I counted up the number of monsters of each type in encounters and dungeons, and it seems that Road to Legend leans towards Eldritch monsters, making them the #1 upgrade for almost all avatars, even if you have them at 30xp instead of 25. This was a little disconcerting, since I'm about to start a new game as Overlord and was looking at playing the Beastman Lord.

I'll probably still play him, but will have to think long and hard about upgrading humanoids to gold instead of eldritch (we're starting at silver since our last campaign ended just after moving into silver). It may still be worth it, though it'll depend on the spawns I can get with treachery. Legions of the Dead (4 normal and 2 master skeletons) is only 1 Treachery while Elite Beastman War Party (2 normal and 2 master beastmen) is 2. Though humanoids get a bigger boost going from silver to gold (command 2 and trickster 2 for starters).

The data includes:

• How many minions are in each encounter
• How many minions are in each dungeon
• How many minions the Farrows start with
• How many minions can be reinforced with a single expenditure in an encounter

It does not include

• Unquantifiable things such as the lower maneuverability of large monsters or the benefit of high speed on a ranged attacker
• Special abilities
• Average damage per monster type
• How many dungeons only offer a certain type of monster, or heavily favor one type even when they allow others.

I counted master minions as one and a half normal minions, since they've got increased damage and survivability, but aren't usually as good as 2 normal minions, since they lack multiple activations and don't double their other stats.

So, while it's not completely scientific, if you're just concerned with how many monsters you'll be affecting when you upgrade a category, go with eldritch every time unless you're ignoring dungeons (encounters and lieutenants favor beasts). Here's the results (the third column is always percentage, I accidentally left the headers off). The data is too big to upload here, but I submitted it to boardgamegeek's Road to Legend section, so hopefully it'll get approved. If you're interested, I can email it to you (it's an excel file, but I can export it to html or pdf if needed).

There are any number of additional variables that might be worth considering, but it seems to me that the one that you must consider in order for this to be meaningful is the relative power of different monster types. If you're counting a kobold and a master demon both as "one monster," then it's entirely possible that the category with the most monster isn't really the biggest, militarily speaking.

Of course, determining the relative power of different monster types is a big undertaking in its own right. But breaking this down by individual monster type, or even just by tier, would probably give a pretty good indication of whether any particular category is strongly slanted towards stronger or weaker monsters.

Did a this myself when deciding what to upgrade, as Playing the Spider Queen, I decided that beasts, were best foor me at 25 points even though eldrich occur more often, but given the spider queen plays more traps, I wanted treachery as fast as possible, so the cheaper upgrade worked out better.

Antistone said:

Yeah, I just counted straight numbers. IMO that slants it even farther towards eldritch than the numbers would indicate, because of how big a benefit ranged attacks can be. Where a melee monster must start its turn within its speed of a hero in order to do any damage, and is unlikely to survive a single shot, speed 5+ ranged attackers can easily start their turn out of LOS of the heroes, move up to attack, and then move away so that the heros have to chase them down and are less likely to be able to battle when killing them.

mordak5 said:

Did you include anything I didn't in your analysis? If so, do you still happen to have the numbers anywhere?

Will dig them out, its was mainly looking to see how often types of monsters occured in the standard OL deck for spawning without treachery monster cards available.

Not as detailed as your stats though

I was pointed to this thread by the friendly folks at BGG. It's another analysis that focuses more on what the monsters gain with each upgrade.

As the author of "that thread," I will add that while I hope it is useful in its current form, a few of my opinions have changed since I wrote it. Will have to update one of these days.

Anyway, I once did a similar analysis, and came to the conclusion that Eldritch is indeed the strongest monster class for dungeon power by FAR. However, one thing that is missing but EXTREMELY important are the monsters that appear in EVERY dungeon - namely, those with spawn cards in the standard Overlord deck.

Of course, your Overlord deck depends a lot on which and how many expansions you have. However, assuming you have them all like I do, it looks something like this:

Eldritch

Skeletons x2, Sorcerers, Dark Priests, Shades

Humanoid

Beastmen x2, Kobolds x2, Ferrox, Medusa

Beast

Spiders x2, Razorwings, Hellhounds, Blood Apes, Lava Beetles

While the sheer number of spawn cards disfavor Eldritch, I find that in practice, the Eldritch spawns are the BEST of the three classes. The Beast spawns in particular are horrible - Spiders are too big to even spawn and so practically don't count, Lava Beetles don't actually do any damage, the remaining 3 spawns just give you 2 regulars, no masters and none of them give you sufficient firepower to even think about damaging the party tank. Humanoids are better, but are terribly unversatile - except for the Medusa, they all rely on Melee creatures of speed 4 or less (the addition of Medusa from Tomb of Ice is actually a HUGE boost to Humanoids). But at least when they DO work, they hit hard, which means the Heroes can't pull the "Nanok does the whole dungeon by himself because nothing can hurt him" maneuver. Whereas for Eldritch, every single one of those spawns is downright awesome if your Eldritch are Silver or better, none of them involve big hard-to-spawn monsters, and they are all very range-y and versatile.

So yes - for Dungeon power, I think Eldritch are easily the best class. But buffing your Lieutenants is relevant too and something to keep in mind. This is why the Demon Prince is the most powerful Avatar by far, since he is the only one that can really achieve good Dungeon power AND good Lieutenant power with the same upgrade. Certainly, though, upgrading a class automatically just because it's a measly 5 points cheaper is not always the best way to play.

If I end up staying Beastlord (almost assured right now, though the Demon Prince's cheap Crushing Blow and strong sieging is looking nice), I'll probably start with Eldritch at Silver and upgrade Humanoids to Silver on my first turn. With 3-4 spawn treachery that means 2 legions of the dead and an elite beastman war party (command 4 has to be nice) or 2 legions and a kobold horde (making many traps free).

I don't know if I'll ever upgrade beasts. I hate bane spiders that much.

I'd definitely love to see an update.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again one more time.

The OL cannot win the game in dungeons.

Even getting a 2-1 CT advantage before the final battle seems to have historically rarely been enough for the OL to win.

IMO this is a good thing, because otherwise Eldritch really would be a no-brainer. They really are that much better in dungeons.

I don't believe anyone is claiming the OL can win the game in dungeons. But he also cannot win if he doesn't earn xp, and the dungeons are the most common places for that to happen.

James McMurray said:

Mostly true.

My point though, is to be careful about focusing on the wrong things. Focusing on getting something that improves your odds is not quite the same as focusing on actually winning.

Crushing the heroes in dungeons, if you can, is all well and good. But , you still need to have a plan to win the overall campaign, and crushing the heroes in dungeons will almost never do that. That, for example, is why I would rate beasts as highly as eldritch overall. They are so much better (more frequent) in Lt encounters (which is where you win or lose the game as OL , mostly) that it more than makes up for the dungeon deficiencies. Especially as the Beast Avatars have other ways of gaining CT (Spider Queen kills with Traps, Dragon gains CT from Chests) that can keep them in touch at least with the heroes.

I have to say that since I upgraded my beasts to silver, razorwings, and hellhounds are a lot better, and blood apes are pretty good too. I agree that the bane spiders are a pain due to the size, getting spawn points, or a decent outdoor map for them is not easy.

Mind you my silver dragon made the hero's flee a dungeon on level 2 and wasted a tank for 4 ct which was nice.

I upgraded to beasts also because I would have had to wait for another 3 dungeon levels before getting eldrich upgrade, and they had an instant effect on the hero's being able to have some silver beasts and 2 purple treachery has allowed me to match the hero's in CT over the last 2 dungeons, and forced them flee, the last dungeon on level 2, and flee an encounter. as well as getting me a replacement Lt for Alric who got killed early.