Squad Leader
Overview
Squad leaders are control units that can command up to 99 other soldiers and ensure unit cohesion. Soldiers who are in a control group with a squad leader receive a multiplicative fighting strength bonus of 10%. With this, soldiers can theoretically achieve a fighting strength of 165%.
Squad leaders are the only settlers in the game that possess armor. This reduces the damage of every incoming attack by 2. Since armor works subtractively, it is most effective against units with low damage per attack, like archers. However, an attack can never be reduced below 1 damage.
For the Dark Tribe, shamans fulfill a similar role as squad leaders do. Shamans lead attacks on the player, and if they are killed, the other soldiers usually retreat if they are not already in active combat. They do not possess the other traits of squad leaders, however.
Strategy
Squad leaders are expensive units that are intended to make up 1% of an army. In practice, however, they work very poorly. Since they try to keep their group together, they can cause trouble when moving through tight spaces, and ruin any combat formations. Squad leaders have no synergy with ranged units, as they always try to fight on the front lines and thus get killed very quickly.
Every civilzation has means to hardcounter squad leaders. Convert Barbarians and Wage Peace are particularly effective, but they can also be stopped by the viking's fear and freeze spells. The mayan Banish spell can seperate a squad leader from his group, both physically and internally (as the teleported unit is considered new).
Trivia
Although they look similar to swordsmen, squad leaders move at the same pace as archers and other units do and cannot capture or garrison in towers.
The morale boost is very buggy and only applies to units which were standing above or to the left of the squad leader at the time when the group was created.
Squad leaders affected by Wage Peace do not drop their sword or their armor.
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