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Ranged army is another option, because of no damage taken.
And finally undead, with high level necromancy they 'heal' very quickly.
The first thing I'll say is that it's possible in overlord to go without a healer if you play wizard and swordsmen with the holy school of magic. The extra swordsman means more stamina to go around, and an extra swordsmen to hit things with. Also with healing spells you don't have to worry so much about keeping your units in range of the healer. I think it should be possible to do that with other class types, but I can't say I've actually done it.
The second thing I'll say here is that with a secondary or tertiary hero, if you have a bit of gold to splash around, you can kit them out nicely and a strong enough hero will make up for the weaker units. This demonstrates that with a strong enough hero, you can use weaker units.
So in theory I'd say that if you can use the extra money from cheaper units to get yourself some equipment, it might work out. I've tried out a few different ideas that look kinda promising, if I can iron out the kinks, but I often end up just restarting the shard and going back to strategies that I know will work. (Partly to get revenge against the AI, and partially for the sake of comparison with the experiment.) It's possible that these experiments don't work out because I just don't know how to play them properly yet.
One thing I've tried is playing with a scout and spearmen, taking advantage of the heavy ammo from spearmen to drop ranged defense so my scout can drop the enemies. At the start of a shard it is possible to do okay with the fights near the captial at least, if you can get to the carpenter shop and upgrade your bow and arrows, and maybe get a crossbow. The trouble is actually getting enough gold to get to that shop.
Obviously later in the campaign this is peasy. All you need to do is use astral energy to buy enough buildings and give yourself enough gold so that you can get to the carpenter's shop. You could even transfer a hero hero to make this happen. However, I've been trying to see if I can figure out something for custom shards.
The first thing that I've been trying is taking out one or two provinces at the start (sometimes I lose some of my army in the process) and plundering them into the ground for the gold. It works, but I feel like it's a bit too slow in terms of leveling your hero. It could be that there's some variation of this method that will work, but I just haven't figured it out yet. One thing I need to test a bit more is building a school of wizardry for the magic coffer ritual.
The second thing I've been trying is just going into fights and letting the spearmen get killed, then buying new ones. In theory, as you level up, you'll eventually get to the point where your spearmen die less, and eventually stop dying at all. I haven't tested this much just yet and there's still a few things to try. I've been putting units in garrison to heal so far, but I've been thinking that maybe I should be dismissing them. Maybe at some point it'd be worth it to garrison units, but by that time maybe you'd have rituals for that instead.
Tactically speaking, this plays quite differently from how you'd play defensive units like swordsmen. I've even found that I can do some fights a lot earlier with this army compared to when I'd do them with swordsmen, like barbarians, where you can take out the shaman before it starts firing on your troops, or orcs, where you can get a lot of shots off before they reach you because they're slow. So yeah, it's been taking me a while to adjust to the different style of play, and a big part of the difficulty in figuring out what's right for these strategies is the feeling that I'm not making the best use of these units tactically, which in turn makes me question details of the strategy, like maybe it'd be better to have a different set of spells for instance.
Another thing about this is that at first I was trying to fit a healer into the army, and I'm still trying that from time to time, but I'm pretty sure that it doesn't even work. So yeah, if you want a strat that doesn't play with a healer, then maybe have a go at this.
Oh one more thing... have you seen Nofair Fight's youtube series? I haven't gotten around to watching it all, but I think he was playing with a warrior, some crossbowmen and the slinger that you start with. Pretty sure it was on overlord. So yeah, that's something different again.
So I tried a commander with swordsman start and I found that the swordsman were absolutely too expensive. I changed gears quickly by pillaging my home province and then building the bandit lair. The bandits were an easy disposable source of fighting power for my commander. I figured I would use them and then switch to swordsman once I had a foothold. Well imagine this...I found some orcs next door and offered them an alliance. I suppose my pillaging and bandits had made me evil enough that I could actually pursue the deal. All they wanted was 150 gold worth of pillaging. So I pillaged my home province and a neighboring province and quickly solidified the deal. With the exception of the iron cost, the orcs themselves were very cheap. I quickly fielded tough armies of orcs and bandits. Once I got iron they only cost 15 gold each with 3 gold upkeep. That's insane for units as tough as orcs. Plus once I built their third building, I started receiving ~300 gold in raiding spoils from the horde every once in a while. As the game went on my commander gained a lot of higher tier slots and I was sad that I couldn't utilise them (3rd shard in the campaign). Anyways, I got an event with harpies wanting revenge in one of my provinces. I quickly sent my second hero to scout that province until I found the harpy nest. Pretty soon I had a lvl 10 commander with 5 harpies and 5 orcs.
This party has to be the most powerful early game setup I can imagine. I quickly wiped out Einor and had no problems dealing with the adventurer's guard at his capitol. Normally, I level a bit more with other heroes before attacking adventurer's guards. Also, the harpies were insane with the commander. I had level 3 offensive tactics and the general promotion. That's +3 attack just from the general. Add to that a few level ups and high morale from kills and I had several harpies with 18-20 attack by the last battle on the shard. It was so cool to fly over the approaching enemy army and then sandwich them between the orcs for some armor removal and the harpies for amazingly damaging blows.
Orcs and harpies gets my official seal of awesome!
So does that mean you had to replace dead orcs from time to time?
Bandits are very cheap and are powerful for their cost. Their downside of reducing income isn't typically a problem until around the time you've conquered the first ring. If they die it's not a problem as they are pretty easily replaced, unlike the better tier 1 units like Swordsmen. If you have a bad start on the harder difficulties, Bandit's might be your only real option. Just focus on replacing them with something better once income isn't a problem for you anymore. Barbarians are kind of like that, but are stronger, and are a better choice when your start isn't desperate.
You can also disregard the healer completely if you find one of those locations that lets you recruit Fairy units. Which seem to be quite common.
I play swordsmen + healer all the time on overlord with a wizard. In fact, I'd say it's the easiest way to play wizard. However, I have found that swordsmen are a bit too expensive if you're playing with other classes because they all have higher command and need gold for buying/reparing equipment.
I've played it on Genesis too. I wouldn't say that you have to play perfectly, but I do make a point of not losing units for a while, at least until you get enough positive income to replace them quickly. Which is usually somewhere in the second ring, I'd say (provided you don't give out medals, which I usually don't until I have enough income to support it). With a healer and all the spells you have at your disposal, keeping swordsmen alive at least that long should be easy enough. Usually I never lose a unit for the entire shard. I'd say that for a wizard cheaper units are more difficult because you have too few command slots, so you don't have the numbers that other heroes have, and you don't join the battle like other heroes. So the units you have need to be really strong. I've managed to get by with weaker units, but I find that they die often enough that it's probably less expensive to pay the upkeep for swordsmen, and when I make mistake, it almost always results in a unit dying, which often then turns into the entire army dying.
I guess when I think about it, if you've been successfully playing wizard with cheaper units like bandits, then you've probably been making better use of them than I ever have, and I could probably learn something from you. However, swordsmen + healer has always worked really well for me.
Oh and if you've got decent diplomacy (and maybe good karma?) you can recruit fairies at a fairy tree if you ever come across one. They don't start with healing but they get it after a promotion or two. I don't remember how much more expensive they are compared to healers but they're leagues better than the standard tier 1 healers.
- Floating means they're much more mobile than healers
- Once they can heal they can do so at a range of 3 which is a much safer distance than 1
- Better missile resistance than healers means they don't get sniped as easily
- A MAGIC (but weak) ranged attack to lend a tiny bit more support against certain enemies