I am curious, has anyone found this unit to be useful at all? For that matter.. What purpose does it serve?



Benefits:

Shared Wisdom trait, +1 Morale to adjacent units; I suspect this means the unit technically counts as +2 morale, since standard units count for +1 Morale, according to The Battle Rules

Can equip Magewand, which will apply the Unsteady debuff to enemies it attacks.

Ranged unit (See attack rating drawback).



Drawbacks:

The unit is very expensive production wise to create.

Suffers from an incredibly low attack rating (low damage trait) which makes it's average damage akin to tickling the enemy to death, if it even does damage at all.



Benefit/Drawback depending on the situation:

As a flying and support unit, it can affect damage bonuses directed towards it, for better or worse. Depends on what you are fighting of course.



Conclusion:

I'm having trouble justifying creating this unit, the Morale trait only increases friendly units damage by 5%, this hardly seems to be worth the cost it has over, say, training another Wyvern instead. Certainly the magewand debuff would be useful, but only at Tier4, where the debuff becomes -40% attack rating on target.



I understand the Drakken are supposed to be more passive-diplomatic, but the only use I can find for this unit is debuffing "super units" that have a lot of damage. Is that.. It?

I've been playing around with the Drakken a lot lately actually, and here's my take on the Ancient.



It's actually a very powerful addition to a drakken army. As many of us already know, the drakken infantry, Drakkenlings, have extremely high health and defense stats as a base, and these are increased even further when you have a hero with the army health boost, such as your starting hero. This makes Drakkenlings extremely hard to remove from the battlefield. Their damage is a joke, sure, but they aren't there to deal damage, they're there to take up battlefield spots so the enemy can't reach your real damage, your wyverns and ancients.



You can think of ancients as sort of highly mobile (flying!) artillery. Your goal, in a battle, is to get your ancients into good spots, preferably on top of cliffs so as to make it easier to throw bodies in the way to protect them, and let them simply sit up there and rain fire down on the enemy. Yes, all of their weapons are ranged, so it's essentially a choice between what debuff you want the enemy to have.



Morale does more than boost damage, it also, to my knowledge, boosts defense, and probably attack too. All of which makes the drakkenlings around the ancients that much tougher to get rid of to get at the ancient itself, meantime it's still bombing the crap out of your army.



Now, as you said, there are several downsides. They're very expensive to produce, with a high base production cost that only gets worse as they get more gear/you advance in eras and thus they advance in levels. This high production cost can be somewhat remedied by just not giving them certain pieces of armor, a helmet being a good choice, or giving them lower tier armor than your current best. If controlled properly, your ancients shouldn't be taking damage except from enemy ranged units, which leads me to my next point:



Ancients are very vulnerable to enemy archers or mages. They're pretty beefy, with decent health and defense, but it still doesn't make them a unit you want to have sitting in an arrow volley. This is where the Drakken's faction tech to have more than one assimilated minor comes into play. You want to get the Ceurtans' Driders in your army if at all possible. The healing from the back will keep your Drakkenlings alive forever and they can also heal up any stray arrows your Ancients catch. Really, driders are just about the perfect unit to really round out a good Drakken army, you won't want to leave home without them. If you can't get Driders due to really bad luck, I would take any unit that does a lot of damage, to make up for the extremely low damage of your drakkenlings. Daemons and Ended work great but are a bit expensive to really get too many, and they basically are just doing the job your wyverns are doing. I do happen to like harmonites for even more tank to cover my ancients.



Don't be turned off by their extremely low attack. While it is very annoying to deal with as they will glance/miss much more often than a standard unit, that much more often part still isn't too common. And even if you miss or glance, you still apply your debuff. Just make sure not to gear them with any +atk equipment, it's essentially only 40% as effective. I would recommend getting them glassteel and boosting their initiative, you need them fast and speedy to get them into a good spot before the enemy can block you off or it gets too dangerous. Apart from that, boost their damage where possible, the titanium rings are a good way to do that, and I actually really like taking the accessory that gives you better use of High Ground. Since I'm putting them on cliffs anyway for safety, may as well get them some extra attack and damage while they're up there.



All in all, the ancients are your actual damage dealers in your army. Very much like Proliferators to a Necrophage, they are sort of the lynch pin of the entire thing, your battle plan is going to resolve around setting up your ancients, keeping them safe, and letting them do the work. Their price means you won't get all too many, but you don't need all that many in the end. 2 or 3 in a good spot are going to cause a LOT of pain to the opponent.