lothern sea guard

[Mr Robert House]

whats the consensus of opinion on them?

they have worse range than aarchers and fewer men than spearmen. theyre also realy expensive if you get the good ones with shields. i usually have 2 of them, one at each end of my 6 archer units incase cavalry bother flanking (they never do)

im talking vortex campaign btw.

[Xhal]

Used to be good but now since the new DLC I never use them.

Use basic archers with no armor initially because they are cheap then go with sisters of avelorn for the armor piercing.

[Wyvern]

Theyre the best unit for doomstacking early-mid gameish or if youre just fighting low/lowish armor factions. The range difference is practically irrelevant, iirc they have better AP than archers and their melee stats are good enough to basically just build a whole stack of them. Upkeep issues are nearly irrelevant if you play on higher difficulties, since you get punished for trying to go wide anyawy.

[Mr Robert House]

so just skip the t3 stuff, and get the t4 sisters asap?

[Cacomistle]

Early on while you need money for infrastructure, I think you're better off with spearmen and archers, and maybe a couple just in case of flanks. When you get further into the game and have more money, plus more bonuses for archers, your archers starting routing their front lines. So a sea guard in the front lines might get 4-5 volleys (with increased missle damage) before the enemy reaches melee. This makes them actually more cost effective than spearmen for your line, and as the post above said going wide is pretty bad on higher difficulties. As such, it becomes best to have an army of a lot of sea guard with a few armored archers behind them where they can't be reached.

I think lothern sea guard also have an extra tech over spearmen for buffing their melee defense or something, but I can't quite remember. They end up with a pretty ridiculous amount for a tier 2 (3 with shields) unit thats also an archer. They get super strong cause you just get a stupid amount of buffs (8 ma/md, ammo and reload from red trees, missle damage, reload, ma/md, weapon strength, speed from techs, potentially more bonuses including a possible decently large upkeep reduction or even more missle damage form influence lords, you get the point).

They make for what I'd call a mid game doomstack. An army that can crush multiple weak stacks, and will win 1v1 vs any ai stack that you'll come up against. Some factions best armies I think are not much stronger (like its hard at least for me to make an empire stack that can 1v2 doomstacks). However, some factions can get actual pretty much unkillable doomstacks (like fey and a bunch of 100+ md grail guardians, or kholek, or isabella and a bunch of vampire lords, or basically any wood elf army if you get enough outposts and a high level lord), and sea guard don't become that strong. High elves in particular are capable of stacks that can 1v2 ai doomstacks, cause they get pretty much the top tier of everything (other than Brettonia's best cav is slightly better, chaos top tier infantry is slightly better, and HE artillery sucks).


Imo, theres little reason to use sisters in campaign, just use sea guard for mostly the same role. They have significantly better melee stats because they are affected by the red line skill (and sisters aren't), and they have more techs benefitting them in every way. If you have sisters doing say 35 missle damage, you might have sea guard doing 50 with a larger squad size. So they will perform better vs anything but heavily armored targets (which even then they'll do better in melee here), and cost less, and there are influence lords that affect them and not sisters but none that affect sisters and not them. A stack of say 10 sea guard, 7 archers, a princess with some bonus trait, a handmaiden/noble for replenishment and possibly army buffs or incindiary, and a mage can take down basically anything and is really cheap, so I see no reason to bother with getting sisters except for on allarielle's army.

[Green Raven]

I found them invaluable when securing the Vampire Coast. Splitting my army into the classic spear and bow formation left me vulnarable to the outfalnk and overwhelm tactics the vampires excell at.. I needed troops I could spread out, while not sacrificing thier defensive capabilities.

Later, when fighting the Skaven, I made sure to have four units of them in every army. They were just so versitile.

[Xhal]

While what you say makes sense in the end game you will fight heavily armored stacks of chaos warriors. Possibly dwarves or dark elves too. Sisters will shred those while archers and see guard will struggle. And by that point money is no concern.

[Cacomistle]

Originally posted by Xhal:

While what you say makes sense in the end game you will fight heavily armored stacks of chaos warriors. Possibly dwarves or dark elves too. Sisters will shred those while archers and see guard will struggle. And by that point money is no concern.

Sea guard don't struggle though. They have over 60 melee defense with a good lord, so with that and a life caster you can easily hold a line. And while their missle damage isn't going to be as great as sisters, they'll do enough with all the buffs (its like 20 percent reload from a princess, 20 percent amunition and 12 or something reload from the red line, another large percentage from techs, apparently alith anar gives factionwide missle damage but I've never confeded him, and another increase if you get a princess with one of the influence traits).

Let me put it this way. Dryads have awful armor piercing. Complete garbage. But if you take a lord with all the melee buffs wood elves get, then have like 50 outposts, they shred armor. Cause fighting an enemy with 100 armor with you having like 70 weapon strength, you'll still do ok damage even with trash armor piercing. Basically you buff them up to the point where they've got enough melee bonuses that fighting an enemy like chaos warriors, a really bad matchup for dryads, they've got equivalent melee stats and deal equivalent damage cause of all the extra weapon strength.

Sea guard stacks are pretty much the same. They won't have an amazing matchup vs dwarves or chaos, but sisters don't have a good matchup vs dwarves either. Dark elves really don't have that amazing armor, so idk why you're including them. They've got like 2 heavily armored units, both of which don't have shields, and if you wipe out all the unarmored units around them they aren't gonna wipe your stack. Lizardmen would be a worse matchup for the whole armor thing, but sea guard have melee defense in the 60s and anti large, and dinos have like 30 melee attack. Sisters will perform better with missles vs dinos, but I'd rather just throw in 3-4 phoenix guard. And yet again you'll wipe out the army around the dinos very quickly.

Also people say money doesn't matter, but at the point where money really doesn't matter you've won the game. It doesn't matter what units you bring. I think where the decision is made is when you first get sisters. At this point, an army of sisters plus sea guard or sisters plus phoenix guard or something might cost 1000-2000 more. That level of expenses on say 3 stacks will add up, cause with that extra 6000 income you can upgrade all your infrastucture all the way. Or the difference between say 8k income and 14k could be that you can now afford an extra stack and maintain 4-5k income, whereas you wouldn't want to go into the negative. This is especially true if you consider the influence lords that give reduced upkeep to sea guard and archers, where their individual stack might cost half as much as a stack with a lot of sisters. Cost becomes less and less of a concern as you get further in, because the costs of extra stacks starts outweighing the cost of elite units, but costs still matter a bit. I mean playing very hard I've never reached a point where an extra 15k couldn't net me another stack (at least a cheaper one), and I've never thought another stack is useless unless the game is over. At least in the sense that a stack with units that cost half as much will save a lot of money.

The bigger issue though is that you get sea guard earlier, which means you get experience for them earlier. Theres probably a way to recruit sisters at level 7 or something I guess, but I haven't gotten that. A level 7 sea guard with the buffs from the second tier of red line skills and the bonuses from higher level will be more effective than say a level 2 sister. Plus, replacing sea guards with sisters means extra recruitment time and costs, especially since you probably don't have the building on the front lines. But lets assume I conquer a level 4 province. I'm paying like 5k for the recruitment building, maybe an extra 2k per turn, maybe 7k in recruitment costs, and maybe 6-8 turns to replace my backline archers and maybe a couple sea guard with sisters of averlorn. And when I recruit them, they're not even better because they're replacing high level units. In that time, I could probably take 2 settlements, which even if we're at the money doesn't matter point, thats 2 settlements my opponent doesn't have.

When I start building regular doomstacks, like swordmasters, star/moon dragons (I usually have moon cause I start recruiting high tier stacks at tier 4), phoenix guard and dragon princes if I'm tier 5, etc, I'll throw in sisters instead of sea guard for a few ranged units. Cause I'm not expecting them to need to melee, and I wouldn't get the ma/md red line skills for only a few sea guard if I put them in instead.

Also for the dwarves in particular, I'm just gonna send an army with a lot of swordmasters. They're usually getting killed by greenskins until lategame, so I'd almost always attack them before they attack me, and therefore I can choose what stacks to send at them.

[Fey Dragonette]

Amazing, fantastic unit. More than Doubles your firepower and defensive capabilities since they're stronger than Spearmen & archers.

[mustachewarfare]

I like it for T2~T3 period. Units armours are not too high at this point in time and having both melee and range option is pretty sweet. Like two sea guard are more expensive but better than 1 archer and spearmen

You start to need something else in mid-late game when high armour units become more common.

[Pimpin Pippin]

If you find it impossible to keep enemy fliers/cavalry/monsters out of your archers then Sea guard are a noob-friendly replacement for archers.
They are pricey but are a mix between archer and spearmen plus they can use a shield... expensive tho.

Sea guard also have lord-specific heroes that make them cheaper and a lot of technologies that improves their performance.
Sea guards also can be used as a flanking unit since they can circle around the enemy infantry lines and shoot arrows up their bums - and if some infantry/cavalry chases them the Sea guard spears are ready.

If you wanna see something funny vs low armor infantry then mass Sea guard, like 15+ of them in an army.
When the enemy infantry starts approaching your Sea guard will wreck them with arrows so hard that they will be near dead by the time they reach melee.

One of their main issues is the lack of armor piercing, which is what the sisters of avernLOL are for.

[Sn3z]

You should always have a few LSG in every tiered HE army they extremely important units. They are hybrid essentially making your backline much harder to hit seen as HE have quite a few problems on flanks atleast in early tiers they also protect from flyers great in other HE matchups, where they are not doing this they should be firing. Their range and the lack of shield variants is not so much problem if your have a flying core that can get into enemy missiles. CA should punish players more in red skills, upkeep and tech that want to spam the unit.

[KDubya]

Don't ignore the benefit of having silver shields on your Sea Guard. A 55% missile resist is huge when it comes to an archer shootout, much more valuable than more AP in that matchup. Sisters can quickly become pin cushions while Sea Guard can fight in the shade all day.

[Cacomistle]

Originally posted by Sn3z:

You should always have a few LSG in every tiered HE army they extremely important units. They are hybrid essentially making your backline much harder to hit seen as HE have quite a few problems on flanks atleast in early tiers they also protect from flyers great in other HE matchups, where they are not doing this they should be firing. Their range and the lack of shield variants is not so much problem if your have a flying core that can get into enemy missiles. CA should punish players more in red skills, upkeep and tech that want to spam the unit.

You should only have them in an archer army. If you make some dragon princes and swordmasters rush army, don't bring sea guard
As you said they can protect your backline, but there's no point if you aren't relying on your backline. And if you bring sisters instead, they can hold their own

[A.Pot]

I find them extremely useful. On my current Vortex campaign as Alith Anar I have an army composed of

Alith Anar himself
4 Shadow Walker
5 Shadow Warriors
6 Lothern Sea Guard with shields
4 Eagle Claws

The sheer amount of arrows they unleash is enough to obliterate enemy armies. Although, it should be important that you invest in the proper skills to improve the ammunition and damage of your ranged units.

[Fey Dragonette]

Originally posted by al_potenciano:

I find them extremely useful. On my current Vortex campaign as Alith Anar I have an army composed of

Alith Anar himself
4 Shadow Walker
5 Shadow Warriors
6 Lothern Sea Guard with shields
4 Eagle Claws

The sheer amount of arrows they unleash is enough to obliterate enemy armies. Although, it should be important that you invest in the proper skills to improve the ammunition and damage of your ranged units.

Is there a reason for 4 shadow walkers and 5 shadow warriors?

outside of cost and upkeep I'm pretty sure Walkers are better across the board and you'd be better off taking more.