Before we get started: general notes.
Although Armored Princess now displays crit chance in the interface, I'm still not incorporating it into my listings. Just like in The Legend, the values always stay in a very low range that cannot be counted on, bar assorted Abilities and the occasional Talent, many of which make the base number entirely irrelevant. As such, it's not worth paying significant attention to it, not even if you're eg trying to stack crit boosters in hopes of getting to 100%.
Crit damage itself has been overhauled so that your current Rage no longer factors into the damage amount. A crit is simply always 150% of maximum damage -if your highest damage roll against a target is 200 damage, you do 300 damage on a crit. Simple as that.
As previously stated, I'm going by Orcs on the March for everything, and mostly not bothering to note the differences between it and base Armored Princess. As such, if you do play the base campaign, you may find that my analysis is inconsistent with your experience -Favorite Enemy being a kind of Human racial trait, for example, is not in the base campaign.
Some changed number points for general illumination:
Morale still operates in seven tiers, but now its effects go like this:
-3 Morale or worse: -50% to Attack and Defense, and crit chance is 0.
-2 Morale: -35% to Attack and Defense, and crit chance is halved.
-1 Morale: -20% to Attack and Defense, and crit chance is reduced by 25%.
0 Morale: Base values.
+1 Morale: +10% to Attack and Defense, and crit chance is increased by 20%.
+2 Morale: +20% to Attack and Defense, and crit chance is increased by 30%.
+3 Morale: +30% to Attack and Defense, and crit chance is increased by 40%.
Short version: positive Morale has a less pronounced impact on crit chance, while negative Morale has a much more pronounced impact on Attack and Defense. (Armored Princess' -1 Morale is just as effective there as The Legend's -2, and AP's -2 is more pronounced than The Legend's -3!) This makes it more important than ever to avoid eg splashing Cannoneers into your Elven army.
Another change to Morale in Armored Princess is that it now interacts with positive effects and negative effects. Negative effects impose -1 Morale per each effect, to a limit of -2, while positive effects can be used to cancel this Morale penalty out, with each positive effect canceling a negative effect's Morale penalty. Note that they only cancel out the Morale penalty from negative effects; they can't be used to compensate for Morale penalties caused by racial tensions, and they also can't be used to improve Morale in a more general sense. (ie a positive effect is not +1 Morale: it's just canceling the -1 from a negative effect)
Concrete example: say we have a Beholder stack that's on fire. This makes it unhappy, lowering its Attack, Defense, and crit chance. If we apply a positive effect to the Beholder stack -Battle Cry, say- now the Beholder stack returns to its previous Morale, most likely of 0. Huzzah! They are no longer sad! Then the fire goes out, but the Battle Cry is still benefiting the Beholders -they remain at 0 Morale, instead of appreciating our hard work in making them move earlier in the turn. (Though of course they do still get the Initiative boost) Alternatively, maybe an Evil Gremlin drops Doom on them while Battle Cry and the Burning are still applying -now the Beholders are back to being unhappy. Or, if we failed to ever use Battle Cry in the first place, our flaming and Doomed Beholder stack is now very unhappy.
A third negative effect won't worsen the Morale any further (Unless it's Curse, whose specific effect is -1 Morale), regardless of whether we say it's stacked on top of two others with no positive effect or with one or more positive effects. This isn't a tug-of-war game that scales infinitely: once a unit has two negative effects, their Morale will never get worse unless it's by losing the protection from a positive effect, and once a unit has two positive effects... well, same thing: it's Morale can't get worse. (Aside from Curse, again) It's a weird, somewhat unintuitive dynamic, but it adds some nuance to the game.
On top of all that? Morale now applies to enemies!... with one caveat. Enemy forces can benefit from racial Morale bonuses (ie an army of pure Elves will get +1 to Morale), but they don't have to worry about unit-imposed Morale penalties. (ie Undead will never offend their allies in enemy forces, nor will Robbers bother Peasants or the like)
Another broad mechanical change is to Burn and Poisoning: back in The Legend, these did low, flat damage values that stopped mattering outside of the extremely early portion of the game. In Armored Princess, the damage is up to 5-10% of the entire stack's Health. This keeps them relevant all the way into the endgame, and encourages trying to apply them to the largest enemy stacks to maximize damage. It's designed so that it's not exploitable, as Leadership of the applying unit is factored in (With a few exceptions) to be compared against the afflicted unit at time of application. (ie if a 4000 Leadership stack Burns an 8000 Leadership stack, the Burning stack will only take 2.5%-5% damage) This can only reduce the damage below the maximum, not increase it; a stack inflicting Burning on a stack half its Leadership will still only get 5-10% damage occurring on the target.
Spells are effectively treated as infinite Leadership for this purpose. This makes Spells capable of inflicting Burn or Poisoning particularly worth noting for eg the Warrior, who may find it useful to fish for Burn/Poisoning even though the Spell's impact damage will be poor. It also means that you should generally try to aim Burn/Poison-inflicting Spells at the largest stacks in an enemy group, to maximize the percentile damage's actual value.
A final point of note that, while true in The Legend, is far more relevant in Armored Princess: Burn damage is modified by Fire resistance (eg Plants can take up to 10-20% damage from a Burn, while Demons will only take 2.5%-5% at most), while Poisoning damage is modified by Poison resistance. (eg Undead as a whole take at most 2.5%-5%) This is most consistently relevant in terms of eg if you're considering fishing for over-time damage, you should use Flaming Arrow on Plants instead of Poison Skull, even if you don't care about the up-front damage.
So, Humans.
First of all, they've picked up a near-universal distinctive racial ability! Like I did with the Undead and Demons back in The Legend, let's cover it here, to somewhat shorten this post:
Favorite Enemy
The first unit that this unit attacks becomes the 'favorite enemy' of all units of this type. When attacking its favorite enemy, this unit does 15% more damage.
Favorite Enemy is a weird Ability whose mechanics are explained incorrectly by the game -it instead claims that being attacked triggers the Favorite Enemy bonus- and whose impact is sufficiently low you can easily fail to notice it in action. 'Units of this type' means that, for example, if there are two enemy Priest stacks, and one of them attacks your Guardsmen stack, both Priest stacks now consider Guardsmen to be their favorite enemy. It does not mean this is some bonus that gets applied to all units with the Favorite Enemy ability -a Priest and a Bowmen can have different favorite enemies.
Also note that favorite enemy is defined by the broad type: if your Archmage stack attacks a Pirate stack, the Archmage stack will get the favorite enemy damage boost even if they target a different Pirate stack.
This all adds a little bit of nuance to the consideration of who to have a given Human unit attack first. Not a ton, but it means that for example you'll ideally have a Human unit attack whatever is the largest proportion of Leadership value in the enemy formation, even if you would like to deal with the smallest proportion first, so you'll maximize the Favorite Enemy damage boost over the course of the battle. You can absolutely ignore it and often benefit kind of incidentally -for example, if an enemy formation is made of one type of Undead and a bunch of non-Undead, you probably were going to point any Priests or Inquisitors at the Undead continuously anyway- but maximizing it is beneficial and not completely mindless.
It's ultimately not very defining a factional trait, but given Humans are supposed to be something of an easy intro to the game (If a bit less strongly so than in The Legend), it's probably for the best they aren't made too wild. It's not the most compelling thing, but it works okay, and that's probably the best that can be hoped for in context.
Race relations for Humans haven't really changed. They go like this:
-1 Morale from Demonic presence in allies.
-1 Morale from Undead presence in allies.
Note that since Morale's affects have been strengthened, this works out to basically the same result as The Legend's -2 to each, just you keep some crit chance compared to The Legend. I meant it when I said they hadn't really changed.
The most interesting part of this is that Humans are the only species in the game that interacts with the racial Morale mechanic without being offended by Lizardmen. Orcs were the chillest species in The Legend. In Armored Princess, Humans have taken their place.
Alas, Humans still don't have a mono-Human racial bonus. It's still there in the code, still commented out, alongside the Human+Elf one, but no. You can effectively achieve one by using Royal Griffins, at least, so their situation is a bit better than in The Legend, and indeed if you want to run Royal Griffins alongside one or more Human units without running 4 Human units that's actually better, but the actual mono-race bonus isn't a thing.
Peasant
Level: 1
Hiring Cost: 10
Leadership: 5
Attack/Defense: 1 / 1
Initiative/Speed: 3 / 2
Health: 6
Damage (Default): 1-2 Physical
Damage (Grubber): 2-4 Physical
Resistances: Generic.
Talents: None
Abilities: Team Spirit (+1 Attack for every 30 members of the stack, to a maximum of +10), Grubber (Calls the Grubber attack against Plants), Favorite Enemy
They've gained a whole Health point over The Legend! Okay and also Grubber and Favorite Enemy.
Grubber, though oddly named, is a bit neat, giving Peasants a notable niche, kinda. Unfortunately, they're automatically overshadowed by literally anything that does Fire damage. Still, I appreciate the effort, and there's something amusing about having farmers be extra-good at killing plant monsters because they... farm? I guess? That seems kind of backward, actually, but sure why not.
They've also changed their graphic, and I approve. Firstly, the old graphic was somewhat easy to lose track of if you were distracted or overly focused, where the new graphic tends to 'pop' on most battlefields. Secondly, there's the more subtle point of color theming; in The Legend, each faction had a proprietary color scheme, which was generally held to except when the game reskinned an existing model, and in the case of Humans, that theme was blue and silver. Switching Peasants to blue brings them more in line with their faction's color scheme, which aids learning and is just visually nice when doing a mono-species army, so long as it's not too repetitive.
Also worth noting is that this 'new' graphic is actually more-or-less recycled from a Hero in The Legend. I actually approve of that kind of recycling; using what you have on hand more effectively is always preferable to spending time, money, and effort into even more art assets, and most players probably completely forgot about the Hero in question and don't realize it's recycled art anyway. I know I didn't notice until I went back to The Legend after playing a lot of Armored Princess.
Gameplay-wise, what I said about Peasants back in The Legend hasn't substantially changed. They're less thoroughly awful than they were, but they're still fairly generic 2-Speed melee. This basically automatically makes them a bit underwhelming. Grubber hasn't really changed this. (Nor has Favorite Enemy) The additional Health does make them even better as Sacrifice fodder, I suppose, but that's about it.
Robber
Level: 1
Hiring Cost: 50
Leadership: 20
Attack/Defense: 10 / 6
Initiative/Speed: 4 / 2
Health: 20
Damage: 2-4 Physical
Resistances: Generic.
Talents: Swift Stroke (Reload: 1. Attacks across an empty tile for 3-4 Physical damage, with no risk of retaliation), Greed (Charge: 1. Instantly teleports the Robber adjacent to a chosen chest. Does not end the turn or consume AP)
Abilities: Robber (Allied Humans of Level 1-2 that lack Robber suffer -1 to Morale)
+5 Health over The Legend! That's a good third again tougher, making them a lot more useful. Also Biting Strike has been renamed to Swift Stroke for whatever reason, and gained a point of minimum damage, making them a little more effective with it.
Note that Robbers and Marauders don't get Favorite Enemy, as an example of how the series tends to place them somewhat outside the Human faction.
Also note that Robbers have been graphically overhauled from boring browns to a spiffy new blue that, as with Peasants, brings them more in line with their faction's color scheme. I approve!
Gameplay-wise, they still suffer from overlapping heavily with Snakes. While Robbers got more bolstered by Armored Princess than Snakes did, they still don't have a real niche. This is particularly bad given Armored Princess' main scenario (Plus Orcs on the March) guarantees a source of the various snakes on the first island! Robbers have no equally-early or even-earlier guarantee, and so where in The Legend's scenario you might use Robbers for lack of access to Snakes, in Armored Princess... not so much, unless you burn through your entire supply of them. Which is fairly unlikely, especially not before you've got access to other, even better units.
That said, one other point in Robbers' favor is the new rage move Treasure Searcher, which generates a treasure chest somewhere on the battlefield. This dramatically spikes Greed's probability of being relevant to a battle, whether through using the Robber stack to collect the chest or using the chest as an incidental method of teleporting the Robbers closer to the enemy. There's also the flipside that it's important to pay more attention to whether the enemy group contains Robbers or not: if it doesn't, Treasure Searcher can dig up a chest on your side of the battlefield without worrying overly much on exactly when your troops are going to pick it up. If they do contain a Robber, you need to make sure the Robber never gets a chance to use the chest as a jumping-off point. It's not a huge thing, but it does make Robbers more memorable of enemies, at least.
Marauder
Level: 2
Hiring Cost: 80
Leadership: 30
Attack/Defense: 12 / 8
Initiative/Speed: 6 / 2
Health: 30
Damage: 3-6 Physical
Resistances: Generic.
Talents: Swift Stroke (Reload: 1. Attacks across an empty tile for 3-6 Physical damage, with no risk of retaliation), Search (Charges: 2. Destroys a corpse the Marauder is standing on, and gives the owner Gold), Running (Charge: 1. +2 Action Points)
Abilities: Robber (Allied Humans of Level 1-2 that lack Robber suffer -1 to Morale)
An additional Initiative over The Legend makes Marauders more appealing if you're wanting casting/Rage priority, and they've gained a couple of Health to boot, which is a nice little boost to their performance. Also the Talent rename again.
Their graphic has also been overhauled from the gray/black thing they had going on to a bright red with a snazzy blue cape, helping bring them more in line with their faction's color scheme. (Via the cape, though red already gets used on some Human elites, such as Inquisitors, so the red arguably counts too) Huzzah! They also just look a lot spiffier in general as a result. I suspect the bland colors of the original were strictly more realistic, but I don't care!
While we're on the topic of their graphics, their UI art here strangely fails to reflect another change to their actual graphic: where Robbers still wield some kind of flail, Marauders actually now wield a pair of knives, and have an overhauled animation for their distant strike Talent to suit it. It makes it that little bit easier to remember which is which, even if in practice the knives are a bit easy to overlook when playing the game.
Gameplay-wise, Marauders jumping up to 6 Initiative is actually a shockingly huge boost to their utility in general. There's very little in the game that goes above 6 Initiative, and while most of the units they share the tier with have higher Speed (And Level, often), there remains some decent sources of support for criminal humans, such as Jimmy Craud, who is extremely early in the game and there's basically no reason to not immediately recruit him. As such, Marauders can actually be exceptionally useful in the early game, especially if you luck into gear support like Jackboots. Swift Stroke lets them contribute without costing you Gold -not to mention helping with Grand Strategy progress- and their great Initiative and potentially high Speed allows them to collect chests, dance around enemies, shut down ranged attackers, and of course give you turn control. I've had a fair amount of fun with them in one run. They'll still tend to lose their luster at some point, but they're actually worth seriously considering fielding in a run.
So Marauders are a lot more interesting and fun than they were back in The Legend.
Swordsman
Level: 2
Hiring Cost: 70
Leadership: 35
Attack/Defense: 10 / 16
Initiative/Speed: 3 / 3
Health: 35
Damage: 4-5 Physical
Resistances: 20% Physical
Talents: Smashing Blow (Reload: 2. Does 6-10 Physical damage to a single target unit in melee)
Abilities: Armor (20% Physical resistance), Cautious (Once 30% of the stack has died, the stack has a 30% chance to evade when attacked), Favorite Enemy
+3 Health is a little nice. More importantly, Smashing Blow is no longer locked behind a Skill (Though admittedly Training 1 was something you were always going to take, so mostly this makes enemy Swordsmen better) as well as gained a point of max damage, and they've picked up Cautious... which mostly makes them more obnoxious as enemies, rather than particularly enhancing their utility as player units. Especially since Armored Princess introduces Medals, and more specifically introduces Grand Strategy, discouraging the player from taking advantage of loss-centric advantages until midway or so in the game. On a unit that you get access to early on. Inconvenient, to say the least.
Cautious also ties neatly into my single biggest criticism of Armored Princess; it's the worst entry in the series about spiking the random factor of battles. (I know some people would expect Warriors of the North to be worse, but I'll cover that when we get there) Now, The Legend already had Beautiful and Death's Deception, so Miss-inducing abilities aren't a new thing, but Beautiful and to a lesser extent Death's Deception could both be worked around with army choices and tactics. You'd never Miss a Dryad or Demoness if your army was composed of animals and/or women, while Ancient Vampires could be baited into Bat form (where they lacked Death's Deception) as well as fought with units with extremely low crit odds. (Priests, conveniently enough, had a 1% chance to crit, while doing doubled damage against Undead with their ranged attack)
Cautious is much harder to actually play around. To a certain extent you can arrange to, for instance, try to drop massive damage all at once when the stack is close to the threshold, and then endeavor to finish the stack with Spells and/or Rage (Direct damage Spells and Rage effects can't Miss) and/or use Charge-based Talents (The ones that can't Miss, that is: they can dodge Imp and Scoffer Imp fireballs, for example), but your unit options for working around Cautious are fairly limited. A shocking number of effects you'd intuitively think would bypass Cautious actually don't, and a lot of the unit Talents that do are non-damaging or fairly dubious for trying to actually take down a moderately healthy stack. (eg Totem of Death's damage is poor, and without shenanigans any Swordsman at risk of damage from it is in range to instantly destroy the Totem) The only fairly consistent answer is to Sheep a target (Which completely shuts off evasion, just like in The Legend), and you're not likely to have Sheep early in the game when you're first fighting Swordsmen and getting irritated by their random dodges.
I'll be covering this general issue more as we go on, because Cautious is not remotely the worst implementation of this approach to randomness. It's just the first one that's cropping up in the order I'm going.
That said, I do at least appreciate that Swordsmen are no longer fairly forgettable as enemies. In The Legend they were just a decently fast melee unit that tanked Physical damage reasonably well, but they weren't particularly noteworthy unless you were dead-set on killing them with Physical damage and you completely lacked speed control tools. In which case there were still many other units that were much more noteworthy/threatening. Armored Princess' version actually requires I pay some attention to them and account for them properly, and Smashing Blow spikes their initial damage drastically, which is more significant than it might sound given that good play tends to involve little opportunity for enemies to get into melee in the first place. If they're only getting one attack in anyway, that one attack hitting much harder matters quite a lot!
Guardsman
Level: 3
Hiring Cost: 120
Leadership: 50
Attack/Defense: 15 / 17
Initiative/Speed: 4 / 3
Health: 50
Damage: 6-8 Physical
Resistances: 20% Physical
Talents: Smashing Blow (Reload: 1. Melee attacks a single enemy for 9-12 Physical damage)
Abilities: Armor (20% Physical resistance), Commander (+1 Morale for allied Swordsmen and Bowmen), Cautious (Once 30% of the stack has died, the stack has a 30% chance to evade when attacked), Favorite Enemy
+5 more Health over The Legend, as well as picking up Cautious, Favorite Enemy, and Smashing Blow now being automatic. Like with Swordsmen, this... mostly serves to make them more annoying as enemies. Unfortunate.
See the Swordsmen analysis above, but attach the note that now Commander actually benefits enemy units, making Guardsmen a little more meaningful as enemies than in The Legend from another angle. Honestly, they're sufficiently similar in practice I tend to get mixed up on which is which, and not really distinguish between them when fighting them. It's a minor disappointment of mine that Swordsmen and Guardsmen are never really separated by any game in the series, too. Still, the boost to their performance is appreciated.
Knight
Level: 4
Hiring Cost: 1000
Leadership: 160
Attack/Defense: 27 / 27
Initiative/Speed: 5 / 2
Health: 160
Damage (Default): 16-18 Physical
Damage (Dragon Slayer): 21-27 Physical
Resistances: 30% Physical, 30% Fire
Talents: Circle Attack (Reload: 2. A Physical melee attack that also strikes all enemies around the Knight. The 'target' unit retaliates, if possible)
Abilities: Steel Armor (30% Physical resistance), Valor (+1 Morale), Dragon Slayer (30% Fire resist, and calls the Dragon Slayer attack against Dragons), Mastery (Defense increases by 30% of base every time the Knight takes damage, to a maximum of 90% more than base), Favorite Enemy
+2 to Initiative, +2 to their minimum damage, and their Leadership cost being cut by 20 points, alongside Circle Attack being innate and Mastery being introduced? Awesome! Knights have gone from being a really terrible unit that requires significant investment in specific Skills to be worth considering at all to being a really solid unit at what they do. They're also really obnoxious as enemies, but I'm okay with that given they're actually worth using now!
Unfortunately, they tend to be outshined by a new Human unit: the Paladin. Knights do have some things Paladins lack, but they just don't really compare to the powerful utility Paladins bring to the table, so even though Knights are no longer unusable through awfulness that doesn't necessarily mean you'll actually fit in using them.
The series does eventually get Knights right, but not yet. They're at least actually good in their own right now, among other points worth using if you don't yet have access to Paladins but want a broadly similar unit, and their anti-dragon utility might sway you to take them over Paladins to deal with dragon-centric forces, especially Black Dragons and Red Dragons, as Paladins are only slightly resistant to Fire.
Though speaking of their anti-dragon utility: Dragon Slayer doesn't actually boost Circle Attack. Which is weird given it did boost it in The Legend, but admittedly it wasn't particularly relevant, since purchasing Training 3 was a dubious decision and Knights were awful even with Circle Attack purchased. This a bit unfortunate; Knights in Armored Princess aren't actually bad units, they're just usually pushed aside by Paladins, so Dragon Slayer not affecting Circle Attack is meaningfully pertinent, where if it hadn't functioned in The Legend most players would never have this matter.
Note that when I say Knights are hard to kill, I mean it. I tend to talk like Defense bonuses don't really matter, and honestly a few points here and there are drowned out by damage variance easily enough, but Mastery rapidly escalates their Defense. Trying to kill Knights with units is always a slow affair, and you're usually best off trying to slow them down and focus on killing everything else before you get to them. This was true in The Legend, but in The Legend it was true because Knights didn't matter. In Armored Princess it's true because it will take as much firepower to down a single Knight stack as it took to take out literally all their allies, thanks almost entirely to Mastery's incredible scaling. (A Mage finds Knights less troublesome to deal with, thanks to her reliance on Spell damage not caring about Mastery, but they're still shockingly durable)
Also, although I'm ragging on how Paladins tend to beat them out in practice, one point in the Knight's favor is that they are more or less uniquely effective for being Teleported into the middle of a bunch of enemy units and immediately trashing 4-6 units with Circle Attack. There's other units with similar area-of-effect, but they usually have worse damage output in practice (eg Bone Dragons) or some other limitation. (eg Paladins can do similar area damage, but only to Demons and Undead. And only once per battle without shenanigans) The Mage would rather just nuke everything herself, but for a Paladin or Warrior it's a nifty option.
It does also make them a little bit more noteworthy as enemies, in that one of the reasons they were so forgettable in The Legend as foes was because it was trivial to stall them with blobs of summons like Thorns. In Armored Princess, if you try to surround them with summons, they're going to cut through them with Circle Attack, so it's a lot more important to slow them down with Slow or Freeze or something, rather than stalling them with summons.
Horseman
Level: 4
Hiring Cost: 1100
Leadership: 180
Attack/Defense: 29 / 25
Initiative/Speed: 7 / 5
Health: 150
Damage: 14-18 Physical
Resistances: 20% Physical, 20% Fire
Talents: None
Abilities: Armor (20% Physical resistance), Horseman (+10% of base damage per tile traveled in a straight line when initiating an attack), Fire Resistance (20% Fire resistance)
+1 to Initiative on top of their historically amazing Initiative, +2 to minimum and maximum damage, +20 to Health, aaaand... they cost 300 more Gold, ouch. Still, Horsemen were one of the better Human units in the original game, and they're even more useful now, albeit about 38% pricier.
Overall Horsemen haven't changed terribly much in how you use them and fight them. There's specific matchups where their Initiative gain makes the difference, such as with Necromancers, but overall they play basically the same as in The Legend. It's actually a bit unfortunate, as Armored Princess being designed to account for how players played in The Legend means that Armored Princess is de-facto nerfing generic melee forces: in The Legend, you could get away with running such units whenever you liked, so long as you weren't overly sloppy. In Armored Princess, for a long time you genuinely just can't afford the Gold losses from running such units!
As such, it's actually notably more difficult to justify using them than in The Legend, a fact that's compounded by the Trapper Medal sometimes closing off their ability to get a straight-line charge. As enemies, they're erratic: the Trapper Medal can end up entirely incidentally neutering a Horsemen stack with no effort on your part for a turn or two, but they're also difficult to get the jump on, even more so than in The Legend. The overall result is that there's a somewhat obnoxious element of RNG to whether they end up doing unavoidable damage to your troops first turn or end up being irrelevant, much more so than most units in the game.
Bowman
Level: 2
Hiring Cost: 100
Leadership: 50
Attack/Defense: 16 / 10
Initiative/Speed: 4 / 2
Health: 34
Damage (Ranged): 3-4 Physical
Damage (Melee): 2-3 Physical
Resistances: Generic.
Talents: Ice Arrow (Charge: 1. 3-4 Physical damage against a single enemy at range, and Freezes the target), Flaming Arrow (Charge: 1. 4-5 Fire damage against a single enemy at range)
Abilities: Archer (Range: 6), Favorite Enemy
Innate access to Flaming Arrow without wasting Runes on a Talent is very nice, of course, but they've also gained +6 Health. Small benefits, but still appreciated. This does mean enemy Bowmen are annoying, especially with Armored Princess having overhauled Burning to do percentage damage, making Bowmen stacks a much higher priority target if you want to avoid casualties. And of course they've picked up Favorite Enemy, which is particularly appreciated for ranged units. (Though Bowmen in particular have incentives to spread their fire a bit)
In practice the big change here is the percentile damage on Burning makes Flaming Arrow not simply a way to pick on weaknesses and get high up-front damage, but also a way to wear down larger stacks. Even with the percentile damage being Leadership-scaled, inflicting a Burn on a much larger stack is still a shockingly effective way of bringing it down to a more reasonable size in short order. On the flipside, enemy Bowman can be really obnoxious in the mid-game, in terms of interfering with your ability to get Grand Strategy progress even if you almost kill them, due to the percentage damage being increasingly prone to guaranteeing a casualty simply because your own forces have grown to the point that 1% damage causes a casualty or three.
This actually has the effect of making the choice between Flaming Arrow vs Ice Arrow on the first turn harder to make, which is something I appreciate: back in The Legend, generally smart money was on using Ice Arrow first turn, then Flaming Arrow second turn, unless you were up against a Plant-heavy force in which case it went the other way. In Armored Princess, it's a much more nuanced decision, and to a certain extent it ends up being a style choice: how do you prefer to play, personally?
As such, Bowmen are actually one the Human units I most appreciate the Armored Princess overhaul to.
Priest
Level: 2
Hiring Cost: 100
Leadership: 50
Attack/Defense: 10 / 10
Initiative/Speed: 4 / 2
Health: 32
Damage: 2-4 Magic
Resistances: 10% Magic
Talents: Healing (Charges: 2. Heals a single ally for 10 hits points per Priest in the casting stack), Bless (Reload: 1. For two turns, a single target ally does maximum damage on their basic attacks, or a single target enemy Undead is afflicted with Holy Shackles for 2 turns, lowering Attack and Defense by 30% each)
Abilities: Holy Attack (Range: 6. +50% damage against Undead and Demons), True Believer (No Morale penalty for Undead allies. Attempting to use Necromancers or Necro Call to animate hostile Priests as Undead will instead resurrect them as Priests that remain members of their own side), No Melee Penalty, Favorite Enemy
+6 Health, and their 'tolerates Undead' Ability has been renamed. Holy Attack also includes Demons now and works in melee, though conversely its boost is weaker.
Nothing game-changing overall, but that's fine: Priests were a very solid unit in The Legend, whose main flaw was being just a little overly fragile. This is perfect, basically. (Even if I'd have liked Heal tweaked )
Inquisitor
Level: 3
Hiring Cost: 300
Leadership: 100
Attack/Defense: 16 / 16
Initiative/Speed: 5 / 2
Health: 70
Damage: 5-7 Magic
Resistances: 10% Magic
Talents: Resurrection (Charge: 1. Heals a single target ally for 7 HP per Inquisitor in the casting stack, resurrecting fallen units if 'overhealing'. Doesn't work on Undead or Demons), Holy Anger (Charges: 3. Blesses a single ally and grants the Holy Anger buff, as well as granting the Hero 3-10 Anger on use. Alternatively can be aimed at enemy Undead to inflict Holy Shackles on them for 2 turns, lowering Attack and Defense by 30%, while still giving the Hero Rage)
Abilities: Holy Attack (Range: 7. +50% damage against Undead and Demons), True Believer (No Morale penalty for Undead allies. Attempting to use Necromancers or Necro Call to animate hostile Inquisitors as Undead will instead resurrect them as Inquisitors that remain members of their own side), No Melee Penalty, Favorite Enemy
+20 Health. This is quite nice, as Inquisitors were frustratingly fragile in The Legend. Also note that Holy Anger has been modified: on the one hand, its low roll on Rage is lower than it was in The Legend (But that's okay, because Rage comes much more readily than in The Legend), on the other hand Holy Anger now bolsters damage against Demons in addition to the Undead. Holy Anger-the-Talent has also been switched to a charge-based effect rather than a Reloading effect, limiting your ability to simply ignore the 20-turn 'no more Rage generation' issue. Holy Attack has also been reworked, just like on Priests, with similar implications. The overall result is that instead of being fairly good as a Rage generator early on and rapidly losing utility, Inquisitors can now stay competitive into the endgame as a combat piece, while no longer breaking the Rage economy by existing. It's very much an appreciated set of changes!
Archmage
Level: 4
Hiring Cost: 900
Leadership: 200
Attack/Defense: 20 / 24
Initiative/Speed: 6 / 2
Health: 140
Damage (Ranged): 5-8 Magic
Damage (Melee): 6 Physical
Resistances: 50% Magic
Talents: Magic Shield (Reload: 1. A single ally is takes halved damage for 3 turns), Fighting Trance (Reload: 2. Still claims to raise the Archmage's Attack and lower their Defense, still doubles ranged Damage while halving Defense. Also sets Shock chance to 50% and slightly more than doubles crit chance, but disables access to the Archmage's Talents for the two-turn duration), Telekinesis (Charge: 1. Moves a single unit, friend or foe, into an unoccupied tile adjacent to their current position. Doesn't work on objects such as Gremlins)
Abilities: Lightning (Range: Infinite. 25% chance to Shock at range), Magic Protection (50% Magic resistance), Persistence of Mind (Immunity to mental effects), Favorite Enemy
+1 to Initiative, +50 to Health, +1 to max damage on their ranged attack. The boost to Initiative is fantastic, giving them a much larger number of units they can potentially cripple with Lightning first turn instead of second, and the massive spike in Health -a more than 50% increase- means they no longer require you desperately keep them out of melee range of literally everything. Huzzah!
So remember how I talked about how Shocking a target that's already ended its turn will basically have the game lying to you, back in The Legend? Armored Princess has fixed that! Huzzah! (Conversely, it has still not fixed the part where Fighting Trance isn't supposed to add Shock chance to melee attacks but absolutely does, whoops)
There's not really much of nuance to add to that, really.
That said, while we'll be covering Medals in detail later it's worth noting now that Archmages are one of the better units for helping hurry Medals along if you feel the need. Magic Shield directly advances Guardian Angel progress; among other points, if you use Phantom on an Archmage and have the Phantom use Magic Shield immediately, it will be able to use Magic Shield again before it times out, turning one Spell cast into two chunks of Guardian Angel progress. Warrior and Paladin runs particularly appreciate this, as they don't get Higher Magic to hurry Guardian Angel along.
Less drastically, Telekinesis is helpful for hurrying Trapper along, particularly if you manage to get Trapper's first rank very early. If an enemy unit happens to circle around a Trapper-placed Trap but is still next to it, Telekinesis can pull them right into it, and it has no weird limitations to qualify this statement; Rage offers a couple options for pushing enemies into Traps, but both of them require a clear space on the opposite side from the direction you want to push, as a comparison point. Telekinesis just plain works; only stuff like Gremlins and Black Dragons are immune.
Archmages don't really help with any other Medals, but Guardian Angel and Trapper are the main Medals you might actually want the assistance on. Conveniently, Archmages are very common in Armored Princess' early game, and are perfectly usable combatants; you're not hamstringing yourself in the short term, at least not necessarily.
Paladin
Level: 4
Hiring Cost: 1500
Leadership: 220
Attack/Defense: 30 / 36
Initiative/Speed: 3 / 2
Health: 200
Damage: 16-20 Physical
Resistances: 30% Physical, 30% Magic, 10% Fire
Talents: Prayer (Charge: 1. Heals the Paladin and adjacent allies who are below Level 5 and not Undead or Demons for 24 HP per Paladin in the stack, resurrecting the dead where applicable. This can resurrect even Plants and machines. Undead and Demons -even allied ones- instead take 14-16 Magic damage, and spontaneously flee 1 tile away), Second Wind (Reload: 2. Can grant an allied troop that has already moved a second turn that occurs only after all other turns have been resolved, so long as the allied unit is below Level 5, its Leadership total is 660 times Paladin count or less, and it's not an Undead unit. Using Second Wind doesn't end the Paladin's turn or use AP)
Abilities: Steel Armor (30% Physical resistance), Mastery (Defense increases by 30% of base every time the Paladin takes damage, to a maximum of 90% more than base), True Believer (No Morale penalty for Undead allies. Attempting to use Necromancers or Necro Call to animate hostile Paladins as Undead will instead resurrect them as Paladins that remain members of their own side), Holy Warrior (30% Magic resistance, and +50% damage against Demons and Undead), Favorite Enemy
The only new Human unit in the base game. The Paladin honestly is basically a super-Knight, with Circle Attack being the only notable loss. Knights are really more about tanking attacks than they are about dishing out damage, though, and the Paladin does a better job of that -and against Undead and Demon armies it can still basically Circle Attack while bolstering its durability, and potentially allied durability as well! They're also useful in the early-to-midgame for keeping your forces alive for Grand Strategy progress, which is a big point in their favor until you have that Medal maxed.
It's worth commentary that Paladins fill the Initiative tier Knights used to fill, as well.
One notable quirk of Paladins is that they break up a bit of a design pattern/flaw from The Legend where all you really needed was good Magic damage and good Physical damage to hit everything in the game competently. Paladins resist both decently well, with minor Fire protection and no Poison protection, and the only vaguely comparable unit from The Legend was Black Dragons, whose immunity to Spells meant that Poison Skull still didn't have a good niche because it couldn't target them, that kind of thing.
As enemies, Paladins are sort of vaguely annoying, but not as big a deal as you might expect. The AI is overly-aggressive about using Prayer, doing silliness like losing three Paladins in a 100-member stack and promptly going for the Prayer even though they could get a lot more resurrection if they waited a bit longer. Worse, the AI prioritizes getting Paladins next to allies to heal them, paying zero attention to what kind of unit they are: Paladins mixed in with Demons and/or Undead will often end up contributing a good chunk of damage for you! With these AI flaws in place, Paladins tend to thus end up taking even longer than Knights do to actually get across the battlefield, and indeed you can hold off on Slow or the like until the second turn, since they'll often Prayer exactly where they are or walk a tile away from your forces to Prayer nearby more allies, especially if you're making sure to catch them in splash damage and all.
Just don't do something silly like zip your Archdemons next to them turn one, is all.
Note that Gift is missing from Armored Princess, and thus it's a bit complicated to try to abuse Prayer for mass resurrection for less Mana and all. You have to use Turn Back Time carefully, basically.
Also, Paladins actually use a different animation when attacking Undead or Demons. It's the same animation Knights use on Dragons, actually.
Rune Mage
Level: 5
Hiring Cost: 15,000
Leadership: 2000
Attack/Defense: 35 / 44
Initiative/Speed: 5 / 3
Health: 450
Damage (Ranged): 40-55 Magical
Damage (Melee): 30 Physical
Resistances: 50% Magic
Talents: Destruction (Reload: 2. Does 35-55 Astral
damage to everything in a straight line, with the damage increasing by 10% for each unused Might Rune the player is carrying), Revive (Charge: 1. Heals a single allied stack for 100 HP per Rune Mage in the casting stack, gaining 9% healing power per unused Mind Rune carried by the player. Will resurrect dead units in the stack, and additionally purges all negative effects. Does not work on the Undead or inorganic units, but does work on Demons. Healing power is also bolstered if the Hero has points in Resurrection), Illusion (Reload: 3. Generates a clone of a randomly chosen enemy that is Level 1-3. If there are no such enemies, generates a stack of Angelic Guard instead. Either way, the size of the stack is 500 Leadership per Rune Mage, with Magic Runes increasing the Leadership number by 7% per unused one carried by the player)
Abilities: Persistence of Mind (Immunity to mental effects), Favorite Enemy, High Mage (+1 Morale to Priests, Inquisitors, and Archmages), Runic (50% Magic resist), Runic Armor (Base ranged damage increases by 2 per unused Might Runes. Health increases by 15 per unused Mind Runes. Additionally, the Rune Mage's ranged attack has a 30% chance to inflict a debuff on enemies, with the exact debuff inflicted being based on the number of unused Magic Runes)
Behold! One of the most complicated units in the entire series! (And the new Human unit for Orcs on the March)
Also one of the more poorly-explained units. First of all, the in-game descriptions give inconsistent numbers on some of these Rune-scaling effects; the numbers I give above are the correct numbers, for reference. Second, these Rune-scaling effects are all actually capped at 20 Talent Runes; there is no difference between 20/20/20 Might/Mind/Magic Runes and 200/200/200. This means means there's a clear maximum power on Rune Mages, which is not obvious just looking them over, and I imagine there are players who kept stockpiling past the cap without noticing no further improvement was happening. Note that the game's tracking of the 'damage bonus' will stop rising at +20, ie at 10 Might Runes, but this is another example of the UI being wrong about the Rune Mage; it will keep rising to 20 Might Runes. (Also, the 'damage bonus' does not apply to their melee attack, which is not communicated by the game at all)
Since we can give specific max strength, let's do so.
First of all, a Rune Mage's maximum Health is 750. A Mage Amelie can use Archmage-the-skill to get their Leadership down to 1500, which gives a 2-to-1 ratio on Leadership to Health, which is actually pretty high when you consider that they're Level 5 and a ranged attacker, both of which tend to lead to depressed Health ratios. That's actually a better base ratio than a Black Dragon, for example.
Second, their base ranged damage caps at 80-95 damage a hit. This is loosely comparable to a Cyclops' ranged attack when accounting for the Leadership difference -and it's worth noting that the Archmage skill will bring a Rune Mage's Leadership down to just slightly over Cyclops Leadership. A properly-supported Rune Mage is actually surprisingly good at damage output given it's both Level 5 and ranged, which tends to depress damage just like Health. Destruction in particular arrives at 105-165 per target once it has +200% damage. Note that as you gain Might Runes the game's claimed percentage boost will be as if it is +12% per Might Rune, but it is in fact +10%. Regardless, Destruction is a decent chunk of damage output at high Might Runes, where I can compare it to something like the Black Dragon's Rain of Fire Talent and we find that per head maxed Destruction can do better than Rain of Fire per target, when Rune Mages have lower Leadership and a Mage in particularly can drag it down still further.
Third, Revive caps at 280 HP healed per Rune Mage, except that the Paladin can raise this by 30% via ranks in Resurrection. Note that the healing-per-Leadership will be better coming from a Mage with Archmage maxed than from a Paladin with Resurrection maxed, though of course Resurrection has other benefits. This isn't a huge amount of healing regardless, but getting it capped gives you a bit more wiggle room to shrug off some casualties where they don't actually cost you anything. It's also worth pointing out that it's one of your only tools for undoing casualties on Level 5 units, and that it works on units immune to Spells -if you've always wanted to use Black Dragons but were put off by the difficulties in avoiding casualties due to most healing not working on them, Rune Mages can let you give them a try without worrying about that. It's also one of the only ways to clear what negative effects can get put on Black Dragons in the first place (eg Poison, Plague), which can be really nice.
Fourth, Illusion caps out at 1200 Leadership per head. That's more than 50% of the Rune Mage's own Leadership, so if you carry a lot of Magic Runes about that does a lot to make up for how Leadership-intense they are. A Mage can use Archmage to bring their Leadership down to 1500, at which point Illusion is 80% of their own Leadership! That's actually kind of ridiculous, and conveniently the Mage finds it easiest to stockpile Magic Runes, since she gets so many from leveling. (Admittedly, her preferred Skill tree is also very Magic Rune-hungry) It's high enough that it's even a reasonably representative way to try out units without having to spend gold on them; if you copy a unit and find it fits into your army well and/or is personally fun for you, you're free to plan around properly slotting them in, instead of having to rely on save/load shenanigans to try out units. Also note this is the actual cap on Illusion's performance, by which I mean most units that summon can have their summons boosted by the Summoner Skill; Rune Mages are the sole exception for whatever reason.
Fifth, it's time for the Spell-on-attack effects:
0 Magic Runes: No side effect whatsoever.
1-4 Magic Runes: Casts Level 1 Helplessness on the target, so a 30% Defense reduction.
5-7 Magic Runes: Casts Level 2 Slow on the target, so a 2-Speed reduction.
8-10 Magic Runes: Casts Weakness on the target, forcing minimum damage to be rolled.
11-13: Casts Curse on the target, lowering Morale by 1 step.
14-16: Casts Doom on the target, ensuring attacks against the target will be critical hits.
17 or more: Casts Sheep on the target, rendering it a helpless sheep that wanders randomly.
Note that in every case the duration is 3 turns, regardless of what the Spell's duration would be if you cast it at that Level yourself, and that these all work on any unit below Level 5. Conversely, Curse can be inflicted on units that ignore Morale, but it won't do anything useful. The interesting thing is the Doom infliction is special-cased to be replaced with Holy Shackles (-30% to Attack and Defense) if the target is a Vampire or Ancient Vampire, so you don't have to worry about your Rune Mage making an Ancient Vampire stack temporarily almost invulnerable.
This is a pretty weird progression to me, given that Slow is generally more useful than Weakness, which is generally more useful than Curse, but they at least got the ultimate possibility right -Sheep is incredibly good to inflict, completely disabling the target, and the Rune Mage's version actually lasts longer than casting it yourself. There's a decent argument, if you've got the Magic Runes stockpiled to trigger Sheep, for casting Phantom on Rune Mages instead of casting Sheep yourself; it will cost less, and the Sheep infliction will last longer... though of course you can't count on it happening, so if you need the target disabled now, it's better to just cast Sheep directly.
On the topic of the trigger chance; the game itself claims that Magic Runes boost it, but it doesn't give actual numbers and furthermore is actually just wrong. The Rune Mage always has a 30% chance of inflicting a debuff with their ranged attack. (Well, unless you have 0 unspent Magic Runes so they have no side effect)
Speaking of incomplete explanations, the game doesn't give Rune Mages an explicit Ability to indicate they're a ranged unit, but they nonetheless are. Their effective range is 7, which can be a bit unintuitive due to being an Archmage reskin, but between their above-average Speed and 7 being a plenty good range they usually don't have to worry. Especially since they prefer to contribute with their Talents anyway.
Even stranger is that Rune Mages have another Rune-based quality the game doesn't mention at all: they get bonus resistances based on your Talent Rune makeup! Specifically:
Might is highest: +30% Physical
Mind is highest: +30% Fire and 
Poison
Magic is highest: +30% Magic and Astral
Might is tied for highest: +10% Physical
Mind is tied for highest: +10% Fire and Poison
Magic is tied for highest: +10% Magic and Astral
Note that for ties you combine them: Might and Mind being tied is +10% Physical, Fire, and Poison resistance. Surprisingly, there's no special-case for having all three tied; you just combine them to get +10% to all resistances. As such, if you're going to have any tied, you'll optimally have all of them tied. Further note that the game considers anything above 20 to be the same as 20 for purposes of determining what's highest; if you're sitting on 21 Might Runes, 22 Mind Runes, and 23 Magic Runes, your Rune Mages will get +10% to all resistances instead of +30% to Magic and Astral.
This mechanic is really easy to overlook. Not only is it not displayed as an ability, but the Rune Mage's resistances don't update to reflect it outside of battle; you can't open your Rune Mage's summary, look at their resistances, spend some Talent Runes, and recheck them to see this effect in action. It only displaying in battle makes it easy to think you're just forgetting a Skill or an effect on one of your equipped items or something if you do run into the effect in combat.
This is frustrating, as it's a very significant effect! If Magic Runes are your highest, Rune Mages rise from 50% Magic resistance to 80%, more than doubling their ability to shrug off Magic damage, which may let you use them as a meatshield for other units against Magic damage-heavy armies. The 30% Astral resistance is less commonly relevant, but Astral resistance is very rare; Rune Mages can justify their place in your army off just this Astral resistance.
Similarly, the 30% Physical resistance from Might being highest is actually fairly significant, especially if you've prioritized getting Stone Skin to a good level; as I've covered before, 30% is generally as high as Physical resistance is allowed to go, so they're actually potentially surprisingly good at tanking Physical damage in a pinch, especially if you've got a fair number of Mind runes to drag their Health up.
Mind as highest is the overall least notable, but still something to keep in mind, especially if you've got gear boosting Poison or Fire resistance.
It's a bizarrely complicated mechanic given it's almost completely hidden.
I think the idea of the Rune Mage is very very interesting, but in practice it's burdened by problems. The Rune Mage is fairly opaque to use, for one, but most critical is how it's clearly scaled to only be all that great if you have a fair few unused Runes, when default play is going to be purchasing Skills pretty aggressively, leaving few or sometimes no unused Talent Runes lying around. The resistance mechanic in particular is outright obnoxious, where you may find yourself not wanting to grab a Talent Rune in the field because it would change your Rune Mage's resistances and mess up your strategy.
Also, they're heinously expensive to hire. As Armored Princess is the least generous game in the series when it comes to money, this is a pretty significant obstacle; even once you have the Leadership to lead one, you may well be unable to buy one. And even if you have the cash, they're not so obviously amazing as to be easy to justify wiping your funds to try them out. It's... all very much not ideal design.
One odd quirk of Destruction is that you inexplicably can't target Gremlins with it, but they nonetheless can be hit by its line of damage.
Regardless, as allies Rune Mages can actually be serviceable just on the basis of spamming Illusion to distract and stall enemies (Note that Illusion's summons last until destroyed, and can't be wiped with a Dispel: they're not a Phantom, in spite of the Talent graphic clearly being based on Phantom), with Destruction and so on being a nice bonus. Revive purging negative effects can also be hugely notable in the early-midgame for helping you get Grand Strategy ranks by not only undoing minor casualties but wiping Burn or Poisoning in the process and thus preventing still further casualties. Only Destruction is fairly forgettable without serious Rune backing, truthfully; they're a decent unit even if you don't stockpile Runes. If you do stockpile Runes, they're one of the better Level 5 units, arguably the best, though this is difficult to quantify precisely given it means you're putting off purchasing Skill ranks.
As enemies, Rune Mages are... sort of obnoxious in principle, as they get to benefit from Rune scaling effects with the AI shouldering no opportunity cost for this effect (They literally add Runes at random off an internal 'Location Difficulty' parameter, with each Rune type having an equal chance of being added per tier and there being an equal chance to instead add to all Rune types), but in practice they're usually not too big a deal. They don't show up very often, they're mostly restricted to the early-midgame (As late-game islands aren't Human-using islands), and the AI just doesn't use them very well. They'll frequently open with a Destruction aimed sub-optimally, they'll aggressively waste their Revive charge much like Paladins waste their Prayer charge, and the AI just doesn't play in a way that emphasizes the utility of summons so Illusion isn't a problem. The only truly problematic thing is that they're a lot more likely to have some moderately serious negative effect attached to their ranged attack than in your hands, and if they ever get around to using it before you kill them that can be really inconvenient, but it doesn't crop up often between their behavior and the fact that it's RNG-based whether they even impose such an effect.
Ultimately the most interesting thing about Rune Mages to me is more conceptual/design-level: they're the first Human unit to be Level 5. They're also the last one, as no later game adds in a new one.
Still, they're kind of a neat idea, even if the actual execution is... odd.
Quick shoutout to Slick Rounder in the comments section of Old Vigaroe for doing a ton of testing to more properly determine the mechanics and limitations of Rune Mages. This was previously a much less informative section, and outright wrong on several bits, in no small part due to the UI elements being full of inaccuracies. Notably, Rune Mages look much better if you know their actual tuning than if you go by the vague and often-wrong descriptions given by the game itself -this is likely a unit a lot of players underrate relative to its actual quality.
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Next time, we'll cover the Dwarves of Montero.
See you then.