Class Roles

This document explores how to best use each (tier 3) class and categorizes them by their role. Many classes can be used for multiple roles, but will be listed only once under the role that makes most sense for them.

While this guide won’t cover them, tier 2 classes roughly follow the same role and have similar strengths and weaknesses as the tier 3 class they promote to & most resemble. For example, acolyte to paladin and horsebow to raider.

Tanks

The sentinel is the ultimate general case tank as well as the best tank against firearms and cavalry. They are still good at tanking magical damage with the -25% passive, but paladins and valkyries will do better with their extra magic resistance.

It’s essential to have some squads with three sentinels to hold off enemy firearms and you can’t go wrong with this class as the default front liner (it even has low promotion cost). Fire, lightning or dark are the best affinity choices for promoting a sentinel quickly, but once you are a sentinel earth, fire and dark are preferred. Dark’s hp penalty can be offset with magic contributing to greater healing and taking a trait like Warrior’s Hubris to leverage the increased strength. Lightning and dark characters can also be promoted to sentinel briefly & then switched to champion/centurion once they have enough strength. By then other characters may qualify for sentinel to replace them.

The paladin is the queen of resisting magical attacks and her striking damage is effective against other heavy armor. She does more damage than sentinels, but may not attack a second time if characters in your squad need healing (which can be good or bad, depending on the priority of heals versus finishing the enemy). Note that she cannot heal outside of combat.

She can outperform the sentinel as a general tank if you are willing to invest a trait like arcane shield and/or arcane vigor along with dark or water affinity. Likely you cannot afford that for more than a few paladins though and/or you’d prefer to use arcane shield on mages.

Bruisers

The champion could be seen as a tank with his guardian trait and heavy armor, but he doesn’t have the other innate bonuses that sentinel and paladin posses. Dark, fire or lightning are almost mandatory with the huge class strength requirement (47) but this pays off with the highest class promotion strength bonus (21). Due to the strength requirement, I often buy mercenary champions even if they don’t have the ideal affinity or trait (you can always change both).

His double strike attack is more flexible than the zweihander’s row attack and generally he does the best damage of the heavy infantry classes. For all those reasons, I prefer the champion above other bruisers, though mixing in a few centurions can still be helpful for their buff.

Centurions have heavy armor and high attack, but lack the guardian trait (-25% damage taken on defense) or other special defense bonuses for themselves. Their adjacent buff from the polearm mastery tech boosts all adjacent attack and defense, but does not stack with multiple centurions. This class is fine to use in the back to defend against sneak attacks & can still buff a few characters that way.

I’m not a huge splash damage fan, but if you have multiple sources of it (or lots of centurions) you may be able to take out the first and second row with them. Splash damage works even better with mages that hit multiple rows like lightning, ice or sorceresses.

Zweihanders have lower promotion requirements (42 vs 47 strength and one less obsidian) so they are a decent temporary class, but otherwise are the lowest priority heavy infantry. Their class promotion strength bonus is only 10 and they need to hit an entire row to get more effective strikes than the champion. By the time heavy infantry are attacking, there should be substantial casualties and I wouldn’t count on doing damage to three enemies in a row. They do have the guardian trait, so they are a better defensive choice than centurion, but they don’t give any adjacency buffs.

One interesting niche for zweihanders is to use them on the front line in combination with Stefan/assassins to attack the enemy back line. This could result in the annihilation of the front and back rows in round 1 and then cleaning up the middle in round 2.

The valkyrie is a mobile paladin, but without the guardian trait for -25% damage on defense she doesn’t hold up quite as well. She can heal outside combat and can help a squad qualify as cavalry while providing a tank and a little healing. She outperforms the knight as defensive cavalry if you are willing to invest a trait like arcane shield and/or arcane vigor, but you can always use infantry up front instead. She is weak to polearms, but that only matters if you can’t take them out in the first phase.

Overall infantry bruisers will both do and take more damage, so the only reason to use a valkyrie is to add another mounted character and/or healing.

The knight does splash damage, so is a bit more of an offensive threat than the valkyrie but cannot heal. Knights are also extra arrow resistant, but most heavily armored classes will resist arrows just fine. The lack of a sunstone promotion cost is the biggest reason to use knights over valkyries at the fore of cavalry squads.

Like the valkyrie, knights won’t outperform infantry, so they are best used when you specifically need a cavalry bruiser.

Physical Damage Focused

Swordmasters deal high damage to single targets and also have the highest critical hit rate with their huge skill stat. While they can evade attacks, they are quite flimsy and will collapse swiftly when struck. They are best with lightning affinity and should be kept in the middle or back line for pure damage.

Swordmasters are likely the best single target damage class and also the best ambush class, so I use them as the backbone of light squads and for boosting damage in heavy melee squads.

Hussars deal the most damage of any mounted melee and as a polearm class give both the adjacency bonus and do extra damage to other cavalry. They are not well suited to the front line, but they can provide the bulk of your damage in a cavalry squad. Hussars benefit significantly from strength and skill, so like swordmasters they should be lightning affinity. Alongside dragoons (once they get the tech to be treated as light units), hussars should be the backbone of light cavalry squads.

Dragoons are the most flexible firearms class as they pack a punch, have bonuses in open terrain and can perform hit and run attacks. Their damage is entirely based on their weapon stat, so they should usually be either earth or water for the hp bonus. If you raised one as a high skill character (swordfighter or scout) they could potentially be lightning instead to leverage skill. Dragoons should avoid the front lines & let others take the blows.

Gunners provide the same punch as dragoons but lack their flexibility and have a bit less HP. However, they are still quite powerful when gunpowder first arrives and after researching the ability to shoot twice. I tend to promote left over water/earth infantry to gunners if I don’t have enough horses to make them dragoons or I don’t want to bother gaining CP in a mounted class first.

Skirmishers

Assassins are a one trick pony, but when you need to burst down mages in the back line they deliver. Their second round attack will not be nearly as strong, but they can help wear down whoever is left. I wouldn’t build very many of these backstabbers, but one or two to augment Stefan could be quite useful.

Rangers are moderately more bulky than assassins and swordmasters, so you could put them in the front of light squads, but they just don’t compare to the sturdiness of heavy infantry. I’d recommend using just enough light infantry to keep the squad majority light & then using heavies to anchor the front instead.

The ranger’s crossbow attack can be impressive against armored foes, but they still won’t reach the damage of swordmasters or the back line focus of assassins (the crossbow attack is to a random line). They have the lowest promotion cost though & their ability to attack up/down walls could be useful in a pinch.

Ranged Attackers

Warbows pack a bit more punch than raiders without the added evasion or hit & run abilities. The latter are essential if you need to harry the enemy and then retreat behind infantry lines, but not as necessary if you are perched on a wall or will be able to advance infantry ahead of the archers.

Raiders are perhaps the best hit and run class, since they can do it at range. They require a horse instead of an additional iron and obsidian, so they are a bit cheaper than warbows. The difference in damage isn’t so much & you can mitigate this by making squads of 5 raiders and 4 warbows to barely qualify for the cavalry movement.

The samurai is a flexible class that can survive well on the front line with evasion, good armor and damage resistance against melee cavalry. Samurai are an ideal front line for archery squads, since they can both take damage and fire at range alongside the archers. However, they only have two range, so this works better with raiders than warbows. Their high (45) strength requirement makes them fairly niche or quite late game, as I’d typically prefer my highest strength warriors become champions instead.

I suppose a full samurai squad could also be a flexible squad that engages melee enemies at range but archer enemies in melee to exploit their respective weaknesses. However, I think specialist squads can take advantage of this better. Particularly since enemy ranged squads are only a real threat if they have cannons.

Casters

Fire mages attack everyone in a single (random) row, even wiping weaker classes by themselves. They are an amazing tool to take out middle and back lines, but it isn’t guaranteed that’s the line they’ll strike. Adding multiple fire mages to a squad can increase those odds quite a bit, but also might lead to overkill.

Mages have high attack priority within a round, so hitting an entire row is much better for them than for the zweihander class. Prior to researching Magician’s Initiative, advanced mages are significantly less useful & I wouldn’t bother using sunstones to promote them.

Ice mages hit a large diamond shape around a single target and can inflict chill on enemies, lowering their skill. I find them to be useful in light squads where I want to dodge enemy attacks and/or boost my critical hit rate. It can also be useful to have different types of mages in the same squad to ensure you strike different targets.

There are some enemy squads of four characters, where the four are at the corners of the grid. Avoid attacking those with ice mages, as your mages will hit only a single character due to their spacing.

Lightning mages strike a column, which can be useful if you are following them up with splash damage attackers like knights or centurions to combine damage to multiple rows. Otherwise I would prefer the attack shape of fire or ice mages. Lightning mages also apply daze (lower strength) or stun (cancel one attack) to the enemy, but sorceresses will typically apply this to a larger number of foes.

The sorceress uses the ice mage’s diamond attack shape, but applies daze or stun like the lightning mage. She also casts on the first turn, even when on defense, making her the mage to use with the Temporal Modulator. She is the only mage to not require a sunstone, so she’s a perfect way to break into using mages while preferring to use sunstones for templars.

Healer

It can sometimes be tempting to take healing for granted, but it’s one of the most important roles for your army. There is little reason to ever prefer a different healer than the templar, but you might temporarily make a hospitaller if a cavalry squad needs one more cavalry unit to achieve cavalry movement.

Valkyrie and paladin are both very helpful supplemental healers but don’t compare as pure healers. One exception is that flying dragon squads can benefit from having paladins up front to both tank and heal so that the dragons don’t have to be front line.

Dragons

All dragons take up 15 capacity instead of 10 but occupy two character slots in a squad. This is good in the early and mid game to squeeze in more usage in lower capacity squads, but in the end full 9 character squads will typically have better damage and survival. Dragons use both strength and magic to determine damage, so they work really well with dark affinity and mixed bonus artifacts.

Dragons cannot dodge, but can still receive glancing blows instead of hits or criticals based on skill. Tier 3 dragons promote into dragon riders of their corresponding color. These retain the same stats and will allow squads to fly if there are equal number (or more) dragons as other squad members with no cannons or cavalry. Flying movement is extremely handy, so it’s worth having one or two flying dragon squads just for the movement type.

Red dragons deal fire damage in a diamond attack pattern and do not inflict a status effect. They require higher magic to promote and receive a magic boost, so water and dark affinity dragons often become red dragons.

Red dragons have the highest magic stat, which boosts their defense against other magic (mage, dragon) attackers more than other dragons.

Blue dragons deal lightning damage in a diamond attack pattern and can daze or stun. They require higher skill to promote and receive a skill boost, so lightning affinity dragons are best suited to become blue dragons.

High skill seems less useful on dragons (they cannot dodge) but they’ll at least receive more glancing blows. This could be useful if you wish to use a dragon in the front line.

Silver dragons deal cold damage in a diamond attack pattern and can chill foes. They require higher strength to promote and receive a strength boost, so lightning, fire and dark affinity dragons often become silver dragons.

Silver dragon’s cold breath could result in more glancing blows due to reduced enemy skill, which could be useful to mitigate damage. Their superior strength also means they will take less physical damage than other dragons.