: add examples of supercombatants, general guide to kitting out thugs and SCs, just generally expanding on everything below

The definition of a thug can be somewhat nebulous, changing depending on the situation and context of what you're discussing. In the broadest sense, a thug is:

• A commander, recruited or summoned…
• …that can take on province defence, small armies, or other thugs, either alone or in small groups…
• …in a way that's relatively resource efficient.

As you can probably tell this covers a very wide range of possibilities. In many ways, a thug is a "you'll know it when you see it" sort of concept. Some nations have thugs which can be recruited from their capital; others rely on national or generic summons they can access with their mages.

Thugs can range in "weight class" from the ultra light who can handle most provinces on their own but not PD dumps to the very heavy who can handle 100 PD and mage supported armies which were not expecting them. A light thug might be a Vanjarl or Phacean Storm Captain with a vine shield. A heavy thug would be a Skratti or Wight Bakemono Sorcerer with most of their slots filled with magic equipment and a pair of mages to fluff them with magic buffs before combat.

A supercombatant (SC) is, in some ways, a "super thug":

• A commander, almost always summoned, or possibly a Pretender God…
• …that can wipe out entire armies with minimal support…
• …by investing significant resources.

Supercombatants are usually something that will come about in the late game, once the most powerful summons, buffs, and constructions have been researched. Usually only a few specific creatures have the stats and abilities needed to properly fill this role, such as the arch angels, Laestrygonian Tyrants, or some pretender gods.

SCs are difficult to make work in Dominions 5 - in the prior games they were easier to make and harder to kill. Due to a variety of reasons this is no longer the case. Nowadays an SC needs to be tailored to the threat they are facing - making sure to have high fire resistance versus Abysia or high magic resistance versus Bandar Log for example.