Firstly and foremostly – I am bad at thugging / SC building. There are many players better than me regarding the topic – however I cannot see an advanced guide as of yet – so I’m doing one up in the hopes of expanding as time goes on.

I will link the old article below as it contains a lot of useful information

https://illwiki.com/dom5/thugs-and-supercombatants

https://illwiki.com/dom5/baalz-zen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oUdOWyzkSw

Thug: A broad brush term for a single unit that can take on a large number of units solo (or with pointbuffs/gear). Notably a 'thug' does not need to fight alone (and you can often fit multiple to a square), but the idea is the 'thug' is the only unit left in combat when all the buffing and preparatory work is done

Light Thug This is usually a thug that is specialized to take on small volumes of PD. Traditionally these are made as gem-cheaply as possible

Heavy Thug This is a thug that can generally take on any volume of PD. These can typically also take on any volume of human, mageless troops. These are often still vulnerable to stronger infantry types (like barbarians and giants)

Supercombatant A single unit designed to take on a substantial army - either with mage support or without

Fluffer A unit whose job is to buff a thug or supercombatant then retreat.

Armor Defeating Hits: These are hits that ignore 25% of prot and occur at increased frequency at 50-99 fatigue and 100+ fatigue. They are a common cause of thug death.

The Defensive Onion Essentially this refers to the multiplicative benefit from different layers of defense. Having for example 3/4 attacks miss due to high defense and another 3/4 due to body ethereal, and another 1/2 due to awe has a multiplicative benefit - the thug gets exponentially stronger for each defensive layer you add.

Thug/Supercombatant Bless A bless designed to make thugs or supercombatants better. As a rule of thumb - these blesses focus on the defensive layers of the thug, be it adding resists / reinvigoration, or an incarnate like regeneration or awe.

Non-Exclusive Terms used to describe thugs

• Protection Thug A thug that relies on high protection
• Defense Thug A thug that relies on high defence to not get hit
• HP Thug A thug with lots of HP and some way of regenerating it
• Repel Thug A thug that stays alive by passing repel checks (typically wielding a longspear or whip)

Counter-Thugs A 'thug' geared specifically to kill an opposing thug.

Broadly – a Thug or Supercombatant is a heavily buffed unit that can fight a large volume of units. The basic idea is they are close to impervious to damage against their targets, so they can kill a lot and can fight without an army behind them. They usually have some gear - and are ways of converting gems and possibly mage turns into PD killers - or even army killers.

Conceptually there's really 3 types of thug - and different players use the definitions interchangably.

Light thug: This is the most common type of thug - and what most players are referring to. These are units or summons with 0-15 gems worth of gear that can take on PD or small armies either alone, or with a few fluffers. I will present a few examples of different types of light thugs.

• A Geronte from Mekone with blacksteel plate (casting fire shield turn 1).
• A polemarch from Mekone casting spells on itself (no gear or fluffer required)
• A def-stacked (bless) elvish commander with barding and a frost brand.
• A Bane (summon) with a thunder whip and a ring of the warrior. Possibly Lightly Fluffed by a Lizard Shaman (Body Ethereal + Barkskin (with 1 gem))
• A Jotun Werewolf with boots of the messenger and blacksteel plate.
• A ungeared sauromancer from Ctis casting soul vortex t1, and invulnerability t2
• A Priest Smith from MA ulm wearing armor and a helmet casting a range of self buffs (e.g. Earth Power, Body Ethereal, Fire Shield, Temper Armor, Ironskin)

Heavy Thug: This is the second most common definition of thug. Essentially - these units are self-sustaining and can deal with any amount of PD or unbuffed infantry. They typically cost more gems and require higher research.

Many players have split opinions on the value of these thugs (both specifically and in principle) - since losing them is incredibly expensive and they're ultimately not targeting armies the way a Supercombatant would. Some of the specific units (such as the phoenix pyre golem) have historically been divisive due to the very high cost.

• A Twiceborned Sauromancer from Ctis with high prot armor/helmet and a shock spool casting Soul vortex, Invulnerability and with a fluffer giving it body ethereal
• A empowered golem with armor and reinvigoration items that casts phoenix pyre turn 1
• A Vampire Lord with Blacksteel Plate armor casting Soul Vortex, Invulnerability, Reinvigoration t1-3
• A Very carefully and heavily geared Priest Smith (using as an unconventional example) - with say +4 reinvigoration on the bless, fire shield, a fluffer for Body Ethereal, a smattering of buffs (Ironskin, Fire Shield, Temper Flesh, Temper Armors, Earth Power, a Shock Spool and some form of HP regen (lets say a ring of regeneration)
• A heavily fluffed and highly geared Chud Jarl (MA Vanarus) with a thug bless (resists + say some reinvig) (say Ironskin, Body Ethereal, Regeneration, Quickness, Mistform, Blur and Mossbody are all fluffed)
  • As an aside - MA Vanarus doesn't 'have' to use the chud for this - but the sacred is a nice example as it requires fluffers and can accept a thug bless well.

Supercombatant Most people separate their definitions of Supercombatants from thugs - but the definition of a light Supercombatant and heavy thug can bleed together. Supercombatants can deal with player armies and sometimes even mages. They vary in how difficult they are to answer - a 'light supercombatant' (E.G. an Ifrit Sultan) may have some pronounced weaknesses - whilst a 'heavy supercombatant' (e.g. bronze colossus) may be incredibly difficult to deal with until the later phases of the game. As a rule of thumb, Supercombatants (as things that want to drop on armies) benefit massively from having a magic phase movement option (teleport/cloud trapeeze), as it allows them to connect with important targets.

• A Bronze Colossus pretender with blacksteel plate (spamming shockwave) is a classic Supercombatant
• A twiceborned musphel jarl (with D2) and a regeneration bless casting phoenix pyre, invulnerability, soul vortex
• An Ifrit Sultan casting phoenix Pyre turn 1 with enough reinvigoration to be fatigue positive (and maybe a life drain weapon)
• A heavily geared Tartarian (level 9 spell)

At core - the different types of thugs fill different roles

• Light thugs tend to be designed to harry border provinces and bottleneck an opposing player
• Heavy thugs tend to do best against troop heavy - mage light stacks.
• Supercombatants can deal with mage heavier stacks and win a war on their own

Since thugs come online in the midgame, there's a tendency for these lines to be dormant incarnates or imprisoned, as there's less opportunity to utilize the bless at early research. Ironically - these blesses tend to either have quite high scales and be targeted at the mid-lategame, or be hellblesses with lots of incarnates - focused on supercombatants. A Demilich (with around 19BP and 7 dominion) is a classic chassis for this type of build if imprisoned, since the combination of the hard to answer thugs and Demilich make a nation incredibly awkward to fight in the mid to lategame, and it only tends to drop 1 scale from a comparable rainbow pretender (at that dominion score)

Thugs have a few advantages over regular troops.

1. Most of their cost tends to be tied up in gems - not gold (from itemization), or mage 'fluffers'. So they are a 'gold cheap' way of raiding
   1. Layered onto this - thugs are a way of turning gems into war value - and if the thug isn't lost, that value sticks around (as opposed to battlefield spells and the like). Particularly at around const5, it can be difficult for some nations to convert a nations gems into efficient combat value without thugs.
2. Thugs can stackwipe large volumes of units for relatively low committment
3. Thugs are less obvious on the game map and can be hidden / the items shuffled around
4. Thugs tend to be more mobile than armies - especially if given boots. This means they threaten different tiles and it can be difficult to guard against the tiles they threaten
5. Thugs can solve problems that units can't. For example, a big stack of infantry may be very hard to deal with for a nation with bad infantry (like xibalba), but a heavy thug or supercombatant may easily be able to deal with said stack
6. Thugs can be difficult to answer. It is another vector of attack for some nations that requires specific, targeted answers
   1. As an intermediate guide - we'll glance over a relevant point on this - which is if someone deploys a thug 'answer' (be it mages or a counterthug), the answer tends to be considerably more gem efficient than the thug (and if they take the items, it's both a big gem loss for you and a gain for them).
7. There's a cool factor. It's fun to see a single unit wipe out a stack.

• 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)

TRAP 1 - 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.

Say you have 29 Prot and roll a 3 when fatigued out (1/12 fights you roll a 2 or 3). You end at 25 prot (29-7+4). Meanwhile an opposing heavy infantry with a mere 16 damage highrolls a 12 (not that big a highroll with exploding DRN - it's exactly 1/6 for 12 or higher).

• It's going to deal 3+1 damage (plus 25% on 3 due to slashing modifier for 4 total) - despite you having 13 more prot than its damage. And you may be tanking dozens of hits each turn, so this 'highroll' is quite likely to happen fairly quickly.
• Comparatively (without fatigue penalties) - at 29 prot rolling a 3 without fatigue penalties that 12 doesn't even make it close to the armor 28 v 32 armor.

Layered onto that - if a bunch of units are attacking (say full surround of 8X3 = 24) - you're going to average about 4 armor defeating hits per round, and .667 hits per round rolling over 12. That can easily overcome any regeneration a unit might have - since there will be occasions where you suffer 2 hits in a round (or worse). If we say a unit is not fatigued, this drops to .11 per round (armor defeating and 12+), which is much more manageable from a regeneration perspective (let alone the extra attacks that miss due to the lower defense penalties).

I apologize if the below math is bad - statistics is not my forte and I used chatGPT to help

• A fatigued unit suffers approximately 6.79 damage/round in this scenario as opposed to an unfatigued unit suffering 2.91 on average - or +133% expected damage at these prot scores.
• Just for comparison - at 28 Damage (aka a giant) into 32 prot and 2 per square (16xturn) - we average
  • 1 in 5.12 hits without fatigue
    • Averaging 6.59 damage/hit
    • 20.612 damage/round
  • 1 in 3.59 hits with fatigue
    • 92.4% more damaging hits
    • Averaging 8.9 damage per hit
    • 39.66 damage/round

The lesson here is to not prot tank giants

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

TRAP 2 - 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).

TRAP 3 - 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.

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.

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

• 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)

• 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).

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.

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

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.

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

1. Melee Encumbrance
2. Spellcasting Encumbrance
3. Any Terrain Encumbrance (e.g high cold etc)
4. Any Reinvigoration or Life Drain
5. 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

• 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 – from the underwhelming bracers of protection at const 3 to the more potent shock spool / dancing trident.
• 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.

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).

• 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.

Code for python to calculate damage (had to be done in a word doc so it has to be copy pasted to python annoyingly)

calculate_damage_defense_not_included.docx

— TODO

• Army Thugs
• Counterthugs

* Review wiki pages

• Second round of feedback
• Thug/SUpercombatant Usage and Risk (aka skirmish raiders, deep raiders etc)

* Doubled cost of losing thugs

• Specific point buffing section (best point buffs research 1-4 → Self and Fluffers → Sort by magictype bold the priorities, bold underline the defining spells)
• Memoria Notes
• Hannibal Notes
• HOW NOT TO MAKE A THUG (lets use my own horrid examples)
• Simplify and rewrite when its all up
• Hammers, 5 Gem items, Steel Oven and Cheap Thugs

You also need a section on identifying good thug chassis. Something like path combinations, stats, stealthy, preexisting gear, etc etc.

– And maybe touch briefly on sacred thugs if applicable Magic phasing thugs are another thing. As well as bringing in scouts with stealth gear for a safe retreat Or magic phase plus stealthy mages combining for extra punch A section on point buffing is needed And a section on SC army wipers – – How to make a thug I think a more useful example for this guide would be outlining how to create a thug to defeat roughly 20pd to raid an enemy province with what it has to defeat and what it would need to do the job. Then a second section detailing how to defeat that specific thug with perhaps a third section on how to ambush that counterthug with another thug type at roughly similar research levels. Simple example would be a D2 mage with gems/armor and a few gems to raid a border province, with the counter potentially being a golem with chains and a firebrand/armor… countered by a teleporter with shatters or any other of the number of anti golem tech.

–

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.

Multiplicative Buffs (The Best Ones) Body Ethere

SelfBuffs

Fluffable Buffs

SelfBuffable and Fluffable Buffs

This essentially is a prot thug that relies on Ench3 (Fire Shield) for damage

Good Variants (and rationale)

Variant 1 - Ephor Fire Shield Thug (5 gems)

• Ephor
• Blacksteel Plate
• Fire Shield, Earth Power, Personal Ironskin, Temper Armors
• This works because for 5 gems - you get a very hard to kill unit with about 30 prot, not desperately high fatigue and a killing mechanism. It may be at a mathematical level better to skip temper armors for fatigue reasons

Bad Variants

Variant 1 - Ephor Fire Shield Thug (30 Gems)

• Ephor
• Full Blacksteel Plate, Blacksteel Helmet, Bracers of Protection, ??Mace of Eruption, Blacksteel Tower Shield
• Fire Shield, Personal Ironskin, Temper Armors, Strength of the Giants
• This fails for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the extra prot for the most part doesn't help deal with a lot of units. Secondly - this fatigues out fast due to +4 encumbrance from the other build - and will get rapidly killed by armor defeating hits. It doesn't answer a lot more than the 5 gem variant (and certainly not a lot more than a pair of them), has fatigue problems, and is a very juicy target for a counterthug

HEAVY THUGS

Controversial Phoenix Pyre Golem Light Supercombatant - 130 Gems

Essentially - this is a high HP, mindless chassis that you stack reinvigoration, phoenix pyre and defensive buffs on. Pyre and Fire shield kill reasonably fast, the unit doesn't take too much damage, reinvigoration means pyre keeps procing and the unit won't die, and there's enough flexibility that some resists can be fitted. This tends to be quite hard to kill with magic since mindless deals with most of the 1hit spells, and resist gear can deal with the rest. Extraordinarily expensive however - and should be 'relatively' cheap to answer with counterthug gear (Axe of Hate in particular).

• Golem (Empowered F1) - 1 F Gem equipped
• Starshine Skullcap, Amulet of Reinvigoration, Girdle of Might, Armor of Knights, Boots of Stone, Shock Trident
• Phoenix Pyre, Fire Shield, Astral Shield, Body Ethereal, Resist Magic

Prot Golem Heavy Thug (85 Gems)

Due to being mindless, this can be a useful way to kit out a golem. It's far from invulnerable, so it may want to stealth away afterwards or teleport again. The magic phase movement isn't strictly necessary but is highly recommended. May want to carry a S gem for returning after the 'main' combat

• Golem
• Frost Brand, Charcoal Shield, Starshine Skullcap, Armor of Knights, Boots of Stone, Chains Of Reconstruction
• Astral Shield, Body Ethereal, Resist Magic

– DEFENSE THUGS

Pair of Vanjarl Thugs - 20 Gems Total - Radier and Army Thugs (weapon interchangable)

A stock Vanjarl Thug Line. Items be shuffled around with Barding/Dream Spool, spells with Personal Flight (counterthug on atk large), displacement/Blur for Shroud of Bewilderment (shroud requires a gem and is a self buff but is considerably stronger than many alternatives), or even stack them (take care on fatigue). Weapons can be swapped out for GSS or similar when counter-thugging. The line works because putting 2 in a tile reduces harass penalties, the str boosts damage and the reinvig keeps them going. Luck is generally avoided for fatigue reasons

Broadly - in these lines - blur/displacement is best for counter-thugging, shroud is best for raiding. They come at different research paths however so the issue may be moot early.

• Vanjarl X2,
• Girdle of Might, Frost Brand,
• Caster 1: Mistform, Air Shield, HoldX3, Attack Closest
• Caster 2: Blur, Air Shield, Bless, HoldX2, Attack Closest

Blue-Gray Highlighted Text####TODO Overdo and ignore fatigue on a vanjarl thug to show how NOT to do it</color>

Machaka Phoenix Pyre Soul Vortex Anti-Infantry Heavy Thug [25-30 Gems] (Twicebornable)

This is a straightforward Fire/Death Pyre/Vortex/Invuln Thug. It's predictable but it's very effective, with vortex providing the reinvig to keep pyre going forever. This requires Alteration 7 for Pyre

• Black Sorcerer
• Skull Staff [Any Armor], Boots of the Messenger, Girdle of Might
• Invulnerability, Soul Vortex, Fire Shield, Phoenix Pyre