Since in Dark Side, Orcs, Demons, and Undead are your initial forces, for Dark Side I've shuffled them to the front of the list. By a similar token, I'll be using this post to cover broad mechanical changes.
First of all, crits. Crits are now identical to a full-damage roll, instead of being stronger than a full-damage roll. Crits now also have a 5% chance of causing Bleeding, which retains its Warriors of the North qualities of doing Physical damage each turn while also lowering the target's max Health. As such, damage is actually less swingy in Dark Side, but crits have gained a new element of randomness to them.
Furthermore, crit chance mechanics have been overhauled: Talents no longer have reduced crit chance, damage over time effects (Burn, Poisoning, Freeze, and Bleed) now have a flat 5% chance to crit instead of using Spell crit mechanics, Spells now have a base of 5% plus 1% per seven points of Intellect (ie at 70 Intellect your Spells crit 15% of the time) with current Mana no longer a factor, while Rage actually works similarly to Warriors of the North, just higher numbers. Specifically: if you're at max Rage, Rage moves have a 10% crit chance, while less Rage lowers crit chance almost in proportion to the Rage reduction. It's 'almost' because only 9 of those 10 points are modified by Rage amount; if you somehow used a Rage move at 0 Rage, you'd still have a 1% crit chance.
Second, Morale. It's finally been overhauled again, with its effects now operating in eleven tiers, reducing the impact of individual tiers of Morale but also allowing the game to play around more with eg more nuance in racial relations effects.
-5 Morale or worse: -50% to Attack and Defense, and crit chance is 0.
-4 Morale: -40% to Attack and Defense, and crit chance is reduced by 80%.
-3 Morale: -30% to Attack and Defense, and crit chance is reduced by 60%.
-2 Morale: -20% to Attack and Defense, and crit chance is reduced by 40%.
-1 Morale: -10% to Attack and Defense, and crit chance is reduced by 20%.
0 Morale: Base values.
+1 Morale: +8% to Attack and Defense, and crit chance is increased by 10%.
+2 Morale: +16% to Attack and Defense, and crit chance is increased by 20%.
+3 Morale: +24% to Attack and Defense, and crit chance is increased by 30%.
+4 Morale: +32% to Attack and Defense, and crit chance is increased by 40%.
(Yes, the Anticipating Trophies graphic has been coopted)
+5 Morale: +40% to Attack and Defense, and crit chance is increased by 50%.
Notice that the benefits of the two new highest tiers beat out the previous highs, while the old positive tiers are weaker. Negative Morale, meanwhile, has been reduced in its impact, being more comparable to The Legend's values (Except you retain some crit chance out to -3) until you start stacking on really serious penalties. As such, it's a lot more plausible to just suck up a minor Morale penalty if you really want to mix a Viking into your Orc army for some reason, or the like. Of course, a lot of racial relations are way, way more hostile...
Anyway, Orcs.
First things first: general 
Adrenaline mechanics, or more precisely what's changed since Warriors of the North.
Most everything, actually.
In Dark Side, Adrenaline Levels are not a mechanic at all. Adrenaline is spent on Talents, and that's it. No passive benefits for getting high in Adrenaline. (Well, this is slightly misleading, as several Orcs have specific Abilities that do passively boost them for rising Adrenaline, but it's no longer a fundamental mechanic) Conversely, Orcs don't deal with charges or reloads at all. All their Talents can be spammed infinitely so long as they have the Adrenaline to burn.
Adrenaline generation is loosely similar to how it was in Warriors of the North. Now Orcs always start a battle with 10-15 Adrenaline, gain 8-10 Adrenaline each time they dish out damage, gain an additional 15 Adrenaline when finishing off an enemy stack, gain 5-7 Adrenaline for taking damage... but Waiting sucks -10 Adrenaline down the drain instantly.
So compared to Warriors of the North, Orcs generate Adrenaline much more rapidly and consistently (Not quite twice as much Adrenaline for dishing out damage, 25% more kill Adrenaline than used to be the max roll, and of course taking damage generates more Adrenaline than you used to get doing damage) but Waiting with Orcs is even more harshly punished. (This is twice as much lost as the high roll was in Warriors of the North) Of course, since Adrenaline is made to be spent in Dark Side, the thing that actually matters is how this compares to new Talent Adrenaline costs...
Also, Adrenaline's max is a fixed 100, instead of starting from 20/30 (AP/WotN) and rising with Skills on the player forces and overall size of the battlegroup for AI forces.
Note that counter-attacks don't generate Adrenaline, and in cases where an Orc hits multiple units at once this doesn't generate Adrenaline per hit. (Caveat: multiple kills will multiply the kill-bonus for Adrenaline generation, as it always has) Also note that the game's logs still provide the final Adrenaline modification, rather than tallying each individual piece of Adrenaline modification: if an Orc burns Adrenaline on an attack (eg Onslaught), the log won't tell you that they used up 15 Adrenaline and then gained 10, it'll just tell you that their overall Adrenaline went down by 5. The game also doesn't explicitly spell this out, but the kill value is stacked on top of the hit value: a kill is actually worth 23-25 Adrenaline, not 15.
On the other hand, where in previous games kills gave Adrenaline to the entire Orc army, in Dark Side only the unit landing the blow benefits. As such, Adrenaline no longer incentivizes stacking Orcs together, a point exacerbated by other changes we'll see down the line; in short, where in Warriors of the North you had means of instantly delivering Adrenaline en mass, in Dark Side you can either boost the overall generation capacity of your army or instantly deliver a bunch of Adrenaline to a single unit. As such, Dark Side leans more toward using a single Orc unit in your army, with it acting as your meatshield and/or arranging to consistently have it land finishing blows.
Greed remains a factional semi-unique Ability, as well.
Greed
If this unit finishes off an enemy stack, it gains +10 Morale for the rest of the battle.
This is, of course, even more powerful now that max Morale is more powerful, though it's also slightly less perfect at protecting you from negative Morale -though this usually doesn't actually matter, as -3 is the largest 'dynamic' Morale penalty you can get. (-2 from having more than one negative status effect, and a further -1 from Curse's Morale-lowering effect) You have to have -3 Morale from other sources -such as racial penalties- for Dark Side Greed to not be pure improvement over prior games' Greed in practice.
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So Orc Morale.
Notably, Orcs no longer have a mono-race Morale bonus, presumably because Dark Side has made the dark races your early-game choice, equivalent to how Humans were in the first two games. This barely matters in practice because Dark Side has the majority of your Titles provide Morale to the core Dark races, and so your Orcs will generally always have a Morale bonus anyway.
Racial relations-wise...
-5 Morale for Light Human presence in allies.
-5 Morale for Light Elven presence in allies.
-5 Morale for Light Dwarven presence in allies.
-1 Morale for Viking presence in allies.
... Orcs are now comfortable with their fellow Dark allies, and instead are primarily offended by Light races, which is part of Dark Side's general design of Light and Dark hating each other. They're also now bothered by Vikings. Interestingly, Vikings seem to be treated by the game as basically a 'grey' species, as they're pretty broadly disliked by Dark and Light races, just less strongly so than the Dark/Light mutual hatred.
Also interesting is that Orcs have commented-out hostility to Demons and Undead. It's -2 in both cases, and that's not simply inherited from Warriors of the North. Apparently at some point they were running Orcs as bothered by Demons and Undead in Dark Side itself, which is actually consistent with how Bagyr is clearly not all that comfortable with this whole 'we're the bad guys' thing. (Which is, in turn, consistent with the fact that Orcs have never been straightforwardly The Bad Guys in any prior game) It's even an explicitly commented-on plotpoint that Orcs aren't 'traditional' allies of the Dark, referred to a few times throughout the game.
Oh, and yes I'll be listing Of The Dark on units for completion's sake, but I'm giving it no description because it doesn't actually do anything. The game description implies it factors into Morale, but eg Dragon Riders are Of The Dark Neutrals and they don't offend Of The Light units, nor are they offended by them.
Also note that, curiously, Orc Hunters/Trackers, Blood Shaman, and Goblin Shaman seem to have been removed from the game, or at least coded to not spawn anywhere. The game outright makes a reference to Orc Hunters not being anywhere in Netana quite late in the game, so it's not some weird oversight, not in their case. My personal suspicion is that Dark Side cut them because it ran out of time to fit them into the Orc overhaul, or something of the sort, because as we'll be seeing Dark Side has a lot of evidence that its ambitions were a fair bit beyond what it ended up actually achieving. Certainly, there's still a number of tooltips that directly reference these units, though maybe that's just a product of the English translation having obviously ported forward the Warriors of the North tooltip translation set -some of your tooltips refer to Valkyries in reference to Rage, for example!
Furious Goblin
Level: 2
Hiring Cost: 60
Leadership: 20
Attack/Defense: 7 / 6
Initiative/Speed: 6 / 3
Health: 18
Damage: 2-4 Physical
Resistances: Generic
Talents: Goblin Greed (-15 Destroys a corpse the Furious Goblins are standing on, generating some amount of Gold if owned by the player. Doesn't end the Furious Goblin's turn). Goblin Insolence (-25The Furious Goblin moves over to melee attack a target enemy for 3-5 Physical damage, and then returns to where they were before using Goblin Insolence. The target doesn't get to retaliate)
Abilities: Of the Dark, Irascible (Anytime the Furious Goblin stack takes damage, the stack gains +1 Speed for the rest of the battle, to a limit of +3 total), Giant Killer (Damage is increased the higher the Level the target is, +10% per Level advantage the target has. Every 10 Adrenaline past 50 the Furious Goblin has increases this by +1%, to a maximum of +5%, ie at 100 Adrenaline the Furious Goblin will do +45% damage against a Level 5 target), Greed
In Dark Side, Furious Goblins have been more than halved in Leadership and had various stats downshifted appropriately, though they've also lost 2 Initiative. (Bringing them back in line with The Legend/Armored Princess) They've also actually lost Running, making them reliant on Irascible to get into the fight quickly. Of course, with Adrenaline having been overhauled, one of the more notable aspects of Furious Goblins is that they can run around harvesting corpses for Gold until the bodies run out, especially if you're using Creation/Gifts to keep their Adrenaline topped off, since there's no charge limit anymore. This can be a nice bit of utility if you're wanting to push up your Gold funds early on and are confident in your ability to cleanly defeat battlegroups even with Furious Goblins in use.
Goblin Insolence is also potentially spammable if eg Gifts/Creation-spamming, so with support Furious Goblins can operate as an odd sort of No Retaliation unit. It's a bit of a silly scenario, but it's neat to have it as an option.
Overall I personally feel this is a downgrade for Furious Goblins, particularly from the perspective of the player using them, but it's a complicated set of changes and it's pretty obvious part of the point was to make Furious Goblins more in line with prior entries' low-Leadership basic melee units.
They're also a relatively tame introduction to how bugged Orcs are in Dark Side: Irascible claims to stack to a limit of +3 Speed, but actually stops at +1 Speed, and Giant Killer's in-game description claims a somewhat weaker formula for its boosts.
Orc
Level: 3
Hiring Cost: 190
Leadership: 75
Attack/Defense: 16 / 17
Initiative/Speed: 4 / 2
Health: 70
Damage: 7-10 Physical
Resistances: 10% Physical
Talents: Potion of Rage (-25 Causes the Orcs to be Furious for the next 2 turns, and they generate 10% more Rage in combat), Onslaught (-15 Runs in a straight line an infinite distance to attack a single target for 10-14 Physical damage. If the target is below Level 5, it's pushed back 1 tile and Stunned for 1 turn. The target doesn't get to retaliate. Can also be used to travel without attacking a target)
Abilities: Of the Dark, Armored (10% Physical resistance), Thirst for Fight (Counterattacks always crit, and every 5 Adrenaline raises crit chance by 2%, to a maximum of +20%), Greed
They've lost Running and Onslaught can't be used to shove Level 5 targets anymore, but in most respects Dark Side is actually really good to basic Orcs. The fact that Dark Side Adrenaline rewards taking damage is a nice point in their favor, making it a lot more appealing to take advantage of Vengeance Thirst For Fight autocrits and in general making getting stuck in a lot more appealing.
Note that Onslaught's 15 Adrenaline is something Orcs will occasionally start a battle with. You can't count on it, especially since Dark Side doesn't have any Skills granting starting Adrenaline (Though there's Items!), but it's something to remember. If you're using Orcs, consider checking their Adrenaline at the start of a battle, before you start making moves, so you can see whether they can Onslaught right away or not. Also note that Onslaught still doesn't require an empty tile of running room (Just like in Warriors of the North), and still looks very janky when used point-blank.
At the very beginning of the game, Orcs are a bit unappealing since you're ideally avoiding taking any casualties at all and Leadership values quickly reach the point that's hard to avoid, but once you reach the point where you don't mind casualties (Money is plentiful, Grand Strategian is maxed, etc) Orcs are one of the best units for acting as your core melee unit. I tend to prefer Veteran Orcs, but Onslaught's potential to cross the entire battlefield instantly has its advantages, as does the Stun infliction and the ability to push enemies. That last point is especially appreciated when you're trying to build up your Trapper ranks. As such, to a large degree which of the two you use is really down to a matter of preference.
Veteran Orc
Level: 4
Hiring Cost: 380
Leadership: 140
Attack/Defense: 26 / 26
Initiative/Speed: 6 / 3
Health: 130
Damage: 13-16 Physical
Resistances: 10% Physical
Talents: Running (-8 +2 Action Points), Fury Attack (-15 Does 13-16 Physical damage to the target and to enemies to the side), Potion of Rage (-25 For the next 3 turns the Veteran Orcs are Furious and also generate 10% more Rage in combat)
Abilities: Of the Dark, Counterattack (If counterattacked, the Veteran Orc makes a second attack on the target), Armored (10% Physical resistance), Prudence (30% chance to evade enemy attacks base. This chance raises by 2% for every 5 points of Adrenaline past 50, and also raises by 1% for every 10% of the stack that has been lost in the battle), Greed
Their actual stats are unchanged from Warriors of the North, but their Talents have been overhauled: Running is connected to the new Adrenaline mechanic, meaning it's spammable but requires Adrenaline to start, Fury Attack is spammable with no cooldown and actually costs 2 Adrenaline less than in Warriors of the North, while Potions of Rage have been massively nerfed by increasing their Adrenaline cost from 8 to 25 and replacing the instant Rage injection with a weak boost to their personal Rage generation. Nimble has been renamed and reworked, having an (intentional) innate evasion bonus and actually having higher potential scaling not to mention now scaling with casualties.
As with Orc's Onslaught, Veteran Orcs will occasionally begin a battle with enough Adrenaline to use Fury Attack. The Adrenaline numbers relating to Running are also a bit interesting, in that you'll always start with enough Adrenaline to Run, but never more than once. (Though if the Veterans take a hit before their turn rolls around, they'll almost always end up with enough Adrenaline for two Run activations: they have to low-roll on the initial Adrenaline generation and the take-damage Adrenaline generation to not have 16+ Adrenaline)
I'm particularly fond of backing Veteran Orcs with Orc Shield: hurling them into the fray, building Adrenaline, soaking hits with Orc Shield and periodic dodges, etc, can produce a whirlwind of lethality that suffers nearly no casualties, and it doesn't require any special support since Orc Shield is your only hit-everything-guaranteed Rage attack so you're going to use it anyway fairly often. With Potion of Rage, they can even turn absorbing a bunch of attacks into even more damage output, and of course Adrenaline is now generated when attacked. And since their dodge chance rises with their Adrenaline, they end up dodging quite often. It's a fun little mini-tactic, and I quite like how the ultimate Orc Rage Skill combines so nicely with one of the upper-tier Orc units. It's good thematics.
Of course, part of why this strategy works so well is more bugs: Prudence is supposed to be a base 10% evasion rate, not a base 30, but there's a value of 20 which is supposed to be the cap on the Adrenaline-based boost to evasion chance and instead acts as a minimum. As such, at maximum Adrenaline an Orc Veteran actually has a 50% chance to evade any attack, higher than any deliberately-given evasion chance on any unit in the series -and they also still gain a little more evasion from casualties! A max-Adrenaline Orc Veteran stack down below 10% of their original numbers has a 59% chance to evade any attack, specifically.
Ogre
Level: 5
Hiring Cost: 3000
Leadership: 1000
Attack/Defense: 37 / 47
Initiative/Speed: 4 / 2
Health: 680
Damage: 50-60 Physical
Resistances: 10% Physical, 10% Poison
, 10% Magic
, 10% Fire
, 10% Ice
Talents: Ogre's Rage (-10 +1 Action Point, and Attack is doubled for 2 turns. Also clears Weakness from the Ogre), Forceful Strike (-20 Targets an arbitrary enemy, inflicting 50-60 Physical damage, Stunning it for one turn, and dropping it in a random tile within 2 tiles of its original location)
Abilities: Of the Dark, Heavy Hand (Melee attacks do 50% more damage against flying enemies, 25% more damage against Soaring enemies, and attacks have a 30% chance of reducing any enemy's Speed to 2), Thick Skin (10% to all resistances except Astral. Every 5 Adrenaline increases these resistances by 1%, to a maximum of another +10%), Greed
They've actually lost a point of Initiative, as well as Draining, which hurts, but new Adrenaline mechanics let them use Ogre's Rage basically every turn if they like, Thick Skin is a little bit better (Especially if you're willing to eg use Creation to top them off), and they've actually picked up Greed, which they didn't use to have, so letting them grab a kill is a big boost to them now. Overall this might actually be their apex in the series, though given how insanely good Drain is it's hard to say.
I've never really given them a chance, personally, but that's kinda true of every entry. I always end up going 'oh, let's give Ogres a try' and then go 'eeeeeh they're underperforming and they're kinda boring'. That's not Dark Side screwing something up, and in fact once you've got Grand Strategian maxed this is probably their best entry, or perhaps second-best after their fairly impressive showing in Orcs on the March.
Shaman
Level: 4
Hiring Cost: 600
Leadership: 200
Attack/Defense: 24 / 32
Initiative/Speed: 5 / 3
Health: 180
Damage: 15-18 Physical
Resistances: Generic
Talents: Dancing Axes (-15 Targets a single enemy anywhere on the field to do 20-25 Magic damage per Shaman in the stack, with 50% of the damage done healing allied organic units. The healing rises by 10% for every 10 points of Adrenaline, to a limit of +30%. Ignores Attack and Defense modifiers), Totem of Life (-20 Sets a Totem in an empty tile anywhere on the field, which in a 2-tile radius around it bolsters the Defense of allies by 20% and once per turn heals organic allies in that radius, starting from the turn after it was set. Level 5 units don't benefit from the Defense boost, but are healed. The Totem has 7 health per Shaman at casting, and similarly heals 7 Health per Shaman at casting), Totem of Death (-20 Sets a Totem in an empty tile anywhere on the field, which in a 2-tile radius around it lowers enemy Speed by 1 and once per turn attacks all enemies in its radius for 5-8 Physical damage per Shaman at casting, starting from the turn after it was set. Level 5 enemies aren't susceptible to either effect. The Totem has 10 health per Shaman at casting)
Abilities: Of The Dark, Adrenaline Control (For every 10 Adrenaline gained by allies, the Shaman gains 1 Adrenaline), Calm (Only generates 75% normal Adrenaline values for inflicting damage, but Morale can never be negative), Shaman (At the beginning of the Shaman's turn, they have a chance to gain 75 Adrenaline. The base chance is 100%, lowered by 1 for each point of Adrenaline they currently have), Persistence of Mind (Immunity to mental effects), Greedy
No actual statistical changes. Dancing Axes is now terrifying, though, and the fact that they can spam it every turn most of the time means they're much more like a conventional ranged attacker, only hideously powerful. Additionally, Calm means Shaman can almost ignore racial tension. Overall, Dark Side boosts Shaman in practice.
Though honestly probably the most significant point is that they can very consistently spam Totems. This is incredibly abusable since the AI tends to prioritize attacking Totems over nearly every other possible course of action, and so you can keep a key problem unit tied up basically indefinitely, or multiple of them if they're failing to one-shot the Totems. And of course slower units can be really messed with through Totems of Death.
I tend to prefer more aggressive options, but Shaman are very handy for a stall-y strategy.
Note that though the game claims the Shaman Ability will set them to 100 Adrenaline, it's actually affected by Calm and so only adds 75 Adrenaline. This is probably a bug. Definitely unintentional is that the game claims they have Persistence of Mind, and they just... don't. Same for Adrenaline Control. It also doesn't actually mention them having Greedy, and Shaman are supposed to be tagged Of The Dark, but while the Ability shows up in their summary the internal tagging is not there, and so for the effects that specifically check for Dark alignment Shaman don't count. Another bug is that they're the only Orc unit that doesn't receive Adrenaline for being attacked; they're supposed to, but under-the-hood stuff didn't get applied to them so they don't.
Yikes, that's a lot of bugs on one unit.
Goblin
Level: 1
Hiring Cost: 19
Leadership: 15
Attack/Defense: 6 / 4
Initiative/Speed: 4 / 2
Health: 10
Damage: 1-2 Physical
Resistances: Generic
Talents: Distant Throw (-15 A ranged attack with an effective range of 5 tiles that does 1-3 Physical damage), Goblin Rage (-25 A ranged attack with unlimited range which does 2-4 Physical damage and pushes the target back 1 tile if there's room to push)
Abilities: Of the Dark, Giant Killer (Damage is increased the higher the Level the target is, +10% per Level advantage the target has. Every 10 Adrenaline past 50 the Goblin has increases this by +1%, to a maximum of +5%, ie at 100 Adrenaline the Goblin will do +55% damage against a Level 5 target), Axe Thrower (The unit can perform ranged attacks to a hard limit of 3 tiles out), Zeroing In (Each time the Goblin's targets a tile with a ranged action, the target tile takes 10% more damage from later attacks, to a maximum bonus of +30%), No Melee Penalty, Greedy
Like Furious Goblins, Goblins have been dramatically re-tuned, dropping a Level, their Leadership dropped to about a third, and their various other stats noticeably slashed appropriately. They've also lost 1 Initiative and gone from being a true ranged unit, if painfully short-ranged, to being like an Alchemist only minus the splash damage and ability to fire at point-blank without retaliation. Amusingly, their damage with Goblin Rage is actually overall higher than in previous games, as it's dropped by about a third while their numbers have nearly tripled. Of course, now Goblin Rage requires a whopping 25 Adrenaline to activate, which is fairly burdensome to actually acquire, especially since Dark Side doesn't provide much support for having Orcs start with high Adrenaline... of course, if you're willing to drop Creation/Gifts on them, then suddenly they can be a surprisingly decent ranged attacker that incidentally keeps pushing enemies back.
Note that Distant Throw's in-game description implies it's fully effective out an infinite distance. This isn't true, not in its case: that's true of Goblin Rage, but Distant Throw is like a regular ranged attack, dropping to half damage if launched further than five tiles out. As such, a Goblin truly operating at decent effectiveness at long range is very Adrenaline-hungry. Which is a problem since Goblins aren't really designed to get into the thick of fighting and there's no kill-spillover Adrenaline in Dark Side.
I personally occasionally use Goblins very temporarily toward the beginning of the game when options are extremely limited, and try to move on and away from them as fast as possible.
A weird point is that the in-game damage number is, like a few ranged units in prior games, actually informing you of their melee damage. Most of the time this doesn't matter since they have the same base numbers, but there are conditions in which their ranged damage will be modified without modifying their melee damage (Or vice-versa), and in those cases the game will thus be misleading.
Also, Zeroing In is struckthrough because it's severely bugged and doesn't work at all. It's actually even buggier than that, as fixing the issues preventing it from working at all actually skips the first damage bonus, so you go 100%->120%->130% without hitting 110% anywhere in there. Its English description is also pretty bad, making it sound like it would trigger for repeatedly targeting a specific unit, but if you correct its bugs it's actually for targeting a specific tile, where if you hit a target, they move out of that tile, and a different unit moves into that tile, your damage bonus will apply to the new unit and be lost if you continue to focus on your original target. If fixed, it actually applies to their Talents as well, and unexpectedly it actually stacks multiplicatively with Giant Killer, where a Goblin could theoretically hit 201.5% damage against a Level 5 unit that held still!
But, y'know, Zeroing In doesn't work at all, so...
Goblin With Catapult
Level: 3
Hiring Cost: 300
Leadership: 130
Attack/Defense: 23 / 15
Initiative/Speed: 4 / 2
Health: 80
Damage (Ranged): 6-11 Physical
Damage (Siege Weapon): 12-22 Physical
Damage (Melee): 7 Physical
Resistances: -50% Fire
Talents: Fiery Shot (-12 Ranged attack against an enemy, which does 8-13 Fire damage to the target and 50% that to adjacent units, with each unit having a 50% chance to be Burned as well), Explosives (-15 Sets three explosive objects no more than 4 tiles out, placed semi-randomly around a targeted tile), Second Wind (-25 An allied unit of 260 or less Leadership per Catapult that is below Level 5 gets to take another turn. Does not end the Catapult's turn)
Abilities: Of the Dark, Archer (Range: 5), Siege Weapon (Calls the Siege Weapon attack against Gremlins and the like. Effective range is 6 for such targets), Pyromancer (50% more damage from Fire, but attacks and Talents do doubled damage against Objects and each point of Adrenaline gives +1% chance for attacks and Talents to Burn enemies, to a maximum of +50%), Commander (Furious Goblins, Goblins, and Spirit Talkers gain +1 Morale), Greed
They've lost Recruiter, but Explosives has been made stronger but more random and instead of being able to give Goblins a second turn they can give anything below Level 5 a second turn. Warriors of the North already did a good job of getting them away from the whole 'why not use Cannoneers?' problem, but Dark Side takes it even further, and I quite appreciate it.
They still also only lose 20% of their damage when firing beyond their effective range, including against Gremlins and whatnot. As Dark Side has some enormous battlefields, this is particularly relevant now!
Explosives has two kinds of bombs it can make, picked at random. Both have 50% Poison resistance and -100% Fire resistance, while the stronger one additionally has 50% Physical resistance. Both of them detonate for Fire damage without regard to Attack/Defense modification (Making them more useful against high-Defense enemies), with the weaker one doing 1-4 damage per Catapult while the stronger one does 2-3 damage per Catapult. (So the stronger one is actually more stable and tougher to detonate, not reliably more lethal, but work with me)
Note that the in-game description for Pyromancer claims to automatically detonate explosives, and does not mention the doubled damage against Objects. Also note that this stacks with Siege Weapon, and so a Goblin With Catapult actually does 24-44 damage per head against Gremlins and the like.
Commander is supposed to boost Morale on Spirit Talkers, but oops it actually doesn't. The in-game description also claims the Goblin With Catapult will gain a point of Adrenaline anytime a regular Goblin or Furious Goblin gains Adrenaline, which is a neat idea, but this is not so; there's absolutely nothing in the code to even try to do such a thing.
Also, this doesn't matter to gameplay, but Second Wind's animation is borked. In Warriors of the North, a Goblin Catapult would play their standard victory animation when using Second Wind, ie pumping a fist and cheering. In Dark Side, the Goblin With Catapult instead uses their regular attack animation. Everyone is invigorated by a rock to the face, right?
At least it now has a sane Leadership limit, unlike Warriors of the North...
While we're looking at a (real) ranged unit: one subtle yet significant difference between Dark Side and prior King's Bounty games is that the AI does not prefer to target a unit that was just a moment ago blocking off the ranged attacks of a ranged unit. They'll wander away from your distraction and mete death out upon whatever you least want on the literal opposite side of the map. Not always, but considerably more often than in prior games.
Personally, I tend to find Catapults too Adrenaline-hungry to be practical, but then I've never really given them a proper chance with, say, Neoline, and Dark Side has a fairly substantial element of unit value being heavily class-dependent in a manner that's just not nearly so true in prior entries.
Orc Chieftain
Level: 5
Hiring Cost: 4000
Leadership: 1200
Attack/Defense: 40 / 35
Initiative/Speed: 4 / 2
Health: 740
Damage: 50-70 Physical
Resistances: 10% Physical, 10% Poison, 10% Fire
Talents: Drain (-10 Steals all the Action Points of an arbitrary target enemy without ending the user's turn), Sneer (-10 Provokes a target enemy of below Level 5 that hasn't moved yet to attempt to attack the Orc Chieftain, with the targeted unit's resulting behavior being exactly as per Scoffer Imp's Sneer), Power of the Horde (-25 One enemy takes Magic damage equal to half the Health of the stack. Ignores Attack and Defense modifiers)
Abilities: Of the Dark, Heavy Hand (Melee attacks do 50% more damage against flying enemies, 25% more damage against Soaring enemies, and attacks have a 30% chance of reducing any enemy's Speed by 2), Devastate (Melee attacks additionally hit enemy units one tile beyond the target for 20% of base damage. Every 5 Adrenaline increases this splash damage by 1%, which at 100 Adrenaline is thus 40% splash damage. No friendly fire risk), Armored (10% Physical and Fire resistance), Poison Protection (10% Poison resistance), Commander (Allied orcs-the-subspecies plus Ogres gain +1 Morale), Greed
They've actually lost some Health, some Attack, some Defense, and some Damage, not to mention Recruiter, but before looking at their Talents they're otherwise just flatly superior, and kind of ridiculously so. And picking up Drain is amazing, honestly. Power of the Horde seems to be a bit buggy, as I've had a run where initially it would only do half the top member's Health in damage, but when I came back to Orc Chieftains much later in the game they were doing the expected 10,000 damage. I have no clue how this bug works and so no idea how to work around it: just keep in mind it exists.
The overall result is that the big thing Orc Chieftains bring to the table in Dark Side is the potential to just spam Drain if you support their Adrenaline generation properly. This can literally disable entire armies turn after turn if they're unfortunate enough to be slower than the Orc Chieftain, with pretty much no protection beyond going first: Drain doesn't care about Level, stack size, immunity to mental effects, or any of the other common or semi-common protections against crazy-powerful effects. This is obviously insanely abusable if eg you've gotten a hold of Creation/Gifts, though the deeper you get into the game the less common it will be to be facing armies with low enough Initiative for this to be at all plausible... but even just having the ability to disable the entire enemy army on the first few turns thanks to Onslaught and Foresight is incredible, especially since battles in Dark Side often only last a couple of turns once your Hero really starts getting into their unique Skills.
Outside of the Drain spam though, Orc Chieftains are a bit disappointing. Sneer is useful, particularly since Dark Side has inexplicably made it so immunity to mental effects no longer protects against it, but if you want Sneer Scoffer Imps can do the same thing and instead of operating on an Adrenaline economy for it they can just toss it out and maybe Frenzy will get it ready to go and if it doesn't that just means they get to tossing fireballs, where for the Orc Chieftain using Sneer costs them in a more meaningful way. Scoffer Imps having greater base mobility also means they're generally better at maneuvering into a position to use Sneer to drag an enemy into a Trap or Zlogn. So Orc Chieftains are mostly operating off their melee combat ability -which Veteran Orcs will usually do better, and even the durability advantage per head is easy to gloss over if you're supporting them with Orc Shield- and Drain, and that's... really all they have going for them.
It's also difficult to get Orc Chieftains early enough to leverage their individually high Health, unlike in Warriors of the North where you could potentially get them from the Isles of Freedom and have them basically invincible for a decent chunk of the game.
And then there's the bugs. Orc Chieftains don't actually have Heavy Hand at all, and Devastate's complicated in-game description is wildly wrong; the Orc Chieftain simply does what they did in the prior two games of cloning their damage against any enemy that happens to be standing on the other side of their target. The odd thing is that the animation has been modified in a manner somewhat consistent with the in-game description (Which claims it can spread to 3 tiles beyond the primary target), suggesting that the team genuinely intended the claimed change and just didn't get around to coding it in.
Similarly, Commander is supposed to give +1 Adrenaline to the Orc Chieftain when allied basic Orcs, Orc Veterans, or Orc Scouts gain Adrenaline, but this component simply doesn't exist. Also, it doesn't boost the Morale of Orc Scouts, which it's supposed to do.
Orc Chieftains are supposed to be much stronger units than they ended up being, but alas.
Spirit Talker
Level: 3
Hiring Cost: 250
Leadership: 50
Attack/Defense: 8 / 8
Initiative/Speed: 4 / 2
Health: 25
Damage (Ranged): 3-6 Ice
Damage (Melee): 3 Physical
Resistances: 10% Magic, 15% Astral
Talents: Avenging Spirit (A single target ally gains a permanent buff. When attacked by enemies, those enemies will suffer 1-2 Magic damage per Spirit Talker in the casting stack, and the Spirit Talker will suffer -5 for each such activation. This damage ignores Attack and Defense modifiers. If Avenging Spirit is targeted anew, even on the original unit, this will cancel the current Avenging Spirit buff), Hex (-15 Target enemy has a 20% chance to Miss any of its attacks for 3 turns), Thread of Life (-25 Two units whose Leadership is each no greater than 15,000 per Spirit Talker are connected. For four turns, 20% of the damage inflicted to the first targeted unit will be transferred to the second targeted unit. Cannot be used on inorganic units or units immune to Spells)
Abilities: Of The Dark, Ancestral Anger (Range: Infinite. The Spirit Talker's ranged attack treats the target as having 20% less resistances than their current numbers. This effect can result in effectively negative resistance on the target. Additionally, this effect increases by 2% for every 5 Adrenaline past 50 the Spirit Talker currently has, resulting in a maximum of -40% to effective resistance), No Melee Penalty, Spirit Talker (10% Magic resistance and 15% Astral resistance), Keeper (At the start of its turn, the Spirit Talker gains Adrenaline equal to the averaged Adrenaline of all Orc allies, excluding the Spirit Talker), Greed
The Spirit Talker's ranged attack is one of the weirder, more obviously hacked-together bits of creative animation in the game, as it literally spawns a Ghost that... awkwardly slides over to the target, playing its idle animation the whole trip, and then performs its attack animation and spontaneously vanishes with no visual effect to make its disappearance look less like a glitch. It's a cool idea that I like, but yikes does it look bad in action.
It's also part of a larger thing with Spirit Walkers being a bit... confusing. They've got an axe in hand, and more on their back, but most of their animations don't actually use them: at range, they have the aforementioned ghost-summoning attack, albeit they pull out an axe and make a throwing motion so maybe originally that was intended to be an axe-throwing animation. In melee, the hyena they're riding on does the regular Hyena attack animation. The only real axe animation they have is that if they charge into melee (Most units have a different attack animation for 'moving up to and attacking in one motion' than for 'attacking a unit having stopped next to it beforehand'), they actually take a swipe with their axe.
Just as prior cases of Thread of Life claim to only connect allies, so too does this game's in-game description claim it specifically connects allies, and it's wrong, a fact the AI is quick to educate you on if you run into Spirit Talkers. You have to pick an ally for sending damage, but not for receiving.
Keeper's in-game description claims to only give 25% of the averaged Adrenaline, where if the Spirit Talker had exactly one Orc buddy who was at 40 Adrenaline, the Spirit Talker would gain 10 Adrenaline. In actuality they gain the full averaged amount; combining them with a regular Shaman and no other Orc allies will result in the Spirit Talkers getting to basically basically have the Shaman Ability themselves and so likely start their first turn somewhere above 75 Adrenaline.
This is notable given that Ancestral Anger will give them up to a 40% damage boost against units with neutral resistances, based partially on current Adrenaline. The in-game description itself gives a weaker-sounding formula that would start from 0% and rise to -20% effective resistances, but nope, it's this stronger one. The in-game description also doesn't clearly communicate that it can go into negatives, so it's easy to think it's just a way to make them less ineffective against Ice-resistant enemies, but no, it's a general damage boost that's effectively more impactful against units with relevant resistances.
Also, Avenging Spirit is supposed to spend 5 Adrenaline on initial usage, but is bugged and doesn't do so. It does spend Adrenaline when the retaliation triggers, though. Thread of Life is similarly supposed to be bounded at 150 Leadership per Spirit Talker, but in actuality has the absurd 'cap' of 15,000 I have listed; you can basically treat Thread of Life as having no cap, because unless you're doing weird stuff like only going in with 1 stack member its Leadership cap is so absurdly high as to be impossible to matter in 99.9% of situations.
Not a bug per se but still worth noting is that some units have attacks that can't miss, and Dark Side is perfectly happy to let you waste your time throwing a Hex on them. So don't do that.
An odd point; Dark Side is really fond of semi-hidden conditional stat modifiers. Most of these stat modifiers are to your enemies in specific segments of the game, but not all of them. I'm mentioning it in this case because one Quest chain -Mimicromania, specifically- ultimately gives you the 'Blessing of the First Blood'. This is not actually explained by the game, and is a permanent bundle of stat bonuses to several of your units, with of course one of them being Spirit Talkers. For most units, including Spirit Talkers, this bonus is +1 Initiative, +5 Attack, and +5 Defense -not huge, but bumping Spirit Talkers up from a lackluster 4 base Initiative to 5 matters in a fair few matchups. Nicely, it doesn't pull them ahead of regular Shaman, so the Keeper trick I covered earlier still works.
Orc Scout
Level: 4
Hiring Cost: 600
Leadership: 200
Attack/Defense: 24 / 32
Initiative/Speed: 5 / 3
Health: 180
Damage (Ranged): 12-18 Physical
Damage (Melee): 10-15 Physical
Resistances: Generic.
Talents: Piercing Shot(-10 Perform a regular ranged attack against a single enemy target, but ignoring the target's Physical resistance), Support (-15 Select an arbitrary ally. For the next 3 turns, the Scout will automatically fire for 6-9 Physical damage on any units the targeted ally attacks without consuming its turn. Each time this effect triggers, its duration is reduced by 1. Support shots can't crit), Companion (-25 Generates a stack of allied Wolves in an adjacent tile whose total Leadership is 150 per Scout)
Abilities: Of the Dark, Shooter (Range: infinite), Crossbowman (Ranged attacks and Talents ignore 20% of the target's Defense, rising by 1% for every 5 points of Adrenaline the Scout currently has), Wolf Cavalry (Allied Wolves as well as werewolves of either type in either form gain +1 Morale), Greed
The game itself doesn't actually mention Orc Scouts having unlimited range. The in-game damage also incorrectly lists their weaker melee, making them seem weaker than they actually are. The Crossbowman and Wolf Cavalry Abilities also don't do anything; the game claims they do the things I've listed, but they don't have any code to do things. Crossbowman is easy to test with Creation or the like; just before-and-after their damage and you'll see it's totally unaffected by their Adrenaline.
Also, you might intuitively expect the Bone ability to protect against Orc Scout shots, but it does not. I'm genuinely unsure whether this is a conscious design decision or a casualty of Dark Side's general unfinished state.
Further note that while Companion's in-game description claims you can only have 1 Wolf ally out at a time, no such limitation exists. You can absolutely spam a new Wolf stack every turn for as long as your Adrenaline holds out: with Creation, this can go on a long, long time.
Also note that Piercing Shot is unusual and actually calls the regular basic ranged attack, and so is affected by some things that normally don't apply to Talents. Its Adrenaline cost is also bugged in a favorable way, in that it can be used even if the Orc Scout has less than 10 Adrenaline. The game's Adrenaline calculations cope with this surprisingly well, where the Orc Scout will lose 0-2 Adrenaline since the hit generation is 8-10, rather than the game skipping the cost entirely or whatever. But yeah there's basically no reason to ever fire an actual regular shot.
Support is also coded pretty bizarrely. If you use Support on, say, an Imp, and then that Imp hurls a Fireball at a group of three units, the Scout will immediately fire on each of them one by one. This is more cool than anything else (ie it's not an 'oh god what' bug), but I'm still almost completely certain it's not the actual intended behavior. It does at least cap at three targets per use, though; if you Support a Giant and have them Earthquake a field of 15 units, the Orc Scout will still only shoot three of them. They also don't get Adrenaline from these Support shots (Not even if a Support shot finishes off a stack!), in spite of what you might expect.
While Orc Scouts are kind of overpowered nonsense in practice (Yes, in spite of all the nonfunctional or bugged qualities making them weaker than claimed), the game design is fairly frustrating. They're the end product of one of the longest Quest chains in the entire game, and they're merely a bit overpowered. Dragon Riders, as we'll see later, are available from shockingly early in the game, if hideously expensive, and yet are quite clearly deliberately game-breakingly amazing. There's something wrong here, that one of our new Quest-locked units takes forever, another is available almost immediately, and the one that's clearly superior to the other is the easier one to unlock by far.
You don't even get a Horde of them when you do finally unlock them! They're endgame content, and the amount you get is unlikely to be able to fill out your Leadership, let alone have spares to make up for casualties. It's crazy.
Aesthetically, notice that Orc Scouts seem to be riding a Werewolf Elf in wolf form. Not even a Cannibal Werewolf, at that. The strange thing is that concept art depicts a regular wolf, and the Quest involves retrieving regular Wolves to provide mounts for the Scouts, yet the model, UI graphic, and loading screen closeup all depict a Werewolf. I'm genuinely puzzled by this inconsistency. Was there some miscommunication that they didn't have time to correct? Did the person who made the model just go off on their own without informing anyone else? Did the team actually decide to switch to or from using Werewolves, but not manage to get everything consistent internally? Seriously, what happened here?
As a bonus bit of aesthetic oddness, Support and Companion are inconsistent about what animations they can play, potentially grabbing each others'.
Orc Scouts are another unit that benefits from Blessing of the First Blood. You're very, very likely to have Blessing of the First Blood by the time you unlock Orc Scouts, so you might as well look at their statline above and add +1 Initiative, +5 Attack, and +5 Defense. 6 Initiative is really good, as I've been over before.
They also have a personal Quest that is incredibly poorly-communicated (Not to mention poorly-placed: you may well complete it substantially before you unlock Orc Scouts themselves), where you're asked to go train with Amazons to make your Orc Scouts better. Once completed, this invisibly grants your Orc Scouts a variation on one of the Amazon's otherwise-unique Abilities, specifically 'Retreat': now the Orc Scout will respond to melee attacks by backing up on tile and responding with a ranged shot, instead of their weaker melee attack, and has a 30% chance to evade melee attacks.
In addition to being communicated extremely poorly, this particular Quest is bugged. First of all, completing it permanently sets the Scout's melee retaliation to 5-7 Physical damage, around half their regular melee damage; you might think that's irrelevant since they now counterattack with a ranged attack, but it is possible for them to be unable to back up from their attacker, in which case they'll use this sad counter. Indeed, this leads to another bug; if an Orc Scout can't retreat when attacked, it retaliates even if it's already done so that turn, effectively giving them a situational Furious! Third, the ranged counter actually retaliates with 10-15 Physical damage, not the 12-18 their proper ranged attack does; this does at least mean that in most conditions they're better off from this Quest, but ouch, bugs.
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An Item worth mentioning is the Banner of the Horde. As far as I've seen you're guaranteed to find it relatively early in the game, and it claims that it will add 1-3 units to your existing Orc stacks below Level 5. In actuality it has a Leadership-derived effect, specifically 4% percent of what you can currently lead of a randomly-chosen unit type, which can add up to a lot of units in the late game, and even more oddly it's not restricted to providing a unit type you're actually fielding! It looks very lackluster, but it's actually quite good for an Orc-dominated army, though it's another case of the series basically discouraging you from actually using Ogres in your Orc army. It also excludes Spirit Talkers, whoops, but still; free Orcs-the-unit, Goblins-the-unit, and Furious Goblins is pretty good already.
It's also worth pointing out that you almost never fight Orcs in Dark Side at all. There's a handful of guaranteed fights across the game, but they're incredibly rare. As such, their performance in AI hands is largely irrelevant -a given run may never see a given Orc unit at all!
Next time, we check out how Demons have changed.
See you then.