options as it solves for most of a thugs problems with fatigue management / HP regen and damage. These D2 or D3 mages tend to be able to take out large volumes of PD (20+) ungeared or with very light gear (armor only).

It is preferable to have a means of magic phase movement on a mage thug so you can drop them on the requisite tile then retreat.

There is a subcategory of mage thugs that don't use the specific spells. These tend to be either capstone mages (Ubar's Sultan comes to mind) or lategame summons (E.G. Caelum's diversity summons).

Protection/Invulnerability Interaction

• https://illwiki.com/dom5/protection
• https://illwiki.com/dom5/stacking-effects#protection

The exact formulae for protection calculation are linked above. However a quick and dirty formula is find the larger number of the two - then divide the smaller one by two and add it. For final values under 30 you can add 1.

• For example, at 20 Armor and 10 natprotection, you could 'guesstimate' 25-26 prot (20 +5). [Actually 25]
  • That exact example is 25, but with 11 natprot or 21 armor it becomes 26 (right on the threshold).

Alternatively - you can use the actual maths (in the linked articles), or the protection table (second linked article) to calculate it exactly.

Invulnerability works similarly to natural protection. If it is higher that natural protection and the unit is hit by Non-Magic weapons it will apply. It does not stack with natural protection, and it does nothing if natural protection is higher or if hit by magic weapons. Two quick examples

A lich with barkskin (10 natural protection 25 Invulnerability, and say with blacksteel plate (17 armor) is hit by

• A magic weapons attack. The protection scores used would be 10 (natural protection) and 17 (armor)
• A non-magic weapons attack. The scores used would be 25 (invulnerability) and 17 (armor

A Berserk Myrmecoleon with a hardskin and Invulnerability bless (for now ignore the fact this is a bad bless and lean into the example). Natural Protection is 18 +3 (E over 3), +5(berserk) + 5(hardskin) = 31 and invulnerability is 10

• A magic weapons attack. The protection scores used would be 31 (natural protection) and 0 (no armor)
• A non-magic weapons attack. The protection scores used would be 31 (natural protection) and 0 (no armor)

Encumbrance for dummies

https://illwiki.com/dom5/dom6/encumbrance In combat there are 2 main sources of encumbrance

• Encumbrance. This is the amount listed on the unit card generally. This comes from heavy items, being armor and shields.
• Scales Encumbrance. The second point of heat/cold adds .5 encumbrance and the third adds +1.5.
  • Traits like cold blooded add onto this

The way melee fatigue per turn is calculated is you add your encumbrance to fatigue when

• Every time you finish a Melee Attack (so 2 weapons is twice the fatigue)
• Every time you fly

Spellcasting Encumbrance

• Every time you cast a spell add
  • Encumbrance
  • Plus your shield and armor encumbrance X2

Wading and Army Thugs

Dominions 6 introduced a 'wading' mechanic for large units. The technical aspects are these

• Units 3 sizes larger or more can wade. So for example, an enlarged cavalry (size 6) can wade through human sized infantry (size 3)
• Trampling units can't wade
• Walls don't interfere with this (you can wade onto a fort wall even if you couldn't normally walk onto said wall).

The main benefits are as follows

• Thugs can be put behind lines - buffed, and will connect with the enemy army
  • As an extension to this - the thug can script hold x5 and not worry about being trapped behind the army. This allows players to layer considerably more buffs than otherwise trying to get them to 'line up'
• Army thugs are more survivable as they don't need to start in or near the front line.
  • The corollary of this is that many Army Thugs need less defensive gear than before
• Players no longer need holes in their lines for thugs if the thugs are 3 sizes larger
• If you're bad as scripting (as I am), wading units are more forgiving than having a thug stuck forever behind player ranks.

Flying Army Thugs

Any army thug that can be buffed or fluffed with flight can set up attack rear scripts after turn 5. This is very handy (especially with slow casting spells), as the thug can arrive at the backline after an opponent is off script, and after all hold/attack units have already moved several tikes. There's not a huge number of these, but when it comes up, it tends to be very good (sniping the entire enemy mage line) so it's worth remembering.

Magic Mechanics and Thugs

• Self buffs spread to mounts For example Personal Barkskin will affect the mount and the rider of a cavalry commander - as will Shroud of Bewilderent, Personal Regeneration and other similar spells
• Spells in the initial script are prioritized off-script. This is relevant when thugs need to do hyper-specific things. For example, a LA Zematia Fire Shield Thug may want Healing Touch in its script - because when cast - it heals both the high armor rider and the mount for a considerable amount - whilst fire shield is doing the damage.
• Buff spells sometimes have weird targeting rules. Essentially - there are two casting categories for targeting (this is not on the spell card). Some spells will target the most valuable targets (E.G. Body Ethereal) whilst others will prioritize the caster (Gift of Cheated Fate). This is not intrinsically obvious and can cause problems when trying to 'thread the needle' with lots of buffs, only to find out the wrong square is buffed. The Author does not know all the 'self-targeting' AOE buff spells.
• Magic Phase Attacks will land at the same time as stealth units un-stealthing and attacking the same time (not an adjacent tile). If a thug is moving in the magic phase, and there are stealthy units, it can be important to get things to line up, especially if there are fluffers. Similarly, if a player has stealthy troops, this allows a thug to focus less on defensive gear, especially if it wades behind the main line or zips around the side.
• Thugs can use gems!?. Although obvious - a lot of players treat thugs as 'geared and ready to go'. A couple of gems can transform a thug quite substantially. Whether it be a F1 mage casting Phoenix Pyre, an E1 mage casting Summon Earthpower, a D2 mage casting Invulnerability, Soul Vortex, etc, a gem or two can completely reshape the buff script.
  • Bonus points if these gems are on a scout and swapped over so the opposing player isn't aware of them

Other General Notes

• Thugs typically get surrounded - and some lines fit 2 or even 3 to a square to lessen the impact of that.
• Supercombatants are always going to have a weakness. Worst case - someone can always drop curse and slowly afflict your thug/supercombatant to death
• Taking the candy out of the loot pinata To protect your thugs - at Const5 and 7 you can make G3 and G2 stealth helmets respectively. You can put these on a scout - move your thug in - then swap their helmet around after combat. This is a handy way of protecting your thugs when allowing you to use a head piece in combat. It's handy with high value units as you can both optimize them for combat, then have them stealth away
  • On this topic - you can also have scouts trail behind thugs, swapping gear in and out, or just carrying gear off to safety after a raid. This way - you can mitigate risk if your thug ends up surrounded, magic phased, attacked or otherwise awkwardly positioned.

Retreat Orders

If you fear a thug or supercombatant drop, you can always script an army full of mages to retreat. It's not always an obvious option - but if you're moving in your own lands - this can minimize damage

Thug Types and PD

Different thugs do well into different PD. More specifically - prot thugs get really unhappy when thrown at Lizardmen or Barbarians and die quickly.

As a rule of thumb - tribe and underground provinces are good targets for thugs since the PD is weak - and the defender because of that is unlikely to invest heavily.

Of course - tracking PD types is laborious. If you're going maximum effort however - you can track the PD type of border provinces before neighbors conquer them so you can later allocate thugs (or not allocate thugs) to take those squares. Meanwhile - if you're going to PD dump against thugs - it's best that be on a tile that has good independents (such as barbs/lizards/bone tribe/heavycav.

Counterthugs

A counter thug is essentially a very cheap variation of a thug - that is designed to kill other thugs. Typically - a counter-thug costs a fraction of what a regular thug costs - with most of its cost tied up in its weapon.

• For example - lets say player A has a protection thug. Without getting too fancy into specifics - lets say they get to 33 protection, 10% regeneration and 20HP, which is high but achievable in a few ways.
  • A counterthug might be a single Cynocephalian Chieftan with a Greatsword of Sharpness. That is going to deal 33ARP slashing damage per round - averaging 21/hit. This kills the very elite thug in two swings (or two thugs in one turn).

Counterthugs tend to be defined by their weapons. Ordinarily they need some trait that allows them to kill a thug easily. Since they aren't designed for sustained combat - they generally don't need to worry about things like staying fatigue neutral or HP regen.

When using counterthugs - you often want a scout or similar unit present to help loot any spoils. If the enemy has a GSS of their own for example and you bring 2 GSS counterthugs, well they already have weapons so they can't loot the 3rd GSS. But a scout could. Generally since counterthugs rarely have much gear beyond a weapon, this is to take weapons.

Army Thugs

Many thanks to Memoria

An army thug is essentially a thug that rather than doing things solo - sits in an army. Broadly - the goal of these tends to be one of three -

• Make a unit semi-indestructible to hold off a large blob of troops
• Have a unit designed to snipe elites
• Have a super-DPS unit embedded in an army line

At late research, soul vortex and invulnerability almost automatically make any death mage an army thug. Earlier, players need to be a bit more creative.

Units designed to hold off large blobs of troops tend to be built similarly to ordinary thugs - albeit with a focus on survivability. They tend to accept every buff the player army can give them, then misbehave with the enemy troop line (sometimes with magic like shockwave, sometimes by just sitting in a blob and occupying it).

Units designed to snipe elites tend to be build closer to counterthugs, with a focus on their weapons. Now because these are embedded in an army, they're often built a little more expensively as players can stack their armies buffs on them and really boost up the defensive onion. But at core, these units are focused around their weapon and target. Flying or Gift of flight can be very helpful on these for finding targets

Super-DPS inline units are just what they sound like. In a line of low to mid DPS units, having a few GSS thugs can suddenly make that line extremely dangerous and hard to deal with. There are quite a few ways to build these, but since it tends to be part of a troop line, the tendency is to make them fairly barebones and weapon focused. Having a unit inline stops it being surrounded and makes it considerably more survivable.

Army thugs tend to be minimalist and dedicated to a single purpose - generally more offensive in nature than a general purpose thug. An oversimplification - they can often be seen as a 'walking Greatsword of Sharpness' that improves army DPS.

Wading is significant on these for a few reasons (+3 size points). Firstly and foremostly it allows them to start the battle with the mage core, soak buffs, then waddle into combat through the line. Secondly, it guarantees they make it into combat and don't get stuck behind the line (and have units to their side so they don't get surrounded). Thirdly (and for me most importantly) it's forgiving, if you err in your positioning, wading means you'll still probably be fine. Dominions is complex, and forgiving mechanics tend to overperform.

Chaff Raider thugs

A chaff raider is one that operates by essentially spamming chaff units. This can be done either via a spell (like horde of skeletons), or through a couple of specific items

• Mirror of Trapped Images
• Amulet of the dead

Strictly speaking - these aren't thugs but they fill a similar niche. Typically these items are placed on high utility chassis, such as a scout (for stealth raiding) or some sort of bird (for long map moves). These units can raid small amounts of PD, particularly when two or three are sent at once.

They provide a source of stealth raiding for nations that would otherwise be lacking. It's not dramatic, but these are sufficiently useful to be worth a mention. Both items come online at Const5, and the best spells for this come on at research 5 (Evocation for Glamor (gemmed), Ench for Death).

These can also serve as solid counterthugs. Essentially there can be more chaff than the thug can deal with - ultimately overwhelming it (assuming it's not a fire shield thug). The mirror dealing false damage is particularly potent here as it helps deal with regeneration thugs

Thug Answers

Returning triggers at the 'end' of the attack cycle for 1 weapon. This means a weapon that hits twice will get both hits in before returning triggers. Now this doesn't stack with buffs like quickness - so you get the number of attacks on the weapon.

There are a few weapons that take advantage of this. Sword of Swiftness hits twice, Gloves of the Gladiator hits 4 times!! and Wave Breaker hits 3 times. All 3 are good options for dealing with a returning thug using items - especially if on a good chassis and carefully buffed.

Magic Answers

Any magic to deal with a returning thug has to kill it in one hit. If your opponent has Astral Paths (they shouldn't unless they're a demilich because of this) - Magic Duel is the best answer.

Otherwise, a few specfic spells can punch through a high HP returning chassis. Ironically these aren't great answers to a demilich as it keeps coming back.

• Gifts from Heaven
• Disintegrate and Stream of Life
• The blood banish spells Infernal Prison and Claws of Kokytos and for smaller targets Life for a Life
• Against non-undead and smaller chassis Bane Fire
• For magic units, Control / Opposition
• Corpse Candle → This is a little buggy due to the way illwinter coded it and does a Lot more damage than regular decay.
• Technically charm effects work but SC's tend to have high morale.

Eriu Hellbless Thug

MA Eriu - Medium to Heavy Thug (Gearless) 1-2 Gems - Sidhe Lord - Ench3 Alt1 - Bless = Awe/Fire Shield/Blood Surge -

This works because of the layering of defenses. The Sidhe lord has a high defense score to begin with. Then it casts Shroud of Displacement, giving it a MR layer. Then it has an Awe Layer. So two layers negate attacks entirely and 'preserve' the defense score. Then it casts regeneration on itself, and has a slight HP layer. And finally, the few attacks that do get through both usually bounce off fire shield (killing the unit), and get killed by the units boosted stats with blood surge.

Essentially - the idea behind such a thug is an awake researcher lets these solo-expand early - then convert into solo-thugging tiles belonging to another player gearless. Awe and Fire shield are compensating for the lack of gear.

• Sidhe Lord
• No Gear (1 N gem)
• Personal Regeneration, Bless, Shroud of Bewilderment, Blurred Body, Personal Barkskin - Attack Closest.

MA Pyrene Arco-Hellbless Emerald Count

MA Pyrene Emerald Count Light Thug (Gearless), No Research - Bless = Invulnerability, Fire Shield, Fateweaving

This layers invulnerability onto an already high prot score and decent HP to make a very hard to kill unit. It then layers the fireshield/fateweaving combo as a kill mechanism. Effective against small amounts of PD. As seen by Arco in the Lucid Tournament Finals 2026

• Emerald Count
• No Gear
• Bless, Attack closest

EA Yomi Arco Hellbless Dai Oni

EA Yomi ARCOBLESS Dai Oni

EA Muspelheim standard hellbless Muspel Giant

Muspel Jarl SC - move to muspel section

EA Panagea Unholy Bow thug

Unholy + Bow Thug - EA Panagea (Thanks Demonsthenes)

EA Fomoria CRUN supercombatant bless

Common Blesses

Anti-Troop

• Reinvigoration (fatigue management)
• Blood Surge (A very nice trait for a solo thug - lots of relevant stats)
• Defense Stacking (Defense and Blur) - (For defense thugs)
• Heroism (A sideways form of defense stacking) (For defense and repel thugs)
• Atk!? - For repel thugs (Rarely good)

Heavy Thug Friendly

• Enlarge (for HP/Twiceborn/Regen+Fluffing, especially good on twiceborn Supercombatant lines)
• Resists (to make answers harder and to reduce fatigue in bad terrain)

General

• Mountain Survival (2 terrains for 1BP - this is very efficient mapmove)
• Undying/Enchanted Blood (HP for a few thugs - usually not fantastic on thugs in place of just more stats)
• Unaging (Specifically for old age thug units)
• Mending Bones (Specifically for twiceborn Heavy thugs)

Classic Defense Stacked Army Thug (Panagea)

5 Gems Gear Centauride Hierophantide Thug

This thug stacks defense to the sky. The basic idea is that the basic thug starts with 15 def, and you can relatively easily get +8 to +9 from the bless, +2 if using quicken self and another +2 to +6 from items. At 27-32 def, (although fatiguing out is still a problem), unless immobilized or shot with arrows, nothing is going to be able to hit that in a line formation - including most opposing thugs. Variants like this can lightly raid but really shine when embedded in armies since not being surrounded means they're incredibly hard to hit. All 3 variants have at least one damaging weapon.

• Centauride Heirophantide
• Greatsword of Sharpness (+4 def) or Thorn Spear (+2 def), or Main Gauche of Parrying + Axe of Sharpness (+6 def)
• Bless contains +5 Defense, Blur, Blood Surge (+8 total), 1 heroism, on top of other things (averaging around +9 def). Bonus points for reinvigoration 2 to hit fatigue neutrality.
• Bless, Quicken Self (on w variants), attack closest

Jann Emir Reinvigoration Thug

0 Gem gear light raider thug

The Jann Emir has everything a thug might need - good paths, a decent chassis, great stats, stealth. It just has massive fatigue issues with encumbrance 6. This can easily be fixed through either careful scripting (ew), or a forgiving bless with +5 reinvigoration + Blood Surge (for 6 total). These lines do benefit significantly from some gear (e.g. a 2H weapon like a GSS removes 2 fatigue per spell cast), but the basic build works gearless.

The spells they cast change quite significantly based on the point in the game, but the main ones of note are Bless, Flying Shield, Summon Earthpower, Shroud of Bewilderment, Fire Shield and Mistform. They can always use tougher armor and reinvigoration gear. Notably - it's easy to go overboard. The best thing about this chassis is the number of defensive layers before items are added, the worst thing being the fatigue. Adding a million items is nice, but unless its fatigue positive, this chassis will struggle to heavy thug.

Do up a clean build AFTER fatigue section is done. Use a comparable bad build as an example (fatigue out)