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    Your Elvenar Team

How good or bad is the Mercenary Camp?

Dadnaz

Dadnaz

Active Member
Hello all,

I've been playing tournaments for a while and I end up never using troops from my Mercenary Camp. I even destroyed it at a certain point. Now with the Spire I will give it another try. I wish the Mercenary camp were something with really good troops but in a very small amount, like "Mercenaries".
What are your thoughts about that. Do you use troops from the mercenary camp a lot?
 
samidodamage

samidodamage

Buddy Fan Club member
As an elf, Blossom Mage was helpful from the start and she's excellent now. I mostly autofight, but will manual fight on occasion. I have a fully evolved Fire Phoenix that I feed 2-3 times during a tourney to have it active when I'm clearing provinces and I deploy at least one UUU military boost bldg for each tourney. I'm now in Amuni and find I'm starting to use the other Merc Camp troops, too. Since they're all at least lvl 2, I find them useful. Having the Flying Academy helps with the training times, so training's more sustainable now as well. I never tore it down, but there were places in lower chapters I could train twice the sorceresses as blossoms in the same time, so it sat idle a lot then. I also now train & use Rangers; they're great against Mages and unlike Cerebus, get first strike because of their high initiative. They also get pulverized by everyone for that same high initiative, so it's a good thing they usually take out the mage in one strike, lol. Just got the 2star promotion for the frogs, so just starting to play around with them.
 
Mykan

Mykan

Oh Wise One
If you combat a lot it has its benefits, if you don't you can get by just fine with barracks.I regularly use my merc camp troops as every single one has its place and benefits. I find the biggest issue for or against merc camp (and training grounds) is the tech of those troops compared to barracks ones and the speed of producing those units verse another building. Both of these factors can change throughout the game.
 

The Unbeliever

Well-Known Member
Merc Camp will have higher value for Elves vs. Humans...

Elves have their 'mage unit' problem solved by the Blossom Mages, while VV's give them a much improved unit to take out heavy ranged units.
Plus they can find decent use for the other units, but those are the main 'stand-outs'.
But the Blossoms alone are the reason for elves to invest in the Merc Camp. ;)

Humans get a lot less out of it, since they already have the god-tier Priests, (though 3* Blossoms will be a big help in that 1 tourney that has lots of heavy infantry), and VV's are basically clones of the Paladin.
Toads are just as useless as Mortars and should be ignored, but humans can get some decent use out of the Rangers who vastly out-preform Xbows vs. enemy mage units.

Still, Humans get more use out of the Training Grounds since their native barracks options are lacking in both any kind of even semi-passable light infantry killer (Ork Warriors) and light ranged killer (Ork Strats). Plus Dogs are fantastic vs. enemy mages


Really, the overall balance between the units sucks, especially for Humans who are generally pretty awful outside of the Priest.
 

DeletedUser19458

Guest
I'm an elf in S&D and don't see point in it, yet. I had it for about a week but then dumped it. Because it shares the same queue, it takes too long to produce troops to keep up in a tourney and with barracks all at 3 stars vs all 1 stars in merc camp, I can't see any of them worthwhile until they get upgaded.

Similar with training grounds. I've only recently finally upgraded it to max and begun training troops there (outside of dogs which I've always been using).

If they separated the training queue's it's value would jump for the early stages when you first unlock it.
 
Deborah M

Deborah M

Oh Wise One
I think the only time I've ever used it is for FA or events. I use Mercenary Camp and Training Grounds then so that I can do separate collections of troops. My main city is Human and I auto-battle so I've never seen any good reason to use them otherwise.
 
Mykan

Mykan

Oh Wise One
My main town is human and I use them regularly, makes a difference to me in tournaments. Knowing when to use these troops is more subtle then the barracks troops and takes more time to figure out. Funnily enough I never use training grounds troops (except free orc strategists), however this is simply because it takes me double the time to train them so any benefit I would gain is completely negated (and more) by the slow training.

The troops have their place even at 1 start but are even more finicky to figure out, once they get the second star they really start to shine.

The Unbeliever said:
Toads are just as useless as Mortars and should be ignored
Click to expand...
To quote someone else on the forum "Frogs eat dogs". Again, really need the second star but that's not unique to frogs.
 

Deleted User - 3932582

Guest
Hurtball said:
I'm an elf in S&D and don't see point in it, yet. I had it for about a week but then dumped it. Because it shares the same queue, it takes too long to produce troops to keep up in a tourney and with barracks all at 3 stars vs all 1 stars in merc camp, I can't see any of them worthwhile until they get upgaded.

Similar with training grounds. I've only recently finally upgraded it to max and begun training troops there (outside of dogs which I've always been using).

If they separated the training queue's it's value would jump for the early stages when you first unlock it.
Click to expand...
That's about the time when MC became useful to me. You get second star for the Blossom Mage in S&D, you've just got a bunch of upgrades for MC in Woodelves, and right after S&D you can build the Flying Academy that can easily boost MC troop production by 30% at L6. With that, MC production speed is getting close to barracks, and L2 Blossom Mage is really good, certainly comparing to Sorceress L3. It's about the same for the Training Grounds, but you'll need to wait a lot longer for its speed boosting AW.
 

The Unbeliever

Well-Known Member
Mykan said:
To quote someone else on the forum "Frogs eat dogs". Again, really need the second star but that's not unique to frogs.
Click to expand...
I don't need Frogs though to deal with puppies...
Pallies destroy them fine since the AI is forever just running the dogs to within free spear-poking range which effectively makes the Pallies act as a ranged unit.

What I *do* need massive help with as a Human is fighting those gakking Thieves, Ancient Orcs & Drone Riders who are able to tear Pallies a new one, despite the Pallies supposedly being their hard-counter! :(
(a common problem with most of the human units actually, but most evident in Pallies & especially the beyond useless as gak Mortars)

Hence why I really, really love the Ork Boyz from the Training Grounds, "cause deyz iz good an 'ard and dead choppy" (dammit - we need an orkmocon stat!)
 
mucksterme

mucksterme

Oh Wise One
it just occurred to me that i've spent the last two days doing training exclusively in the Merc Camp
Archers and Toads
As far as the Blossom mage so many love
Maybe it'll change when it hits level 3
But right now my favorite mage is the banshee
If I do an all mage team I'll often do two of the top tier mages ( forget the name) and three banshees
 

Sun Country

New Member
I sold my mercenary going into S&D because I never used the troops, so I understand your question. I ended up rebuilding it in halflings, and and use the troops a lot more now that I've figured out how/when to use them, and as they've leveled up more. Like Mykan said - the 2nd star matters on them. The frogs are to die for against the light melee and the valorian guard eats light range for breakfast. Building up the military AWs helps a lot as well, and I rarely have to use resources during tournaments.
 

kctanzen

Well-Known Member
Sun Country said:
I sold my mercenary going into S&D because I never used the troops, so I understand your question. I ended up rebuilding it in halflings, and and use the troops a lot more now that I've figured out how/when to use them, and as they've leveled up more. Like Mykan said - the 2nd star matters on them. The frogs are to die for against the light melee and the valorian guard eats light range for breakfast. Building up the military AWs helps a lot as well, and I rarely have to use resources during tournaments.
Click to expand...

I think you have this a touch backwards -- dogs are most effective against light range and mages .. valorian guards are much more effective against heavy range than light range.
 
i8sh

i8sh

Active Member
So I decided to build a merc camp after getting the 2* ranger promotion in the halflings chapter and quickly built and upgraded the FA to level 6 (+ 30% training speed). I can now produce the Rangers faster than the dogs. In about half of the dust tournament battles so far, they are much better than the crossbowman (I am human) as their extended range, increase in attack damage, plus strike back ability, makes them lethal mage hunters. You do have to know how to use them as like the nimble crossbowman, they can be easily slayed by units that are light-ranged killers (I should probably point out that I frequently will manual fight and scout the terrain before deploying my armies). I however am glad that I made the decision to build it and would recommend it to any human player when you can get to this point in the research if you do any tournaments as it is well worth the space.
 
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