Best sacred units?

[Evil Dave]

Zooko said:

It appears to me that if you spend X gold and Y resources on Fire-9/Astral-9 flagellants, then the resulting team of flagellants will decisively win in hand-to-hand combat against other national troops that you could have bought for X gold and Y resources, even if you get a dual-blessing of your choice on sacred troops.

Am I wrong?

Not very wrong. I didn't try too many opponents for flaming flagellants, just ones that I thought might work. Two kinds can beat them. F9W9 Serpent Dancers demolish them on an equal resource basis (100% win), and are as good on an equal cost basis (47% win). E9W9 Heart Companions beat them soundly on an equal cost basis (83% win), but always lose on an equal resource basis. But both of these are capital-only units.

OTOH, it's not possible to perfectly test all opponents. Jaguar Warriors look like they might work, but the simulator can't handle their second form. Since it only handles melee, it can't cope with sacred spell-casters either. I wonder how W9S9 Shamen would do. They're half as many resources, and with a few buffs (Astral Shield and Luck) I think they might be able to hold off 11 guys each. Even with the S9 blessing, Flagellants have relatively low magic resistance, and they only have to fail once vs. the Astral Shield to turn into Walls of Meat for the Shamen to hide behind. Tho in a real battle, the Shamen would probably collapse from exhaustion...

[archaeolept]

meh, who says equal resource needs to be hand to hand? massed longbows swat those little buggers like the flies they are.

Where those guys shine is against early SCs (well, and most indies). I used to do the flaming head strat for Mary against Norfleet; put a bit of the fear of god in him for a change (its esp. successful because the twist of fate negates much of the lifedrain, as target does not seem to be maintained and the Vampire Queen will attack other flags who still have their twist of fate intact as readily as those who don't, it seemed)

I like all mictlan sacreds, the vans, the herse, the tuatha; maybe the dancers, pythium w/ a water bless, white centaurs.

I find spiders too... fragile ;p

[Endoperez]

I think one of the reasons I like to have good blessing for Marignon is the cheap and good Flagellants WITH Knights of the Chalice. If your enemy has Longbows, you can have small army of Knights to kill them off, and not too many early tactics work well against low-prot masses which deal lots of damage and small groups of high-prot high-stat elite units.