Units

Spearman

The Spearman is the defensive unit: it has the highest HP and defense on the board.

Type advantage

It defends 2 times as hard against Raider. That is the cornerstone of the type triangle: the Raider cuts through everything in the open, and the Spearman cuts through the Raider (Combat).

The bonus only applies while defending. Attack a Raider with a Spearman and there is no multiplier — wait and you win, chase and you lose.

Fortifying: where a line is actually held

What turns the Spearman's identity into a mechanic is fortification. A dug-in unit defends 1.5 times as hard, and that multiplier goes alongside the terrain and type multipliers: a Spearman fortified in a forest against a Raider carries all three at once (Combat).

The price is its remaining movement and its action for the turn — so fortifying is not "doing nothing", it is a decision: you stop advancing this turn and nail the line down instead.

If you dug in inside your own territory there is a second payoff — healing: 4 HP instead of 2 (The turn cycle). Fortifying a battered Spearman on the border is cheaper than pulling it back and building a new one.

Moving or attacking breaks the fortification; it lasts as long as the unit holds its ground.

How to use it

• Dig in inside a forest. The terrain multiplier scales defense power and fortification stacks on top of it; a fortified Spearman in a forest is in practice the hardest target on the board (Forest).
• Stand in front of the city, not inside it. A city defends with its own HP and a friendly unit in the region is not a garrison; a Spearman only helps when it physically blocks the attacker's path. Because only one unit fits on a tile, that is a genuine plug.
• The Spearman is what makes a line. Every tile next to it is its zone of control: a unit trying to walk past has to stop there (Combat). The tiles it forces a halt on are as much yours as the tile it stands on.

How to build a line

Because a zone of control follows adjacency, the plug is wider than the tile the unit occupies: leave a single tile between two Spearmen and that tile sits in both their zones, so anything trying to pass halts there. Widen the gap and the line leaks — what you count when building a line is not the distance between tiles but the chain of adjacencies.

Build it knowing the limit too: a halted unit can still attack from where it stopped, it just cannot walk on. A zone of control does not prevent an attack — it prevents passage, and leaves the attacker where you can see it.

Before the rivals arrive: bandit camps

The Spearman has a job in the opening turns too, and that job is the Bandit camp. By force, a camp only falls when its last bandit is destroyed, so clearing one costs a real attack turn — a camp's warband includes a Spearman of its own, and that is the camp's anchor. The bandit at the gate, meanwhile, hits hard and has little HP: attacking is a trade, and the unit that can afford that trade is the one with the highest HP (12) and the highest defense (3) on the board.

A camp's threat is a question of place: bandits never leave their leash, so clearing a camp is a decision, not an obligation. The alternative is buying it with gold — that road spends your purse instead of an attack turn.

Its weakness

Move 4 and attack 2. It cannot chase anything and it cannot break a city: its attack vs. city value is 2, far below the Siege's (6). It will wear a soft target down in a few turns — a neutral village (Neutral village), say — but battering a standing city is not its job. The Spearman holds a line; something else advances it.

The numbers on this page are read from the game’s balance tables.