Royal thorns, have they been mentioned?
 

I have been scouting through the forums for various tips on how to make a third runthrough more fun, however I have failed to see anyone mention the enourmous power of the royal thorns.

They were somewhat limited in my game but I had enough to make most fights ridiculously easy. I just avoided using them against other heroes and dragonstacks.

I had the item which gives them 100% to damage+ 50% slower rage reduction after battle... my companion held a +1 to poison damage dagger and I was weilding a +20% to critical hit sword.

In Elon I got dryads to produce more thorns and I sometimes used the time scroll to renew another summon with the Royal thorns. Each stack of the small thorns were often making crits for 20k damage wiping out any stack + another 1k thorns on the dead body using the paladins "extra turn" if available in the same round.

Against Baal I had so many thorns up that there was barely space to move.

As for keeping the Royal thorns alive I used demonologists and sacrificed paladins to keep up their numbers.

among various topics they are mentioned as good unit;)

Yea; most of my games only a few show up (there seems to always be two guaranteed loads of them; one on debir with 3 to 7 and one on [] with 30ish.

In one game (warrior) over 1000 showed up; had an impressive stack of ~1000. Only problem was resurection. The warrior usage of them resulted in thorns in stakcs of 3000 or 4000; throw in phantom on the royals and .. :)

royal thorns are a pain vs fire damage though:)

a big weakness but oh well xD;-)
don't use em vs dragons or heroes :D

Not to mention that the Spell target isnt needed, since the the thorn stacks automatically attract the attention of the AI ... most times.

most times if they cannot reach a real unit

but archers might hit your real units;)

Yeah, Royal Thorns are pretty good. They tend to be lacking in number though, and their weakness to fire can be... very painful. Also, demonologists are the only consistent resurrectors for them... and also quite possibly the rarist unit in the game. So I think the combination of the two is why you don't hear a lot about them.

Royal thorns are pretty good but they arent so popular because most users here play no loss campaings. And its impossible to do this with them.

it's very easy to do a no loss with royal thorns if u got demonologist
:)

There are some nasty heroes on first islands with flaming arrow where u cant avoid loss of royal thorn. Doubt u have demonoligist in tha part of game. Unless you do map kiting of course