Should thugs fight alone or with bodyguards?

[thejeff]

There are a couple of early game thugs builds that work well with a bodyguard. A single one with the same movement will split the attacks on the main thug in half.
Vanherse with a Van, Eagle King with a yazata, a few other things.

I'd strongly hesitate to send a Thug with enough bodyguards to trip the 75% hp retreat, unless they're close to as tough as he is.

Later in the game thugs and SCs are often teamed up or used in larger armies. Multiple thugs can be used as SC killers.

SP is different from MP in many ways. Strategies that work in one don't work in the other. The AI tends to recruit more chaff troops and have them wandering around it's backfield and it tends to buy a decent amount of PD. It also doesn't know how to target a thug's weaknesses. This combination means that cheap disposable thugs tend to get overwhelmed, but it also means it's worth investing more since if you equip a thug to handle an arbitrary amount of chaff and your enemies common magic, he'll survive indefinitely.
In MP, if you put that much into him, a player will find the weakness and kill him anyway, so you want minimal investment. Which is ok, because players, knowing that any PD can be killed by a decent thug don't bother investing in much of it and you can raid them with even cheaper thugs. Who will quickly be killed, but who cares they were cheap.

[aaminoff]

> I'd strongly hesitate to send a Thug with enough bodyguards to trip the 75% hp retreat, unless they're close to as tough as he is.

This is critical. In general, a thug is designed to be able to fight without taking any damage for a very long time. You usually optimize thugs' equipment/buffs for defensive capabilities (protection, awe, defense, reinvig) and assume that given enough time the thug can kill PD with their natural attacks. Banes/Bane lords are a good example of this: If you ever try to use them together with an army, they will be almost useless because of their slow movement; by the time they do anything useful the rest of the army will either have won or be routed.

Bodyguards are sometimes useful, especially when they occupy the same square as the thug. So you will see Helheim helkarls with one mounted sacred; Caelum Eagle Kings with one Yazata, Kailasa yakshas (?) with one summonable sacred. Are there any size 2 thug types? Ulm perhaps? In that case I could see putting in 2 bodyguards to fill the square. The reason you want to do this is it halves or thirds the number of incoming attacks; this is important if you are relying on awe/defense.

[rdonj]

Originally Posted by aaminoff

> I'd strongly hesitate to send a Thug with enough bodyguards to trip the 75% hp retreat, unless they're close to as tough as he is.

This is critical. In general, a thug is designed to be able to fight without taking any damage for a very long time. You usually optimize thugs' equipment/buffs for defensive capabilities (protection, awe, defense, reinvig) and assume that given enough time the thug can kill PD with their natural attacks. Banes/Bane lords are a good example of this: If you ever try to use them together with an army, they will be almost useless because of their slow movement; by the time they do anything useful the rest of the army will either have won or be routed.

Bodyguards are sometimes useful, especially when they occupy the same square as the thug. So you will see Helheim helkarls with one mounted sacred; Caelum Eagle Kings with one Yazata, Kailasa yakshas (?) with one summonable sacred. Are there any size 2 thug types? Ulm perhaps? In that case I could see putting in 2 bodyguards to fill the square. The reason you want to do this is it halves or thirds the number of incoming attacks; this is important if you are relying on awe/defense.

There's defnitely size two thus. First that springs to mind are oreiads.