 Hello folks and welcome to the Heroes of Might and Magic 3 Creatures tier list. We're going to be working our way through all 126 creatures that you can purchase in the towns in the game. I haven't been able to see anywhere else on YouTube where anyone has tried to cram all the creatures into a single tier list. So I think it's high time someone did that. So sit back, relax, and we'll get cracking. We're not going to be just putting archangels in the S tier and say the pikemen here in the F tier because archangels are amazing on the battlefield and pikemen are way less good. What we're looking for here is value. We're looking for value for money primarily, but also accessibility. How easy it is to get the creatures online relative to how much impact they have on the battlefield and your overall strategy. And we're also going to be thinking about the opportunity cost of going down and in a certain path investing your money in a particular creature. I'm going to be working my way down from Castle to Conflux, which is the order that the towns appear in the game menu, and we'll start with tier one, work our way through all the tier ones, and then cycle back to go on to the tier twos and so on up to tier seven. So let's get cracking. Castle Town tier one. Let's get started with pikemen and halberdeers. The pikemen is really solid. Really, really solid creature. 10 HP. Very, very relevant presence on the battlefield in the early game and the mid game. The movement four can be a bit of a let down, but usually you will be fighting on grass and they get the plus one movement in that early part of the week. So I like for the pikemen to start us off. I think it's a really solid unit. I'm going to say somewhere in the B category for the pikemen. The halberdeer, one issue, obviously the halberdeer is more powerful on the battlefield than the pikemen. One issue with the halberdeer, though, is that you do have to invest the gold to upgrade the town and then the higher cost of buying the troops. And that's money that you could be spending on marksman or archers marksman and then griffons later in in the castle town. And both of those units are awesome, as we'll see. So there's a bit of an opportunity cost with halberdeers. They're a little bit less exciting and they don't come online as as quickly as other tier one upgrade units do. So I think it's still a really solid unit. The halberdeer might put it towards the edge of the B tier. I just make sure that I'm not going off the screen. We'll be moving the creatures around as we go to sort of make everything fit together. Happy with this for now. That's castle tier one. So moving through the towns, the next town on the list is the ram part. And we have centaurs and centaur captains. Centaurs are a pretty solid creature. They do a good job of sort of striking quickly. They've got a nice movement. They do tend to die a little bit more easily than I would like. And in terms of expense, the amount of centaurs you get, the number you get for the money that you spend is just OK. They're a fine unit, especially obviously in the first early part of the game. But nothing to write home about. You don't want to be stuck with these guys into the into the mid game in particular. Now, centaur captains, on the other hand, are a significant upgrade to the normal centaur. They hit harder and you'll be quite happy having a large stack of these in the mid game. Again, though, relative to the amount of money you're investing and the timeliness of when they come on stream, in terms of excitement factor, I wouldn't be massively more excited about centaur captains than I am with, say, Halberdeers or something like that. So perhaps we'll move these guys to this sort of region. We'll we'll see about whether or not we want to to keep them there as the as the thing goes on. Moving through the towns, the next cab off the rank is the gremlin. We're in the tower talking about gremlins. So the basic gremlin is absolute garbage. One of the worst units in the game on the battlefield. The main thing you want to be doing with your gremlins is keeping them alive. Keep them alive as long as you possibly can so that they can be upgraded into master gremlins. And this is the first example of a unit that we'll talk about where the base version of the unit is completely different to the upgraded version. The base version movement for HP for they die like flies on the battlefield. Really, you do not want to be fighting with them. I would say that they're more or less an F level unit in terms of excitement factor for wanting to have them into any any distance into the early game. You want to upgrade them to master gremlins. The master gremlin is a ranged unit, still very squishy, but the ranged attack actually hits quite hard. The master gremlins hit really hard relative to their expense. It's not very expensive at all to upgrade from normal gremlins to master gremlins and something you want to do fairly urgently. I actually really, really like these units. I'm excited to spend money on them well into the mid game and you'll still be picking up just about everyone that you can. So I think we have our first A grade unit. I wouldn't give it an A plus, but it's it's a solid A grade unit relative to the other tier one upgrade units, in my opinion, anyway. Moving through to the evil towns. Now we have the inferno is the first one off the rank and we've got imps at tier one and familiars as the upgrade. Imps are atrocious, really, really bad. They have movement five instead of movement four compared to the gremlins. So they move a bit quicker and in large numbers, they can surprise you. One thing that really works with both of these is when you do have an implication nearby the inferno at the beginning, you can pile into getting a big pile of these fairly early in the game and be pretty happy with yourself if you if you if you pull that off. Basic vanilla imps on their own, though, are very unexciting. I put them probably somewhere in the category. Familiars are a pretty substantial upgrade to the imp. They have movement seven, better attack and defense, and generally are going to be more relevant for longer. In the very late game, you can end up with a large snowball of familiars that can be relevant in a fight. OK, they're going to die on mass, but they also do have the drain magic ability where they drain magic from the opponent and give you the magic a couple of spell points, but can actually add up over the course of a fight if you're in a in a in a tight sort of fight. I think overall, though, as a upgraded tier one unit, familiars are probably in the somewhere in the D D category, not particularly exciting, but not particularly terrible. We have the necropolis next. We're talking about skeletons and skeleton warrior skeletons are obviously a really important kind of base unit for the necropolis for the necromancy skill. If you've got a strategy whereby you are piling in to necromancy as a skill amongst your heroes, then the skeletons are going to be really, really relevant. I kind of like to think of these as sort of a base unit and perhaps a C grade unit that we can sort of pivot almost everything else around with skeleton warriors. You've got a conundrum on your hands. You're going to have heroes out exploring, expanding your frontage. If their necromancers and necromancy skill, every single necropolis hero has necromancy, they're going to be raising basic skeletons after each fight. It's sort of the gimmick is that you kill a bunch of wandering monsters, reanimate them as skeletons, which is really, really cool. I say it's a gimmick. It's actually a really cool feature. Here's the problem. As you go into the mid game, you've only got seven slots in your army, and you kind of need to keep one of those free so that you can raise these things. If you are habitually buying skeleton warriors from your hometown, that can present a sort of a problem. If you're able to easily get back to your hometown regularly to upgrade your skeletons into skeleton warriors, it can be a whole thing where you you're able to actually build a large mass of these in the early game and that becomes your strategy. Skeleton warriors becomes your strategy. So a little bit circumstantial situational skeleton warriors. Often you'll find you better just to stick with normal skeletons. Sometimes it'll be correct or appropriate to go for skeleton warriors. Overall, I don't think they deserve a massively different ranking, still something I'm happy to pour money into. Not particularly excited about about it, but also not particularly disappointed either. Let's move on to the dungeon. Now we're talking about troglodytes and infernal troglodytes. I can't help but like the troglodyte. I can't really explain why that is. I like them. They they tend to have if you start in your dungeon in the underground, all of your troglodytes are going to have movement five instead of four right from the off. They have solid stats relative to the amount of money you have to spend on them. And you can get the mushroom rings, which lets you get tons more extra troglodytes. How many more I can't exactly remember, but enough to really make an impact and you're going to want to invest in the mushroom rings. You're going to want to invest in in these. You're also, by the way, then going to want to spend the money to upgrade to infernals because infernals get the extra movement and it's not very expensive to upgrade into infernals. Where do I want to put them? Tier C for now. If the infernal troglodyte is a C, I kind of want to bring. Well, I might leave the help. I might leave him there. I'm not sure how I feel about this. Do I like these better than a centaur? I think I do. So we'll do that for now. OK, moving on. We have we're out of the evil towns and into the neutral towns. We're talking here about the goblins of the stronghold. We've got goblins and hobgoblins. A normal goblin is not particularly impressive. He has movement five, which is better than this other stuff. But the rough ground terrain doesn't really change that to movement six that much. You'll have rough terrain near your base, probably. But there isn't a lot of rough terrain on the map a lot of the time. If you play the random map style that I that I tend to like playing. I don't get excited about spending a lot of money on goblins, noting that they are that there is a accelerated building. Let's call them accelerated buildings where you get an extra eight goblins per week, which does improve their usefulness, in my opinion. Quite substantially. Much to promote for me is a little bit while I'm here. Hobgoblins get a pretty significant increase to movement, which is actually quite relevant. But they do die easily, not particularly amazing, not particularly terrible, somewhere in the C category, I think. OK, what's next? We have the fortress. We're talking about nolls and nulmar orders. A noll, a basic noll is a really solid unit. Big beefy HP, just like the pikeman movement for kind of hits a similar profile and feel to a pikeman. It doesn't really feel right to put it in a different tier to the pikeman for the same reason we talked about at the beginning. Really, really happy to invest money in these. And if we haven't gotten around to upgrading them, still really relevant into the mid game. I think noll marauders are worth the upgrade and something you want to do quite quickly. Yes, you have lizard men, lizard warriors, and you have serpent flies and dragonflies to come, which all are going to be wanting money and resources and investment. But I think these are slightly more accessible than the halberdier. So I think they're a little bit better. They're still in the beat in the beat here. But in terms of excitement and when you can get them online, relative to the amount of money you have to spend, I do consider these to be better value for money in that context. So noll marauder is still a really, really good upgrade choice. And the final neutral town we have is the Conflux. If you're interested in Conflux, you can see me playing Conflux in a recent video that I've been posting. I've nearly finished posting all of the episodes of that. In these two units, you have something similar happening to the gremlins, what happened to the gremlins. The sprites, movement 7 right off the cuff, very, very good flying. And against the kind of random goblin type opponents you see in the first week or two around your base, these are absolutely fine. You can get some really good work done with them. However, similar to the gremlins, you don't want to be stuck with these for long. You're going to want to preserve their lives so that you can upgrade them. The sprite is absolutely spectacular. She goes from movement 7 to movement 9 and no enemy retaliation. So there's an absolute combo we'll be coming back to right through this tier list. Fast units with high movement and no enemy retaliation are fantastic. Just that it's really, really good and it's possible to just win fights with no losses as a result or stack the odds massively in your favor by waiting and tactically setting your troops up to wait and then attack later in the combat. Relative to the other tier 1 units, Upgradables like Halberdeers were looking at normal orders. These things are just so, so much better. The other thing is that you can get tons of them. You can get the Magical Garden, which gives you an extra 10 per week. And then when you buy them, they're extremely cheap. They're like 30 gold each to buy. You can get a huge swarm of them early in the game and just completely take over the early game as a conflux. Conflux does pay for that later, particularly in the mid-range where we'll be talking about the elementals, which, spoiler alert, I'm not a massive fan of. But until then, I think we absolutely have our first STA unit, the Humble Sprite, which can just do so much work. Such a great unit. So we're off to tier 2, back to the castle, and we're talking about Archers and Marksmen. A tale of 2 units once again. The normal archer only has HP 10, but it packs an awful punch. You can sometimes be stuck with these for various reasons for a while before you're able to upgrade them. But a really, really good unit, like a really solid ranged unit. I don't want to be stuck using it for very long because the upgrade is unbelievable. Marksmen gets increased movement and 2 shots instead of 1. They double in terms of the power output, the damage output. These things are value-for-money-wise, absolutely spectacular. They are a menace to fight against if they're in a monster stack on their own. And they're a menace if you come up against an enemy hero with these in the first few weeks. Into the mid-game, these guys en masse can still be absolutely devastating, and they'll still even make an appearance in the late-game. Really, really relevant. Extremely easy to get online, extremely powerful. I think this is for now an S to your unit. Maybe slightly better than the sprites. You're very, very happy to spend money on Marksmen getting to the Marksmen in lieu of getting to something else, delaying your griffins if you have to in order to get these guys up. They're really, really strong. Special unit for me. Moving down to the rampart, tier 2 is the Dwarves. Dwarves or Dwarves, depending on your allegiance to various nomenclature. The basic Dwarf is really, really unexciting. He has movement 3, HP 20 is really, really fat and solid. But movement 3 really stinks. He often misses out on the fight or he only comes in at the very, very end after all the hard work's been done by somebody else, usually Centaurs or obviously Elves will be talking about soon. I think these are a D. One interesting thing I have to confess, I've played the game since 1999 and it was only about 3 years ago I realized with this image that the Dwarf is facing this way. I had this weird thing where I was looking at the picture, I can see him kind of looking out at me like his right eye in the picture. In my mind was his left eye and he's looking out he's looking out at me and holding his hammer anyway and lifting his left knee anyway. It's hard to explain but anyway, obviously he's looking off to the right in the same way that the Battle Dwarf is. See this bit of his beard here? I thought that was like the left part of his moustache. Maybe you guys can see what I mean and his hat was sort of on lopsided. Anyway, stupid. The Battle Dwarf is a pretty good upgrade. It's almost you have to do the upgrade because you're stuck with a movement 3 unit otherwise for the whole game. He's going to slow down your hero and the adventure map. The Battle Dwarf goes to movement 5, still the HP 20. His magic resistance goes from 20 to 40% so you just generally people aren't going to cast spells against you or if they do you're quite happy for them too. Battle Dwarf, tier 2 unit, somewhere in here. I don't hate him. I'm okay to spend money on him but not really in the early game which is where you'd want something like this in the early game. I so want to spend money on these. These guys I don't really want to desperately spend money on in the early game. Happy enough to in the mid game though. Okay, onto the tower. We're talking about gargoyles and obsidian gargoyles. I think these might be called stone gargoyles. Stone gargoyles are really, really good. They're really, really good. Similar to what we talked about with the sprites except in terms of the manoeuvrability and option value they have a really solid profile of HP, attack and defense as well. Value for money is there. Accessibility is there. It's not very expensive to get these online, to get the sculptor's wings. Really good unit. I think a really solid unit. Happy to have it up here in the B category in terms of value and excitement factor. Where in the B? How happy am I with these? Move them along a little bit this way. Obsidian gargoyles, pretty good. And an upgrade to attack and defense. I don't think that there's a massive value... Sorry, reword that. I don't think it's extremely cheap to get the upgrade going. But as far as upgraded second tier units go, these guys are okay. You can get by without upgrading them to obsidians for quite a long time though. So I think we're going to leave these guys at the bottom of the B. Some of these might leak off the edge of here and need to be pushed down into the C as we go. So we'll see. Moving on to Inferno and we have gogs and magogs. Now this is a tricky one, right? The basic gog is right here in the center of the universe. You need them, right? Inferno really struggles, as you can see here. We've gone through a terrible start with familiars. You need these range units to do something. They have movement four, but they do have a nice beefy body. They can take quite a lot of damage and they do a very good amount of damage relative to their cost. The magog is a massive problem. When you're playing a resource constrained version of the game, you can't afford the friendly fire effect of the fireball that comes out when the magog attacks. I think there might be some mods that allow you to hold the control button and change where the fireball erupts on the battlefield, which completely changes the analysis. These guys would be up in the Cs or Bs or whatever in that case. But I find these guys to be pretty much unusable. So it's with great regret I do need to put them down here just because I really don't want to be using magogs in the game at all in the early or late or mid or late game because I don't want to have to work around the fireball. It would be different if all the inferno troops had fire resistance or could resist it the way that... We'll be talking about likes later. They have the death cloud, which all of the other undead resist. The fireball will incinerate your imps. And for that reason I just don't use them. So they have to go in the FTS, sadly. In the necropolis we have walking, dead and zombies. Walking dead basically they feel a lot like a dwarf. Kind of awful. Worse HP. They can't benefit from morale. They don't have the magic resistance. They aren't particularly cheap relative to the body that you get. They deal quite poor damage. I can't believe I'm still... The more I talk the more I want to send them down here. Zombies, you're obliged. You're not going to want to walk there with walking dead around for very long. You do need some good meat in your army as a necropolis hero. And whites and wraiths that are coming up next are very very unexciting as we'll see. So you're going to want these zombies. So even though it's a zombie, I actually think it's quite high up on my list. It doesn't deserve to be, because you will find yourself wanting to spend money on it and the payoff is worth it. The reason being that your other options here are just, you know, mediocre. As we'll see when we talk about whites and wraiths, that just doubles down on the attractiveness of the zombie. Weird word to use, attractiveness. But that's how I feel about zombies. Harpies in the dungeon. A little bit of a tale of two units again. The basic harpy strike and return movement. Six, I think it is. Effective yet not massively exciting. Acceptable, an acceptable unit to have, you know, in some numbers in the early game. Like we've said before with similar units we're talking about before, you're going to want to upgrade to the harpy hag. She goes up to movement nine, strike and return. Movement nine and no enemy retaliation. Combo, right? Once again, same thing we were talking about with sprites. She can strike from nine hexes away with no retaliation, fly back to safety. Very, very good option value on the battlefield. It is not expensive to upgrade the dwelling. It's a thousand bucks and maybe some sulfur, I think. So this unit is really, really good. A really, really solid A level unit. Maybe just falls short of being an S tier unit because well into the late game they can feel quite soft and squishy. You know, but certainly competing for a really strong A to A plus, I think, the harpy hag. Moving now to the stronghold. And we've got wolf riders and wolf raiders. A wolf rider is basically a goblin that's just more expensive and has a little bit more HP. Maybe plus one movement. They have way worse movement than you expect them to have. I really don't like wolf riders. I don't want to be spending large amounts of money on them to be a wolf rider. I will by wolf raiders, but I won't be piling tons of money into these and getting them out on the battlefield as soon as possible and then relying on them well into the late game. There's not at all an exciting investment proposition. Wolf raiders, on the other hand, do get an impressive nine movement or maybe it's eight or nine movement and they go, obviously, improved attack and defense but they also get two attacks instead of one. Now that should be awesome, right? You would think, well, hang on, doesn't that gel with what we were talking about before? The answer is not really because when the enemy retaliates they're very soft and squishy and they're going to take massive casualties in response to their retaliation unless they're attacking something which is going to die or largely die to the first attack. So the second attack is really, really hard to kind of unlock and leverage and get value out of. If you're attacking something that you're executing putting out of its misery the first attack is going to do all the work anyway. The second attack is probably not going to be relevant. If you're attacking something that's huge and beefy like a big pile of, let's say, dendroids or whatever, demons, something big and you're trying to put a dent in it well, yeah, you'll put a dent and then they are going to retaliate and you're going to take significant casualties before you then swing with your second attack and, of course, your second attack is weaker because you have fewer raiders following the retaliation so they promise a lot but in my opinion they don't deliver particularly well so they're acceptable. You're kind of stuck with stronghold. You've got to do something. The next creature we're going to be talking about is the orc which, you know, isn't insanely great either. But yeah. I might just do a little bit of tidying up here to make sure that we're going to have enough room to fit all of our creatures so I'm just going to do a little jump here and I'll be right back. Okay, where were we up to? On to the fortress and we're talking about Lizardmen and Lizardwarriors Lizardmen and Lizardwarriors. The humble Lizardmen I think is a really solid unit. You can get the Lizardsden pretty cheaply I think you need wood. Um, yeah, I'm happy for these to be up here. Lizardwarriors are good but not essential. You don't have to do the Lizardwarrior not particularly excited. I'm going to need to promote the zombies I think as we'll talk about in a moment I'll just make that slot available. Finally we have the Conflux at tier 2 we're talking about air elementals and storm elementals so this is the beginning of the elemental cycle there's air, water, fire and earth between tier 2 and 5. These as a group of the four of them kind of really struggle as a block specifically though with air elementals storm elementals these are okay I found out actually in the latest run through you do have to purchase a mage guild before you can get the altar of air built so if you're starting town doesn't already have an altar of air these aren't as accessible once you have them they're fine they're okay they deal 2 to 8 damage so they love bless as well if you can cast bless on them I think though in terms of excitement how excited am I to invest it's a low C I'm trying to think who I want to demote maybe it's these guys I want to demote to D tier to make room for them I'm not super excited about an air elemental but I'll work with it relative to the amount of money you've got to spend Lightning elementals are a must upgrade you want to make that upgrade they go up to movement 8 and their ranged attack is strong and solid I actually think they have the same stats as each other but it's just that it becomes a ranged attack similar you'll want to bless these if you've got that spell works pretty well solid unit happy to invest money in them probably towards the higher end of the C category I think that works okay so C is starting to fill up and I'm worried that we're going to have a lot of units we want to declare as C category so we'll have to see whether the C category gets oversubscribed okay and we're on to tier 3 I had to just very slightly adjust the screen there hopefully that won't move things around too much though for you guys griffons and royal griffons at tier 3 yeah these are good these are really really good a basic griffon for starters you have the I forget the name of it but it's plus 4 griffons a week it's a greater building you don't need a citadel you can start piling up on these they are expensive but they are awesome on the battlefield really really good flying 25 HP really hard to kill two retaliations is really really relevant as well sometimes yeah these are a B I just don't know where in the B I mean they're as exciting as gargoyles at least in terms of value for money somewhere in this region the royal griffon is a really substantial upgrade plus 2 movement and instead of 2 retaliations you get infinite retaliations so these things can fly over castle walls and really wreak havoc in large numbers if you've got a big blob of them in the mid game it's worth investing that money you're never going to be sad really investing your wealth in royal griffons even though you are you've got marksmen competing for your money I think these are an A somewhere in the A category they're an A grade unit royal griffons very exciting post a child unit of the castle but even if you can't get to them and you're stuck with these for a while you're still going to be quite happy yeah I'm happy with that A grade for royal griffons now we move on to the rampart we're talking about elves and grand elves so this is a special unit let's start with the normal elves the green elves let's call them they're extremely easy to bring online you pay about 10 wood and 1500 gold for a homestead and you get these guys 7 a week I think it is to start with however many you get and for the money that you pay and for the money you pay for the dwelling these guys are excellent they deal a really really solid punch very very happy to invest money in them if for some reason you're stuck using them and buying them without being able to upgrade them they're happy elf is a really really solid unit but here's the catch you're not going to want to fight with your elves for very long you're going to want to upgrade them to the grand elf the grand elf has the same feature as the archer the marksman upgrade you get an increased movement and two shots per turn instead of one these things are absolutely fantastic it's extremely easy to upgrade the homestead it's not very expensive it might be the same cost again $1,900 something like that in gold and some wood but it's worth it's wood spend the wood get these if you're the rampart town you are getting to these as quickly as possible and getting as many of them as you possibly can they're tier 3 they deal more damage than the marksman and relative to how hard it is to get them online they are extremely special they're better than marksman in my opinion I don't know they're so amazing I don't know what's going to beat them there is we've got to make it all the way up to tier 7 so it'll be interesting to see if we can find units that can compete with them I think there will be actually at least 2 or 3 that will maybe be pipping for a higher position on the list than the grand elf these are awesome just a really really great unit you can build your entire strategy around grand elves if you've got access to enough of them if you're stuck with one homestead one rampart town in your game they'll just be a very nice feature of what you're doing but they're a cut above absolutely special unit can't speak highly enough of the grand elf what's next golems and iron golems in the tower town stone golems the base unit stone golems are not very exciting for the same reason as the dwarf movement 3 they're just not that good the problem is that you will find yourself buying them and using them in quite significant volume for reasons that we'll talk about when we get to talk about mages and arch mages spoiler alert it can be difficult to get mages and arch mages online and as a result you might find yourself using stone golems to provide the meat if you're a wizard hero and you're casting lots of magic arrows and stuff and you just need something you will want to get the upgrade pretty quickly though because they go from movement 3 to movement 5 when they become an iron golem and with iron golems we really are in this c-d plus sort of category better than a harpy more exciting to spend money on than a harpy it's close I want to cram a whole pile of things into c- and I'm not really able to so we'll put them up in this category for now they're probably slightly better than what I've got represented here but excitement value they're extremely relevant though one thing I'll say about them is they're very relevant right into the late game which can't be said of every tier 3 unit but in terms of urgency ooh iron golems yes let's get to iron golems quickly yes I really need to unlock my iron golems no one ever said that ok inferno we have the hellhound and cerberus the hellhound is solid he's a good solid unit and thank goodness because inferno as you can see is really struggled so far you're going to want to get to these and start spending money on them they're not particularly impactful on the battlefield compared to other tier 3 units but what you get is decent you get a decent body 25 HP I believe similar to the same as the griffon movement 7 actually they feel and play a lot like a griffon but they can't fly and they don't have the extra retaliations good solid unit one other thing they also have similar to the griffon I can't believe how similar these are is the accelerator building you can get an extra 4 I think it might be the cages something like that that gives you an upgrade to the kennel gives you extra hellhounds cerberus is a fantastic upgrade these have a similar story to the griffons these are even better though than royal griffons in my opinion because we have the combo just like this unit just like that unit no enemy retaliation in addition the cerberus has 3 attacks and it attacks all 3 hexes in front of it without friendly fire I'm nearly certain if you have a friend in one of those hexes the hellhounds are so the cerberus will leave it alone but it will attack all of the enemies that are in the 3 hexes in front of it so this is in my opinion an A grade unit especially in the context of the inferno contextually speaking contextually speaking this is where you want to spend your money in the inferno as quickly as you reasonably can and for that reason these are a really solid A grade unit what am I putting these are they better than harpy hags yeah I'm going to be brave and put them up here right how do I say this whites and wraiths whites and wraiths the white is exceptionally unexciting um how do I feel about a white I mean I do not want to spend money on a white movement 5 they die they've got like hp 18 you can't buy large amounts of them in they don't have the accelerated dwelling their wounds heal at the start of the turn but that ability is kind of useless on a unit that doesn't have very much hp anyway healing your wound of your top unit would look better on a tier 6 unit like a cyclops or a manticore naga or something like that that ability on this particular unit is just not exciting these guys are right down in the doldrums for me are they f are they my most hated unit surely not I hate this more um they're not unusable are they hated more than a walking dead yes I don't like them I don't like them I don't want them to be anywhere high at all so they're down here in the low ease I'm not excited to spend money on a white probably spent long enough talking about it the wraith is a pretty good upgrade it goes to I think movement 7 and it gets the mana drain ability as I figured out in my last run through it doesn't give you the mana it just drains the enemies mana but maybe it drains more of it as opposed to what this thing does over here um how eager am I to go for it with wraiths not very d minus um part of the reason is their overall absolute power level but also we've got vampires and likes coming up which are both very good um I don't want to upgrade this and start buying these instead of getting my vampires online so but they are much more useful on the battlefield than these things so a d minus maybe an e plus uh for the for the wraith in terms of how exciting um so yeah old necropolis gets off to a bad start but things do get a lot better over the next three levels okay we're onto the dungeon level 3 these are beholders and evil eyes I love the artwork of these really really cool he's got these little teeth underneath um terrifying nightmarish creatures and excellent on the battlefield uh beholders you can get them at a relatively cheap cost to build the pillar of eyes I think it is um no melee uh penalty when they do get uh attacked in melee they can walk around your backline if they are engaged and attack someone else and be really relevant really solid unit um happy to invest good amounts of money in these in these bad voice uh so yeah be evil eyes is it worth the upgrade they don't change much they're much the same but the upgrade is fairly cheap so I think maybe they belong as a pair are they better than a griffin or a gargoyle in terms of excitement value I'm not sure about that maybe they're in here in this region and we need to move these guys this way a little bit uh just massage this around a little bit solid solid unit the evil eye and beholder okay orcs and orc chieftains I believe it is um I don't like orcs I think the I think from a design perspective the whole gimmick with orcs is that they are tough they're hard to kill and they have range and there's not many units in the game that have that that are a ranged unit and are hard to kill here's the thing the spells of the game and the way that the stronghold works mean that it's hard to get the best leverage of that combination of abilities they're also movement 4 um for a level I think that movement 4 for a level 3 unit is slow um okay maybe you're saying okay I don't need speed because I'm a ranged unit but you kind of do it matters um I'm not super excited to invest in these having said that there can be times where you know if you've got an external dwelling the orc tower uh and you want to pile up and get lots and lots of orcs going okay maybe it's a thing um but I'm not excited to get these online quickly uh they're not E and they're not F but they're not great upgrading them to chiefs just always seems like such a low priority it's something I just don't do uh urgently I'd much rather start investing in my ogres and and what something else um but they are a decent upgrade having said that um they're a decent they are a decent upgrade having said that it may be promote them to D tier orcs and orc chiefs and so as you can see already we can see the effects of the first three levels some towns start better than others okay right some towns really start better than others I'm looking at the castle here you know uh looking at the fortress is another town that starts starts really solidly uh and then certain towns like the inferno um you know where the necropolis where things are strong hold things aren't aren't too hot um in the fortress tier three is really really great uh serpent flies uh very very good and um yeah the movement they dispel any spell as well so that did I did mean for that to rhyme uh a solid b b b unit are they are they an a? they're a very very high b if they're not an a uh you can get by with these without upgrading them for a while um amazingly high uh movement movement nine um awesome awesome unit much more hp than you expect for a dragonfly as well you think that they die like flies to use that expression but they don't they don't die like flies that they're resilient the dragonfly is incredible it is fantastic uh huge movement can cover the screen in one go uh casts weakness on anything they attack and dispels whatever else they had going on so these are special I actually think they are special to have a tier three to have all of that at tier three really really really good somewhere underneath these other special units dragonfly is awesome and I'm happy to spend lots and lots of money uh on uh on dragonflies I'm going to promote the serpent fly uh as well um a minus dragonflies though special special unit water and ice elementals down at the conflux uh these are I found these in my last run through to be really expensive extremely powerful on the battlefield the ice elementals I think what happened is I had a alter of water outside the conflux so that's why I piled into them but a basic water elemental without any other reason to buy them or go into them even if you have got an alter of water nearby she was not excited these were not exciting for very long you're not going to want to play with these for very long if you can help it um water elementals D minus maybe an E the ice elemental definitely worth the upgrade um the cost of upgrading the alter was not high and then the performance on the battlefield is way better so similar to the air and lightning elemental story um how excited am I to spend tons of money on them not very maybe put them here I might promote the sprites actually and push her down to there she's just okay um I found in large numbers relative to the amount of money that you have to invest and that is the end of tier 3 and we're nearly at the halfway mark going well right onto tier 4 back to the castle and we're talking about swordsmen and crusaders here's the thing with swordsmen I love these and these and as a result I don't have a lot of money left over it often takes me ages to get the swordsmen dwelling built and then once I have built I just let them build up and I don't buy them I don't use them so for that reason these guys are actually quite low on the excitement scale on the Richter scale of excitement as we'll call what we're doing here crusaders on the other hand are really really that was my dog good um crusaders are great actually they have the same ability as the uh wolf raiders they attack get retaliated against and then attack again the difference is that they have 35 HP alright they can take they can take a beating and then deliver their second attack uh and you can be kind of okay with it especially if it's a close fight where you know you do have to take casualties you can throw these guys into the fray swing take retaliation swing again if they get a morale flash it's quite easy to get uh with leadership in the castle hero if you have knights as your heroes it's quite possible to get a second attack with these and if you've already softened up a target getting to swing twice more uh is combo town it feels amazing when you pull that off uh so yeah I'm happy to invest in these the problem is you need crystal I think to get them online they're not cheap to get online so where should they go maybe they can take this slot here uh for now um somewhere in the middle of the sea go maybe they're a high sea say that they're a high sea I think that's okay for crusaders maybe I'm being a bit hard on them but again like similar for some reason just a little before you might not have the dwelling online for a while uh and you might not have the upgraded dwelling uh done for a while in the same way that you would be sort of be lining your way towards certain other tier four creatures that will come to uh in just a few moments uh right let's move on then to the rampart pegasus and silver pegasus a normal pegasus is garbage terrible value for money uh they die too easily they take up two hexes they're kind of clunky they don't really synergize with what the elves uh doing uh what the centaurs are doing not really I don't need a unit that flies around with seven moves it's basically a really poor version of a of this okay so I think it might even have the same HP except it's tier four so imagine this but at tier four and without the second retaliation where would you put it it's going to drop down the order right that's basically what a what a pegasus is silver pegasi are better movement 12 uh can be relevant in the late game quite a lot to have an additional unit that has really fast moves in addition to your dragons and stuff how excited am I to get the upgrade uh the the upgrade is expensive and for that reason I'm not super excited about silver pegasi uh I don't rush them I'm they're not a high priority for me when I'm playing rampart um that all is okay because rampart already has the most special unit in the game so far it's okay for these to be not as good I think it's alright look if you if you're buying silver pegasi in large numbers in the mid game you're not going to be sad but it's not something you especially aspire to you don't really want to waste time a big chunk of the game with loads and loads of these are not great I don't think that's my opinion okay moving now to tower we're talking about magi mages and arch mages now here's the thing when you're starting the game from a zero start point with no resources at all no free crystal no free gems no free anything these are a nightmare it can be you can be ready to build the tower the mages tower but not have you might still be on zero sulfur or something in order to get the mages tower you need every resource and if you're starting on zero zero zero that can be really hard it can be just one particular resource that you're still missing but it's impossible to get in order to get it you need to go to your marketplace but you'll be getting terrible prices because you have only one marketplace and yeah so unlocking these is really really hard on the battlefield they're great sure yeah 25 hp no no melee penalty and they deal massive damage wonderful but I can't build the tower and the problem is with the tower town you need this dwelling in order to unlock anything else in the game you can't get the genies the nagers or the titans the giants or any of that without the mages tower so these guys get a bad score and I might get some hatred for this in the comments I don't know if anyone's going to bother commenting but if you do because of the clunk yes they're extremely powerful they belong up here in terms of power level but accessibility excitement factor oh great I'm going to get to you know start a game as a tower I can't wait to get my mages online I just don't think that because it's like I'm dreading having to get all the resources together to try to find a way to unlock them so they're down here they're down here in the context of playing a resourceless start they're down here in my opinion moving on we have demons and horned demons in the inferno demon is an exceptionally boring creature hp is 35 I think and movement is just okay they're not particularly expensive and they're not hard to get online in terms of the cheapness of the other dwellings and everything you need the prerequisite to get a demon is not very much relative to some of the other tier 4s I think and it feels that way anyway maybe that's just because I haven't bought the magogs and the fact that these stink down here naturally tends to promote the stuff that doesn't stink and it's a point about making about the zombies as well so demons have sort of zombie fever you're going to want to you're going to be happy enough to use them and whatever but they're not massively exciting I can't have them above a crusader just because the crusaders the crusader is such a flavourful unit so I feel bad having him this far down anyway demons just okay if you've invested in them you'll be not terribly sad but you don't want to be stuck with them for a long time I actually think they're not, they don't deserve that spot I am going to just rejig the lay out here as for horned demons these are solid for the money a decent upgrade yeah you're not going to be super sad about a horned demon if you've made that investment to upgrade them they are more powerful than demons do I want to make this upgrade very badly not really so I think I have a unit that kind of is we're going to overload this C- area a little bit and see if I can just overlay yeah because I feel like C- is a region that there's going to be a few units that want to find their way down there I think the basic demon actually beats the upgraded one in terms of value for money and accessibility okay we are exactly by my reckoning half way vampires and vampire lords so the vampire is really good just as a vampire the dwelling is pretty easy to get online you get movement six which isn't amazing but then no retaliation okay which really matters as we've said as a solid unit I'm happy to be flying around with vampires for a while it can be the case that you're stuck with them and not able to upgrade them for a while because it's quite an expensive upgrade but yeah no retaliation and in large numbers in the early game quite useful if you're stuck with them in the mid game you're sad because you really do want to upgrade them which brings me to vampire lords this came up in my last run through these guys are just unbelievable they're so so good in large numbers firstly they have the combo they have the same combo that these three units have and they're in this region just as a starting point for that reason however in addition the vampire lords regenerate so when they attack however much damage they deal gets rejuvenated they heal that many vampire lords now in the late game if you've got enough of these and you've got a big stack of them the fight can be unwinnable for the opponent because these things just fly around the battlefield mopping everything up and if they take damage even if they take massive lightning bolt damage they can just feed their way back to a high stack they're a nightmare to deal with here's the catch they're hard to get online so that softens them slightly normally they'd be right up there with grand elves I'm kind of torn between A and S I think they do have to be S just because of what's possible in the late game the absurd things you can do in the late game with these guys and the shea terror they strike into the hearts of any who oppose them but I can't put them way up here because of the fact that they aren't very accessible compared to these other special units I think I might be with that again, controversy there'll be a lot of love out there for vampire lords if anyone who's watching this I'm sure okay Medusa's and Medusa Queen's are next they're in the dungeon the Medusa is I'm never that excited by these I find them to be really expensive relative to how good they are it kind of feels like just a worse version of the beholder it does the same job on the battlefield it sits there and then can do melee with no penalty I find that by the time you've spent 10 grand on Medusa's however many that buys deals about as much damage as 10 grand's worth of beholder's deals and these are tier 4 so I need more I expect more and want more I find your opponent in melee is kind of good actually but it only comes up when they retaliate and they're being set upon by something it would again be different similar to the Magog thing in the vanilla game it would be different if you could choose to walk up and paralyze, petrify something but because you can't choose you've got to shoot if you can shoot these just have to kind of muddle along they're not terrible, they're not F but they're not as good as the stock units in my opinion in terms of excitement factor the Medusa Queen's similar story obviously better but you've got to invest and I don't really want to invest so I don't really want to make the investment to get them that badly they do hit pretty hard though a Medusa Queen so maybe the Queen is a little bit better than Medusa the normal one I'm screwing my face up more than I really should because I know I can see myself in my second screen here I'm being pessimistic they're fine but I'm not excited about them OK, ogres and ogre magi ogres and ogre magi a basic ogre is a tank an absolute tank happy to go for these quickly and not spend very much money on orcs good solid unit happy to spend money on them well into the late part of the mid game I do want to upgrade them quickly though ogre magi have 60 HP at tier 4 they can cast bloodlust on something if you've only got a small stack of them but if you've got a big stack of them these things are absolute houses huge HP for tier 4 extremely scary to fight against in large numbers a really really good good unit one I'm happy to spend the money on they're hard to unlock I'm trying to remember what it is I think it's gems you need so they have a similar thing going as to what the vampire lords have not as great as these but because of the resource constraint they're not quite an A level unit in my opinion right who's next we have basilisks in the fortress and greater basilisks I like a basilisk I like the basilisk it's good it's solid happy to spend money on this unit am I really super excited can't wait to get my basilisks they're probably somewhere in this vicinity here probably somewhere in this vicinity of a decent C greater basilisks on the other hand can I be bothered by the movement upgrade good power level upgrade if I have an external dwelling of basilisks whatever the basilisk pit is and I'm buying lots of basilisks sure let's upgrade let's get excited about them but without that I'm not super excited um hoping the graphical still turn out okay and that we can see what's behind here let's keep moving fire and energy elementals value for money I think they do a significantly more damage than a water elemental so I think I'm happy to be a bit more excited about them you can skip water elementals and go straight to fire if you want so for that reason I'll maybe promote them above the water elemental and that's a good way to scale and figure out the order of events but fire elementals at tier 4 compared to some of the other stuff that you can get instead well I shouldn't click that I should click this ogre here or this basilisk just not that great relative to the expense energy elementals, actually not bad actually not bad I'd be happy to use this unit well into the late game, get it online relatively quickly if I can so I'll put that in the B category B- for an energy elemental maybe I should explain a bit about why that is the reason is you get plus 2 movement I think it is maybe it is plus 1, plus 2 I think and flying and good HP and they can fly over the castle walls and help the phoenixes and what not kind of similar to a silver pegasus but a little bit more affordable in the context of your other choices in the conflux a decent choice so that's tier 4 and we're on to tier 5 back to the castle again and we're talking about monks and zealots I don't like these I don't use these really I have to build the dwelling it's not massively expensive to get the dwelling but the guys themselves come in pretty small numbers and they don't pack a massive wallop on the battlefield I think the zealots have no melee penalty I can't remember if the monks do but it doesn't matter for long for me very often I don't find these exciting and I'm putting them down here I'm putting them in the D category D minus do I want to give them a D minus they're better for me than these two units so I'm moving them over there and I'm moving these guys into here unexciting members of the mid-range part of the castle town these three guys together a little bit of a blip crusaders can get a bit more excited about these guys not really so I've just put some boxes around these to just help make them stand out hopefully that's easier on the eye we are cramming a heck of a lot of creatures onto our canvas here just trying to figure out the best way to make it appear visually acceptable okay so we've done tier 5 for the castle moving on to tier 5 for the rampart for the dendroid guards and dendroid soldiers the guard is movement 3 for a tier 5 unit is woeful but these things are houses obviously huge HP and they also have the accelerator building the dendroid arches dendroid saplings that give you an extra 3 a week I think it's only 2 a week but we're talking about tier 5 so for that reason dendroid guards are great but you don't want to be stuck with them for long kind of similar to the dwarfs I want to upgrade them quickly so I can get the extra movement and then these guys the dendroid soldiers are by contrast quite solid I'm happy to pour quite a lot of money into these at the expense of these Pegasi, skip them get the dwelling and move on quickly to soldiers that's normally going to be my recipe for success as a rampart so a solid B for the dendroid soldier and I'm actually going to swap the evil eye out because I think if I'm honest I don't build evil eyes as often as this represents I don't do the upgrade as often and dendroid soldiers are a really really worthy unit that deserve a spot up here somewhere absolute nightmare once they get into base contact whoever is unfortunate enough to be fighting them in the tower at tier 5 we have the genie and master genie I think these are garbage I hate the genie it never does enough for me it's basically like a vampire it has the same stat line I think nearly as a normal vampire the normal vampire is tier 4 this guy is just and he's so hard to get by the time I've gone through the rigmarole of getting all the resources I need to build these two guys my prize is that I get to unlock drumroll genie's dream genie genie genie lives on his back and he lives in the E tier for me I don't like them I don't ever spend money on them unless I don't have anything better to do master genie's significant speed upgrade if you haven't got many of them you can use them to cast a friendly spell mage no, what am I calling it ogre mage, the ogre mage casts bloodlust whereas this guy casts a beneficial spell it could be haste, it could be bless, that kind of thing master genie's, yeah okay I'll go for them if I don't have much they're sort of in this category for here d, d minus, d-ish I don't want to if I am stuck with genie's I will upgrade and get to them quickly, I don't want to be stuck with these basic ones just a d are they better than these in terms of excitement accessibility they're in this category somewhere I don't know exactly where I might move them to here actually okay, tier 5 in the inferno pit fiends and pit lords yeah, both decent in terms of the value for money getting these guys up quickly is kind of important so they're kind of in this category alongside their demon buddies probably about here somewhere a pit lord is quite good you get to resurrect demons from fallen comrades which can be good if you are if you have gone heavy on imps and you've got you can engineer your strategy around them just trying to think where I want to put the pit lord it's not a b unit though I think it's probably a c so we'll give it a c and we'll just reformat these now what's next we have likes, I'm going to call them likes some people call them liches I'm going to call them likes and arc likes I guess I'll call them arc liches how about that what do I call these things, arch mages I don't know how to pronounce that word arc or arch maybe someone can tell me what the correct way of saying this is arc liches and like liches these guys are very good mausoleum I think it's called it's not particularly expensive to get online these are really really solid happy to make the upgrade, worth the money for the upgrade you get more damage more movement and stuff like that so they act a little bit sooner in the turn these guys are really really solid are they a tier maybe they're a tier actually I think maybe the basic one is a tier in terms of get this thing built get these things on, I want them I'm excited about it these can wait a little bit if they have to upgrading them can come later I can circle back to the town it's not essential, there's not much difference between them, it's not an expensive upgrade so they're quite close in ranking but I think these do deserve an A rating okay let's move on minotaurs and minator kings in the dungeon these guys are solid really really good welcome relief after the disappointment of the medusas basic minator I don't want to be stuck with for too long he's fine, he's absolutely fine maybe top of C walking around with minators you don't want to be doing it for too long because it's worth going for kings the king both types have this always positive morale rule which can come in very handy but they just have great stats they deal great damage, great HP minator king I think could be an A grade unit as well he'd be strong just very tippy top of the B I think for the minator king, happy with that next we have the stronghold we're off to visit the rocks and thunderbirds these are great, these are really really good rocks are great on their own they're a solid unit, you can be happy buying lots of them running around the map doing things with them I think these are A these are A tier units and they're not even upgraded the two hexes of body can sometimes be a liability and the movement isn't amazing but they deal massive damage and their HP is spectacular really really hard to kill thunderbirds meanwhile have a spectacular move as it moves 11 over remember the moves I don't have all the wiki up here with me I probably should by the way these things are great they have massive moves they cast lightning bolt I think it's one time in 10 whenever they attack they're really hard to kill do massive damage great great unit you can be really happy piling into these I think upgrading the dwelling is not cheap it's not the cheapest upgrade in the world but these things deserve a spot in the A tier as well I'm just trying to figure out where it's in this region towards the A- I don't know where exactly but yeah really really solid thunderbirds are go thunderbirds are go for me fortress gorgons and mighty gorgons we'll start putting things in the F tier to start with a gorgon, a basic gorgon extremely tough, hard to kill they'll tend to have very high defense really great HP slow as a wet wheat takes up two hexes I'm not massively keen to spend tons of money on these solid D just okay they're in the just okay bucket mighty gorgons we'll put them here for now they're heading into the D category mighty gorgons, really special unit really interesting unit you get obviously an upgrade to moves and a little bit more attack death stare is a really relevant ability and kind of essential for the fortress because they only have hydras at tier 7 I say only hydras are okay but they obviously struggle for moves as we'll come to mighty gorgons can take on anything, gold, dragons, titans devils, behemoths you name it and the reason is that the death stare ability is really really powerful and you can stack of them though for it to work in addition to that getting them online is expensive you have to build the resource silo first and that costs 5 grand before you can then build the upgraded dwelling so it's kind of these two units aren't really close relatives of one another I don't think because so much separates them in terms of power level and investment how excited am I about mighty gorgons and getting money in there I'm very excited about getting them on the battlefield how excited am I to spend the money b- something like that okay another quick edit there I've made the foreground guys a little bit smaller so you can still see the background guys a bit better okay we've nearly finished tier 5 now so tier 5 in the conflux is the earth and magma elementals I had an earth elemental dwelling outside my conflux in the last game um... really unexciting I mean woeful so so like movement 4 you would think okay well alright tier 5 movement 4 if you hit really hard isn't that like a dendroid yeah but they don't hit as hard they don't have the root binding ability um I just find them to be really kind of garbage honestly um I'm as excited to build the upgrade I'm about as excited to build the magma and elemental upgrade as I am to I'm not excited to do it I don't think I'm ever gonna do it I don't think I'm ever gonna play a game where I do bother with this upgrade or bother buying these they might be F I think magma might be F I think these guys are a bad E yeah I don't like them at all are they very bottom of the F I don't want to do this I don't want to buy them I'm not excited about building the dwelling I don't want to buy them and use them on the battlefield I'm gonna find something else to do thanks for coming this is how I feel about them and that's why they are where they are I've got to be honest with myself okay I might be wrong you guys might disagree I don't think you'll disagree right moving on to tier 6 and we have Cavaliers and champions now I'm not a big fan Cavaliers are alright but quite expensive to get the jousting ring dwelling online and they do not move anywhere near as far as you would hope or think that they move amazing HP is one thing I'll say not excited though I'm not super super excited to get these going I think I'm less excited than I am about these guys over here he's ducking behind my camera if I do that sorry I don't mean to say I'm less excited than an earth elemental that would be mathematically impossible I'm heading towards low D for these guys I'll just put them there for a moment that'll look a bit funny until I fix it champions on the other hand are really good and you don't want to stick around with these for very long before upgrading to champions that said how eager am I to get my champions built they have movement 9, 10 over grass they're just okay I guess D solid D I'm not desperately trying to get them over the other things I could be doing with my money at that stage of the game so Castle kind of drops off in that in that mid sort of mid to late era just tweak the formatting there hopefully that looks good crisp enough hopefully if you're watching on a tiny mobile device my apologies if things are getting a bit crazy but we're actually doing well well past the two thirds mark now I think let's talk about unicorns unicorns and war unicorns shall we I love the unicorn I really like unicorns really really good unit you don't have to upgrade them to war unicorns if you don't want to they still have huge HP they still have a blinding attack movement 7 the kind of thing with rampart that happens is you want to sort of dominate the middle of the battlefield you want to walk out with your dendroid soldiers and kind of have this mass of bodies in the middle of the pitch while your elves work them over from close range and unicorns do a really really good job of that they just feel good the two hexes is really useful as well for body blocking the elves and that comes up quite a lot as opposed to the Pegasus which is not a good choice like fast cavalry is not a great choice to pair with what the elves and dwarves and dendroids kind of trying to combine together to do how unicorn fits into that strategy I think a lot better so I like the unicorn I'm willing to spend quite a lot of money and resources and forego other things in order to get it how excited is it an A yes if it's not an A it's a high B I think it's just a high B just a high B for now I'll fix the formatting in a minute war unicorns is it worth the upgrade yes I'm not as excited though so kind of a middle B for the war unicorn the formatting tweak moving on to the tower we're talking about nagers and naga queens these are good the naga hits very hard no enemy retaliation insane HP hard to kill reasonably affordable in terms of the dwelling downside of the naga movement 5 for a tier 6 unit is pretty bad and I'm minded to give her a low C for that reason well I'll give her a high C C++ for the basic naga the naga queen is a really good upgrade you get movement 7 I think it is she goes from dealing 20 damage to dealing 30 damage a 50% upgrade in damage it's a really nasty unit really terrifying in large numbers kind of feels like you're fighting a tier 7 unit sometimes I'm happy to give her an A but not a high A an A- she's a really really solid unit so I'll just fix the formatting here very very good units here at tier 6 for the inferno we have the efreet and efreet sultan yeah cousin of the genie but substantially better I must say HP 90 really really good huge movement with flying solid solid unit as a basic efreet so where is he he's probably in the high B I would say the efreet sultan is worth the upgrade but not particularly more impressive for happiness inducing then a basic efreet after you've spent the money I do quite like the fire shield but if he's getting attacked tons and the fire shield is going off a lot you're not really happy with that you want to use your nice fast units for swooping in alpha striking and not taking too much damage in return so but still nonetheless fire shield really really good as well I think these both both deserve a solid B okay so getting a pretty good collection going here moving on to the necropolis the black knight and the dread knight these guys are very very good where do they belong hmm so similar kind of vibes the black knight has to the naga and the unicorn instead of blind it's curse that these things can do I don't think I can give the unicorn this score without also giving something similar to the black knight because the rest of the necropolis's creatures up to this point haven't been amazing he's probably that much more attractive can sneak in maybe to the A- for a basic black knight I think for a basic black knight I might come back here to the B category just because of the likes and the vampire lords how excited am I oh yeah black knights I am quite excited oh I'm torn let me come back to him for a second dread knights are great and worth the upgrade you get double damage in large numbers they're an absolute nightmare similar to these and I'm happy to move them in to the A category oops that didn't work hang on a moment yeah so let's move make some room here get the dread knights up here get them up here they're good just re-shuffle these guys back along a little bit as for the black knight I'm not as excited about the black knight because this upgrade is a oh yeah let's do this upgrade it's an expensive upgrade but you get an amazing unit just with curse just with movement 7 not as great I think yeah we need to come down here into the B category okay what are these guys manta cores, scorpi cores I don't love these I'm not a big fan of either value for money just isn't really there poor movement for the manta core they don't have the health of say a naga or a black knight and yeah synergy with your archery units in the dungeon synergy with the harpy hags flying over from a distance not really there either so in terms of bang for buck value for money not an exciting unit I think the scorpi core upgrade is quite expensive and even less attractive than the basic manta core we're kind of in this D sort of area for me what am I going to say for these guys I think I have to put them both in that D category okay so moving on to the stronghold we have cyclops and cyclops kings these are good, these are solid I don't desperately want to upgrade them that much in terms of the cost of doing so so I think I like the basic one better C and C minus respectively for the cyclops and cyclops king not a great deal to say about them suffer from the same thing that the orcs do and that a lot of their value is in their high toughness which I'm trying to shoot from a distance doesn't come up that often okay they're harder to kill with spells lightning bolts and whatever but that's what's giving me the rationale I'm hugely excited but I am happy to spend my money on these guys okay fortress wyverns and wyvern monarchs this is a really interesting creature really really interesting wyverns have this weird thing where you can build a wyvern nest for like 3500 gold and some wood very early on like you only need the serpent fly hive you only need the tier 3 you can skip, I think I'm worried about this but it's great to wyverns so it's kind of like you get access to this amazing unit way way earlier in the game than you would normally so for example naga is how hard it is to get to naga because of the problem that we talked about earlier with the mage tower is the opposite here with the fortress and you can start collecting wyverns on top of that there's tons of wyverns out on the adventure map you can go to there's all these trees with serpent fly hive locations where if you beat the serpent flies that your reward is wyverns in addition to that I'm nearly sure I've opened a pandora's box and been given wyverns so they keep showing up everywhere as prizes and things and you can get a big stockpile of them so these units are absolutely incredible relative to the value now on the battlefield are they the most powerful tier 6 unit in the game far from it in fact they might be the weakest they have 70 HP instead of like the black knight has 110 I think the naga has 110 so the wyvern on the battlefield one on one is the worst or one of the worst tier 6 creatures but it's accessibility is fantastic it's value for money how much value do I have to forego elsewhere to get these online is very very low for that reason in my opinion the normal wyvern deserves a place in S tier it's a really special unit and you can be happy beligning them and going straight for wyverns from Serpent Flies in your fortress town the upgrade to wyvern monarchs is expensive they get a much better movement profile and they get the poisoning attack which is really strong they aren't special I don't know if they're A tier I don't think they are actually in terms of if often you won't bother you'll be out adventuring collecting more wyverns from doing things and getting back and upgrading them at that stage of the game is a bit of a pain in the proverbial but they're a really solid unit happy to give them a B or happy to give them a B plus actually okay next on the list we have psychic elementals and magic elementals fortunately for the conflux as you can see excellent very very good you'll want to get the magic elemental upgrade pretty quickly a basic psychic elemental though if you're stuck with these for a while solid C magic elementals though are really really special immune to every type of spell in the game completely they share that property only with black dragons just a great great unit in large numbers a nightmare to deal with I would actually give these a really solid A in terms of how impressive they are on the battlefield really really great unit and yeah psychic elementals solid solid enough maybe they deserve a bit better maybe they could be in the B minus sort of camp okay and we are on to tier 7 back to the castle to talk about angels and archangels wow how do we begin the portal of glory is expensive you need the other dwellings and everything lined up and then it's 20 grand but angels are great they're really really good you can also get free angels when you conquer the griffin conservatries or griffin bastions and in large numbers they deal massive damage, fantastic attack fantastic defense decent HP for a basic tier 7 creature they are really really really good and you're happy to get your portal of glory up as quickly as you reasonably can obviously you're going to be investing in other things first so I think these deserve a spot in the A tier I said I wouldn't put tier 7 units or level 7 units in the A and S just because of the fact that they're strong but I do think that angels deserve a special mention up here in the A rank for just their sheer power even though noting they are you do pay for it, they are expensive archangels it depends on the game you're playing if you're playing on an expert map sorry yeah an extra large map these are kind of I would describe them as tier 8 these are tier 7 you got tier 4, tier 6, tier 7 here these are kind of like tier 8 you've got to spend so much more money again and they're so much more powerful again than your basic angel so in terms of value how valuable is it it's quite a hard question to answer in terms of ranking in a typical game where you're starting from zero resources and you're heading into a late game if you can afford them 5 grand each I mean these are 2500 each it's spectacular on the battlefield no one's arguing that I think though overall in terms of the general vibe of things value for money at times that I'm going to be investing in them I'm probably only going to give them a B so don't hate me but I think these are here somewhere this could happen a lot with the rest of these tier 7s actually as we go but let's see if we can get there okay in the rampart we have green and gold dragons and we're talking here of course about spell resistance these guys can't be hit with anything from level 1 to 4 level 1 to 3 sorry 1 to 4 for the gold dragons green dragons are really really good worth the investment get those cliffs up the second half of the cliff is 20 grand and a bunch of crystal I think for the gold dragons so yeah your greenies you can start collecting larger numbers of them fairly early in the game relative in the mid game it's not very hard and expensive to bring them online so I think these deserve a slot up here alongside angels and other creatures like them happy enough with that gold dragons again kind of a tier 8 creature very expensive extremely amazing extremely powerful the spell resistance thing to me matters a lot it matters more than what the archangels can do okay the archangel will beat the dragon in a one on one fight but the dragon just with its fire breathing I haven't even talked about they have this fire breathing thing you can get a free hit on a second unit really really nice I actually think these guys are further up than the angel for that reason similar to the archangel I think they're higher up for me than an archangel I'm happy for them to be in the A category a bit further down than the junior guys were talking about here in terms of value for money okay giants and titans in the tower I like a giant 10 grand for the cloud temple is very reasonable you can get these guys up and racing they're really solid in numbers if you can get the dwelling up and this is the problem with the tower town in general these guys form a bottleneck around which everything else has to rotate so that wears the giant back down again I would like to give him an A but he ends up as a B as a result of that titans on the other hand tier 8 5 grand a piece spectacular they have 300 hit points more than an archangel and they hit like absolute trucks I'd love to have the ability in the vanilla game to walk around with them instead of shooting as an option but even without that they're still really solid I think I'd like to put them in the A rank probably wedge them in here I think they belong around about there I'm happy with that moving on to the inferno yeah these guys are great really really good no retaliation no retaliation uber speed terrifying to go up against I like them very much how much do I like them I like the normal devil about as much as I like these guys somewhere in here and and I love upgrading them I love going for the arch devils as quickly as I reasonably can bring them on early on in the late game are they special they're not quite special they're not quite special but an arch devil is a really great great unit and in large numbers or as large as you can reasonably get them in that late game you're gonna be very happy investing in them and it's a welcome I mean a free to great as well devils thank goodness the inferno desperately needed it after a lot of mediocrity earlier on I don't think I need to wax on too much more about how great they are if you've played the game you're probably familiar with how how great they are next thing on the list is ghost bone and bone dragons and ghost dragons garbage garbage is maybe a bit unfair yeah a bone dragon value for money is okay it's not expensive it's not hugely expensive to bring online but they're really not they're really not something I'm desperate to bring on as quickly as possible in terms of you know getting a far I think a movement nine or something so how do I feel about a bone yeah it's not good I don't want it as much as I want these ones here so it's going there I don't have to overthink it ghost dragons I think are even worse in terms of value for money as an investment quite a lot more expensive but quite a lot more powerful I do like the aging attack and my apologies if there's edits in the video here I have a really itchy nose that I keep itching which is causing me to have to just do a couple of cuts here and here and there yeah ghost dragons though by the time you've invested the money and what you get out of them I think are probably even worse than bone dragons not excited about these and you have to stay down in the E tier I'm afraid red and black dragons yeah oh man so much to be said about these red dragons are kind of similar to green dragons in a lot of ways a lot of similar properties they behave exactly the same way almost identical stat lines which one am I more excited to get to quickly probably a little bit more excited to get greenies than I am to get reds but the red is still a really solid unit for what you get out of it a few of these in the mid game flying around causing all kinds of mayhem better than an angel I'm saying better than an angel black dragons are incredible they're just fantastic immune to every spell in the game 300 HP cover the map in one hit breathe fire over two hexes you get a big stack of these in the late game you're gonna win they're just an absolute house you can be very happy sinking your mana into them you're going to be trying to upgrade the cave to turn your reds into blacks pretty quickly these are a special unit really really special unit they belong up in here where exactly now this was the unit I was thinking of earlier when we talked about the grand elves are they better than a grand elf I'm gonna come back to that question at the end I'm gonna leave them there for now so I'll leave them there not quite sure where they're going they might be the best unit in the game in my opinion we'll see right, behemoths an ancient behemoths a normal behemoth is quite affordable and he packs a reasonable punch yeah I like a behemoth I think he's a solid unit I'm running out of space in the bead here I'm willing to grant I'm willing to grant him a spot there in B ancient behemoths are less attractive you've got to spend quite a lot of money they get an increase in that defense reduction ability or whatever they're quite scary and 300 HP is great and everything but stuck you know on the ground they don't have the no retaliation thing they don't really have a gimmick I'm excited about so I think these guys are more in the D sort of category in terms of value for money okay, who's next hydras and chaos hydras these are not good tier 7 I want 5 moves or something hydras as basic hydras no retaliation multiple, it attacks all the hexes around it oh I didn't mention that before these guys have that there will be hex around them as well with no retaliation and high movement and can't have spells casted I didn't wax on about how great these are earlier, I wish I could go back to talk about how great magic elementals are there's a relationship between these two units this has a similar property right, it attacks all the hexes around them movement 5 takes up two hexes no other benefits and it's tier 7 compared to tier 6 with the magic elementals so hydras really really unappealing money, the money you spend on them is pretty reasonable what you get for your money isn't bad but in a tier 7 creature I need better I mean they're not worse than these other things we have here surely so we'll move those along yeah move those along, pop them there as for chaos hydras, pretty good upgrade I think they get plus 2 movement they become a little bit more tenable they're more expensive though to get online de-ish is fine for these guys I think all right drumroll, we have one unit left fire birds and phoenixes yeah, what can I say I guess I'm going to start actually with the phoenix fastest unit in the game very affordable to bring online you do need mercury is one key thing if you low on mercury it can be hard but on top of that they're cheap you can buy them their individual unit cost is 200 what is it, 2 try to remember how much they are per bird they're not very much they're not that cheap sorry but they're not very much money relative to the other tier 7 upgraded units and on top of that another important thing I figured out is that you get 4 a week in terms of growth which is great compared to the other upgraded tier 7 units the phoenix has the fire breathing ability it has the rise from the ashes ability now if your phoenix is a dying as a stack that's really bad and you don't want the phoenix to be rising from the ashes that means that things are going badly for you similar to the fire shield effect it's not as good as it looks because you don't want to be taking so much damage that you're getting a stack of phoenixes dying that means the campaign is going badly but with that said you're going to get the first turn every time when you've got phoenixes and your opponent doesn't and that makes them even aside from all the other stuff I was just leaving about very very special indeed where do they belong they're up here in this vicinity I might wedge them in between here and here and I might demote these guys down just to make room for you know just to distinguish what we mean by special there's special and then there's special special and the phoenix is a really special unit I think extremely powerful late game unit still going to come back to this question now in a moment just to finish off though fire birds you don't want to be using these for very long but if you do have to very fast, very very good and very handy you're not going to be using them for long though I'd give them a B let's say a B plus similar to a green elf similar to a green elf has the same sort of characteristic going on fine unit but you don't want to be using them for very long before upgrading so we have got there all of the creatures are on the map we have one final question to solve which is who wins is it black dragons or is it grand elves I honestly hadn't thought about this before starting which one do I think is a more special amazing unit which one is the one that I'm really the most excited about when I get a chance to buy one I think I'm going to have to go with I'm going to have to go with the grand elf I think the grand elf is the specialist unit most special unit in the game and I'm going to put it at the top and I'm going to put it at the top the black dragon is a close second I think the phoenix comes next I like marksman I love sprites and I think these guys are have a bit of a gap there's a bit of a gap between sprites and dragonflies vampire lords would be at the very very front of everything if they weren't just that little bit more difficult to bring online the turns are here for a sort of a special reason they're kind of just squeak into the special tier for this weird thing they have going where they're exceptionally easy to bring online but of course you know don't have the same impact on the battlefield that other tier 6 creatures do so that's it that's my map let me see how that panned out I hope that graphically it looks okay for you guys and yeah so look if you've stuck with me through the entire video from start to finish thank you very much and I hope that you've enjoyed and it's been a chill sort of session and that I'd be interested to see if you guys agree with my classifications if you think I've been really harsh on anyone I wonder if maybe the archangel will attract some hatred if anyone can be bothered commenting I don't know some other creatures I've said here that I kind of can't stand either or that I don't really rate very highly the mages arch mages thing is a really specific thing related to me and the way I play the game with not having the resources ready to build the thing it's really frustrating so there is a lot of context to my decisions as I've placed things on here anyway thank you guys for watching I hope you enjoyed and we'll see you all again soon bye for now