treants can take heavy damage, without many casualities
86-106 dmg
378 hp
bonus vs light melee
12 weight (thats why they run on small numbers)
sword dancer 2
9-11 dmg
31 hp
bit of bonus vs heavy ranged
do the math
12 sword dancers
108-132 dmg
372 hp
the time is almost the same for 1 treant and 12 sword dancer
orcs, war dogs, thieves are all light melee
so you can brawl with them favorably
few tactics:
-go to fight, then take a snapshot of the battle field, usually is the same if im not wrong, you can surrender without losing any units
-there are maps where you can block incoming units in 1-2 squares, you need 2-3 troups of treants for that, just stand in the way of incoming attackers and hunt down everybody with archers
-dont move towards opponents, you can move 1-2 squares or stay in place, move forward the treants, they are last so you need them 1-2 turns to be ahead
-you can calculate what they gonna attack, the AI is stupid:
archers attack sword dancers or archers in this order, so use sword dancers to drag the attention to them, and keep archers out of range
sword dancers range is inside archers range, so you can attack then if you dont die from archers attack
they only focus treants if there is nobody else in range, or if they would need to go around treants to attack others
-vs war dogs, simply get out of their range, if they cant attack, they still move closer, when you hit first their attack will be bad, you need almost same ammount of sword dancers as war dogs to draw attention from archers, archers are very bad vs dogs but good vs orks
-archers are best units to fight, if you can defend them, so block them with treants, let opponents hit you, you can stay in a corner and wait they attack, only hit when you can, it doesnt matter how long is the fight if you lose less units
-vs mortars and archer based comps: treants are only needed if you do kamikaze run, you lose too much with swds then use only treants, they shoot randomly so you need a bit of luck, but simply run them over with swd-s and hit them from one hit, archers are weaker, they reach them maybe faster, but you need as many swd troops as mortars and archers at least, or 1 more
-vs archers, you can take up the damage with treants and keep sword dancers outside the range, but sneak closer and attack when you are close enough
-vs treants, swamp monsters etc. you need 1 treant group for assurance, and only archers, go around, step out of range and poke them until they die, usually you can avoid them to hit you for 4-5 turns
-best to fight with full 5 troups
-sword dancers are great when you got troup advantage, treants are better when you got disadvantage in troup number, but not in size
-best to skip their range and 100-0 their health, even small number of troups deal a lot of damage, so is better to kill one troup than damaging many of them, even if you could kill 15 of orks, you should finish the remaining 10 of others, as they got bonus on attacks, and 2 attacks are more than one big usually
-units only counter first attack, so try to send one unit top side, other bottom, this way you can fight in 2 fronts, if they can, they will always attack the same unit 2x instead of 2 units separately
- archers need at least 1 hex distance or they got countered , but you can attack other units standing near opponents, if you can kill that opponent with the other archers
-the main goal is to dont lose units, not to finish battle fast, you can run away when you got wounded troups, and can poke down them with archers in 2 more turns, you can use sword dancers to drag attention of anybody, opponents move toward them usually, so you can turn attention from one treant to other, damaged treants are best, thats why they are better than sword dancers, 6 treants and 72 sword dancers, same attack from archers may kill 11 sd-s but only damages the treants, if they cant do another attack on you until end of fight, you just won 11 minutes on the fight