Units that you hate/love, but are forced to use?
 

The love/hate relationship! Just casual comments, not to be taken mega seriously. :)

Inquisitors

- ah yes. Fragile, annoying, but sometimes necessary for some parties due to their ability to resurrect. But such crappy damage, slow moving, and relatively fragile.

Paladins

- slow as balls, but seems to be the ONLY option for mass resurrection.

Engineers

- argh. They are soo useful yet soo worthless at the same time. Their AoE blind disable and ability to make tanks, plus no-retaliation. If only they could hit from a much larger distance without hurting your own allies....

Repair Droids

- How could I forget these guys? I had a bad experience with using them the first time I played the game. They clearly are verrry handy to help someone achieve no-loss early on

Shaman

- if you use black dragons, odds are, you might have thrown these guys in to heal them. Very handy to have when you got a lot of level 5 units running around.

Some Kind of Dragon? OR the Royal Griffin

- Who can say no to the ability to hit two squares or the ridiculous royal griffin and its heavenly guard? Begging to be phantomed...

Rune Mage

- So good, yet I wish I had another slot. Only way to roll with all level 5s with no-losses semi-easily. Disabler, resurrector, no-retaliation astral attack. They are pretty darn good, but I wish I didn't have to bring them along with black dragons.

Black Knight

- Frenzy + Black Shard + EvilN. Nuff Said.

Assassins

- with that new modification, I feel like I have to use these guys. You can't even let them sit in the castle without all of your precious work begin reset. Either in the reserve, or in the army, you can't seem to get rid of these guys once you go down the path of "bonus damage." If only I could stoneskin them.... :(

I agree with every unit you mentioned. The thing is that once you use the units on regular basis...they become boring.
The assassins though are not worth the prize or the leadership. They die easily.

So far, the only unit I had to use in pretty much all my walkthroughs from this was the Inquistor, and only early on. Since I always due no-loss walkthrough, they are a must, until you get the Resurrection spell.

I'd also add "Units I'd like to use but don't..." - due to no-loss play, a lot of otherwise usefull Level 1-2 units are instant "NO" for me, like Dragonflies or Robbers, or Devilfish, even if they seem pretty powerfull in large numbers, you just cannot avoid losses with them.

Yeah, definitely.

In my ever going trend to buck the consensus, I did use some low levels.

Ah... Elves, Bowmen, and Hunters were part of my crew (along with paladins and royal griffins, puke). The most unlikely army and somehow these other two dudes, impy, and me ended up no-lossing with it. Actually I failed to beat baal with it, because I was too lazy to keep retrying, but hey, no-lossing all the way past Ktahu with 3 archer stacks has to count for something. And every boss was taken in less than 10 rounds, it was only the resurrecting (2-3 rounds) that brought me over 10.

Turn Back Time is the usual weapon of choice if you got a weak stack. In my archer build, it was mostly paladin surround resurrecting (using turn back time to rejuice the paladin's prayer/resurrection).

But admittedly it is annoyingly tedious unless you have a deadly combo / strategy with it.

Well, if you're paladin, your inquisitor can deal serious dmg, especially with inquisitor sword equiped, they easily outdamage hunter.

This seems odd, but ancient ent as a shooter does way more damage than hunter.

Precisely my point. If you go Paladin Class, you almost have to go inquistor and paladin to make use of the damage bonus. That is less flexible than a Warrior class, and a warrior class can still come close to outdamaging the Paladin class using paladins anyway.

Hunters have a pretty bad damage / leadership bonus, and require quite a few buffs to make it work and need 100% critical.

It is because they have no range penalty, so they are penalized by having a relatively bad damage ratio.

Ancient Ent surprisingly has a decent damage / leadership ratio.

If you just take them as is without buffs, the results aren't too surprising. You need to have telescopic scope to overcome the Attack/Defense Ratio gap, increase base damage to increase your Damage/Leadership ratio, and buff your criticals since the Ancient ent cannot raise criticals easily to 100%.

I tried doing a 'ranged unit' build using a Mage Class, thinking my double cast and super buffs would give me the flexibility needed, but alas, it failed in the later stages as I didn't have enough leadership.

Without the raw base damage, the buffs did not amount to enough.

Would you rather multiply 10 dollars by 2 or 20 dollars by 1.5? :)

Err, even with telescopic sight hunter still lose to paladin class's inquisitor + inquisitor sword. Inquisitors does slightly higher dmg (not counting the dmg bonus from his bless thing). And to easily have 100% crit chance, you need to have 2 artifact slot.

Well, in my last game, i have several items that increase crit, so my inquisitor have about 80% crit chance too (the weird thing is they always crit at that rate), hunter always crit too but coz i have inq sword, hunter still lose in dmg output/turn.

Though if you have elven set + telescope (especially elven bow), hunter easily outdmg paladin's inq+inq sword, problem is i never got that bow even once since KB AP. Though elves is always my favourite race. Hunter and elf always my irreplacable team back in the KB the legend.

To my experience, inq sword always spawn, though from elven set, it's the crown that always spawn (why not the bow?:mad:), i often have 2 to 3 crowns.

I have the hunters with the elven set + astral bow inflicting some serious damage, especially to animals. They outdamage the normal elfs, but they get beaten in damage by my other plant units of Royal Thorns and thorn hunters making use of the plant set of thorn crown +botanic diploma. So my army looks like this:
Royal Thorn + thorn hunters + Hunters + Dryads + Paladins = enemies don't make it to the 2 round ;)

Oh wow, that's one hell of a team.

Yeah, the thorn crown is an amazing buff

Are you playing Impossible Mode, No loss? How do you revive the plants safely? Or do you just teleport the paladins in to draw aggro?

Of units mentioned in the first post I use but three ;)
On regular basis, that is. Plus EGD, but you haven't specifically mentioned them.

Inquisitors - for my mage their rage-building ability is quite important, so I use them for 50-66% of game. They can be cloned with phantom, and I found that I more often used their Rage ability three times, instead of using Rage twice and Resurrection once. But after certain level they are not needed. If there were seven base slots...

Paladins - they are quintessential and it's easiest to fight some bosses with them. I don't like fighting bosses at all. I take them when I can. Oh, and they abide by the laws of coexistence when it comes to undead, I like it. I feel forced to use them sometimes though, that's why they may fit the hate-love relationship role.

Rune Mage - They Are Awesome. Archmage Skill For The Win. Zap Mooks To Death. And Clone, He He He.

I like to use Black Knights occasionally, but they are costly to heal. Their redeeming feature is their cool appearance.

Engineers I liked first, and used, but I prefer Alchemists, because they possess similar sturdiness but better effect-to-leadership ratio.