Thugs and supercombatants: what they are and how to stop them

What makes one heavily built unit survive a fight alone, how it is equipped and buffed, and what beats it. Rules from the manual; advice marked as opinion.

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

A thug is the community’s word for a single commander built up with gear and buffs so that it can win fights alone, usually to take provinces cheaply. A supercombatant is the fullest form of the same idea. Neither word is a game term, and the manual uses neither. This page splits the subject in two. The first half is rules the manual states, each of which helps a lone unit live. The second half is advice, and it is marked as opinion where it appears. The long-form argument for why the plan works at all is in Why Dominions 6 is deeper than it looks, and this page does not repeat it.

What keeps a unit alive

A fight against one unit is a fight against a chain: the blow must hit, get past protection, get past any resistance, and the target must stay on its feet. Each rule below attacks one link. The combat page lays the chain out in order.

Defence skill

Defence is rolled against the attacker’s attack, and a blow that misses never reaches the protection step. The combat page explains the roll.

Protection

Protection is rolled against the damage of a blow that lands, and a tie goes to the defender. It is not the same figure everywhere on the body, and a shield adds to it only on a shield hit. All of that is on the protection page. Protection can be bypassed, which matters for the counters below: piercing weapons reduce it by fifteen percent, the armour-piercing ability by half, and an armour-negating attack ignores it entirely.

Ethereal

According to the manual, most strikes from non-magical weapons miss an ethereal unit: three in four. Ethereal units can also slip through fort walls and attack the defenders behind them. The rule is on the ethereal ability page, and the spell Body Ethereal is one way a unit can come to have it.

Regeneration

The manual says regenerative creatures heal some of their lost hit points after every combat round and run a lower risk of permanent afflictions from being wounded. It says regeneration does not affect inanimate beings such as golems and longdead. Two variants exist: reconstruction works only on inanimate beings, and reforming flesh works on all undead and on nothing else. The spell is on the Regeneration page.

Magic resistance

The manual describes magic resistance as defence against magic, and says not every spell has to beat it. Where a spell does ask for a check, the caster’s penetration roll is set against the target’s resistance roll and the caster wins ties. The resistances page covers the roll, and combat magic covers it from the caster’s side.

Fatigue

A unit that tires fights worse, and at one hundred fatigue it falls unconscious. For a heavily armoured unit there is a sharper reason to care. The manual says a very low protection roll can give an armour-defeating hit that bypasses a quarter of the protection. Against a target with fifty or more fatigue a slightly higher low roll also counts, and against one with a hundred or more a higher one still. A unit that is immobilised or unconscious counts as having a hundred fatigue for this purpose. The manual adds that such a hit is very hard to score on a fresh unit that can move. The full list is on the protection page, and the rest of the cost of tiring is on the fatigue page.

How the unit is equipped

A thug’s strength comes mostly from what it carries. Items are forged from gems by a mage with the right paths, and each slot on a commander holds a limited kind of thing. Forging magic items covers who can forge, what it costs and where an item is worn. Items that add levels to a mage’s paths, which a caster-thug may want, are on the path-boosting items page. The item pages themselves list what each item does, and this page rates none of them.

Self-buffing with spells

Spells that help the unit survive are cast before the fight is joined. The manual’s rule for casting is that every spell costs the caster fatigue, with extra fatigue for the caster’s own encumbrance and for the encumbrance of its armour. That cost is on the fatigue page and in combat magic. The spells most often named for a lone fighter are Body Ethereal, Mistform, Regeneration and Fire Shield. What each one does is on its own page.

A second mage whose job is to cast those buffs and then leave is called a fluffer. The idea is in the essay.

How to counter one

Each answer below follows from a rule above. None is a promise that it works against a particular build.

• Bypass protection. A piercing weapon reduces protection by fifteen percent, the armour-piercing ability by half, and an armour-negating attack ignores it. The manual says lightning spells are armour-negating and fire spells are armour-piercing. See damage types and protection.
• Use magic. The manual’s three-in-four miss chance for an ethereal target applies to non-magical weapons. A spell that asks for a magic-resistance check is stopped or not by that roll rather than by protection. See combat magic.
• Make the target tire. Armour-defeating hits become likelier as a target’s fatigue rises, and an unconscious or immobilised unit counts as at a hundred fatigue for them. See the fatigue page.
• Banish what can be banished. The manual says undead units are subject to banishment. See the Banishment spell.
• Do not count on morale. The manual says mindless units have fixed morale and never rout while a suitable commander is present, so a plan that depends on a rout does little against them. See the morale page.

What this page does not cover

This page gives no stat lines, no ranking of items, and no numbers for how likely a given build is to win. It does not claim that any layer is the strongest. The wiki’s own measurements of these rules are not part of it.