I have just finished a game with Gilden under Lord Markin and before the game I was looking forward to using Golems as a unique troop type.  I was hoping they would add flavour like the Juggernauts do for the Trogs under Warlord Verga.  My game with the Trogs and designing different sorts of Juggernaut was fun and they were useful troops.

But any Golems I could design were a terrible dissapointment and hardly usable, sure they were high HP and defence but terribly slow and did very little damage. The regular Gilden troops  were great once I had Light Plate armour (the next tech after the one needed for Iron Golems).  Four man (and later 5 man) units of lancers (Boar Spear mounted on horses) had the nearly the same defence and nearly as many HP as the golems (level 3 built in a Command Post and with Gilden HP bonus) for same amount of iron and build time.  The key difference was that the lancers move 4 tiles (versus 2) and do 4 times the damage.

My other main troop type, available a bit later, was 4 and 5 man units of Longbow mounted on wargs. and these worked well with my few champions and the melee troops (mostly lancers but also some maces and swords) all mounted on horses.   At the end of the game I had 5 or 6 mixed stacks of these troops and they worked well together taking full advantage of Gilden's extra HP/ level and +25% defensive bonus.  My trained troops stomped over anything the AI's came up with with very few losses for a conquest victory.

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So my question is what use are golems?  Why would Gilden even build them?  given they have such solid trained troops available at that stage of the game.

If you agree with me that they seem useless, how could they be fixed so they would be interesting and worth building?

JJ