Klackons are still just horrible. No matter their production bonuses, when playing on higher difficulties there is no way you can create Settlers more effectively than you can just conquer existing towns. The problem with Klackons is the way to play them is to out-settle everyone else, but on Hard/Extreme/Impossible the enemies get significant production bonuses. Thus is is far more effective to let them build town and then take them over. Even with production bonuses you can't keep up on Extreme or Impossible.

The only half reasonable way to play them on harder difficulties is using a Heroes strategy and using their early bonuses to quickly get lots of tax revenue to quickly hire and support heroes. But even that is better done by other races, because, again, Klackons are at a major disadvantage when it comes to conquering enemy towns.

In the time it takes to build 1 or 2 Settlers with Klackons you could have already conquered several neutral towns using Hell Hounds and/or Phantom Warriors or Bears and Sprites or even Ghouls. Settling your way to victory is a losing strat in this game and it only becomes worse as the difficulty increases. And every neutral town that you don't conquer is just giving aid to your enemies, who will gain them instead.

Yeah, Dwarves can be good, but pretty much only with Sorcery, to a lesser extent Nature. At least with Sorcery you can make Flying Hammer Hands, which are powerful enough with Adamantium that they don't really need power buffs. But again they suffer when it comes to race relations and conquering others. They are also good for a Heros strategy, but not even as good as Klackons because you can't get the needed Retorts to really do it right when you start on Myrran. They don't seem too slow to me. Their Spearmen and Bowmen are every powerful and they have good race relations (for Myrran), So you can typically conquer neutral towns very quickly with them which helps boost their speed. Perhaps the strongest non-11 book start is Draconians with Warlord and all Life books. Well, 3 Nature, the rest Life would be a stronger start, but isn't worth it in the long run. Draconians are basically the only race for which is it actually worth it to rush with Spearmen. Their race relations aren't that bad. They have a few really bad relations, but most are the same as High Men. Elvin Lords are absolute killers, and you can get them relatively quickly. Their early Mana bonus makes them ideal for a Conjurer start. Nature or Chaos with Conjurer, or better Archmage + Mastery + Conjurer, means you can pump out full stack of of summoned units very early and use it to take Nodes to get more power. You can also take Neutral towns with your summoned army. While your summoned army is busy you just rush to Armor's Guild, and you can guarantee that you'll be fielding Elvin Lords before anyone else has anything that can deal with them. Pair them with a cheaply summoned Fire Giant or put Pathfinding on them and you've got a very powerful force that can easily take lots of towns quickly. With conjuring you can then just build a Spearman in conquered towns and summon Hell Hounds or Bears for added defense.

A stack of Longowmen with Fire Giants can move around taking encounter zones and cracking Towers. Elite Elvin Lords can kill anything they hit first pretty much, especially with buffs. You have to be tactical with them, but as long as you ensure that you hit first they've wipe out pretty much anything except the highest end units with Flame Breath or Thrown Attacks, etc.. With Nature they eventually get Iron Skins which also helps a lot, as well as Resist Elements, which also helps early on. Giant Strength and Flame Blade both make them significantly more deadly.

I see we play different versions. I'll see myself out.

Regarding the Magician discussion: I find Magicians pretty much useless in MOM. The only real reason I ever go for Magicians is if I'm facing a lot of ranged attackers like Slingers or Longbows and I don't have Guardian Wind. The innate Missile Immunity can make Magicians worth it then, but that's about it. And when all is said and done, in those situations I prefer High Elf magicians with their 2 movement and easy Pathfinding.

I think some of this depends on which version you play. On the original 1.3 version you can certainly turtle up even on Impossible, but on 1.4x and even more so on 1.5x, turtling is far less effective, because the AI is so vastly improved that the enemies get out and expand much more and are a lot more aggressive. So if you turtle it just doesn't work on Hard+.

IMHO there'd need to be a separate tier list for Impossible, just because so much about the game changes at that level. Maybe not on the original, but definitely on 1.4/5x. Not only that, but so much of it becomes situational that really a better approach might be to just make a list of the most viable race/book/retort combinations.

You're right that on Impossible where settling your own cities is mostly pointless, Draconians shine and Klackons suck. Hordes of enchanted Draconian Spearmen are a lot of fun. Meanwhile, unless you want to raze every city you conquer and resettle the area, Klackons are going to have to deal with punishing unrest.

This list was looking more at Normal/Hard/Extreme difficulty, and it's also focused on versatility. It's less concerned with how well races can do with specific strategies and more with how they do with any strategy. That's the reason why High Elves are ranked fairly low. Your argument for them is a double-edged sword: They absolutely excel when you can use summons to do your REXing for you, but that's kind of the point - they need summons to do their REXing for them. Halflings or Dwarves, on the other hand, can turn their bonus gold into extra mana for early summons, or they can use their own troops to REX, or they can amass a sufficient defense and sit back and econ up, etc.

Definitely agree on Magicians. They'd be okay if it weren't for needing such a terrible building. If the Wizard's Guild had a sane production cost and didn't come with a power penalty, I'd see myself using Magicians more often. As it stands, though, Warlocks are really only the ones worth getting. I guess Orc Magicians too but that's less because they're any good and more because what the hell else are you going to build as Orcs?

What I've learned over the years playing this game is that generalization doesn't work well. It's all about specialization and maximizing specific advantages and matchups. There are really only a few general purpose power units, which are just basically so OP that they are almost always good, like Shadow Demons, Wraiths, Death Knights, Paladins, Slingers, War Trolls, Great Drakes, Sky Drakes, etc. Yeah, with those you can just pretty much do whatever with them (with very few exceptions).

Otherwise though you really need to pay attention to maximizing your matchups and advantages.

When playing on Extreme or Impossible you pretty much have to go into a game with a specific strategy in mind and having everything optimized for that strategy. Over the years I've become more and more fond of summoning. I think summoning is pretty much the most powerful aspect of the game, because it lets you produce more troops faster, it's easy to move troop production to any city, the troops are more expendable, summoning lets you focus on building your economy.

Death is kind of so over-powered it's absurd so I don't often play Death anymore except on Impossible. The only way I can even attempt to compete on 1.5 Impossible is with Conjuring and Hell Hounds to start. Often either all Chaos, 2 Chaos + Death or 2 Chaos + Sorcery. So, since, IMO, Conjuring is the most powerful approach (other than Artificer + Runemaster), then of course I consider High Elves a top tier race, because High Elves are basically the best race for Conjuring (other than Death).

I've never been a big fan of starting with Myrran races. The only good ones IMO are Draconians or Beastmen. With Beastmen you can use an all Sorcery strategy for Flying Minotaurs, which works pretty well, but really Flying Paladins is better. With Draconians Life is clearly the way to go, with or without Warlord. Draconians with Life are actually worth it because Life doesn't provide any way to deal with Flying enemy units, but being Draconian does. But still, it's possible that Barbarians with Life are better.

Trolls and Dark Elves are not even options on 1.5 Extreme or Impossible. Dwarves can work, but again mostly with Sorcery IMO, but Nature works too.

But yeah, on the harder levels for me it's often about getting a full stack of Hell Hounds or Bears/Sprites ASAP and taking as much as possible as quickly as possible. The resource advantages of taking encounters and Nodes early is so huge. And when it comes to research its typically about searching for that powerful summon ASAP. So, just researching whatever is cheapest until you find the spell you want. That's typically a top tier Uncommon summon, like Basilisk, Shadow Demons or Chimera (though I will take Doom Bat over Chimera if both are available due to lower cost and scouting advantage of the Doom Bat.) .

This is where Life is terrible. For me a lot of the game is about the Uncommon spells. The one who gets that powerful Uncommon first and can take advantage of it can really dominate. Life has a bad Uncommon set. The only really good spells are Raise Dead and Prayer, but neither are game changers like Shadow Demons or Basilisk.

Chaos has three strong Uncommon spells (Flame Blade, Doom Bat and Chimeras), Nature has Basilisk, Cracks Call, and Pathfinding), and Death has Shadow Demons, Night Stalker, Black Prayer and Lycanthropy. Lycanthropy might not seem great, kind of expensive, but Werewolves can tear through virtually any normal units they may face if you research them quickly and use them right away and they are relatively cheap to cast. Another advantage of Lycanthropy is it doesn't require a Summoning Circle, so if you have a town that's facing pressure you can upgrade your crappy units pretty easily.

I think I'd tier the races like this in regard to how good they are as a starting race, in no particular order within tier:

Top:
Barbarians
Halflings
Gnolls
High Elves

Mid:
High Men
Dwarves
Draconians
Beastmen

Low:
Nomads
Orcs

Bottom:
Troll
Dark Elf
Lizardmen
Klackon

All of the top tier races have reasonable racial relations and can employ strategies that result in the fastest possible fielding of useful military force. Barbarians, Halflings, and Gnolls can all produce powerful Normal units quickly. High Elves have an advantage in producing summoned units, and also produce powerful Normal Units (Longbowmen) fairly quickly (though its typically better to focus on summoned units early on with them).

The Mid tier races can all be used successfully. High Men are a little slow at the start, but can be okay with a Conjuring strategy to start to allow economic development. Once going they are very strong with good racial relations. Dwarves have a strong economy, but their units are a little lacking in terms of sophistication and their racial relations aren't great. Also, having to give up three books to pick thin limits the strategies you can employ with them.

Draconians have powerful units that can be developed early and flying is a huge advantage, but their economy grows a little slowly. Again, having to give up 3 books to pick them is limiting.

Beastmen have some powerful units and good racial relations. Overall they are a powerful race, but again having to give up 3 books is limiting.

The Low tier races are reasonable but they have few real advantages or are a bit too slow getting started.

Nomads are fine, but their build path to powerful units is quite ex[pensive and cumbersome. Their economic bonus is so small as to not really be that useful.

Orcs are fine, but they have no real advantage over comparable races. Their Wyvern Riders are inferior to comparable units and far too to develop.

The Bottom tier races all have significant drawbacks.

Trolls, of course, have some of the best units in the game, but as a starting race they are pretty terrible given how poor their economy is. It's far better to conquer Trolls than start out as Trolls.

Dark Elves just grow far too slowly and have horrible race relations. This is a disastrous combination. Also, their main advantage (magic attacks) can be easily defeated by Magic Immunity and even Resist Elements.

The Lizardman economy is just too horrible. One free Common spell isn't worth giving up all that Lizardmen have to give up. I'd rather just take 2 Nature Books if I really wanted to start with Water Walking that bad.

Klackons are just a disaster. It might be fun to build a Klackon empire on Easy or Normal difficulty, but on harder difficulties the name of the game is conquering enemy and neutral towns, which Klackons are horrible at. Having a massive unrest penalty with every race just makes conquest needlessly handicapped for Klackons and there isn't any real strategic advantage that makes up for this disadvantage on harder levels (where enemy/neutral towns develop much faster than your own towns).

That's just it. Klackons aren't conquerors; they're viruses. You start off with a higher tax rate, constantly building new towns as closely packed together as the game allows, razing any enemy towns in your way (unless you want to exploit them for something). It's not an out-of-the-gate early win strategy, and you will take losses along the way, but it can be a very effective one if you commit to it. Doubly so if you take the Alchemy retort, in part to make up for the fact that Klackons can't build their own Alchemist's Guild.

Also keep in mind that their xenophobia can work in your favor; opposing wizards won't be able to make much use of any conquered towns, because of the Klackon race relation penalty. This will allow you to reclaim them that much easier, continuing your inexorable wave of expansion.

Right, but on harder difficulties the other wizards get resource and production bonuses. Their towns grow faster than your towns, even with the Klackon bonus. So as you go up in difficulty, it becomes increasingly advantageous to conquer as opposed to build. On Extreme and Impossible enemy towns grow so fast that trying to out Settle enemy wizards is just a fool's game.The amount of resources it takes to conquer new towns is less than what it takes to build a new town.

Can it be done? Sure, but its the most difficult approach, thus they are at the bottom of the list.

The way the game works, a lot of your strategy depends on the difficulty level. On Easy you are best off building a lot of your own Settlements because the enemy wizards are so bad they aren't going to build very many good towns, so you need to do it. Klackons are great at this level. On Hard now your town will grow more slowly than enemy towns, but with good choices you can still do better at building towns. One Extreme, however, enemy wizards can build Settlers so cheaply and the towns grow so fast it's foolish to essentially destroy all those resources and build your own.

It's like someone planting gardens that are full of fruit and you coming in and instead of taking over the existing growing garden, burning it down and then starting over planing a new one. It's just hugely inefficient, and on harder difficulties with the efficiency disadvantage that you are already in, destroying all those resources to replant your own just doesn't make sense.

For Impossible and maybe even Extreme I would generally agree with this list. The one change I would make is that I think I'd make a new tier between Top and Mid, and put Gnolls and High Elves in it. They both have awesome opportunities for quick expansion (in HE case assuming you set them up properly book-wise), but that's just it - it makes them a little too start dependent. If you roll a lonely start where there's nothing to expand into, they can find themselves struggling. By the time the AI finds their way over to your continent to expand onto it for you, they're coming with giant stacks of Uncommon or Rare summons. Granted I suppose on Impossible you're at a point where you're probably rerolling every time you recognize a no-win scenario anyway, so practically it probably doesn't make that big a difference.

That is certainly true. I recently started a Gnolls game on 1.5x Extreme and the first town I found was Klackon town so I just restarted. On my new map, however, I was alone on an island (despite playing Huge) with only 1 encounter I could take, but luckily the spell I was able to research was Floating Island, so I went ahead with it and it worked out fine. I do have a big island with just my capital and 1 late Gnoll Settlement though, which is kind of funny. The place could hold 4 or 5 more towns easily.

But in the prior Gnolls game I played (I often don't fully finish these days, I just get to where I've clearly dominated all the wizards and then abandon games usually), on like turn 4 I discovered a High Men town very close to me, which had roads that led to a whole cluster of about 8 High Men towns. But, all the enemy wizards quickly started taking over the towns with summoned units. Luckily I was able to get 2 Riders out fast enough to take 2 of the better towns and I pretty quickly attacked the capitals of two wizards and then started taking over their towns, but that was a situation where getting a fast start was really important, because if you turtle up and let enemy wizards take over a bunch of High Men towns on Extreme it's going to be painful. It was also a situation where Gnolls were better than Halflings, because speed of getting to places was really important and the enemy wizard capitals were pretty far away.

I'm really liking Gnolls with Blue and Green because Web is critical to be able to take out Sprites early on with Wolf Riders. Ultra elite Wolf Rider remain relevant throughout the game, though obviously Slingers do as well. But still, Slingers can be defeated with Guardian Wind or Warp Wood. But anyway, of course, with Gnolls you don't expect to rely on Wolf Riders forever, you obtain new races early to develop them. For me, I find I can get better starts with Gnolls than Halflings. You can't deny the power of Halflings, but they are just so slow tactically. Plodding around with 1 movement per turn is just miserable, and I've definitely lost encounters and even games due to not being able to get places fast enough with Halflings.

You'd want a wizard profile that leverages Lizardmen or Trolls properly. They are by far the fastest races if you build around them.

Take one to all of these:
Earth Lore
Alchemy
Warlord
Heroism

Lizardmen troops all get an extra heart per figure. I would always take that over Gnolls or Barbarians. But in 1.31, Lucky has both the hidden +10% to block AND -10% enemy to hit, so that Halflings are the considered the best military rush race on arcanus. I think the 3rd party stuff changes this.

As to Trolls: if you know how to use regeneration in the battle screen, you can use your initial spearman and sword to take out weaker Myrran lairs and any neutral garrison, except draconians (but if you have a couple of the items I listed, you can handle them too).

Err no. With Gnolls all you need to build to make a Wolf Riders is a Stable. A comparable military building investment for Lizardmen (Armory) gets you Halberdiers, one of the worst units in the game in terms of value.

Wolf Riders have 3 movement, 7 melee, 3 shields, 5 health and cost 100 hammers to make.

Halberdiers have 1 movement, 4 melee, 4 shields, 2 health and cost 40 hammers to make.

But Lizardmen get no Sawmill, no Forester's Guild, and no Miner's Guild, so producing those 40 hammers is almost as intensive as the 100 for the Wolf Riders.

3 movement vs 1 is huge and 7 melee (9 at full level) goes a long way in armor piercing. In 1 vs 1 match-ups Wolf Rider decimate Lizardmen Halberdiers. I've taken full garrisons of Lizardmen Halberdiers with just 2 Wolf Riders (plus magic of course), so maybe not totally fair, but probably 3 Wolf Riders can take a 9 Lizardmen Halberdiers of the same level.

And as for Trolls, if you plan on leaving your fortress unguarded I guess you can attack with your starting units, but that doesn't seem wise or helpful. Actually building units with Trolls is very painful. It's not so bad if you conquer them and can rush-buy a bunch of stuff with the superior non-Troll economy. And taking 50 turns in a battle with a Troll spearmen in the early game isn't exactly my idea of fun lol :p

Nothing in this post addresses the point, so I'll just reiterate it.

You'd want a wizard profile that leverages Lizardmen or Trolls properly.

I don't think it's necessary to build a building (certainly not the torturous 600 hammers worth of production tech you mention). You can just use spears or swords if you want. This is why I mention Earth Lore, so that you can see exactly where to go in the first several turns of the game, and Alchemy/Warlord/Heroism, because these have huge synergy with multi fig units. Sorry I didn't elaborate, I thought it would have been obvious; I mean, I said "wizard profile," and listed some example wizard assets, the game is called Master of Magic, and if you start with a military race you might consider playing to its strengths (though it is by no means required).

Gnoll spears can make effective use of these magics as well, it's just that an extra heart is better than an extra 2 strength on these types of units. I am not here to poo-poo wolf riders, either, but they come later than spears and swords. I don't know your approach on this. Personally, I build a farmers market before cranking out 100h units. But not 10h units.

I'm not sure how you go about thing. I try to develop my capital before building units. You end up with more units faster by a few turns in.

My typical build order is : Granary > Marketplace > Farmer's Market > Sawmill > Forester's Guild > Shrine then either a unit production building or possibly a Miner's Guild first. When rush buying with Alchemy it doesn't take too long to get all of that and getting to Wolf Riders fast is like having Paladins in the early game. Wolf Riders with Resist Magic and a few other minor buffs can wipe out any early and even mid-game units.

I typically never build Spearmen (other than in a newly captured town early on as a guard), Swordsmen, Bowmen or Halberdiers. (Halfling Swordsmen being the exception).

I typically try to race toward the optimal units ASAP.

Spears and Swords suck. Any time I've tried strategies using early Spears and Swords I've been punished by mid-game as other wizards come in and dominate, even if you do manage to take out one wizard early.