Gargon667
Mentor
I'm interested if anyone has any views on the different types of Light Melee troops, by the way. In these conversations it's usually just dismissed with "all LM is bad", but being bad should we not consider what the least bad are?
crazywiz has already described all LM units very well and I agree the dogs are by far the least bad LM units. Their range makes them somewhat usable.
The problem for all LM units is: to be useful you have to have a "perfect" enemy setup and on top of it a usable map. That is a rare combination.
Under most circumstances some other unit will produce better results.
Dogs are specialized against Mages, but even if you face 5 Mages there is a far better option than to use dogs. Rangers will easily outperform them. Even if you throw a few LR units in with the mages, Rangers (even barrack LR troops) will still do better (better range and higher initiative plus the ELR boost)
Drone riders are specialized against LR units and they do fairly well, but Orc Strategists will outperform Drone Riders (or dogs) against LR units. So you have to mix in a mage or two as well (on the enemy side), which stops your Orc Strategists, but brings the Rangers back into play. So it is very hard to find an enemy setup that will make LM units the best unit for the job. And a bad map will still kill them...