A thug is a commander whose main purpose is to kill enemies while engaged in melee combat. This distinguishes them from army commanders, who exist mainly to lead units and provide morale bonuses to them, and non-thug mages, who cast magic to buff friendly units or kill enemies from afar. Thugs are equipped with items and/or use their own magical abilities to improve their survivability and deadliness.

Thugs come in two primary classes: army thugs, and solo thugs.

Army thugs operate primarily as part of a larger army. They tend to focus on killing specific threats that the average unit cannot deal with.

Army thugs range from generic commanders equipped with a Greatsword of Sharpness, to quickened Sidhe Lords (still carrying a Greatsword of Sharpness), to Colossi Storm Captains advancing and casting Shock Wave.

Solo thugs are intended to take enemy provinces on their own. They range from those intended only to face some native province defense and little dedicated resistance, to durable, deadly commanders built to fight entire armies. There are many counters to solo thugs, so skilled use of them involves determining what threats the opponent is likely to respond with and moving to avoid them.

Solo thugs must kill or rout the opposing army before they die or retreat, which means some amount of deadliness and survivability is mandatory. Solo thugs are likely to be mages, who are able to buff themselves to improve their durability, and have a mechanism to kill large numbers of low-quality units, such as a Frost Brand, Fire Brand, or the spell Fire Shield.

The advantages of using thugs to raid enemy territory instead of small armies of units is that single commanders are typically much more mobile (and therefore responsive) than armies. If they are mages, they may be capable of magic-phase movement through spells like Cloud Trapeze or Teleport, and even if they cannot cast these spells they can be equipped with items like Boots of the Messenger that significantly increase map movement.