Axewarrior
Overview
Axewarriors are the viking's special unit. They are melee fighters similar to swordsmen, but can attack and destroy towers directly. Their damage per attack is higher, but due to their slower attack speed, their DPS is still lower. Similar to the spearmen from The Settlers III, axewarriors can fight in double-file. However, they usually only do this when combined with swordsmen, as axewarriors don't automatically close the distance to enemy soldiers in order to allow their comrades to help.
Strategy
Axewarriors are the scourge of any tower based defense, as they can destroy them within seconds if they reach their destination. Since towers are often strictly limited in Multiplayer matches, axewarriors cannot leverage their greatest strength outside of singleplayer. Axewarriors can help in infantry battles, but have less to offer than archers or even swordsmen.
Due to their slow movement speed, axewarriors are even more susceptible to large masses of archers. Backpack catapultists are another very effective hard counter.
Theoretically, level 1 axewarriors are a soft counter to level 1 swordsmen, but such matchups do not really happen in practice.
UBO increases the health of axewarriors to make it easier to integrate them into normal armies. This allows them to be mixed with swordsmen, where their higher range comes into play. UBO also makes blowgunwarriors much more threatening to axewarriors, however, as they now have the necessary firepower to seriously harm them.
Trivia
If axewarriors are used against towers, it's worth remembering that all buildings including towers have five points of armor.
Axewarriors have the highest single-target damage output of all normal settlers in the game, with 32 for a level 3 soldier. This can be increased up to a maximum of 106 using maxed fighting strength, the squad leader bonus and the bloodrush spell. Backpack catapultists are are contender due to their area of effect damage, however.
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