Single-unit stacks: win your fights without losing troops

What is a single-unit stack?

Your army is made of stacks: a group of creatures of the same type occupying one slot (you have up to 7). A single-unit stack is a stack you deliberately reduce to one creature, by splitting it off a larger stack.

Its purpose isn't to deal damage: it's a utility stack. It fills the empty slots of your army and acts as bait, shield or blocker to protect your main stacks. You expose or sacrifice it to preserve your valuable units.

Set up your stacks before the fight

You can't split your stacks during battle: everything is prepared beforehand, on the hero's army screen or the army panel on the map.

• ›CTRL + click on a stack splits off a single creature into an empty slot.
• ›CTRL + SHIFT + click automatically distributes the stack across all empty slots.

Retaliation: the rule that makes it all work

When you attack an enemy stack in melee, it retaliates only once per round. Once that retaliation is used, it can no longer counter the next attacker until its own turn comes around.

This is where the single-unit stack comes in. Before the fight, split a low-value creature into a single-unit stack, then in combat:

1. 1Send that unit to attack the dangerous enemy stack first.
2. 2The enemy spends its retaliation on this sacrifice.
3. 3Hit the same target with your main stack: it no longer takes a counterattack.

You sacrifice a worthless creature, and in exchange you get to strike that target without taking a counterattack.

• ›Retaliation only triggers on a melee attack. If you attack at range or with long reach, without being adjacent, the enemy doesn't retaliate, and you don't need bait in that case. Conversely, a ranged creature attacked in melee can still retaliate, with a melee attack.
• ›Some creatures, like the Griffin, retaliate several times: a single unit won't use up their retaliation.

Protecting your shooters: the living wall

Your shooters are fragile, and the moment an enemy reaches them, they can't shoot at all: they can only make a melee attack, which for most shooters deals far less damage. So keep them at range and out of contact with anyone.

• ›On deployment, place your shooters in a corner of the grid.
• ›Surround them completely with single-unit stacks to block the attackers' path.
• ›Use the Skip command on these shield stacks: they stay in place without moving or triggering a needless retaliation.

While the enemy goes around or wears itself out on your blockers, your shooters fire freely for several turns.

Conversely, stick a single-unit stack against an enemy shooter: as long as it stays in contact, the shooter can no longer fire, only strike in melee, and therefore far more weakly.

Controlling turn order: Wait and Skip

In Olden Era, the action order depends first on Initiative (the highest acts first), with Speed breaking ties. Two commands give you control:

• ›Wait pushes your stack's action to the end of the round. Useful for letting the enemy advance toward you, then striking in melee without wasting your movement.
• ›Skip ends the turn without doing anything. Useful for keeping a shield stack in place.

Used well, they let you make your bait strike just before your main stack, on the right turn.

Focus: turning a sacrifice into a resource

Olden Era adds a combat resource absent from the older Heroes games: Focus. You gain it by attacking and by being attacked, and it's used to trigger your creatures' and your hero's abilities.

Stack size has no bearing on the Focus generated: a single creature taking a hit yields as much Focus as a stack of five hundred.

So your bait stack doesn't just protect your troops: while it's being attacked, it charges your Focus bar. A ranged stack and a melee stack both generate Focus when they attack, but the ranged stack can attack more often, since it doesn't need to move; you're therefore sure to generate some every turn, which isn't always the case in melee.

How the AI picks its targets

The AI always seeks to inflict the maximum possible losses. This has two consequences for your single-unit stacks:

• ›If killing your single-unit stack is the best it can do that turn, it will go and kill it, even if that forces a detour. Your bait works well in this case.
• ›But if it can hit a larger stack and kill several creatures at once, it will always choose the larger one.

Use this logic: position your bait so it's the best available target when you want to draw the enemy in, and keep your numerous, fragile stacks out of its reach.

In practice: clearing week 1 neutrals

For a fight against guardians in the early game, proceed in this order:

1. 1Don't accept automatic results that cost you losses: if every fight takes a bit of your army, you eventually run out.
2. 2On deployment, place your shooters in a corner and your melee units around them.
3. 3Split off a low-value single-unit stack as bait.
4. 4Use Wait to let the enemy come to you.
5. 5Send the bait to trigger the dangerous stack's retaliation.
6. 6Hit the same target with your main stack, with no counterattack.
7. 7Spend the Focus you've built up, notably on the Heroic Strike, which is very effective early on.

Pitfalls to know

• ›Against a creature that retaliates several times, like the Griffin, the anti-retaliation bait is limited.
• ›Long-reach attacks bypass your walls. Some units strike from one tile away: they hit your stacks without being adjacent, and a blocker won't stop them.
• ›Magic ignores your walls: a living wall doesn't protect your troops from an enemy spell.
• ›A stack that Skips its turn triggers neither morale nor luck. Splitting your stacks doesn't lower your morale, which depends on the number of factions, not the number of stacks.