How do you fit black knights into a full army?

[loreangelicus]

Originally Posted by john_crapper

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When you play The droid tactic, do you use any specific items items/sets that work in conjunction with droids? Because from what i've seen as stats they are not impressive, and I dont see why you bother wasting 3 slots on healers + guard droid, when your target unit is the black knight? I suppose the fact that your whole army is immune to mind spells is a bonus, but I really cant place the droids strategically - their damage is mediocre and apart from being self-sustaining I fail to recognize their utility.
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Royal Hammer (+5 attack, -15% leadership dwarves), Engineer's Badge (+2 intellect, -20% leadership droids), and Horn of King Borg (+5 attack dwarves, -10% leadership dwarves) all add up to -45% leadership for droids; so you almost double your droid count, which effectively doubles their survivability and damage output.

They have 20% physical resistance and 80% poison resistance, high mobility (speed 5 and 3 for repair and guard droids respectively), and repair droids have a reload 3 repair ability that "resurrects" a massive 85% comparable leadership; Eviln level 3 at 30% stack resurrection looks pathetic in comparison, and that requires 35 mana. And don't even mention to me the Resurrection spell, not when I'm trying to resurrect a 45,000+ leadership stack that is being whacked on the head by three 70,000+ leadership enemy stacks on Impossible difficulty.

They draw aggro from enemies like moths to a fire. So long as your enemies can attack them, they will leave your black knights and bone dragons alone, sidestepping them to reach the droids if need be.

You guessed it, these self-sustaining near-impossible to kill droids will act as tanks for your team, allowing your bone dragons and black knights to concentrate on DPS.

Droid damage is mediocre? You must have only used repair droids. At half-stack (you normally split them into two stacks) I understand how their halved damage could indeed look mediocre. You should always use both guard and repair droids, or none at all. Let the full stack of guard droids take on ALL possible enemies it could draw aggro, then fly in your repair droids to repair it.

To bad I can't attach the Excel file I used to evaluate all units from all the races. Taking leadership, attack value and damage, repair droids' damage (0.11 Damage Per Leadership) is between that of a bowman (0.10 DPL) and hunter (0.12 DPL); guard droids' damage (0.18 DPL) is between that of swordsmen (0.17 DPL) and veteran orcs/decaying zombies (0.19 DPL). Royal Snakes are at (0.21 DPL) so not bad, though they are not as easy to resurrect as droids or undead. Black Knights actually just start off at 0.18 DPL (same as guard droids), though their special ability makes it a lot higher as they attack more.