Blesses: sacred units and bless effects

How sacred units, the blessing spell and your god's bless effects fit together, with the manual's rules and one player's view on building around them.

verified 6.37updated 2026-10-02 · Jake7 min read

A bless build is a plan where your army’s strength comes from a few sacred units carrying the effects you chose when you designed your god. This page has two kinds of text. The rules are restated from the game’s manual, and we have not re-measured them. The parts marked Opinion are one player’s view, reasoned from those rules, and they are not reference.

The price list for bless points, with every effect and its cost, is on Pretender design. This page does not repeat that list in full. It explains how the pieces work together and what to do with them.

What sacred units are

Every nation fields a set of sacred troops. The manual says you usually raise them only at home, since a magic site in the capital region unlocks them. They are tied to the nation, so a conqueror who takes that site gets no access to them.

The manual names one main advantage of a sacred unit, which is that it can be blessed.

How blessing works in battle

A blessing is the lowest-level holy spell, which puts it within reach of every priest. Per the manual it works during combat only. Each unit that receives it gets three things:

• one point of morale;
• every bless effect chosen for your pretender when you made it;
• every bless effect of any Throne of Ascension that your nation or its disciple nations have claimed.

The morale point is common to all blessings and is never on the list of purchases. Because the effects come from your god’s design and from thrones, every unit that receives a blessing gets the same set.

Automatic blessing

Pretenders and disciples are sacred units. They are blessed automatically inside their own dominion, and the manual says they cannot be blessed outside it. Sacred units standing with their pretender in a battle in a friendly dominion are blessed automatically as well. At no other time are they blessed for free.

Where bless points come from

Bless points exist once the god has skill 2 or more in some magic path. In general each level above 1 in a path is one point, so Air 2, Death 4 and Nature 6 gives 1 + 3 + 5 points. Some nations and pretenders add more; the manual gives Marignon three extra. An effect costs the sum of its skill requirements, and a scale requirement does not change the cost. The pretender design page covers the arithmetic and the design-point side.

What each path offers

The manual lists the effects path by path. This is a summary of where the cheap and the dear ones sit, with the manual’s costs in brackets. Use the full list for the rest.

• Fire: Superior Morale (1), Attack Skill (2), Fire Resistance (2), up to Fire Shield (6) and Flaming Weapons (7).
• Air: Precision (1), Shock Resistance (2), Farshot (2), up to Thunder Weapons (7), Charged Bodies (8) and Flight (9).
• Water: Cold Resistance (2), Defence Skill (2), Swimming (2), up to Chill Aura (5) and Slow Weapons (5).
• Earth: Reinvigoration (2), Strength of the Earth (2), Unbreakable (4), up to Hard Skin (6) and Fortitude (7).
• Astral: Arcane Command (1), Magic Resistance (2), up to Magic Weapons (5), Twist Fate (6) and Etherealness (8).
• Death: Undying (1), Undead Command (1), up to Withering Weapons (4), Reanimators (7), Death Weapons (8) and Fear (8).
• Nature: Resilient (1), Low Light Vision (1), Poison Resistance (2), up to Barkskin (6) and Regeneration (7).
• Glamour: Undreaming (1), Heroism (1), Quiet Stride (2), up to Obfuscate (6), Displacement (7) and Dread (7).
• Blood: Strong Vitae (1), Strength of the Flesh (2), Strong Blood (3), up to Unholy Weapons (6) and Blood Vengeance (7).

The manual’s own worked example is a pretender with Fire 4 and Astral 4. Playing Machaka, which gets no extra points, it has six bless points. Facing Ermor, it buys Solar Weapons for four and Magic Resistance for the other two, and every blessed unit also has the morale point.

Passive and incarnate effects

The manual marks two special kinds of effect.

• Passive effects are always active. It names unaging and larger as examples, and flags them with an asterisk in the lists.
• Incarnate-only effects are set in bold in the manual. They work only while the pretender is both alive and awake.

Bold does not survive in the plain text we work from, so we cannot say which effects are incarnate-only. Look at the game’s own list. This is the one gap that matters for planning, because an incarnate-only effect depends on your god, and a passive one does not.

Opinion: what a bless build is for

A bless build makes sense when your nation has a sacred unit worth the effort. The effects are bought once, in the design screen, and then every sacred unit that gets blessed carries them. So the question is not which effect is best in the abstract, but which effect makes your particular sacred unit do what it already does better. A unit that already hits hard may want defence and resistances; a unit that is fragile may want something that keeps it alive. Pick the unit first and the effects second.

Cheap effects are underrated. The lists have many effects at one or two points, including attack, defence, precision, strength, hit points and resistances. A handful of those on a good sacred unit is a real upgrade, and the points cost little next to the expensive weapon and shield effects at the top of each path.

Pairing is simple in principle: the effects should fit what the sacred unit does. Weapon effects suit units that win by hitting, and resistance effects suit units that are expected to face the enemy’s magic. I would not buy an effect for a role the unit does not have.

Opinion: traps in the arithmetic

The manual’s two rules produce a pattern that is easy to miss. Points are one per level above 1, but an effect costs its whole skill requirement. So a path at 7 gives six points, and its own 7-point effect is one point out of reach unless something else supplies it: a second path at level 2 or higher, a nation bonus, or the effects of a claimed throne. The same holds for the top effects in other paths, and for the two-path effects, which cost both requirements added together.

My advice from that is to count your points before you commit design points to a path. Work out the effect you want, add up its cost, and check the points your paths actually give. Spreading thinly over many paths gives a point or two each, and it will not buy the dear effects. Putting a lot into one path buys the dear effects but gives up the others. Neither is wrong, and the trade is the design.

Last, remember that blessing is a spell cast in battle. A bless build with sacred units and no priests to cast it has paid for something it cannot use. I would plan the priests at the same time as the troops.

What the manual leaves out

• Which effects are incarnate-only, in the plain text we use.
• How many units one cast blesses, or how a priest chooses its targets.
• How the Thrones of Ascension add effects, beyond the statement that they do.

We have no measured findings for this page, so none are used.