Armies and Troops

As you may know already, there are 3 tiers of creatures in Heroes VII. The core creatures are the cheapest, more numerous and less powerful ones, the champions are the opposite: few, costly and very powerful. Elites are between those two extremes.

In Heroes VII, there are more subtleties in the power range of creatures. There is generally one core creature and one elite creature noticeably stronger than the two others of the same tier. It feels a bit like game prior to the tier system (Heroes V and earlier games) and it is supposed to bring more variety and liveliness.

Also, the range of power between the weakest core creature and the biggest champion is greater than in the previous game. A bunch of sentinels cannot take out a titan by themselves: the big guy will kill them by the dozen with each slam. This makes champion creatures more epic and more valuable.

In Heroes VII, you can play your own way, for sure, build-up your heroes to follow a certain strategy that you favor personally. Nevertheless, each faction has strengths and weakness, and it’s a good idea to leverage the strength Asha gave each of his children. Each faction also has a favored enemy and most of times an arch-enemy that is their own nightmare.

This brings a new dimension in the game: the fact that you need to know who you’re fighting to best adapt your doctrine.

An easy situation is playing Haven against Necropolis. Everything that boosts your troop’s morale will be good to resist the powers of the undead army, your spells and powers of the school of light will hurt them more than anyone. That means you can play your strength and you’ll be in a good position to win.

Against Dungeon, the situation will be much less comfortable. The dark elves are the perfect weapon against you, as they are darkness itself. They will weaken the power of your light, dodge your powerful counter attacks and use tricks against which you have little protection. So as a player, if you find out that you’re against Dungeon, you better adapt your strategy, towns, and hero builds.

In Heroes VII, each faction has two champion creatures, but each town can only dwell one kind. Also, it’s generally better to have more of one kind than trying to have both.

More importantly, as your strongest creature, the champion is the final touch to an army’s style. There is generally a great difference between the two options. For instance, the Celestial is a support creature. It will protect his allies and resurrect them, so choosing him is a strong statement: you will use your Elite creatures to do the job, and your champions to protect and empower them. Selecting the Swordmaster means that you intend to deal the big damage with your champion, and you will certainly do so.

Creatures are recruited in dwellings. Some of these are built in towns. Once you’ve invested to get them, they will produce troops on a weekly basis, and you can then buy the creature to join your armies. Some other buildings can boost the number of such produced troops, and so can certain hero abilities, or even artifacts. Of course, having more troops produced isn’t so good if you don’t have the resources to buy them.

There are also external dwellings. They are buildings found on the adventure map, that provide the same services than those in towns, but they need to be conquered first, since it is generally guarded by neutral creatures. Once this is done, they are generally linked to a town of fort (if they are part of an area of control) and add their production to the area of control’s pool (for more details, read the article: map control in Heroes VII). It is also possible to recruit directly from them, but only their own production.

In Heroes VII, dwellings can also be upgraded to provide upgraded versions of the troops they generate, but this is costly and not useful in all map configurations.

They are called so because they’re not found in any faction’s lineup. They are generally found as wandering creatures on adventure maps, but sometimes, they can be recruited from specific dwellings. Their power varies from the typical core to champion tiers. Recruiting them can be useful if you lack the production capacity and have the money to pay for these mercenaries, or if you just feel like adding some of them to your army. After all, who says no to a bunch of gold dragons?