How to Thug

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Dominions 6 is a wondrous game, but it's one with a lot of content.

[00:00:04]When you're trying to play the game, the idea of thugs and combines is kind of presented to you very quickly with the existence of Titans and the irrevocably complex and really fun item system.

[00:00:15]That along with self buffs kind of very much encourages you to mess around with it. But as you play the game, it it's not I'm not going to say it's unintuitive, but it takes a lot of requisite knowledge to really get comfortable.

[00:00:28]This video is an attempt to kind of give the premise of them, give a lot of basic terminology and ideas to allow you to make you make your own or even use cookie-cutter thugs that I have designed.

[00:00:38]And it allows you to see some of the more advanced tech that a high-level players will utilize to take advantage of the systems to really abuse them to their fullest potential.

[00:00:48]Now, beyond the more nuanced purposes of thugs, which we will get back into as well as the definitions, any combatant has to think about these things.

[00:00:57]What its purpose is, how it's going to kill stuff, how it's going to survive with the options of defense, negation, protection, regen, revival, and the auxiliary effects that will allow it to better serve its purpose.

[00:01:12]And so as we go through a couple of these prerequisite designs we're doing at the very beginning of this video, think about that.

[00:01:18]So if you're trying if you're making a commander to kill unsupported troops, it is just a thug.

[00:01:26]Here you can see thug that is designed solely around killing stuff in time.

[00:01:31]It has protection, but that's not very high. It has defense skill, but not very high.

[00:01:35]It's got AoE and it's got a vine shield, but it's not doing anything spectacular.

[00:01:40]It's going to be self-buffing, but nothing it's going to self-buff with is going to be considerable to the degree that allows it to prove itself unilaterally effective. This regen will kill PD.

[00:01:52]It will kill an army of 30 to 40 men with a major too, but if anything truly exceptional comes across it, it is going to die. But, that is okay because the last thing you have to take care of is cost, right? You want to be efficient in everything you do in life and in the game.

[00:02:10]And so, you would rather not use something that's super expensive for a task that something cheap can commit.

[00:02:17]Now, killing a thug, you are going to make a counter thug. Counter thugs are generally barebones with one to two items.

[00:02:25]The GSS is almost universal in people's minds specifically because it has armor piercing on its attack.

[00:02:32]Now, if you can cast weapons of sharpness to give another weapon armor piercing, as we'll get into later, there's a host of other weapons that actually perform better than the GSS.

[00:02:43]But, as a default, the GSS is always a good option. It gives good stats and it's got really good really good damage with its AP.

[00:02:51]Now, when you're killing a large stack, you need a super combat. The way these will work and exactly their survival mechanisms will vary as we'll get into further in the video and as we've covered some of the options.

[00:03:03]But, generally that means you want to show up to a stack, kill everything and survive whatever's there.

[00:03:10]Now, that does mean that super combats are often tailor-made for what they face.

[00:03:14]If you're dealing with an enemy stack that does a lot of lightning damage, they've got storm demons, you need to make sure your super combat has enough chakras.

[00:03:22]If they have counter thugs of a certain design, you need to make sure to tarpit them or avoid them or be able to tank their attacks.

[00:03:29]And so, you must operate within the circumstance you're dealing with, which is why a lot of these things really praise having magic phase movement so you can attack a target before they can build for you, so before they can be prepared for your arrival.

[00:03:43]You pop in in the magic phase and they can't do anything about it.

[00:03:49]An army thug is a chassis designed solely to perform within an army. That could be killing stuff, right? But it's always killing stuff in support of troops. It's not meant to be able to operate alone.

[00:04:00]And oftentimes it's acting supportive.

[00:04:03]This specific chassis uses an eye shield. You seat it into the front line and it'll just make the enemy units go blind. It's not going to win a battle on its own, but throwing it into a stack is a useful way of using your gems if you have nothing else to spend them on.

[00:04:16]Here is a heavy thug. This can kill a small stack with a bunch of mages as long as they're not exceptional or the stack is not fantastic and they don't have casual counter thugs around, it should be perfectly fine.

[00:04:29]This one is of course magic phase capable and a little bit more on the bare bones end, but this can kind of shift around depending on what you're working with.

[00:04:38]Then you're killing a super combatant.

[00:04:40]Often, depending on the circumstance, there is a multitude of ways of doing it, right? You can use a bunch of counter thugs as we'll get into.

[00:04:49]But you can also use a single commander that has been geared specifically for the target and counter magic phases.

[00:04:56]This is one here designed to win fights against other golems. It teleports in, it hits them with the GSS, and it kills them when they're using gear such as this, which is more suited to dealing with troops.

[00:05:10]All of these options and all these survival mechanisms, specifically defense, negation, or the avoidance of damage, protection, regen, and revival, which I will get into further because it gets slightly more complex, are all focused around protecting your combatant and making sure they complete their objective in the requisite time.

[00:05:29]And before twilight hits, right? Now, twilight is the new addition in Dom 6, which means after turn 100, your commanders will lose all of their self-casted buffs, which for most super combatants and thugs and heavy thugs is what allows them to survive.

[00:05:45]Now, how does all of this apply in an actual game, right?

[00:05:49]Yotenheim to our south has decided it is time for them to use a thug chassis, right? This isn't a particularly exceptional thug.

[00:05:57]It's stacking too many items like lycanthrope's amulet is expensive, but it it does the job. 30% regen, it's berserk so it won't route.

[00:06:06]And it rolls into our PD and some of our left behind troops and kills them all.

[00:06:14]I will not make you sit through this, but it does. It just sits here regening and hitting.

[00:06:18]Nothing that these troops can do can counter it, and we need to deal with that.

[00:06:22]Well, how do we do it?

[00:06:24]We look at what tools we have available, the gear, the spells, and we go about it. And these spells here is key.

[00:06:31]See, the further complicating factor beyond what your guys can use as gear, you also have the spells they can cast or have cast on them.

[00:06:40]Now, this is hardly all of them. Here you can see some of the spells, right?

[00:06:43]And I'm just you can just kind of see them shoved into your face, but there's a host of spells in this game that provide damage negation of different forms such as body ethereal, personal, mist form, and mass body.

[00:06:53]Protection like iron skin, which I actually don't think I have up here.

[00:06:57]And by relation, the half damage from temper flesh and liquid body.

[00:07:01]And then of course regen and revival with soul vortex and phoenix bind.

[00:07:06]With all of these spells, it's very tempting to then think of just your thugs as casting on themselves, but you also have the ability for you to cast spells on them using other commanders. And that's what a lot of this is thinking about. You have so many pieces that fall into play for both killing and using them that it gets overly complicated.

[00:07:27]So, here we are being attacked by this werewolf, and we need to kill him, and we have two thugs. Two counter thugs, really. This one more bare-bones, this one a bit more geared.

[00:07:36]Now, we can just run them in, and this may work.

[00:07:40]But we can also be a little bit more creative using a mage to fluff them so that they're more effective.

[00:07:48]Here we've attacked.

[00:07:49]We have of course a handful of sacred and a more aggressive blast to counter.

[00:07:54]Have it close and then we are fluffing with quickness.

[00:07:59]And so we get the buff up.

[00:08:01]These guys end up with their stats and all their benefits with 38 damage AP and two attacks.

[00:08:10]And we go.

[00:08:14]And as we attack you can see they take the lead because of their quickness, but also it doesn't matter because they do 29 damage.

[00:08:25]And so you could see a chassis like this that could have taken on unlimited standard troops dies to just a few swings of the GSS.

[00:08:34]So what exactly do those combatants look like? Well, here is a list of a bunch of including ones that I showed earlier and new ones. So you can kind of see the things you're going to be running into or you may want to run depending on your roster or your nation, right?

[00:08:47]Now everyone knows about the frost brand thug, right?

[00:08:51]Depending on the chassis you're going to need armor or in this case also a barding.

[00:08:56]But a frost brand and a vine shield together are effective counter. Although the frost vine shield has been nerfed like working only in tangle up two squares per round, it is still a very effective negation tool to prevent foes from attacking. Although the frost brand allows the user to strike in an AOE.

[00:09:13]Therefore killing targets.

[00:09:16]You have a simple minor thug. Well, this thing isn't great with a decent Mario blast it's going to take six to 10 PD.

[00:09:24]And you're not going to have to worry about it, right? If it dies, doesn't really matter.

[00:09:29]This king of magma is not actually using his sword like it it he has his sword to kill, but it is not his killing mechanism.

[00:09:37]He sits in the back, casts heat from hell with fire storm, and lets the people in the province burn to death, right?

[00:09:45]And so through I hope as I show these, you can kind of see the variety of tools you can utilize in the way ways they can be used.

[00:09:53]A classic GSS thug walks up, hits them with the sword to deal with whatever enemy thug or super cabal you're dealing with.

[00:10:00]Another counter thug, the black lord.

[00:10:03]Here is a more unique chassis. So, the disc can fly, and although you don't actually want very many because they're not very make recruit efficient because they are a mage that is quite expensive for what you are getting out of them. If you have them, you can give them a halberd of might and an amulet and a rabbit's foot for twist fate and have them turn one, attack rear, and kill the enemy mages, right? And so once you stop thinking about chassis solely in specific gear sets, a lot of use cases and sets of gear that you didn't think about before kind of become available.

[00:10:39]Here is an army thug using an eye shield. This is the one I showed from the Adobe demo at the beginning.

[00:10:45]Here is a firebrand thug. You can mix it into your army and use it as an army thug or send it out to take PD.

[00:10:52]Here is a defense chassis. And so as we spoke about defense, right? As a form of negation, this chassis is 36 troops. Especially if this has awareness, are rarely going to kill it.

[00:11:05]Instead, however, it must be countered with more creative methods, such as a flesh eater to make you berserk, or web and earth melt, or a spell of ice to stick it in place so that it can then be killed. Of course, that's not counting pure magic solutions, but these are the kinds of things that should be thought about.

[00:11:23]Lich and throat's amulet to deal with berserk to deal with fear so you go berserk.

[00:11:28]This is a overpriced, of course, right?

[00:11:31]But the concepts in this chassis are very useful. This can take This is a immune to PD because it's got invulnerable and fear and region. This is going to run through PD. It's going to make them run away.

[00:11:41]Got berserkers. Not going to route.

[00:11:44]It is a very uh technically efficient in its gem cost for what it does chassis. Now, of course, this chassis is expensive, but you can still do see a lot of useful traits on it. It's got flying.

[00:11:59]It's got spirit sight.

[00:12:01]And of course, it's got triple blessed, right? And your blessed can be a very core part of it.

[00:12:05]Praetorians are a classic choice for super combatants and thugs and heavy thugs in the late game.

[00:12:12]They're cheap for what they are, at least they were historically, and they [snorts] can take small sets of gear with a wide variety of paths to deal with a lot of different foes.

[00:12:22]And that's That's a key aspect as we continue looking at a couple of these chassis. The other key benefit and focus of combatants is variety, right? What kills one will not kill another, though enough GSSs will generally kill most things.

[00:12:37]And what one can attack, another one will, or what one can do, another one will. And so by creating variety with both your combatants and your thugs, right? And your armies and everything you can bring to bear, you can vastly uh shift your the combat potential your stacks have using combatants that require specific counters or hard to deal with or or stealthy or are just complicated to handle, right?

[00:13:03]Like all of these talks of super combatants and counter thugs are very easy, but if the enemy super combatant kills your whole army and then your counter thug gets to it, is it really a success?

[00:13:14]Right?

[00:13:16]And that's getting on to some of these more complex ones, right?

[00:13:19]The golems are a classic, right? Because they can teleport, they can deal with unprepared armies handling.

[00:13:26]What some people will know and what is more esoteric tech from the older games, is there are golems that do stuff like the horror harmonica with a ring of returning, or in this case, the armor of virtue.

[00:13:39]What this means is they teleport in and just call horrors and have wailing winds active.

[00:13:46]And if you attack it, it then returns to someone's camp.

[00:13:50]That is something more complicated, and it is of course counterable, everything in this game is.

[00:13:55]But it can be very, very difficult.

[00:13:58]Especially with 95 HP uh slash and pierce resistance, and even more 21 defense skill.

[00:14:06]Oh, this is future me. Um I have some poorly edited in footage following really this message, where I talk about the golems a little bit more in depth, uh both of them, include some references that won't make complete sense.

[00:14:21]Apologies about the weird cut, but this was a pain of a video to make. I have like 10 to 12 segments that I've had to decide what I have kept in and what I have removed.

[00:14:34]And so, it's just been very, very messy kind of making it fit, and it's still gone about 5 minutes longer than I wanted it to be. And that's after like brute force cutting a bunch of things.

[00:14:47]I don't know. These long videos are kind of a pain to make.

[00:14:51]But we try. Also, I lost this game. Uh there it is, took a long turns because all the other people are fighting and wouldn't fight him.

[00:15:00]I'm I'm afraid of this video dragging on, but I might as well show some of the cool stuff you can do.

[00:15:04]This is the horror harmonica uh combat, and so you can see it teleports in, casts himself buffs to make sure it doesn't die instantly if troops get up to it. So, that is of course actually probably not what you want to do.

[00:15:15]And then cast call horror because it doesn't have to spend blood slaves to do it because it has the horror harmonica.

[00:15:21]And of course, wailing winds as well, one of the best spells in the game.

[00:15:26]Now, that may have been quick, but it shows up and instantly spawns a horror in the back line, right? Because call horror comes from anywhere, and these are strong horrors, and start to routing enemy troops and just sits here dealing damage, perfectly fine cuz it only returns on damage, and gets returned, and the enemies have to deal with the remains of the horrors and route.

[00:15:56]Or could route, right? So, in this case they do cuz of wailing winds, but you can see the golem killed 50 sacrends.

[00:16:00]And of course, this isn't made supported, whatever, one made, so on so forth.

[00:16:05]But it did that.

[00:16:06]And now, it is right where is it set to? Here, I'm guessing. Yes, it's right here.

[00:16:16]And it can do it again.

[00:16:21]Now, now, the other key thing with super cabans is you do not want them landed on, right? You don't want them magic face themselves. And so, like with the horror harmonica and the returning ones, right?

[00:16:35]You're often going to avoid that by having, you know, the returning. And so, you're going to calculate, okay, is this stack going to ping it off? Good, then I can drop it, right? You in fact have to be careful about accidentally landing in a province that you cannot escape from. Now, there are ways to get around this. You can use a obs- obfuscate bless to stealth away, or but you have a scout holding a shade auburn to transfer onto your caban and then have it stealth away itself, if that happens, right? Or even just give it all its gear and stay there naked if it's non-stealthy, but that is part of why stealth is so valuable. But you can see here, this is a caban that cleared, let's say 100 PD cuz it can.

[00:17:17]It's Self buff for that. It's geared for that. And here is one geared solely for killing a golem.

[00:17:24]And as you can see undoubtedly and unsurprisingly this one wins.

[00:17:33]Now you can always just retreat, but this for golem specifically and I keep bringing them up because they are so common because S3E2 is almost universal in the late game and they're such an easy to thug chassis and they only cost 35 florins. They also can't retreat because they are mindless.

[00:17:50]And so they can't do what a lot of thugs do which is retreat out of provinces when something is coming that they can't deal with. So you're kind of forced to walk away or send more stuff. Sometimes that can work.

[00:18:03]But often times if it's magic phase you will lose.

[00:18:08]These chassis can become like puzzles for you to solve which is part of the enjoyment. How do you deal with Soul Wars takes Phoenix power or Phoenix fire, right? Constantly losing fatigue, keeps surviving. Well, as I showed in one of my last videos, you can use drop one. That doesn't always work. You can use the axe that gives chest wounds. You can berserk and give them a chest wound for encumbrance. You can give use a fatigue item. You can paralyze and soul slay them. There's There's many options, but it very much becomes a cat and mouse play of thugs and counter thugs.

[00:18:42]The Oh yeah, the way you deal with this, right?

[00:18:46]Is returning procs on damage at the end of a phase.

[00:18:52]And so if you have multiple attacks you can actually attack something multiple times before it use its returning procs. Now you're never going to use the hill giant chassis unless you're a psycho or you're in one of those games where you really need the damage value.

[00:19:09]But if you ever run into something like this, this will kill it. Uh a couple of these with quickness, weapons of sharpness will kill that every time.

[00:19:19]As long as they can hit it. You don't need every item. You don't need the direwolf pal. You can use other chassis if you can get enough strength. The importantest thing is one or two of these strikes will kill it.

[00:19:29]And then it's dead.

[00:19:32]But yeah, I've I've really moved quickly here trying to make this video a bit on the quicker end.

[00:19:37]But the complex or the the topic of thugs are very complicated because they range from a combatant like this given a frost band and blessing and told to go get them, tiger, with a regen bless.

[00:19:48]To more complicated chassis and nations gearing out their commanders with a variety of gear to fit into stacks, right? Fitting them into your armies, using them for specific objectives.

[00:20:02]Or even just to diversify your threat profile, right? Giving your assassin gear so it can act as like a thug in assassinations, using repel.

[00:20:13]This is one of the mechanics that can deflect enemy strikes, right? Uh repel for reference acts as like a defense skill with a attack skill on a high length weapon.

[00:20:25]And so when dealing with all of these options, it very quickly becomes overwhelming.

[00:20:30]You see all of these and there are so many items in this game.

[00:20:35]There is There's really a lot. And when you're dealing with mods and small and big, really. Big and small.

[00:20:43]It gets even more complicated, right?

[00:20:45]What might work in one version of spellcasting may not with all the spellcasting ones. Some make certain thugs better. Some make them worse, right? Suddenly your mages are casting shatter more often to deal with golems.

[00:20:56]Or they're casting webs on elf thugs. Or they found themselves now trending towards buffs that don't actually help kill anything.

[00:21:04]Right?

[00:21:05]But when you're dealing with so many items and you have a lot of niche ones that are actually very cool and very useful.

[00:21:11]You want to look at the pyramid of defenses, right? The the list.

[00:21:16]Protection, it's the easiest, most basic. You of course got your armor, you've got your stone skin, your iron skin.

[00:21:21]Your defense skill with your gosh of pairing.

[00:21:25]And then and the cat charm.

[00:21:29]You have a repel with having a high length weapon and high attack skill.

[00:21:33]The classic thing of course the pipe burning pearl.

[00:21:37]And then of course you've got the more esoteric and I'm going to say esoteric stronger ones, harder to deal with ones, regen.

[00:21:43]Means you can deal with chip damage and also in some chassis that's your pure form of protection.

[00:21:49]Uh fear.

[00:21:52]And eventually returning Phoenix pyre and soul vortex.

[00:21:57]And so it creates a very fun and interesting game of cat and mouses and chassis designing, right?

[00:22:05]Where you're deciding whether you were taking for this chassis. Can you cuz you have five slots, so you're taking Okay, well you got to take you want to take personal You want to take iron skin, temper flash, moss body, okay.

[00:22:16]Well, you want to take personal regen.

[00:22:19]But then what else do you take? Do you take a gem and cast Where is it? Shroud of bewilderment, a very good defensive spell.

[00:22:28]Do you instead cast summon earth power with a gem to get reinvigoration because high fatigue kills chassis constantly.

[00:22:34]Anything over 50 is dangerous for a thug.

[00:22:37]Do you take Do you want to quicken self so you kill quicker?

[00:22:41]Do you use liquid body instead of temper flash to get the wound fend but you lose strength and combat speed?

[00:22:48]And so do you use elemental fortitude?

[00:22:49]Do you And so with all of these different options very quickly it gets exceedingly complicated.

[00:22:58]And very and complicated to deal with, right? If a chassis has fear, you are going to want berserk. You can touch a madness set, you're going to want to cast quickness, all sorts of things.

[00:23:08]If someone's like seating your back line with flying mage killers, how are you handling that?

[00:23:15]Right? Your thugs can't buff, so it has to be something that's not being buffed, and if it gets target, you have to target it as it Do you care if it dies?

[00:23:22]Are you going to go cheap or make something expensive and effective?

[00:23:26]And that's where the very interesting playing counter play is.

[00:23:31]Now, if you If all of that's too complicated and you want the basics, give your giants regen and your golems reconstruction and frost brands with like a charcoal shield and some prot.

[00:23:43]Give your elves vine shield frost brand or mace of eruption or fire brand and some armor and a barding if they need it. Give your army thugs uh shh What are they called? Ice shields and life long protections.

[00:23:56]And give your counter thugs GSSs.

[00:23:59]If that's all you wanted to do, that's all you got. But, when you're getting into the more complicated game of what you can do with all these chassis, casting spells to hurt the army instead of doing it yourself, being making sure targeting specific stacks with specific gear, right? You have so many options.

[00:24:16]Taking indie troops and using them as your counter thugs because they have high stats even if you don't particularly like them.

[00:24:22]Stacking defense, how do you deal with stack defense? All of this, as it gets more complicated, it creates a really interesting and fun ecosystem of game play.

[00:24:33]Thanks for uh watching. This video was actually extremely hard to record cuz this I could talk about this for ages, and I tried to kind of rush through.

[00:24:40]I hope you enjoyed it.