[MaxWilson]

About doubling up on thugs: this is also true strategically. Having two thugs (or pairs of thugs) attack adjacent provinces helps guard against surprises which are tough enough to force you to retreat but not necessarily tough enough to kill you straight out. Like, say, Send Horror spam, or 11 mages popping out of a fort, or an indy province which turns out to be inhabited by Spring Hawks and Sylphs. If you were flying in, or if you have an opponent who is savvy enough to attack your escape routes, you may get afflicted and have to buy a new thug but at least you won't lose the equipment.

Plus, it's a lot easier to do things like cut off enemy armies or avoid "bouncing" off armies when you have attack-capable units in multiple provinces.

On a tactical level, using multiple thugs can sometimes help save equipment even if you DO die. You still win the battle (denying gear to the enemy) and if someone has slots free he may pick up 30% or so of the gear. That someone could be another thug or even a mage--Niefelheim/Ashdod/Caelum/Agartha/Abysia/etc. certainly have the option of converting an arty mage to a thug if he picks up the right equipment.

One final thought: peacetime armies (like the United States Air Force currently) sometimes focus on performance, spending lots of money to eke out every last bit of superiority and minimize casualties. In Dom3, though, you're an evil pretender who doesn't HAVE to care about casualties or PR, so you can go for the Russian approach, "quantity has a quality all of its own." A decked-out Seraph with four artifacts is STILL going to die to PD 20 + five indy priests with SotD, whereas an equivalent gem-weight of cheap thugs will take some losses but still kill all the priests.

-Max