Perks to pick

[jamesrg84]

So what perks do you pick for fun / usefulness

I think the 3 snots and always slapped seems powerful

Not sure about the cheaper reaserch. Feels like one good being kill with the 50% perk more than makes up for it.

[Zero]

Demonic Corruption(Demons do +50% dmg vs good beings, good beings drop 50% more evilness)
Efficient Dungeon Research(Dungeon branch is 30% cheaper in gold and evilness)
Master of all Factions(Each level of faction research increases damage of all units by 1%)

The first and third are probably a no brainer. The second one is to speed up my dungeon development - you get more snots, more room efficiency, traps etc faster

[Soul]

cant recall their names....

first I like to run with the one with snots always moving at full speed and you get 3 extra ones at start of mission...

second I use the perk that makes traps cheaper and give them 50% more damage... makes my dungeon more secure and not have to worry about rushing units back everytime heroes enter...

3rd perk I use the one that increases damage by 1% per research level of dungeon, horde, demon, and undead.... that means with 10 ranks in all of em... which you want anyways for more snots and units.... you gain a 40% damage bonus globally against everything...

[tomorrowandtomorrow]

I also use snots and traps as my two defaults. Snots just seems like a no brainer, your economy runs on them and getting three bonus ones plus perma-slapped status to make all of them work faster is all up side, no down side.

Traps are a huge help in buying you time to do stuff on the overworld, especially in campaign missions where you frequently get swarmed by heroes. They're also fairly low investment to buy into initially (1k gold for each kind, IIRC), but I tend to have trouble finding the resources to upgrade them later in the game, I usually end up prioritizing other things. So the trap perk makes them cheaper to build and more powerful up front, which also extends their usefulness as the game goes on. And if you do fully upgrade them, they're pretty friggin strong with the damage boost from the perk.

I like ghost heroes for my third. In theory, something like cheaper research would be better for general play, but I really like the mechanics of the perk. I do a standard starting force of some imps and banshees, and then I spam orks early game with the expectation that they're going to die and come back as stronger ghost heroes, which lets me be a little more reckless with my troops. They can't heal until you get vampire queens or their ice tomb room, so they're going to die sooner or later, but they're tough while they last, and they give unupgraded horde units an added layer of usefullness that they wouldn't have otherwise if you want to focus on the other factions. Later I invest a little more evilness to trade orks for gnomes with their first upgrade, because they die more easily (which produces more ghost heroes), but they also hit a lot harder and get the damage bonus vs buildings. Once I have gnomes and spells(for portal and general utility), I go full undead until I can build ice tomb. Ice tomb lets the ghost heroes revive and heal as normal, and heroes graves will automatically attach themselves to an existing ghost hero once they're built, so at that point my existing ghosts are basically permanent and I can either start converting heroes into more ghosts, or just passively build them up as my gnomes die. If the game goes on for long enough, I'll swap the gnomes for infernals, since at that point I can easily produce most ghost heroes with heroes from my prisons if necessary.

That's the way I find to be the most fun to play the game, but I already tended to go heavy on undead even before I unlocked that perk, so the ghost heroes perk is a nice way to bridge the early undead game with the late game.

[wildmick]

30% off dungeon, half price traps, and double evilness from kills. works for me.

[Vlad Vasiren]

Has anyone else noticed Master Of All Factions does not give us +40% total? I have run 2 skirmish maps on normal difficulty since unlocking it, and I've noticed both times that my units do around 3x damage. Thalya at lvl10 has over 80 damage without the perk, but with the perk she caps out in the 200s at the same level. I ran the math, and it seems we get a bonus that matches the number of the level. So level 1s in total will give us +4%, 2s will give us +8%(added to a total of +12%), etc all the way up to +220% total.
I'm not complaining about such a gift of power, but it does make some units less useful later, given how long it takes for them to wind up the attack or for the attack to land.
Examples are the goblin wolf rider's charge, the imp's fireball lobbing, the succubi's wind up to throw, the infernal's slow sweeping arm, the vampire's reach out to drain, and the necromancer's twirl and sweep.

[Draconic Creature]

The always-slapped snots is a must-have imo for sure, it makes them ridiculously more efficient and faster at everything all the time, plus you get a couple extra snots on top.

As for the other two, the stronger, cheaper traps, and the 5 evilness per hero taken out by a trap.

It adds up pretty fast, plus once I've gotten a good corridor consisting of 1 slime block, 3-line spikes, repeat, with the entire length also lined with sawblade traps, very little can actually make it through, and that's if I don't slap a slime ball trap on the end to send them all the way back to the beginning to do the run over again.
Anything that makes it even through that is basically already dead and I can mop them up easy.