Armed Peasants are the first unit you have access to, they are quite cheap but also very weak making them, arguably, the most useless unit in the game.

While this sounds negative it has an upside; they are cheap and because of this Armed Peasants are quite expendable and useful in a myriad of situations where more advanced units would only sacrifice themselves to become cannon fodder.

Most notable among these uses are getting cheap reports from un-scoutable castles and tripping oil pots if the defender has them placed along the outer walls of his castle.

Gold Cost	3 each
Rank Required	Village Idiot (1)
Unit Space	1
Weapons Required	None
Research Required	None

 

Armed Peasant Defense

Even with a goodly amount of archers providing support the Armed Peasant doesn’t last long in the keep except against other Armed Peasants. If you don’t have archers in towers don’t even bother placing armed peasants in your castle’s keep as the attacker’s archers will kill the peasants long before the attacking melee troops have a chance to engage.

Although they are useless in the Keep, Armed Peasants do have one use in defending a castle. If you place a tunnel outside your castle, Armed Peasants will emerge from it with the intent of destroying enemy catapults whenever you are attacked. Although the amount of peasants emerging from the tunnel depends completely on the Tunneler’s guild in the local parish, tunnels can be very deadly if used correctly.

Armed Peasants from Tunnels target units in the following order:

1. Catapults
2. Archers
3. Nearest Unit

Note: Armed Peasants which emerge from the tunnel generated each time you are attacked, like Knights, you never need to have Armed Peasants in your Barracks or Castle for a Tunnel to work.

Armed Peasant Offense

Armed Peasants can clean up some very small wolf and bandit camps but as the game progresses you will unlock pike-men and use them almost exclusively instead. If you are forced by your low rank to use armed peasants when attacking wolf lairs be sure to include archers, the peasants will act as a meat shield while the archers do most of the work killing the wolves.

Armed Peasants are put to better use offensively when they are used to trip oil pots on AI castles or just before a timed attack hits an enemy player’s castle. An attack of 500 peasants is a cheap method of getting a report from an un-scoutable castle. Your overall cost for a scout wave of 500 Armed Peasants? 1,500 gold.