Demon farming analysis

[u/SignificantDiver6132]

Inferno is generally seen as one of the weakest towns, but it does have one ace up their sleeve: Pit Lords' ability to summon demons from the corpses of fallen allies. This effectively allows them to upgrade most lvl 1-3 weaklings into Demons.

However, the conversion isn't much of an upgrade in most cases. This is because the conversion doesn't actually increase hitpoints and actually loses them if the amount doesn't exactly match the amount of Pit Lords doing the summoning or if the dead stack consists of mobs that have more HP than Demons themselves.

The best case scenario is turning a low damage, high HP mob into Demons. For example, 1.75 Dwarves turn their combined 3.5-7 base damage into 7-9 base damage of a single Demon, plus a couple points of extra Attack.

The worst case scenario is turning a high damage, low HP mob like Sprites. 12 sprites do a combined 12-36 or 24 average damage, which is about the triple what a single Demon does. You're also losing great speed, fly and no retaliation in the process.

Hit points are somewhat better protected due to Demon's base defense of 10, but in many cases this is only a few points of defence difference. Hit point artifacts and First Aid specialty heroes do help a bit on the hit point conversion rate.

Pooling creatures from several different cities and external dwellings into one superstack is pretty much the only remaining tangible benefit. And since the new Hota Patch, letting Marius boost a larger share of their entire army to new heights.

[u/Archibald_The_Red]

On a bigger map that strategy is great. I had recently played as Inferno new HotA bigger type of a map and It was great. If you have time those demons are easily becoming an ultimate weapon. The thing is the game is balanced in such a way that having one super stack is nearly always better than having many good stacks. And demon farming surely provides you with one. However It is always a race against time. That's why this strategy is not viable on Jebus Cross or in shorter games.

[u/SignificantDiver6132 → u/Archibald_The_Red]

You do raise an interesting point here. Due to the retaliation mechanics, a strategic value of a stack of mobs is certainly not a linear function of the amount of units in it. Rather, the stack becomes exponentially more useful at least all the way up to the point where it one-shots any opposition stack.

This is, incidentally, the reason why secondary and tertiary towns seldom provide you with armies that are anywhere near the effectiveness of your first town armies. Unless the map specifically has mechanics for the secondary and tertiary towns to produce more units per week than your primary, via f.ex lots of external dwellings.

Skellies and Demons just happen to be the two singular unit types in the game where you can effectively pool the unit production of several otherwise unrelated cities together. Skellies just get extra backup from Necromanvy as well.