Originally Posted by
noobium
Learn to ****ing read. Cleric advantage is in ****playing other kingdoms, which is what FS is all about, being ****heads and crying to your allies / "the community" whenever someone refuses to play into your hands. If you look at it in those terms, then Cleric has some extra advantages over other personalities.
I'm not even going to bother with the rest because it shows a stunning (and probably deliberate) ignorance about game mechanics, just the same old "durrr i sustain moar troops" logic.
Tactician has way more versatility. It's not just about hitting faster or fitting the 12hr attack time cycle, it's about easier wave synchronization. Everyone else has to build barracks, which isn't always possible or desirable. The effects of easier troop synchonization go way beyond just cramming more attacks per day.
Warrior as mentioned is a natural +15% OME anyway, except it doesn't eat up pop space. By your "win before 24 hours" logic (which is dumb but not even going to bother, but you should know wars are won by defensive provinces), warrior is only overtaken by Cleric in offensive power after about 5 waves - 5 waves where the warrior starts with higher peak offense and thus superior offensive output per unique.
If you have better outputs per unique or better economic outputs, it stands to reason that those outputs are being leveraged in any situation, whether you're fighting a 1vs1 or multi-way hostile, or growing or whatever. Cleric has no additional outputs, only retention over time.
There are setups where Cleric's retention has more impact, like running fewer attackers and more turtles, like the 9 hitter / 16 tm setups that were popular for a while.
Undead's retention is a lot more substantial, but Undead comes with serious drawbacks like a hard restriction on thief ops and thus no nighstrike. I take it none of your undead have ever been shredded by a competent NS job? Even in ghettos I can expect to shred 15-20% of an undead's offense from a well executed core NS run. If I were really concerned about attacker offense, for sure I'd be directing stealth to focused NS. You should know tactics better than me, Mr. Pro Asshole. You should be able to calculate the effectiveness of NS on an attacker army. Then again, I see badinfo still about how NS doesn't affect armies out or doesn't affect elites, so that probably leads to a ton of kingdoms refusing to do what should be obvious.
Also lol, when Cleric was -50% and +1 gen, it was hardly "the only option". It was merely an option, and one that was often defeated by Merchant and Tactician, based on my recollection of wars. A great many kingdoms passed over Cleric then in favor of Merchant, Tactician, or Sage. Even the version with reviving soldiers wasn't an automatic win button until BB used it on a race that was actually suited to Cleric.
I remember getting into a hilarious argument with one of the so-called pro trolls about this very topic, when I argued that Cleric was being underrated by the resident IRC assholes. Naturally the community won and I lost, but my argument was scarcely different from what is the dominant thinking now - except I wasn't so bullheaded to think that my way was the only way, and merely defended the usefulness of +1 gen. Even then, I was more interested in the 5th gen than the troop sustainability... and most of the community didn't care about -50% losses either, because they correctly saw that offensive sustain by itself is overrated.