Great video! One thing I would add is that in your type overview you list light thugs as for raiding and heavy as for use in armies, but there's a number of chassis that make excellent light thugs in armies; they don't need to be nearly as sturdy as solo operators, they just need to be cheap and sturdy enough to hold a weapon. For example, the Xibalban Ah Ha' is a 140 gold W1E1 that you can craft a frost brand for and give a single earth gem, which you can then deploy a halfdozen of in your army casting Earthpower>Ironskin>Temper>Quicken, and now you have a robust, killy shock troop that only builds up 1 fatigue per turn (you can also skip the earth gem and just go ironskin>temper for even cheaper usage, though less killy). Other examples is putting Snake Bladder Sticks on Lemurian Centurions, or Holy Scourges on Paladins. In general, light thugs in armies are good for carrying cheap, killy weapons for nations that can struggle with damage output (whether due to attack skill or strength).
Oh yeah 100%! Those are some really nice examples you've given for people to use, so I'll pop you up the top! Army thugs were a slight deviation from the video that maybe I should've included a bit more on, just didn't want someone who hadn't used a thug before try and solo an army with it!
Since this is dom6, I am missing a mention of some of the new glamor spells that are good on thugs: 1) Displacement: Really good on defense based thugs if the enemy don't have true sight or sprite sight (-10 to the fist attack of every enemy then - 5 after that) 2) Shroud of bewilderment: Good on all thugs as it reduces incoming attacks (hit stopping) It works a lot like awe, but requires a MR check instead of a morale check. In addition to preventing hits it also causes enemies to be confused for one round if they fail the MR check. True sight and sprite sight do not negate Shroud of bewilderment, but it does give a +4 bonus on the MR check.
Very true! 1) I didn't mention displacement (or invis) because they don't stack together, I meant to cover them later on but must've forgotten to put it on the script! Very good versus normal troops though, not as useful against archers however and quite late for invis. 2) And that's the big one I forgot to mention, really good spell, especially with the confusion. I think using this as well as a nightmare aura would be pretty effective. Really good points to bring up seeing as I forgot!
Small correction: Body Ethereal is not "hit stopping" but "damage negating". You get hit, and damage is calculated, but there is a 75% chance that the damage is then negated if the damage is non-magical.
Good point! I think for some reason I thought that the 75% chance to miss was in the same part as awe, where it checked if the weapon was magical then rather than after the damage, but it makes more sense it's coded to check when the damage is applied where it checks if it's magical or not.
I had great success with black lords as thugs, they work well as leaders of black knights for raiding purposes and cheap enough to join armies and add some damage with mace of eruption. And you can equip them even heavier due to insane crafting effectiveness of ma ulm. I used mace+burning pearl+bracers, it's like 3 gems
Hey glad you've found them useful! I think with the mount changes with Dominions 6 they're actually pretty solid, especially for how cheap they are in terms of gold and gem investment, you only have to worry about the overall gem investment when it comes to hammers, though you have the earth income to offset that, and the mage turns required, though again you can offset that with your citadels and 3 cp recruitment. I think their main benefit is their versatility, you've got a good chassis base and then you can kit them out to be an anti thug, anti chaff, defense tank, whatever you want to do!
This channel is incredible. The accent doesn’t hurt either. You should have a hundred times the subs. People like you are why newbies like me love this game!!
Literally without Chazzy's videos I wouldnt of bought the game. I pirated it and was kinda meh on it then I found his Ulm series and I now have over 300 hours in the game on steam
Great Guide. Few additions: For movement consider spell options like cloud trapez or teleport. It is this option to attack at unexpected places or cut of retreats that make thugs truly worthwhile. On my giant boys Tartalo - give them a sword of sharpness and you have a great counter-thug. The nation has smith, so equiping is a bit easier though opportunity cost still applies. Though discussion about nations should go somewhere else, as you could talk a really long time about ways to thug alone. Great overview in any case.
Yes magic phase attacks are very useful! I personally think they're more important on a SC rather than a thug, though a heavy thug who can take on armies can make good use of them, as for my lighter thugs I would rather keep them away from armies where possible, but that's my typical doctrine for them. On your point on the Tartalo, I completely agree, they do make a decent counter thug as you suggested. I am still not sure if they're better than Mairu Champions though, as the opportunity cost of having your slow to recruit capital only mages is quite high, especially in terms of your commander recruitment turns. Still, can't complain with that much damage! Glad you enjoyed the video!
Could you make a video about assasination atempt? and if assasin are good at expending against indie? Thanks for the guide! didnt know rly what a thug was before hand.
Assassins can be incredible against indies. If you kill an army's commander(s) it will auto route. Most indie commanders are very weak. If you can consistently win assassinations, you can lead your invasions with assassins and take provinces with little risk
Thanks! Ive been using them for expension but im not 100% sure how to do it and when to get them instead of a mage or commander so cant wait for your video!
The first thing to remember about assasinations is that the calculus of combat is different for assassins compared to thugs. By this I mean that unlike thugs, assassins either win or they die. Barring shenanigans with twiceborn or returning, if they rout, they automatically die. Mundane assassins like Sceleria or LA Marignon have will often suffer heavy attrition trying to assassinate all the commanders in a province, and even compared to thugs being deployed on a conventional battlefield, items you invested into kitting out an assassin are hard to reclaim. The holy grail of assassins are ones which are mages/priests (Ctis empoisoners, TNN boubhan si, some LA Abyssian slayers, serpent assassins from Pythium, etc), sacred, or with inbuilt equipment or traits that make them especially effective (for example, the special duskdagger wielding assassins Vaettiheim gets, or the innately ethereal Elludian stalker indies) Additionally, the equipment and research priorities for assassins is often very different than it is for thugs. Thugs need a high defense, prot, or both. They need multiple layers of damage negation/reduction or hit negation. They want decent magic resistance, they want high base stats, and often a means of clearing chaff. Assassins are different. With assassins, defense is secondary to ensuring your target dies. Often your assassin is going to start the assassination attempt extremely close to the target, with only a few body guards or random commoners between them and the quarry. The most effective strategy for assasinations is generally bringing friends, via items like Lifelong Protection, Bottle of Living Water, Bag of Air, etc, or summoning spells like Horde of Skeletons, Swarm, summon air elementals, illusions, etc. the other two effective strategies are rushing the target with an assassin who is fast and hard hitting enough that the enemy dies before they can actually fight back, and usually involves some magic items or a useful bless. This is also an area where magical ranged weapons can be extremely useful. The final effective strategy depends a lot on your paths, and involves single target damage/kill/disable spells like mind burn, paralyze, frozen heart, blood poisoning, slumber, etc.
Good video, however not much bless discussion. I’d argue thugs (at least PD raiders) are actually way more viable in Dom6 because you can take stealth/dread/awe all of a single rainbow with 7G and 3s in other paths. Especially since dread is now more effective than in Dom5, and stealth bless wasn’t even a thing before. Being able to combo big blesses from same path also enables combos like fear/Stygian or regen/berserk. Increased numbers of troops don’t necessarily matter because if a thug can beat 50 unsupported troops he can probably beat 75 troops just the same , and mages are actually more rare now
I do agree with you in quite a few points! This was more of a generalised overview of thugging, I did briefly mention that you can get some of the mechanics I mentioned through blesses, but it was more to go through how a thug actually works. When it comes to the large amounts of PD I do agree, though with the changes to certain spells like mistform having a 1% chance of being negated by any attack there is a chance you can die just against more troops. It really depends on what kind of thugging you're doing but you are right in that you would imagine that a 50 troop thug could take 75 fairly easily depending on how you've kitted them/what chassis they are. It's probably something that we could follow up with some more examples and a more in depth bless discussion, but that is very nation dependent, so I'll see how the schedule looks.
So being "quickened" gives you a +2 to your Attack Skill and Defence Skill and lets the quickened unit perform regular combat actions twice every turn, basically meaning that they can attack with a weapon twice instead of only the once, or move twice instead of just the once!
am I crazy or is there no mention of stealth in this presentation? I haven't gotten into dominions 6 yet, but in 5 stealth was one of the best possible options for keeping a thug safe. You could sneak into enemy provinces, confirm that they were safe to attack, execute an attack, and then go back into stealth while giving your enemy no chance of reprisal. It has disadvantages compared to unstealthed thugs, namely that you can't attack a province on consecutive turns without giving up the advantages you gained by having stealth, but it remained nevertheless an extremely strong option for letting thugs pick their fights.
I entirely agree with you! Stealthy thugs are much better now in dominions 6, especially seeing as you can make sacred thugs, or those wearing shrouds, stealthy thanks to an obfuscate bless! I do talk briefly about flying, stealth and magic phases in the enhanced map move section, but thanks to you I have realised I left that part out of the video timestamps so I've added it in, thanks for letting me know!
I do love the Iron Angels, a much needed map move for such a slow nation! Glad you enjoyed them and I hope that build was useful for you, obviously there's others you could use but that's a fairly basic one to do!
@@ChazzyBurger Something I often think about is how to properly kit them. Of course, that depends on their role. Auxiliary raiding? Supercombatant killer? Mage stopper? Something else?
@@AlgaeNymph Now that's a deep question! When raiding pd you can use the build I used in the video, or kit them out with double brands for a good bit of aoe damage. Supercombatant killer? They're going to need a bit more kit and tailored more to what the SC lacks. If you can give them axes of hate, heart finders or flesh eaters they can all do good work vs SCs. If they're weak to poison, something like a serpent Kryss can do a lot of work. You probably want to get these guys on top of the SC as soon as possible to mess up their scripting as well, which thanks to the fact you're not waiting for a bless and can fly is pretty doable! For lighter thugs GSS are very cheap to get and with their stats they'll be hitting often and hard! The main issue they have is their lack of paths for self buffs, and bringing other mages to buff them mkes them come online later and have more potential to be countered. Hope that helps!
Great video!
One thing I would add is that in your type overview you list light thugs as for raiding and heavy as for use in armies, but there's a number of chassis that make excellent light thugs in armies; they don't need to be nearly as sturdy as solo operators, they just need to be cheap and sturdy enough to hold a weapon. For example, the Xibalban Ah Ha' is a 140 gold W1E1 that you can craft a frost brand for and give a single earth gem, which you can then deploy a halfdozen of in your army casting Earthpower>Ironskin>Temper>Quicken, and now you have a robust, killy shock troop that only builds up 1 fatigue per turn (you can also skip the earth gem and just go ironskin>temper for even cheaper usage, though less killy). Other examples is putting Snake Bladder Sticks on Lemurian Centurions, or Holy Scourges on Paladins.
In general, light thugs in armies are good for carrying cheap, killy weapons for nations that can struggle with damage output (whether due to attack skill or strength).
Oh yeah 100%! Those are some really nice examples you've given for people to use, so I'll pop you up the top! Army thugs were a slight deviation from the video that maybe I should've included a bit more on, just didn't want someone who hadn't used a thug before try and solo an army with it!
Since this is dom6, I am missing a mention of some of the new glamor spells that are good on thugs:
1) Displacement: Really good on defense based thugs if the enemy don't have true sight or sprite sight (-10 to the fist attack of every enemy then - 5 after that)
2) Shroud of bewilderment: Good on all thugs as it reduces incoming attacks (hit stopping) It works a lot like awe, but requires a MR check instead of a morale check. In addition to preventing hits it also causes enemies to be confused for one round if they fail the MR check. True sight and sprite sight do not negate Shroud of bewilderment, but it does give a +4 bonus on the MR check.
Very true!
1) I didn't mention displacement (or invis) because they don't stack together, I meant to cover them later on but must've forgotten to put it on the script! Very good versus normal troops though, not as useful against archers however and quite late for invis.
2) And that's the big one I forgot to mention, really good spell, especially with the confusion. I think using this as well as a nightmare aura would be pretty effective.
Really good points to bring up seeing as I forgot!
Also mirror image and some of the base glamour buffs seem to stack, at least on some sacreds tha Vanir have i havent done wider testing
Small correction: Body Ethereal is not "hit stopping" but "damage negating". You get hit, and damage is calculated, but there is a 75% chance that the damage is then negated if the damage is non-magical.
Good point! I think for some reason I thought that the 75% chance to miss was in the same part as awe, where it checked if the weapon was magical then rather than after the damage, but it makes more sense it's coded to check when the damage is applied where it checks if it's magical or not.
ruclips.net/video/6sQuvHTPbgM/видео.html
"How do you deal with your enemies? Well, the simplest way, is to just kill them." so true king
31:08 It's pretty impressive that one sorcerer was able to beat off 40+ men at once.
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Oh myyyyy
All the while holding his staff in two hands!
@@ChazzyBurger A staff of such size explains his skill with his hands
ruclips.net/video/9yCDqWbC7PE/видео.html
ruclips.net/video/9yCDqWbC7PE/видео.html
Holy shit 41 minute ChazzyBurger deep dive! We Feasting. Thx for the content Chazzy
Not an issue! Apologies for a couple of missed cuts that I made while editing, and sorry for making you sit through all of it!
I had great success with black lords as thugs, they work well as leaders of black knights for raiding purposes and cheap enough to join armies and add some damage with mace of eruption. And you can equip them even heavier due to insane crafting effectiveness of ma ulm. I used mace+burning pearl+bracers, it's like 3 gems
Hey glad you've found them useful! I think with the mount changes with Dominions 6 they're actually pretty solid, especially for how cheap they are in terms of gold and gem investment, you only have to worry about the overall gem investment when it comes to hammers, though you have the earth income to offset that, and the mage turns required, though again you can offset that with your citadels and 3 cp recruitment. I think their main benefit is their versatility, you've got a good chassis base and then you can kit them out to be an anti thug, anti chaff, defense tank, whatever you want to do!
This channel is incredible. The accent doesn’t hurt either. You should have a hundred times the subs. People like you are why newbies like me love this game!!
Glad you've found the video useful! Thanks! We'll see how we do in the future, long as these videos helps that's the main thing!
Literally without Chazzy's videos I wouldnt of bought the game. I pirated it and was kinda meh on it then I found his Ulm series and I now have over 300 hours in the game on steam
@@juliang867623 Prot never gets old.
Solid stuff man! Loving the guides they’ve made it much easier to feel like I sorta understand the game!
Excellent! That's exactly what I was aiming for! Glad you're enjoying the videos so far.
Production quality is huge on this one, thanks!
Glad you think so! We've graduated from excel into powerpoint with this one!
You never miss, Chazzy. Always dropping in with a new amazing video.
Thanks! Glad to hear you've enjoyed it and I hope I keep it up!
Thanks I was waiting for this one!
No problem! Hope it was what you were looking for!
Nice catch on sight vengeance.
I only wish I had caught it before recording rather than during!
This is an absolute godsend for new Dominions players, thank you!
Great Guide. Few additions:
For movement consider spell options like cloud trapez or teleport. It is this option to attack at unexpected places or cut of retreats that make thugs truly worthwhile.
On my giant boys Tartalo - give them a sword of sharpness and you have a great counter-thug. The nation has smith, so equiping is a bit easier though opportunity cost still applies. Though discussion about nations should go somewhere else, as you could talk a really long time about ways to thug alone. Great overview in any case.
Yes magic phase attacks are very useful! I personally think they're more important on a SC rather than a thug, though a heavy thug who can take on armies can make good use of them, as for my lighter thugs I would rather keep them away from armies where possible, but that's my typical doctrine for them.
On your point on the Tartalo, I completely agree, they do make a decent counter thug as you suggested. I am still not sure if they're better than Mairu Champions though, as the opportunity cost of having your slow to recruit capital only mages is quite high, especially in terms of your commander recruitment turns. Still, can't complain with that much damage!
Glad you enjoyed the video!
Could you make a video about assasination atempt? and if assasin are good at expending against indie? Thanks for the guide! didnt know rly what a thug was before hand.
Assassins can be incredible against indies. If you kill an army's commander(s) it will auto route. Most indie commanders are very weak. If you can consistently win assassinations, you can lead your invasions with assassins and take provinces with little risk
Yeah of course! I was going to cover it more when I cover LA Vaettihiem, but it isn't only for that nation, I'll put it on the list!
Thanks! Ive been using them for expension but im not 100% sure how to do it and when to get them instead of a mage or commander so cant wait for your video!
The first thing to remember about assasinations is that the calculus of combat is different for assassins compared to thugs. By this I mean that unlike thugs, assassins either win or they die. Barring shenanigans with twiceborn or returning, if they rout, they automatically die. Mundane assassins like Sceleria or LA Marignon have will often suffer heavy attrition trying to assassinate all the commanders in a province, and even compared to thugs being deployed on a conventional battlefield, items you invested into kitting out an assassin are hard to reclaim.
The holy grail of assassins are ones which are mages/priests (Ctis empoisoners, TNN boubhan si, some LA Abyssian slayers, serpent assassins from Pythium, etc), sacred, or with inbuilt equipment or traits that make them especially effective (for example, the special duskdagger wielding assassins Vaettiheim gets, or the innately ethereal Elludian stalker indies)
Additionally, the equipment and research priorities for assassins is often very different than it is for thugs. Thugs need a high defense, prot, or both. They need multiple layers of damage negation/reduction or hit negation. They want decent magic resistance, they want high base stats, and often a means of clearing chaff. Assassins are different. With assassins, defense is secondary to ensuring your target dies. Often your assassin is going to start the assassination attempt extremely close to the target, with only a few body guards or random commoners between them and the quarry. The most effective strategy for assasinations is generally bringing friends, via items like Lifelong Protection, Bottle of Living Water, Bag of Air, etc, or summoning spells like Horde of Skeletons, Swarm, summon air elementals, illusions, etc.
the other two effective strategies are rushing the target with an assassin who is fast and hard hitting enough that the enemy dies before they can actually fight back, and usually involves some magic items or a useful bless. This is also an area where magical ranged weapons can be extremely useful. The final effective strategy depends a lot on your paths, and involves single target damage/kill/disable spells like mind burn, paralyze, frozen heart, blood poisoning, slumber, etc.
Very thorough and well done
Thanks! Glad you found it useful!
Yess, loving these guides! Great stuff
Glad you're enjoying them, hope this is what you were looking for!
@ChazzyBurger yeah this is exactly what i was looking for, already giving me ideas about ny next game!
Good video, however not much bless discussion. I’d argue thugs (at least PD raiders) are actually way more viable in Dom6 because you can take stealth/dread/awe all of a single rainbow with 7G and 3s in other paths. Especially since dread is now more effective than in Dom5, and stealth bless wasn’t even a thing before. Being able to combo big blesses from same path also enables combos like fear/Stygian or regen/berserk. Increased numbers of troops don’t necessarily matter because if a thug can beat 50 unsupported troops he can probably beat 75 troops just the same , and mages are actually more rare now
I do agree with you in quite a few points! This was more of a generalised overview of thugging, I did briefly mention that you can get some of the mechanics I mentioned through blesses, but it was more to go through how a thug actually works.
When it comes to the large amounts of PD I do agree, though with the changes to certain spells like mistform having a 1% chance of being negated by any attack there is a chance you can die just against more troops. It really depends on what kind of thugging you're doing but you are right in that you would imagine that a 50 troop thug could take 75 fairly easily depending on how you've kitted them/what chassis they are.
It's probably something that we could follow up with some more examples and a more in depth bless discussion, but that is very nation dependent, so I'll see how the schedule looks.
Thanks!, this is one of the areas I really knew nothing about, this has been very helpful.
Okay, this is epic.
A question
You mentioned "quickness" several times, what it actually do? I though it only doubles the combat movement speed
So being "quickened" gives you a +2 to your Attack Skill and Defence Skill and lets the quickened unit perform regular combat actions twice every turn, basically meaning that they can attack with a weapon twice instead of only the once, or move twice instead of just the once!
Great video as always
Thanks, glad you've enjoyed it!
am I crazy or is there no mention of stealth in this presentation? I haven't gotten into dominions 6 yet, but in 5 stealth was one of the best possible options for keeping a thug safe. You could sneak into enemy provinces, confirm that they were safe to attack, execute an attack, and then go back into stealth while giving your enemy no chance of reprisal. It has disadvantages compared to unstealthed thugs, namely that you can't attack a province on consecutive turns without giving up the advantages you gained by having stealth, but it remained nevertheless an extremely strong option for letting thugs pick their fights.
I entirely agree with you! Stealthy thugs are much better now in dominions 6, especially seeing as you can make sacred thugs, or those wearing shrouds, stealthy thanks to an obfuscate bless!
I do talk briefly about flying, stealth and magic phases in the enhanced map move section, but thanks to you I have realised I left that part out of the video timestamps so I've added it in, thanks for letting me know!
The examples given are very expensive given the advice "they should be cheap", some costing 47 gems.
Pretty good video once the comment corrections are read. Subbing for the future Supercombatant video
> Iron Angel
Thumbs up from me! : D
I do love the Iron Angels, a much needed map move for such a slow nation! Glad you enjoyed them and I hope that build was useful for you, obviously there's others you could use but that's a fairly basic one to do!
@@ChazzyBurger Something I often think about is how to properly kit them. Of course, that depends on their role. Auxiliary raiding? Supercombatant killer? Mage stopper? Something else?
@@AlgaeNymph Now that's a deep question! When raiding pd you can use the build I used in the video, or kit them out with double brands for a good bit of aoe damage.
Supercombatant killer? They're going to need a bit more kit and tailored more to what the SC lacks. If you can give them axes of hate, heart finders or flesh eaters they can all do good work vs SCs. If they're weak to poison, something like a serpent Kryss can do a lot of work. You probably want to get these guys on top of the SC as soon as possible to mess up their scripting as well, which thanks to the fact you're not waiting for a bless and can fly is pretty doable!
For lighter thugs GSS are very cheap to get and with their stats they'll be hitting often and hard!
The main issue they have is their lack of paths for self buffs, and bringing other mages to buff them mkes them come online later and have more potential to be countered.
Hope that helps!
Great vid
great video.
❤️🩹