: 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.

Thugging and Super Combating is not as much about killing the enemy as it is about keeping yourself alive. To this end there are many spells which can be used to make thugs and SCs multiplicatively more durable. This is an incomplete list and you can help by expanding it.

Liquid body and Temper flesh: Halved physical damage rounding down after protection goes a long way towards keeping someone alive. Temper flesh comes with some fire resistance and liquid body comes with affliction resistance and some other effects but for the most use cases these spells are equivalent.

Hellpower: Hellpower provides a host of stat boosts to a caster, +att, def, mr, etc. which are all extremely valuable to a thug or SC but comes at a steep cost in fatigue and risk of being attacked by a horror. It is recommended that it not be cased by any single mage under B5 because of the long time they will spend asleep following the casting. The number of horrors which will be attracted by this spell make it only survivable by already powerful units such as Melqarts, Skratti, and Pretenders.

Body Ethereal: provides a 75% chance for non-magical attacks to wiff. This is a good spell to fluff because it only requires s1 but a bad spell to have an SC cast because they can be cost effectively countered by magic duel.

Moss body: Someone more smarter than me needs to explain how it works.

Legions of steel: +3 prot to all armor is good for anyone wearing armor and invaluable for prot stacking tactics.

(Personal) Regeneration: early in the research tree come the absolutely vital regeneration buffs. Regeneration is great for thugs and SCs early, mid, and late game. Regeneration gives 10% health back every turn, rounding up! This stacks with natural regen (like on trolls) and regeneration from gear (like hydra skin armor). An Awake titan with a bit of armor and personal regen can expand. Later in the game regeneration is used to stop chip damage in long battles from killing thugs and SCs. Regeneration also reduces the odds of getting afflictions by 90%.

Various Prot buffs: Everything from iron warriors to barkskin can be a valuable asset to a thug. Boosting natural prot partially stacks with armor but because it is a flat reduction to damage taken a linear increase in prot results in an exponential decrease in the likely hood of a DRN rolling high enough to deal damage against very high prot. Protection stacking is a bread and butter method of increasing the durability of a thug or SC.

Quickness: +2 att and def, doubled movement speed, and doubled attack rate are wonderful for any SC but it comes at the cost of doubled fatigue. This spell can be amazing to have on fatigue negative undead thugs or ruinous on one with more serious fatigue concerns such as heavily armored skratti.