Extensive guide to Tortuns

Introduction

The tortuns are a race of people who has their priorities well clear: first is the gold, second the gold and third... the gold. Tortuns are the best sailors in the world, challenging the bravest seas and the mightiest storms if that will end with the ship’s chest full of shiny gold, their ships are built above giant marine turtles called tortalleons, these are the main strength of the tortuns, as near half his population forms part of the crew of one of these heavily armed ships. Gharivol, the capital city or the tortuns is the biggest and safest port in maljara, being the entry point of all the supplies from the mainland as well the exit of all the goods the island of maljara produces. The blooming economy of the port was the perfect place to raise the industry of the gunpowder, it’s known worldwide that the tortun weapons are the finest of all poxanthuru, well above those crafted in the foundry of Valdac and the ancient craftsmanship of the dwarves. As good sailors, tortuns have a deep faith, they worship Eriluun, the sea goddess, who grants those who pray a safe pass through the sea and gives powers to those who are worthy of her love. The blessed lead the prayers every night around the smell of incense near one the numerous altars distributed in Gharivol. The city is in one of his hardest times, besieged by the feral kanens and the ever expanding stitched army. The walls of Gharivol are thick, their defenders brave and their gunners accurate, maybe this is not enough this time, but tortuns are most willing to prove it to the last consequences.

General description of Tortuns:

Tortuns are generally slow but strong and resilient champions, with impressive damage stats, countered with ponderous, wich makes your attacks to cost 1 more ap, high standard defense and hp. Tortuns also have the capability to deploy very long range champions to keep your enemy at bay. The weakness of the tortuns is in his early game, when they are vulnerable and his low speeds can get him in tactical disadvantage and having a font or two less than his opponents, however, if you manage to past through the storm, the tortun will start to slowly overwhelm your enemy by crude nora advantage, because tortun’s racial, tortun’s trade (CD 2, For 1 turn, whenever this unit successfully attacks, you gain 1 nora for every friendly unit within 6 spaces with this ability.) says that tortuns are the best af generating nora, outclassing anyone in this category.

Tortun champions review

1) Split Heroes: you can chose only one of these per battlegroup and cannot be run in FF bg’s. They have their own defined play style and I won’t be giving them a rating, you choose the one you feel closer to your ideal.

Tremir Craghide: Commonly underrated, the first hero of the tortuns is your best melee option, good damage, hp and defense, added to rogue foe and reflexes as upgrade makes him tanky, also vindictive can increases drastically his damage output once a tortun is on cooldown. But you don’t want Tremir in the front lines for too long, because once battle starts, he will be able to cast a tortun cannon barrage every turn, a devastating AoE that can hit enemies more than once, specially effective against 2x2 units. Keep him alive and he will win you the game single handed.
Recommended upgrades: reflexes to help his survivability and violence charged 2.

Mangleshell (FS/SL): The dread pirate is the most popular split hero for tortuns, able to do massive damage at log range and to shutdown most champions willing to attack him, with intimidating, most melees won’t be even able to attack him in the absence of a prestige unit in the battlefield and ranged units can’t answer attacks once mangleshell hits them thanks to frightful blows. His high cost is eased with his signature ability pirate’s treasure, that will grant you a lot of nora if mangleshell was in play long enough and you manage to grab the “X” he leaves when he dies. Recommended upgrades: intimidating for survivability and dread to support your other tortuns a little.

2) Standard Tortuns: no special restrictions to use them (max 2of each in any battlegroup).

Exotics:


Privateer Captain: The newest addition to the admiral’s crew, the privateer captain is a champion designed to harass and defend fonts with his signature ability “change of plans” and the relics he deploy, both land mine and artillery marker are great mele deterrents to protet your ranged tortuns and great font contestors Privateer Captain also provides shatter, to relieve your corsairs of the obligation of dealing with equipment. Slam is a great asset for any rune, enabling a rich offensive gameplay by messing with your enemy's positioning, also, slam can and should be used to disengage your ranged tortuns.
The hidden jewel of the privateer captain is the ability lockdown, a ability that is both great offensively and defensively, providing tortuns a unique source of support. First of all, lockdown prevents flying, making it very useful to defend fonts in certain maps and to cliffs unaware enemies, and lots of people doesn't know about lockdown until you make them cliff his champion, doubling his efectiveness. The second thing it does is preventing relocating, this stops annoying high moblity champions that rely on teleport or leap to escape to safety, and negates relocating support, specially useful against UD. For his use in defense, this effect also applies to your own champions, so you are safe from Relocate: foe and pull, allowing to place some baits to catch the relocaters, notice the privateer itself isn't affected by lockdown, so be careful.
Versatile and handy with great font harrasing capabilities and slam 8/10
Recommended upgrades: slam and shatter or bash depending on your need of shatter.

Tortun Captain: The captain is still one of the better tortuns despite his recent nerf, cheap for his stats and with a better font capping capabilities than most tortuns, the 7 spaces he can move is enough to make him a autoinclude in tortun's bg's, he also provides the powerful scramble, one of the few abilities that supports a phalanx style of gameplay, and the versatility of stab and pin down. He is one of the few ranged unit in the game with unstoppable. You’ll feel his low real speed hard once the has battle started and you can’t count on accrue anymore.
Good font grabber, good stats and with ap gen but low real speed 6/10
Recommended upgrades: accrue and pin down.

Legendaries:


Tortun Bokor: The bokor is the only tortun that can’t be played in the natural FS/KF split, the only way to use him is making a FW split, granting you for a bit more flexibility while making a bg in this split without resigning tortuns. The bokor ñppls like a common champion for tortuns, average stats, short range with stab to go melee, the usual turtle and ponderous, but is with soul collection and cursed treasure that he brings the uniqueness to a tortun bg, soul collection will grab all globes in a big radius around the bokor, who can be in the front lines as he is tanky enough, this will give you a lot of nora (a real lot) while at the same time it s negated to your enemies, this, added to tortun’s trade, will end in a giant nora advantage that will win the game. Cursed treasure is designed to help witches rather than tortuns, but cursed is a useful condition to have applied to your enemies, so it adds to the usefulness of the bokor.
Good stats, soul collection. 7/10
Recommended upgrades: soul collection and tortun’s trade.

Rares:


Tortun Battle mystic: The combination of arrow eater and a ranged attack makes the battle mystic perfect to stall and threat unharmed your opponent’s attempts to attack you at range, add on top of that immunities to the most common non physical damage types and this champion will be able to shutdown most bg’s long enough for you to prepare your defense. He is also a great source of alt damage and your best magical attacker, something very needed due to all the vaporize and phase shift there is around, he’s very cheap so you want him deployed as soon as possible. He also have spellswallower as a upgrade, so you can choose to neglect one immunity to gain a better late game potential and mystic push, his signature ability is way more useful than it sounds and it’s better when you have both of your mystics out.
Magical damage, range hate, immunities, cheap, passive support. 10/10
Recommended upgrades: immunity fire + immunity ice or spellswallower and immunity ice or fire. I prefer to run one with spellswallower and immunity fire and one with spellswallower and immunity ice.

Tortun Corsair: The tool box of the tortun army, corsair was always around doing what had to be done and always did it well. He provides counters to countless situations: he detects, he pilfers to deal with problematic equipments and to provide a way to remove ponderous from tortuns, he has tariff to punish severely enemies for losing champions simply wreaking themes like mogas, zombies or stitcheds, he counters nora gen with resonance and can also have precision if you want to choose it over pilfer or detect. Those essential tools came together with a more than nice pack of stats, the usual unstoppable on melee tortuns and pistol shot to increase his threat range, the corsair is the response to almost any complicated situation in the battlefield but due to his cost you don’t want to deploy him over more specialized tortuns if the situation doesn’t demands it.
Good combat capabilities and wide array of tools to deal with almost anything but a bit pricey. 7/10
Recommended upgrades: detect + pilfer but depends on your distribution of counters among your other champions.

Tortun Portalmage: The most popular support tortun has his laurels well earned, short after being deployed he will accumulate enough charges to summon his first tortalleon pigmy: a 17 damage, 3 def and 59 hp monster that almost pays for the portalmage itself, he can summon one tortalleon every 5 turns (charges won’t be a problem with deploy charged 2 ), which is an incredible amount of free meat for you to throw at your enemy, meanwhile, he will be healing your other tortuns 10 hp a round to help to sustain your army. Even with 5 speed, the portalmage is always with lots of spare AP, what makes him the best target to horn of order to make him a total support machine, providing healing, ap and free meat from behind your lines. The downsides of portalmage are the delay between his deployment and his pay off , his low speed that can compromise your early game in some maps and his ease to being sniped down quickly if you aren´t careful.
Healing and lots of free meat, best user of horn of order.8/10
Recommended upgrades: charged heal and deploy charged 2

Tortun Favored: The favored has been in the shadow of the portalmage since I remember, but the recent changes to tortun’s trade and the tap to the portalmage’s summon made me to rethink about the favored. In the support section, heal mass comes very handy now that you have to clump your champions to reap the benefits of tortun’s trade, also, nora shield is no longer punished by it, allowing you to use it a full power and grant flight can be situationaly useful, but, unlike the portalmage, favored can attack, providing another source of alt damage and generating nora through tortun’s trade, favored also have tidal wave,a fixed 12 damage physical bomb that doesn’t hurt your tortuns and synergizes with some FS spells. Nora shield is specially efficient when used on tortalleon pigmies due to his nora/hp ratio and the fact that your enemy can’t ignore a 17 damage champion sitting in front of his army.
Good and flexible support with combat capabilities 7/10
Recommended upgrades: nora shield and heal mass 3

Tortun Repeater: Once he was the most overpowered tortun of all, when suppressing fire triggered once for each champion instead of once every turn, dealing obscene amount of damage and generating loads of nora due to the old tortun’s trade. Today, he’s a lot less impressive than before but remains pretty good, his main trait is his impressive range, allowing to hit the enemy well behind the front line and with the proper support, he will be attacking more than any other tortun, even reaching three attacks per round. He also provides some self support and alt damage with explosive attack and utility with sword breaking, relieving you other tortuns of the task of dealing with enemy equipments. The bad thing about suppressing fire is that your enemy has very often the decision of which unit will take the shot, reducing the efficiency of said attack and even using it against you with some range counter retaliation like RD or CA: Ranged. This is a noticeable downside for a champion near the 80 nora tag who also deals with a speed stat of 5, with everything that brings.
Very long range and good damage output but the opponent chooses the target almost always, low speed,expensive. 6/10
Recommended upgrades: explosive attack and sword breaker or font blessing.

Tortun gunslinger: One of the best ranged tortuns, what this champ have of special is the best arrange of upgrades I’ve seen in poxnora, each one viable and interesting on his own. In general, gunslinger packs high damage for a 3-5 ranged unit with good defense and hp and the standard 6 speed of tortuns and his ability, ricochet shot is very nice control ability, now, depending of the upgrades, you will have a total different champion.
With multiattack and CA: ranged upgrades you will have a nicely balanced champion in offensive with a good portion of range hate, multiattack allows for better use of tortun’s trade.
With multiattack and damage upgrade you will have an immense offensive threat hitting like a pigmy 5 spaces away and double tapping with 8 ap.
With multiattack and declare target you will have a good offensive unit that will support your other tortuns attacking that unit, this benefits mortars and repeaters more due to his long range.
With CA: ranged and damage upgrade you have the most range hate build, making practically impossible to ranged units to attack the gunslinger.
Other combinations aren’t particularly synergistic. As a note, using CA: ranged have some of the risks of suppressing fire, mostly against IS players, who with a righteous deflection will dispatch your gunslinger in a heartbeat.
Strong and flexible unit. 7/10

Commons and uncommons:


Tortun Minelayer: The cheapest tortun ( non counting tortalleon transport) alongside the broadside, he’s one of your sources of detection and he’s a lot cheaper than the corsair. He also provides a deployable land mine to bother your enemy a little. One of his upgrades should be exertion to help with his low speed and to help this champion to be useful at least as a font capper, the other can be used to bother your enemy further with more traps or to increase his less than impressive damage output with explosive attack. His 5 speed hinders him a lot and only is useful if you want to use him as a cheap detection source and to increase your chances of capping fonts first turn, exertion can occasionally get you a font in the same turn minelayer is deployed.
Detection, traps and exertion but 5 speed and bland stats. 5/10
Recommended upgrades: Exertion rank 2 and any of the others.

Tortun Mortar: Tortun mortar have good damage and the longest natural range in game, spiced with his signature ability artillery, who splashes 2 spaces around the target damaging all units for 80% mortar’s damage. This combination makes him extremely strong in the offensive, and isn’t a bland champion at defense either, with turtle and 3 defense, but to justify his really low price, his mobility is really low, 4 speed + accrue means he almost never will be able to hit in consecutive turns by his own, also, his range is great, but have a rather high minimum cap, making him very vulnerable to enemy’s mele. Their incredible damage potential is the base of one of tortun's most effective strategies, involving buffing and taking care of the mortar (read more in the bg section).
Very high damage output, very long range, non-physical, cheap but with very low mobility. 8/10
Recommended upgrades: Stat bonus: Damage 2 and Siege


Tortun Broadside: Sharing the place of cheaper viable tortun with the minelayer, we found the broadside, the ideal of the tortun ranged champion: hard-hitting and tough but slow. For his price, he’s a perfect include, his 6 range and 14 damage with the added threat of barrage is more than enough to convince the most reckless enemy not to introduce this champion inside his treat range, he also has bash, so he’s also dangerous at melee range. The bad thing about the broadside is that you need to be very careful with the amount of 5 speeders you put in your bg, as this can make your already weak early game even weaker, so he is competing indirectly with any other 5 speed champion you want to use.
High damage output, range versatility, very cheap, 5 speed. 6/10
Recommended upgrades: Barrage 1 and sunder

 

Tortun Fishkisser: Tortun’s most popular melee champion, the fishkisser is though with his two defense + tough 2 (upgrade), and his damage output and threat range is increased significantly with manic, but manic’s price is the unreliability of the fishkisser to cap fonts, hurting your early game even more than a 5 speeder, also, his price is quite high at 80 nora, he shines in chopping blocks bg's, as when he's deployed before the blocks, manic will hit before the blocks calculate the damage, giving you a nice additional hit to manipulate who the blocks target, further notes on manic available in the guide
Tank and beater bundle, bad at font grabbing, and overcosted. 5/10
Recommended upgrades; tough 2 and assault to lock ranged units, but others are viable too.

Tortun Groundpounder: Alongside the captain, one of tortuns best runners, with is ability crushing charge he adds 2 spaces to his reach and with the extra AP from opportunistic, he’s the only tortun able to reach 8 spaces the turn after he’s deployed, although this decreases in the subsequent turns. He’s got one of the highest natural damages in game, only outclassed by 4 champions in the game, and he can also upgrade to bring a good amount of champion control abilities to the table. Again, he is severely hindered by his low real speed, and this time it’s your enemy who decides whether or not you will have that extra AP. Another problem is his surprising squishness, you won’t believe this champion can be killed so fast.
Very needed runner and decent combat champion with control abilities but with low real speed. 6/10
Recommended upgrades: Antagonize and tremor

Tortun Slamhammer: Slamhammer is a champion that’s looks pretty good when you see his stats and abilities: good stats, multiattack and pummel to go through ponderous and CA: stun to get along, but he’s horribly overcosted at 83 nora, what makes him practically unrunnable, as he will never pay in the battlefield the nora you spent on him.
Nice design but very overcosted. 4/10
Recommended upgrades: resistance physical 2 and pummel rank 2 or knockback 3

Tortun Inventor: In a recent change, he’s got accrue replace with +1 speed, reducing his efficiency in what he does best: harass fonts. His lethal combination of stalling abilities allows the tortun inventor to stay in a enemy font forever, he can paralyze, then turtle, then flash bomb and he can paralyze again once discovered, he’s a bag of tricks in middle of a bunch of very straightforward champions, which is a welcome relief on the monotony of tortuns. When he’s not harassing a enemy’s font he can use a wide array of offensive support to aid you main troops, besides controlling single champions, inventor brings a lot of much needed alt damage in his basic attack, grant electricity aura, which also doubles as a perseverance counter and lighting skewer, a fixed 14 damage non targeted attack in a straight line.
Tricks, offensive support and lots of alt damage. 7/10
Recommended upgrades: Grant: electricity aura and paralyze


Tortun Grenadier: A very flexible damage dealer, with good fire damage his 2-4 range, which he can extend further with far shot alongside a powerful rank 3 bomb, this unit can attack anywhere from 1 to 7 spaces and even hit more than one unit at a time, 70 nora is more than reasonable for this reliable mid range damage dealer, the bad thing about him is he doesn’t do anything besides damaging things, so he lose points respect other champions with more utility
Single purposed unit with alt damage. 6/10
Recommended upgrades: Far shot and lay trap: fire

Tortun Galesinger: Tortun’s third mage, the galesinger tries to do a lot of things and accomplishes none. He’s very slow to take advantage of zephyr shield and, if he ever gets the chance to use of it, the threat he represents to your enemy is almost none, letting him simply wait until the shield is off, so his use as a tank/harasser is discarded. Another thing he tries to do is controlling your enemies with gale and soothing serenade, but again, his low speed and the high AP cost of this abilities doesn’t allow him to be surprising about it’s use and he will end exposed most of the times, the only reason that would make you think about using him is bastion of will, to provide a global counter to charm, abash and domination, but the galesinger isn’t a champion that will be of any help sitting at the back of your army, so avoid his use unless you are running some knockback trick deck but even there are better choices.
Unpolished unit with no clear use. 3/10
Recommended upgrades: Bastion of will and soothing serenade

Tortalleon Pygmy: The most infamous tortun of all, the pigmy was, is and will be hated because of his main trick: combo attack devastate. He was extensively used by KF players in conjunction with time slip to guarantee a almost certain kill more than 10 spaces away, being the tortun unstoppable, there is nothing you can do to avoid the tortun come and you had to retreat or block his path to save your key champion, only to see the freshly blood covered pigmy turtle to become unkillable and time slip used again. CA: devastate surprisingly still on the pigmy but moved to upgrades to deny it to portalmage’s summon. Talking about the rune itself, pigmy combines and incredible nora to hp ratio with a fearsome damage plus a dot, and with the constant threat of a sudden CA:devastate with minimum support. This two things combine excellent with favored’s nora shielded, as you will gain almost all of his price back if your enemy’s kill the pigmy, or otherwise he will be dealing lots of damage to your helpless enemy’s champion, also, with unstoppable, the options of your enemy to hold it at bay are drastically reduced making him a real trouble his downsides are his low real speed and the fact he can’t store the 10 AP needed to double hit outside of FF KF.
Good tank and beater and with CA:devastate to get instakills and cheap with 4 real speed. 7/10
Recommended upgrades: block and CA: devastate

Tortalleon Gunbattery: Using few words, gunbattery is very situational, that, and the fact that it was forgotten in Sokolov’s big tortun’s revamp, it’s enough to keep it away from your bg. Explaining further, this rune has no other use than artillery strike, a delayed AoE that’s easy to predict and avoid, making him only useful when your enemy’s cornered on when you can target your enemy’s shrine directly. This is very map dependent, and the same is accomplished and surpassed by the more flexible and mobile mortar for the same price, could be used like a lesser third mortar but it’s a overkill.
Situational and outclassed but sturdy. 4/10
Recommended upgrades: Bash and tremor

Tortalleon Transport : More a sketch than a finished rune, the idea behind it was pretty good, providing mobility to a group tortuns that are able to attack in the moment they are deployed (Unload gives unloaded champions 1 AP per enemy champion deployed and a reset, it like deploying the champions again.), but the load rate is very slow to be useful, also it requires a favored or spell support to work and is very vulnerable to spot removal. Transport was used when you were temporarily able to load champs that weren’t tortuns to load and unload ash the bandit prince repetitively to get his summons every time. After that, the ability returned to his former version and the transport into the shadows again.
Unrunnable 1/10

Directly related non-champion runes

Horn of order (FS/KF) : Tremir’s hero equipment is the most powerful equipment rune in poxnora, giving the user drive and invigorate 2, allowing to get a surprise 5 AP to perform a mini-powerturn and making the wielder a amazing support unit for the rest of the game, increasing the damage output and threat range of all the units in his surroundings. In some rare cases, you can use the horn of order to remove ponderous on a isolated tortun and get that extra attack to get a kill. You should always have at least one of these at hand, preferably 2.

Thunder (FS/SL) : Mangleshell’s personal equip increases user’s damage potential with a source of both alt damage and knockback with explosive attack 3, and gives also the interesting effect of draining your enemy’s bank of nora with each hit. When used on Mangleshell it protects this expensive champions of undesired single target spells like fading recollection or others.

Tortun Cannon Barrage (FS/KF) : A decent AoE spells when it’s at his full potential, but his randomness and his dependence on the number of deployed tortuns do you have makes it to be two steps below spells like thorn collection or stellar horizon. Tremir cast this spell for 4 charges.

Land mine (KF) : Formerly called tortun land mine. A simple shadow spawned trap with the additional effects of distract and knockback, is deployed free by the tortun minelayer and the privateer captain. It can be used defensively or offensively, and can become a good source of non controlled damage manipulating opposing champions with knockback or relocation effects to trigger the land mine damaging several units. Useful to finish or distract units charged with defensive abilities (like kento, or units with righteous deflection) if your opponent left a less important unit near it

Artillery marker (KF) : The artillery marker is a good melee countermeasure, but is extremely vulnerable to range, triggers three times before his destruction, is deployed for free by the privateer captain. Keep in mind knockback won't trigger the marker, but you can use it to lock the enemy inside the stun zone, forcing to eat the damage or receive aid to get out of there.

 

Support review

Review of selected spells, equips and relics from all factions that you can use to support your champion line up

K’thir forest

Horn of order: Tremir’s hero equipment is the most powerful equipment rune in poxnora, giving the user drive and invigorate 2, allowing to get a surprise 5 AP to perform a mini-powerturn and making the wielder a amazing support unit for the rest of the game, increasing the damage output and threat range of all the units in his surroundings. In some rare cases, you can use the horn of order to remove ponderous on a isolated tortun and get that extra attack to get a kill. You should always have at least one of these at hand, preferably 2.


Thorn collection / nature’s wrath / stellar horizon: Excellent AoE’s all of them, thorn collection refund is huge and is even better if you target a nora shielded unit of your own, nature’s wrath magic damage is a nice source of alt damage and is the cheapest rune of the three(uncommon against legendary and exotic) and stellar horizon needs to be cast centered on a champion, making it the least flexible of the three, but with a wider area of effect. Tortun battle mystics, portalmages and galesingers are wizards and can benefit from the additional effect.

Carnivorous vines / brambles / living vines: Control spells with variations carnivorous vines is single target, with the ability to grant champions inmobile, condition that paired with knockback will allow you to do extra damage and bypass knockback's only downside, that is when you cannot kill a champion if it moves, brambles deals 8 damage and living vines equips your enemy with barbed vine leash(1 loss of life on normal moving and 5 on special movement, but you can’t use it to damage your enemy by knocking it back) but is worst at applying snared

Reclaim: Good control spell that can be very useful to save your champions


Balancing force: Nice counter spell, although forgotten, it can counter righteous deflection, treefolk’s blessing, fading recollection, treefolk’s blessing, vertical push and many other runes. I can imagine that using it against UD is a risk because of sacrifice and retribution, but nice spell to have if you have the room in your battlegroup.

Protection / Escape magic: Designed to keep your key champs alive but each working in a different way, protection doubles as a automatic tank maker against bg’s with little alt damage and escape magic is more reliable, saving and getting your champion out of danger to be healed by portalmages or favoreds.

Bullseye: A nice power turn spell, the only available in FF KF or classical tortun split, tortun’s excellent ranged units will exploit this spell to his maximum. I found that using two is a waste of space in your battlegroup, but one is more than nice to have around.

Balancing act: Useful rune to protect one of your champions from range that ends being free of it didn’t accomplish the mission, Situationaly useful

Treefolk’s blessing: Spot resistance physical 3 and regeneration 3 is good to use on hard to take down champs like the fishkisser, only downside is the proliferation of alt damage. Situationaly useful

Vortex: Spot removal to get rid of those problematic champions until you draw your counter or to expulse a enemy from a font to gain tactical advantage. Very handy


Pride of K'thir: 5 global hp and +1 damage for all or most of your champions at the cost of 20 nora is always a good deal

Strategic retreat: This rune allows you to overextend your forces to achieve some kills without fearing your enemy’s retaliations, fits with tortun’s defensive play style

Herbal antidote / cleansing emerald: Best sources of cleanses of the game, each brings his own advantages, herbal antidote is countered by more sources but you don’t have the risk to be stuck without cleansing where you need it if your enemy didn’t destroyed the emerald, but emerald area of effect is bigger and if placed correctly it can deny further enemy’s attempts to put conditions on your champions.

Burning oak seed / Frostcall quiver: Both of them sources of spot alt damage, frostfall quiver add a dot to increase the damage output and burning oak seed bring a useful immunity. Use them if you don’t prefer to include alt damage champions.

Shimmering flower: Good rune used to shutdown mostly support champions, but it’s also useful against bomb champions like jangar arcanis or skywing imperator and some special champs like goblin spellkaiser.

Withering fern: Perseverance counter and slowly eats the defense of very tanky champions making them more vulnerable as turns passes. Very useful and very cheap

Dreambox: Counter relics, most likely to screw some font contesting by your enemy, but potentially giving you a good relic like unholy tomb or orb of protection to give some examples.


Eriluun’s favor: Looks great on paper, and it’s cheap, but his effect isn’t there when you need it the most, in your first turn, also, the payback is slow and you will notice his effect isn’t noticeable enough to warrant a spot

Tortun Cannon Barrage: A decent AoE spells when it’s at his full potential, but his randomness and his dependence on the number of deployed tortuns do you have makes it to be two steps below spells like thorn collection or stellar horizon. Tremir cast this spell for 4 charges.

Land mine: Formerly called tortun land mine. A simple shadow spawned trap with the additional effects of distract and knockback, is deployed free by the tortun minelayer.

Artillery marker: The artillery marker is a good melee countermeasure, but is extremely vulnerable to range, triggers three times before his destruction, is deployed for free by the privateer captain.


Time slip: The ability to give any champion 20 AP (up to 24 in case of unstoppable units) in the following turn for 30 nora is useful for a lot of things, but you want to use it in your tortalleon pigmy to get those 10 range instakills. This was already revised and was left as it is, only excluding summoned pigmies from the carnage. A very powerful combo that provides tortuns a much needed way to instakill champions. Run 1 or 2 if you are running real pigmies.

Petrichor: Powerful and cheap AoE heal. Worth using, most of the time it will have the same effect as the deploy of a Divine favor 3 champion.

Catharsis Bloom: Good healing source and contesting relic,deployed early it can create safe zones where you can retreat your injured champions, the heal from the relics adds to each other, and if you are lucky, you'll have spots were your champion can heals half his hp in a single turn. This makes a good combo with turtle, as a tortun near some blooms can heal 2 times before the enemy is able to damage him, and that ussually means a full heal tortun to take down.

Forglar Swamp

Horn of order: Tremir’s hero equipment is the most powerful equipment rune in poxnora, giving the user drive and invigorate 2, allowing to get a surprise 5 AP to perform a mini-powerturn and making the wielder a amazing support unit for the rest of the game, increasing the damage output and threat range of all the units in his surroundings. In some rare cases, you can use the horn of order to remove ponderous on a isolated tortun and get that extra attack to get a kill. You should always have at least one of these at hand, preferably 2.

Tortun Cannon Barrage: A decent AoE spells when it’s at his full potential, but his randomness and his dependence on the number of deployed tortuns do you have makes it to be two steps below spells like thorn collection or stellar horizon. Tremir cast this spell for 4 charges.

Tortun Land Cannon: A good surprise damage relic that represents a threat after his deployment and first use. It bypasses things like shielded, weaken spells, and dodge and is countered only by impenetrable, what makes him a nice addition to go around certain champs although it isn’t cheap.


Nora artillery: This spell is a total waste, it’s delayed, it’s not sure you will hit your enemy, it isn’t hidden and it’s inefficient, don’t use it.

Lost Echoes: Is the cheapest finisher you can get, in case you are a few hp short of killing a champion.

Bubble of protection: Instant buff of 35 hp to increase the survivability of key champions.

Font eruption: Powerful spell that will damage every enemy unit inside font or shrine deployment zone, it commonly run in pairs to do power turns and to destroy some key relics like chopping blocks or temple of brutality

Monsoon: Pretty weak AoE spell only doing 8 physical damage, in addition, it creates water and impending terrain that doesn’t affect your tortuns for 3 turns

Flood: Perseverance counter and situational finisher that also screws your enemy’s positioning for a while, it combos extremely well with poisonous fumes/hungry mire, it also creates water

Spirit altar: 5 global hp and +1 damage for all or most of your champions at the cost of 20 nora is always a good deal

Undertow: Relocating spell that requires water to work. It’s very dangerous when used well

Drown: Instakill spell requiring water and with some restrictions, very useful. Most of the time you’ll be able to kill a champion costlier than the spell itself, gaining nora and board advantage at the same time.

Backfire / Backfire boon: Excellent spells that will protect your clumped tortuns from aoe damage spells and will screw your enemy’s power turns. It’s up to you if you decide to pay extra to get the additional heal, but is recommended most of the time, you have to learn how to time it to get his maximum potential.


Hungry mire/poisonous fumes: Spells that are characterized for producing Aoe2 terrain that damages your enemies when they step in, bypassing things like IS bonus and spell resistance. Poisonous fumes damages more but hungry mire deals a better damage and provides a control aspect to the spell. This spells make powerful combos with knockback sources like the privateer captain or flood, with the possibility to deal huge amounts of damage surprisingly.

Boghopper bravado: Spot source of fearless and iron will to replace the absence of a prestige unit. Useful to counter defensive abilities like abash and horrific aura

Erode: Counter relic spell

Gloomwater: A good debuffing spell reducing enemy speed by 2 and making them useless to fight, It’s better than others in his type as is able to affect more than one enemy champion. It combos pretty well with backfire and backfire boon, as you practically forces your enemy to cast a spell when you use this.

Forced reconstruction: A curious spell that can prove useful situationaly, if you can’t save a tortun, you can use this spell to get an additional 13 damage hit to finish something and keep the font contested or something like that.

Cleansing mist: preventive cleanse spell that also heals a little, it’s difficult to use but FS have nothing better.

Font of restoration: Instant heal of half your champion’s that can brings cleansing if not destroyed, but it’s unlikely to survive a round unless far behind the front lines.

Circadian vault: Spot alt damage and water generation that it’s also good contesting fonts with hidden: water.

Poison trap: Good trap that depletes enemy’s AP when triggered, specially good locking champs or frustrating font contesting attempts

Swamptouch amulet: On demand escalation to make your mortars or repeaters a quickly increasing threat to you opponent.


Tome of the arcanis: A good relic that provides mainly a quick source of metamorphosis, excellent to deal with champions that are hard to handle by normal means, the book also grant the user with some other support abilities that are situationally helpful. It has to be used on a wizard and your choices for this class in tortuns are battle mystic, portalmage and galesinger.

Emergency Kit: on spot detection is super useful and powerful, and this equip also provides a speed boost for champions outside the deployment zones and MS, a damage and defense bonus.

Thunder: Mangleshell’s personal equip increases user’s damage potential with a source of both alt damage and knockback with explosive attack 3, and gives also the interesting effect of draining your enemy’s bank of nora with each hit. When used on Mangleshell it protects this expensive champions of undesired single target spells like fading recollection or others.

 

Sundered lands


Quicken/quickening: Power turn spells (single target/global) that gets you a free attack attached to the next attack your champion(s) does, this is very good in general, but with tortuns it’s excellent, high damage champions designed to not hit twice in a turn bypasses this impediment and also gets double the benefit from tortun’s trade, these power turn spell are the reason to split with SL. These trigger combo attacks, so they are pygmy's best friends,

Draconic benediction: Power turn spell that gives 3 damage, 1 defense, flying and 2 AP to all your champions, It’s not as synergistic as quickening but the addition of AP allows to a effective increase of the treat range of your champions instead of simply incrementating the damage output.

Acid storm/firestorm/tornado/burning sands: Good AoE’s with his own traits each, Acid storm is pretty standard, firestorm is stronger but costly and tornado is designed to destroy relics. Choose whatever you like the most, choosing ones with different DoTs is useful to spell spam.


Mine field: Cheap spell with a high damage potential, you can use his control aspect, countering enemy’s movement with high damage or you can effective the damage instantly with the aid of some source of knockback

Purge: Aoe Cleanse and dispel in a single rune, very flexible.

Transfusion: Increase the threat range of your champions enormously using the spare ap’s of some of your idle units or steal them from the enemy. Be careful when using this as your unstoppable tortuns won’t be able to give AP. The combination of transfusion and quicken will increase your pygmy kill range to ridiculuos amount, be sure to exploit this fully to pick off primary targets.

Cancel magic: Useful Counter spell that will save you from bad positioning or will frustrate enemy’s power turn or cleanse attempts Very recommended.

Enslave: Nice spell that can be very annoying and situationaly powerful.

Magnetize: Anti relic and anti equipment in one spell, a very useful combination that will solution all your problems in these areas.

Sandspout: control spells that blinds opposing champions in a good area, the effect is cleansable making it less powerful.

Ferocity of kain taris: Surprise your enemy giving that champion a last chance, perseverance counters are common but when it’s surprising it’s more likely you opponent isn’t ready to deploy and use them.


Mimic: Mimic may seem situational, but it's great to deal with problematic champions. Playing with tortuns, I found that a early rush with a strong champ it's all your opponent need to gain a clear advantage. With champions that counter themselves (majestic mele units like icesnap or minotaur battlemage, or most intimidating champ for example) mimic will save you the day, and is cheaper than his counters (blink and VP). Recommended.

Bloodthirsty blade: Spot multiattack and impervious can decide a 1vs.1 battle or get you that needed second attack, make sure you have a shatter option available to avoid losing your champion. Pilfering it with a corsair resets the effect duration.

Bonesplitter maul: Good equip to surprisingly increase the treat range, damage output and tankiness of your warrior tortuns (most of the melee ones, notable exeption of tortun corsair) .

Legion standard: Spot prestige and pawn, be careful not to redirect damage towards your battle mystics

Rage band: Equip that gives a good general state boost (+3 damage +1 speed) alongside with unstoppable and violent, ability that allows the user to increase his damage to ridiculous levels, outstanding when used on mortars and can be used aswell for repeaters and grenadiers. The best way to use these kind of buffing equipments is when they are the difference needed to get a death with the initial buff they provide.

Dunewalker's Mantle: Spot damage buff (+7) and mobility, conditioned by the presence of sand. These are useful if you are running dune walkers or another kind of sand generation. Best used on mortars, mangleshell, repeaters or grenadiers.

Peridot sphere: Good equip to punish your enemy’s positioning with more damage. Aoe damage can get brutal when used in combination with a mortar’s artillery or grenadier bombs.

Dragon god’s staff: good source of cleansing and dispel later.


Hive: perseverance counter and good contesting relic.


Skywing beacon: The ability to deploy champions from it can be determinant if your enemy doesn’t manage to destroy it the same turn it was deployed.

Thunder: Mangleshell’s personal equip increases user’s damage potential with a source of both alt damage and knockback with explosive attack 3, and gives also the interesting effect of draining your enemy’s bank of nora with each hit. When used on Mangleshell it protects this expensive champions of undesired single target spells like fading recollection or others.

Forsaken Wastes

Mobilization: One of the best power turn spells in the game, and by far, the most flexible, as you can use the 4 AP it gives not only to attack but to do anything from using ability to contest a font. A must

Anathema: A powerful AoE magical damage spell with the added effect of decay, his downside is that it cannot damage relics, but it’s still a tier 1 spell

Depths of Despair: A cheap finisher, cheapest of all.


Soulreave: The solution to all your problems with alt damage and also lets you bypass things like impervious and nora shielded with his loss of life effect, a very useful spell that’s even better in tortuns

Steal life: Good spell, that damages and at the same time heals one of your champions, the requirement of 0 AP is not so hindering as it sounds.

Essence drain: Halves the HP of any champion, very useful to get rid of problematic tanks and to one turn key champions

Domination: A very hated spell whose main use is cliffing champions, it’s countered by prestige and bastion of will and depends on the availability of cliffs. When it’s not used to cliff champions it can be used to get an extra attack or a useful ability from one of your enemy’s champions

Soul bane: Single target 15 loss of life and global debuff on kills.


Cloak of skulls: goes well with tortun’s good front line tanks, fishkisser and pigmies, increasing the toughness and generating more problems to your opponent to deal with.

Cursed blade: Good to nullify the menace of your opponent’s beater and to make bomb champions useless. Equip champs like Skywing imperator and piranhids quickly before your enemy’s equips them himself.

Reaper’s blade: Tortun’s high damage and ponderous makes this rune less desirable than soulreave to satisfy your loss of life needs, however, reaper’s blade also counters high defense champions, something soulreave doesn’t, so maybe you want to give it a try

Soul reaver: FW only source of spot cleanse is a must, his defiling aura can prove situationaly useful too.

Tempest crown: Good to equip your beaters to keep them alive and to make ranged units think twice about attacking them


Chopping block: The infamous chopping blocks. These two relics defines a game play style on his own, they have the wonderful capability of putting pressure on your opponent across the map, something that fits very well with tortun’s stalling play style. Don’t try to include these at light, you will need a bg made around them to take full advantage of them and even them they will take a long adaptation time to get used to the game play. The simple act of deploying these things (you don’t need to win with them) can make the inner beast on some players to take the control and you will be object of insults, on purpose disconnections and more, so be aware.

Tome of hate: Tome of hate makes his input to the attrition engine at the time it heals your shrine, this allows you to scry carelessly and to use tortun’s trade even in presence of a corrupted nora champ.

Unholy tomb: Another item of the attrition engine that generates lots of nora, however, it will also lower your champions hp, so his effectiveness isn’t the same that when used in a actual FW bg.

Ancient’s protection: Good and very cheap counter spell that damages your shrine when triggers, for that, it’s almost obligatory to run a tome of hate if you run this spell.

Elsari bazaar: Nice relic with some cheap sources of ap, it isn’t a horn of order, but will give you these little one or two ap you needed.


Grim well: Good contesting relic, it can be used to lock single units both ranged and melee in a font battle.

Ironfist stronghold


Blink: Spot removal, can be used to reset buffed enemy champions but be aware of blinking champions with on deploy effects, as they will trigger again, of course you can use this for your advantage too. If you block the spot where the blinked champion was, the come back will be delayed indefinitely, a common use of this is to blink a champion contesting a side font and drop a relic on the spot to gain the font and a superiority of 1 champ over your enemy.


Righteous deflection: The best range protection in the game, last for long and is cheap.

Impervious: You send the tortun of your choice in middle of the battle and see it go unharmed. Useful to contest crowded enemy fonts ant to protect your champs from the splash damage of your mortars or spells/bombs.

Refute: This rune will make a mess of your enemy's plans, time it right and you will send the counter your enemy was waiting to draw and all his copies to cooldown, this rune is particular in that it can counter any kind of rune, not just spells, for this reason, it's harder to catch the desired rune, but the versatility it brings is unmatched

Unobstructed view: the solution to your detection needs

Earthquake/Bane blast: both of them damaging AoE’s, they are not specially strong, bane blast can benefit from having a tortun inventor to apply paralyze or can be used also a hammered(hammer strike) to make good damage. Earthquake bring a great control aspect but not hitting flying units is a noticeable downside. Privateer's captain lockdown helps with this issue, grounding all champions in range.

Disarm: Spot shatter

Hammer strike/ sapping beam: Used to lock down a single champion, sapping beam last longer and hammer strike damages in addition to his effect. Both of them are useless against unstoppable champions

Gravity flux: Interesting spell with two main uses in tortuns: getting champs near your CA: devastate tortalleon pygmy and clumping your enemy’s champ together to blast them off with mortar’s artillery. Tortun battle mystic’s mystical push it’s very useful when trying to cast this spell as it will allow you to clump your enemy’s champions without putting one of yours at harm.

Might of ironfist: good mini-powerturn spell, pummel is only useful with melee champions but the damage increase can be used on ranged units in special cases, specially good with CA: devastate and his loss of life component can be used to finish kills and to counter perseverance

Strip armor: Most efficient tortuns are physical damage, so you can run these as a power turn spell with success, but you won’t take advantage of his full potential without the trick runes needed for his specific exploit.

Tales of valor: Powerful damage buff for champions near his end.

Tactical Manual: Cheap equipment that provides a slight boost on damage and a moderate healing source, the fact that it encourages your opponent to damage your champion to control your damage doesn't help too much.

Forge hammer: cheap equipment to increase your tortun's damage stat. It gives permanent +2 damage and 4 more when you are near a relic. It synergizes nicely with guard tower to get an +8 damage and 3 defense on any tortun, preferably a mortar or repeater.

Granite bracers: Good to protect a champion from traditional attacks, but sadly it is wasted without block and dodge, and only the tortalleon pygmy has one of those


Holy blade of valdac: Spot prestige and alt damage with added dot. A handy equipment to have if you have the room

Full plate armor: It’s fun when used on a tortun fishkisser: resilient + tough 2 means no aura damage unless amped and manic is excellent to bypass the drawbacks of lumbering.


Wildeye bracers: Extrange piece of equipment whose main use is as a negative equipment on AP control decks. Listed here because the lore is tortun based.

Guard tower: spot battlemaster and detect to aid in battle and knockback and resistance to last longer, a exellent contesting relic that can be very helpful in many situations. It combos with forge hammer to make mortar/repeater powerturns.

Earthshaker: Sturdy relic with crowd control, exellent at contesting and useful for finishing champions.

Morin's Corner: Cheap healing relic.

 

Shattered peaks

Avalanche/ lighting storm/bad blood: Aoe’s with slight differences, avalanche is more useful in general but lighting storm has a better damage type and synergizes with water generation.

Havoc’s touch/Zealotry/Peak tactics: Different ways to increase the damage output of champions, better used on mortars or repeaters. Notethat zealotry doesn’t increment the splash damage of artillery

Ferocity of kain taris: Surprise your enemy giving that champion a last chance, perseverance counters are common but when it’s surprising it’s more likely you opponent isn’t ready to deploy and use them.

Moga Rumble Pack: Powerful equipment that grants vivify, a reliable and constant source of AP once the battle started, a way to make up for tortun's low speed


Alacrity: AP generation is always useful and this is a more than decent power turn spell.

Vertical push: Spot removal spell with added damage, useful in font contesting situations as you will be able to deploy champions to help finishing the VP’ed enemy.

Cyclops eye belt: Spot slam, better used on special bg’s but can prove useful in general, excellent in a tortun repeater, even if it doesn't trigger with suppresing fire.

Diamond mace: Spot shatter

Earthshaker’s bracelet: Spot immunity to the most common damage with the bonus addition of a control ability.

Ol’ sok: Source of poison clouds, very synergetic with slam.


Slaver’s whip: Drive and possession in one equip, meaning that your champion will be able to do some support after making a chasm kill.

Vicious harpoon: Pull is a very powerful mechanic, allowing you to screw your enemy’s positioning and set up easy kills, it’s even better when it’s available surprisingly in the place you need it.

Cleansing emerald: Excellent source of cleansing, it’s also SP/KF so it flexibilizes the battlegroup building a little


Echo chamber/thunderhead totem: Damaging relics, thunderhead totem doubles as perseverance counter and echo chamber applies distract and is as powerful as a AoE spell.

Ritual of Binding + 2xOnus of kiergana: The shrine sentence combo, it founds in tortun mortars the perfect partner, as our little 8 range siege champions can output tons of damage to a shrine from a mile away, and onus of kiergan will get rid of bothersome champions. A combo worth building for.

Whispers of the mind: Cheap control spell that not only will save your champions from the attacks of your enemy but will also leave it undefended at your mercy.

Savage tundra

Arctic gift: If drawn early, you can forget of any problem you thought you were going to have, more pseudo speed, more stats and mobility are a really nice boon for tortuns. You cannot count on it too much thougt, if you can cast it before you start deploying tortuns it's a dead slot. Portalmage can use it to spread the ice with his summon,

Ice storm: Powerful AoE spell, sadly, ice hinders tortun’s too

Frigid barrier: Good damage and control spell that only works on fonts

Ice gale: ST’s staple of all time, ice gale knockback will get you chasm kills, positioning advantages and huge amounts of damage when used correctly and you learn to fully exploit all his incredible flexibility.

Cleansing storm: Good source of cleanse, also cleanses your enemies


Healing hand/ phoenix’s anklet: Ways to avoid the death of your own champions, It’s nice to have the option to give that champion a second chance or to destroy your enemy’s plan for his turn, having to deal with an unexpected situation

Snow blind: Awesome counter to targeted spells with the potential to turn the power of the spell on the user, you can cast it and it won’t expire, so you don’t need to be very careful about timing. It’s pretty popular, so it won’t be a surprise if your enemy cast his spell to avoid it being countered.

Flag of unification: spot prestige (limited to an aoe) and ranged protection, but inutilizes a champ, tortun’s doesn’t have a good target for this equipment

Ice carved greaves: Spot alt damage that also is able to give a ranged champion a melee attack.

Keeneye crown: Increasing range is very powerful, specially when you use it on your 8 range mortars or 7 range repeaters.


Coordination tower: The ability to increase damage in spot is excellent when playing mortars or repeaters but it’s also useful n general

Ferren hideout: Spot relocate is as powerful as ap generation, so become familiar with this relic to take full advantage of it.

Underdepths


Fire blast/Superiority/Maddening echoes/Fiery ambush: Some of UD’s best choices on area damaging spells, each one with his own benefits and drawbacks

Fading recollection: useful to get rid of problematic champions and making support units and some very abilities reliant champions useless.

Sacrifice/Retribution: UD’s most used spells of all times, they define UD’s identity by his own. Getting a last use of your almost dead champions makes this runes very efficient, both the nora gained back and the damage dealt are huge in exchange of an almost dead champion

Avenging flame: Somewhat tricky spell, it punishes the enemy with damage and a control debuff on the death of target champion. It combos well with sacrifice.

Masochism: Protect all your champions redirecting all the damage your enemy deals redirecting it to a expendable one. The damage is transferred as loss of life, so it bypasses impervious from turtle


Purefire: Spot single target cleanse and dispel, a very useful spell combining two great effects making it very flexible.

Summon borghas: When playing mortars and grenadiers, you will be able to make devastating Aoe damage using fire volatility from the summoned borghas.

Shatter: spot shatter that also damages the target champion

Mandate from Sheoul: Strong spell, that will provide a good amount of heal, a stat boost and a equip if used correctly. Pilfer on corsair allows you to grant a ranged unit the perks and still use the BotS

Molten cloak: Very cheap and provides a lot of useful things, immunity to fire and frost, a damage shield to discourage melee, trail lava and the ability to apply inhibited. It makes a lot for what you are paying.


Tinder box: Source of healing when fire damage is present, also adds a rank 3 aura to increase damage or to counter perseverance. It adds a very needed +1 speed to tortun grenadier and mortar

Orb of protection: Global range protection relic with a effect that stacks and also heals with fire damage. Very powerful.

 

Non tortun Champions review
The nature of tortun’s trade makes choosing champions that aren’t tortuns a bad choice most of the time, however, there are certain champions you would like to include anyway because his synergy with the theme, or because you like them or maybe you don’t have a specific tortun to fill that role, also, in certain splits, you are forced to run outside theme champs to be able to carry the required amount of champions and keep some key support like Horn of order or others. Here are listed selected champs from all factions that are specially synergistic with tortuns to help you to fill that hole in your battlegroup.

K’thir Forest


Elven strategist: Relocate: ally, Relocate:foe and battlemaster make him a very powerful support unit, adding the much needed mobility to tortun bg’s and increasing the treat range of all your army.

Epochal Sage: global support with the possibility of repeated triggers of premonition and divine favor, with drudgery to control the enemy. Haste is an exellent support ability when used on mortars and pygmies.

Elven Bard: global AP gen and soothing serenade for a reasonable price

Wizard of the ways: Great font runner that also provides great mobility support and sunder at very long range, he also has relocate: foe to manipulate enemy champions-

Angel of restoration: A nice champion by itself, k'thir's angel can do a lot of healing and cleansing with the correct upgrades and can be a good standalone champion if you choose the others. Worth trying in FF KF.

Aspect of life: Dedicated healer, the best of his kind, it can also tanks a little with majestic and ethereal

Dugon, garu stalwart: Powerful tank with combat support and control abilities

Fairy trickster: Counter spell mastery and metamorphosis are handy tools to have at disposal

Elven Taskmaster: Use it just behind your mele to use drive and command charge and to hit from behind your tanks, this will allow you to run a bg with few to none melee sources, as command charge works on ranged units, so you can get those hits to deal with units with range defense.

Fae oracle: Champion with snowballing potential in FF KF with control abilities and weaken spells to support your clumped champions

Avenging angel: Divine favor 3 + invigorate 2 are enough reasons to include this champion

Ghost Stalker: A interesting support unit, with the swap + cast: ghostly visage upgrades, and his most important ability this champion will prove as a very versatile ally for tortuns. Soul collection helps a lot with the low speed and number of champions tortuns ussually deploy, swap is a great offensive/defensive tool, you can increase a broadside's barrage range to inavoidable levels, or retreat valious units from the front lines. Cast:ghostly visage can be used as a defensive ability, a flight source or to control enemy units. The stalker itself is a good target for visage, as he will be able to swap and collect globes while corporeal.

Occuli slag: A replicating nora miner with utility: detection, grant: flight and the ability to chain premonition. It's used in conjuction with catharsis bloom to heal the replicas and conbined effort to gen even more nora.

Forglar Swamp


Firk mastermind: Ranged alt damage and support with battlemaster and command: dodge

Salaman negamage: Source of dispel and sever summons, depending on the popularity of certain themes having sever summons can be the difference between a viable bg or not.

Boghopper shaman: Divine favor 3 with heal mass to further healing once it’s deployed. Excellent target for Horn of order

Angel of nourishment: On spot cleanse and healing with good speed and combat capabilities once intensified

Jellebrium darkweaver: Ranged alt damage with shroud and drudgery to slow down your enemy.

Tide master: Good meta rune to complement your favoreds in water generation in case it's needed.


Salaman hunter: Good option to increase range dominance in a FS BG.

Snaptooth ancient: Good range with entangling attack and Blood for nora, also creates poison clouds, powerful offensive weapons when paired with knockback support and can be used to heal after a blood for nora use.

Darkmarsh enforcer: Decent font runner with drudgery to control the ap of your enemy, it’s also great to stall the game to give you time with his set of abilities and cheap price.

Revolting Fentek: a decent melee unit with a forced movement ability and a poison cloud trap that synergyze with many tortun abilities and champions, like suppressing fire on tortun's repeater. Repulsion also is useful for his capability of disengaging your tortuns in a big radius, allowing to increase your threath range significantly.

Augur of the deep: A top FS unit with slam to add to many synergies present with tortuns. Slam is a really versatile ability as analysed in privateer captain's review.

Sixul: FS's 150k is a great frontline unit, tanky, with good damage output and with pull to threathen the enemy, what makes him really nice with tortuns is fire volatility, that can be used in powerful combos with mortars and grenadiers.

Sundered Lands


Snogvie the antbear: The ultra powerful snogvie can find his place in any SL bg, if you have it, there is no reason not to run it: A powerful greeting that also distracts and destealths on deploy, extremely good range, best type of damage of the game and weaken spells. He is also resistant to range with absorb and is impossible to one round him without dispel support.

Draksar Broodqueen: Detection and invigorate makes her autoinclude, immunity fire and lay hatchling to work with mortars are nice bonus.

Draksar morph: A nice ranged champion with alt damage that also packs three interesting abilities: metamorphosis to deal with problematic champions, mutation to buff your champions and blood for nora that is great to make those costly SL power turn spells cheaper.

Draksar bookburner: Anti spell and anti wizard support with ignorance, council spells and book burn. Also great range to hit behind your tanks.

Draksar forerunner/Draksar explorer/Kanen tracker: Cheap champions that fulfills at the same time the roles of font runners and detection sources and do that greatly, every one has his own merits to be chosen and all of them makes great target to Horn of order due to his high ap generation.

Skeeick herder: Access to both drive and declare target for a fair price, he also generates sand in case you are running mantles, a great support champion. His signature ability will make a good discount on SL beasts that you may run, like snogvie or doombringers.

Mantid tracker: A rune that can serve as a cheap detection and font runner or can be used like a declare target machine to make surprising power turns.


The doctor: A great support rune that brings heal, dispel and mutation for a bargain price. It also grants a 6 nora bonus every time he grabs a globe in addition to his gain of charges to heal. Good target for horn of order, It can combo with myx matriarch to dispel cocooned units to avoid waiting and gaining the buffs immediately.

Myx matriarch: A nice support unit that brings free meat, the powerful and low cd cocoon, to buff your champions and protect them for a while or dispel right after the cast to get the buffs instantly, also either a greeting to help like a anti stealth or soothing serenade to shutdown champions, I prefer this last, as you want matriarchs as early as possible.

Negation mage: A particular rune that has the potential to win the match by itself. Soul collection is the answer to a great problem of tortuns that is they low nora globe picking rate, each globe that the mage grabs is one your enemy doesn’t, incrementing the already big nora advantage from tortun’s trade. The negation mage also has counter spell mastery to protect your army and meaning that once the negation mage reaches the needed amount of charges, your opponent will have to pick it down or waste an additional spell to cast whatever he needed.

Draksar marauder: Great front line champions with a nice 1-2 range, good stats, support with battlemaster, a bomb and potential to snowball with his mutations and violent, the nature of the interaction between bombs and violent makes this champion is better run in pairs or with another front line draksar at least.

Draksar marine/berserker: Draksars with Ally fs and kf respectively, they find their efficiency increased in presence of tortuns. They are fast mele champions providing more damaging power the berserker and more control options the marine

Dune walker: Provides mobility to your tortuns and sand support if you want to run dunewalker’s mantle. He's the core of the sand theme, and you'll want him in in case you want to focus in sand to split with SL. He, as a second deploy, increases the movement range of the unit deployed first in 3 spaces, helping a lot with the lack of fast units and complex terrains. The fact that he can use his grant abilities in the moment he's deployed is great to make surprise moves. To make him even better, tunnel abilities aren't relocation abilities, so privateer's lockdown doesn't bother with the added mobility.

Dragon engine: Good anti rush and font runner, it represents a serious threat to anyone, it’s severely countered by fading recollection and shimmering flower, so be careful when playing this champion.

Mengclan Lord: Offensive support unit with lots of useful abilities to help to tortun's offensive success and nora advantage with long games. His signature ability, bound nora, will give you a the advantage of a whole turn of font's nora generation, and for this, the longer the game is, the greater this advantage become, and that suits well tortun's late game potential, this also works as a anti-counter-powerturn limiting your opponent resources to answer a quickening/draconic benediction turn. The rest of his ability set is useful as well, pull is a great addition to any battlegroup, entangling attack is a good debuff against melee champions, drive is great also to support tortun's heavy hitters and shred defense and swordbreaker add two very useful counters. Pull can trigger the effect of artillery marker, giving you a way to damage and stun champions (for 1 turn), this can be useful against elusive/block/doge/counterattack champions.

Broodguardians: Detection grunt, overcosted, but with a fun set of abilities, aiding the tortun phalanx with defender and hoping from font to font to deal with those annoying font harrassers. Privater captain can provide him enough relics to count consistently with the buffs from guardian. If you can get some broodlings of him, they can be interesting rush deterrents or 1 hit dummies. They can also feed the doctor with deaths and globes as they are real champions, every globe the doctor grabs from one of the broodlings will give you 11 nora.


Forsaken Wastes


Sarinda: Great rune that represents a threat by his own to any champion with her ability deathstrike and also supports your champions offensively with relocate foe. Dark healing is a great ability that not only cuts your enemy’s healing but also heals all your champions in return. Great unit in general and better in attrition/chopping block bg’s, it also contributes to the duration of elsari coven with tortun bokors.

Cleric of unrest: A invigorate champion with a debuff and weaken spells.

Mute Stalker: an Ally:KF champion that makes for an exellent melee unit, with good stats and range hate, he also has a exellent upgrade selection. recommended.

Obsidian venger: The star of every chopping block/attrition bg able to afford him. This champion is able to deal high amount of damage and go unscathed with oblivion shield. He also has a Aoe loss of life cast and decay, a ability that cuts in half your enemy’s healing.

Executioner: Cheap melee grunt good at capping fonts due to exertion. A place filler in the absence of better candidates.

Undead magister: Counter spell Treat him like a spell most of the time, but may be able to cap a side font sometimes.

Xulos, undead sage: Of course, in the moment you deploy Xulos in a split he will die, so I going to talk only of his on deploy and on death effects. First of all, if you manage to get Xulo’s globe with a bokor (very easy with soul collection) it will be end costing 75 nora, 75 nora for 9 global loss of life and 12 instant healing to all your troops and further healing in the next turn. I f we consider what other factions pay for divine favor champions and how much do they pay for damage spells with similar damage but restricted AoE, the price it's very cheap, with the downside of having to use both effects at the same time. I consider Xulo’s is a good addition to attrition bg’s and I have used it with success in the past.

Elder bloodbinder: powerful unit with ranged alt damage, a melee form with detection, shroud for support and vaporize for survivability.

Stitched librarian: A pack of utility, having detection and shatter in a single cheap champion, it is useful to cap side fonts and he will hinder your enemy’s nora generation when he build enough charges. Recycle can be used to get free horn of order uses.

Stitched anathema: FW’s only source of sever summons.


Frostvein witch: long range alt damage + dot with drudgery, blockade and debilitate to stall the enemy, contributes to the duration of elsari coven with the bokors.

 

Ironfist Stronghold



Dwarven mortar crew: If you like mortars and you want to have 4 of them in your bg, this rune is the solution, dwarven mortar crew brings more range dominance to the battlefield than his brother itself. With a basic attack and artillery strike, this champion will make your enemy to think twice about his positioning, as is practically impossible to escape his huge range and to spread enough to avoid artillery’s strikes, add to this the problem that tortun mortars also bring to enemy’s positioning and you will make the match a nightmare to your opponent.

Dwarven sergeant: Excellent support unit, giving loads of ap with drive and rallying cries and supporting your champions with command: block and train strike. He is specially good to be left behind among your longest range units, as he will be able to increment their damage output a lot and also he can defend them of sneaky champions as his damage will escalate to surprising levels with surge: enemy.

Ethereal priestess: Good unit to take care of mortars or dwarven mortar’s crew, making these champs fearsome with hasten and keeping them healthy meanwhile with heal mass, she also provides soften and force barriers to stop the foe or do some knockback combos.

Leoss monk: Good invigorate unit, that also carries good combat abilities (although with merciful) and two great support abilities like divert and righteous shield.

Leoss magnate: the newest leoss is a neat support unit, with haste and magnate blessing he will be able to effectively support frontline champions as well as long range champions, while adding his own attack with decent range and alt damage. He has access to divine favor 3 to heal on deploy.

Dwarven king/Wild chieftain: Warcry units to make powerturns.

Dwarven roughneck: A bag of tricks to break with the monotony, combat awareness means that you can bomb and attack adjacent units with the mortar without any harm for him. Brings controlling abilities and stealth and that makes him excellent to harass fonts.

Mountain sentry: cheap detection + harrasser, can prove useful if the most is done with retreat and mark. Pilfer is nice for horn of order powerplays.

Grintmaw shaman: Heal and cleanse with the addition of the annoying dampen that will cut in half your enemy's best attack stat inside the area of action. Good support/healer

Ironfist agent/Nightwatch: Both of them sources of stealth and control abilities, different in each case, with the added utility of shatter. Agent's mines are the same as minelayer's. The agent was the first really popular corrupted nora champion, so it is hated by many tortun players.

Groble rock-eater: Pretty self explanatory, the groble rock eater tanks against damage types making him a exellent locker/staller, as good as the tortun battle mystic at it. Hard counters lets you safely build up your army untill the enemy draws a counter, buying you some precious time.

Stone Colossus: A useful tank, with an amazing nora to HP ratio to synergize with favored's nora shield along with tortun-like stats with 17 damage and 4 defense, he's also unstoppable so you don't miss anything from the mele tortuns he's replacing. Colossus is vulnerable to magical damage,and that can be a big liability against some bg's but it's compensated with resistance physical 1 and prestige, a needed counter that also negates dwarfbound on this champion, making him able to be splashed in these decks.

Rockforger: A tank with free meat and self healing abilities, with the key ability vitalize, a strong global support that gives +1 speed to champions with less than 6 speed. Tortuns have many viable champions able to benefit from this and this makes this rune a strong include.


Angel of mercy: Best healing and cleansing support in the game IMO. With intensify and cleansing aura he will be a excellent support unit, shutting down debuff based bg's and after a while he can attack with a respectable damage at great range.

Veilwalker: The veilwalker is a great support unit for tortuns, blood for nora is great when there is plenty of healing, despoil provides defensive support against spells and helps to get globes and hex is exellent as tortuns lacks debuffs.

Priest of valdac: Divine favor unit with Heal 3 to further heal after deployment.

Northern cross militia: Divine favor unit (rank 2), with added abilities more focused on annoy the enemy, like antagonize, bodyguard or restraining aura.

Ivory wing: A single target cleanse and healing unit with a counter to high defense champions.

Ironfist collector: Recycle is not only a way to deal with enemy equipments, is also very useful in tortuns/IS splits, as you'll be running soul reaver/vial of holy water that you will want to recycle as soon the first cleanse is done, gaining a free cleanse and being able to reuse the equipment quickly. Recycling a Horn of order will allow you to do creative powerturns and to get rid of ponderous, again, for free. combine with armory to get a powerful nora generation engine given enough equipments.

Nora miner: Self explanatory, use these to increase your nora advantage over your adversary.

Savage Tundra



Lonx beast tamer: Definitive support champion for tortuns with invigorate and drive making her a walking horn of order with the addition of vitalize on top of that.

Chronomancer: Great support unit with good mobility and great control abilities, able to buff your champions and stall the enemies. Spell shift is nice.

Crystal phoenix: Divine favor 3 unit with inmortality Freeze bug keeper: Sever summons unit with nora mine, can chuck a freeze bug and kill it with sever summons to make an instant death nova.

Jakei heretic/Valassa the elder: Very long range alt damage with support in the form of crystallize and shroud for support and horrific aura to improve survivability.

Jakei starseer: Prestige unit with invigorate rank 1 and starshine to give majestic to nearest champion. Prophetic balance and gift of scrying are nice.

Strig warlock: Blood for nora unit with shroud and a swarm, making for a very complete champion. He can also damage on deploy or become another source of detection.

Jakei wingmaster: Detection unit with good speed and battlemaster to support your units.

Jakei maiden: Excellent and cheap unit for mass healing and cleansing. It also brings some control abilities but is better if she is at a safe place.

Jakei frost queen: Very long range to add to your already long range champions to further out range your enemy.

Artic delegate: A good set of support abilities with divert, stall and heal champion, all paired with a awesome range to hit from behind your tanks and support them from near.

Yeti druid: Nice suport champion with cleansing aura and heal champion as upgrades for healing and divert to support your champions. Favor is nice to help him pay his cost back.

Yeti scout: Detection and shatter in one cheap champion.

Yeti tracker: harasser and support bundle, has a really good presence on fonts with snow trap and stealth and can help greatly with declare target. A combination of an advanced yeti tracker deploying a ferren hideout and declaring a enemy as a target can make for a 10 spaces pygmy instakill.

Leoss monk: Good invigorate unit, that also carries good combat abilities (although with merciful) and two great support abilities like divert and righteous shield.


Leoss magnate: the newest leoss is a neat support unit, with haste and magnate blessing he will be able to effectively support frontline champions as well as long range champions, while adding his own attack with decent range and alt damage. He has access to divine favor 3 to heal on deploy.

Tundra whisper: magical damage, annoyance with ethereal and majestic, grant frost aura to increase damage and counter perseverance and three wishes to boost your tortuns, most useful on tortun gunslingers with his magnific set of upgrades and to give summoned pygmies the power of combo attack: devastate

Shattered peaks



Cyclops warwizard: If you replace every “cyclops” in this rune with “tortun”you would have the best offensive support unit you can ask for. Sadly, it's not that way and you'll have to comform with a slightly worse version. With grant: teleport he will aid with the low mobility of your champions, with stall he will help to control the enemy and with the incredible powerful cast: alacrity this unit will be making powerturns every time the ability is off cd. Very recommended if you're going to run Tortuns/SP

Cyclops wardrummer: Cheap source of vitalize and knockback with a good amount of HP.

G’hern general: Nice standalone unit with a really nice set of supporting units. Battle leader will allow you to build up all your army at the same time and with designate flagbearer and battlemaster he will provide a lot of phalanx support

G’hern soothsayer: Ranged alt damage with multiattack 3 and sunder, if this isn't enough, add blood for nora and prognostication for more utility and lifedrinker for self healing.

Hyaenid mundunugu: Ranged alt damage with control abilities, metamorphosis being excellent to help to kill problematic champions like groble rock eater or Rugolth's revenge

Hyaenid pack leader: Good front line champion with area support with command dodge and declare target to increase the threath range of your champions. He's 7 speed also, to help with your bg average speed.

Moga conduit: Counterspell source able to cap fonts.

Voil infernal: Excellent healing unit with detection. It also counters enemy healing with dark healing and have hex, a source of loss of life and a powerful debuff. His attack isn't negligible either, and lifedrinker is nice for his survivability.

Voil jester: This champion packs a bag full of annoyance, with deflect and divert you enemy will have a hard time attacking, and with his other abilities he will keep sabotaging him. For tortuns, it's recommended to choose the book burn upgrade.


Voil transporter: Detection unit that also adds mobility to your army, he's also a very cheap 7 speed flying champion that helps a lot if deployed early, as he'll be able to cap a side font and can ease a tortun into rougher contesting zones. Relocate: Ally range is long enough to avoid being severely hindered by privateer's lockdown. As this champion is ussualy with spare AP mid to late game, he's an exellent for equipment such as horn of order and vicious harpoon.

Voil lifestealer: Excellent font runner and contester. He can capture adjacent fonts immediately with exertion, and with life siphon, evasive and hit and run he will be able to defeat in 1vs. 1 almost any champion. I found that playing against him, only a fishkisser or a slamhammer can win in a font contesting situation against him, so it's a champion to be considered.

Slag Overmind: The best relocate: ally unit in the game, it's practically imposible to take down from range due to paralityc feedback, has mindwipe aura to escape engagements or, if you choose, illusion of lies, that will give you lots of useful ilusions, they are good for grabbing globles, dropping relics, triggering traps, serve as knockback damage fooder and as thorn collection refund increaser.

Mud Elemental: super efficient grunt with useful resistances and access to cast hungy mire to support knockback mechanics

Moga Cannon: The most similar thing to a tortun mortar you'll find out there.

Underdepths

Deep elf summoner: Invigorate unit with a summon to annoy and slow the enemy.

Deep elf infiltrator: A good harassing unit, that provides both stealth and detection, a nice combination that maximizes the effectiveness of detection. It also bring a mobility/powerturn enabler option with call of the hunter.

Minotaur sentry: Detection unit with good survivability against both ranged and melee attackers. It also supports allies with battlemaster and can deploy a contesting relic.


Ember wasp: Source of fire volatility to make devastating area damaging with paired with fire bombs, mortar's artillery and borghas.

Nefari griefbearer: Sever summons, drudgery, relieve and dispel makes for a great utility champion, running it will free you from running less efficient tortun champions with the same counters.

Nefari messenger: 7 speed and initiative to accelerate your game a little and drive to support your champions. His range is great to hit from behind your tanks and his damage is decent.

Nightfall spider: 7 speed and elusive champion with valuable magical melee damage, but nightfall spider main job is to bring a lot of stealth to your bg, making the game suddenly change for your unaware adversary.

Nefari caverunner: One of UD's best units, caverruner brings a amazing set of abilities for a bargain price. Initiative to spice up his early game and tunnel to provide her mobility and extend his movement range further. Flash bomb is a great ability for control enemies that also increases caverunner's survivability a lot, making her a powerful font contester. To add to his damage output there is fire bomb, allowing her to hit up to seven spaces away and make powerful combos with fire volatility from borghas and ember wasp. A very reccomendable unit.

Goblin spellkaiser: Meta unit with good mobility and a more than interesting set of abilities. Spellkaiser has a wide variety of forms to attack, control and debuff your enemy's champions. He is hard countered by distract, shimmering flower specially, and fading recollection.

Puppet Master: Puppet master have a incredible synergy with tortuns, starting from mystic push, that stacked with those of the battle mystic will make almost impossible to your enemy to cast offensive spells, also dread can be stacked with mangleshell's to get a almost global 6 damage debuff, that combined with the 3 regular defense of tortuns will make killing your champions a hard task and energy thief, that can be used to feed the puppet master with ap to transfer with his signature ability can be used comfortably with the number of unstoppable tortuns available. Grant flight on favored can be used to negate the drawback of lumbering on puppet master's ability.

 

Strategy Section:
Battlegroup building: General considerations

Speed Distribution in a tortun BG

Let me talk to you a bit about speed distribution in a bg and how tortuns rely and compete with each other for a spot in a battlegroup based on his opening speed. Right now, there are tortuns with the following opening speed in non FF KF and non IS splits.
8 (spaces first turn) 1 groundpounder
7 captain, minelayer
6 lots, some with natural 6 speed and some with pseudo 6 speed
5 repeaters, portalmage, broadside
4 fishkisser (manic can benefit you or not, the reliability of the fishkisser is the same as a 4 speeder)
In most maps, drawing 5 speed or less means you can't reach your natural font in first turn, that means you don't want to include many champions on that bracket because they'll end costing 12 more nora if drawn first turn in many maps. 4 (of 16-17 champions) is the most of this champions you can include before taking serious risks (in my experience). Also, in some maps, you need 7-8 speeders to be able to cap first and second font and don't be vulnerable to rushes or losing the mid font very early (later you can afford losing the mid font, but very early is difficult to overcome) a decent number is also 4 (again, empirical) as a proper 7-8 speeder will give you 12 extra nora (respect to a 6 speeder who cannot cap the far font) and vital board presence to avoid rushes.

As you can see, the +1 speed of FF KF drastically alters the variety of champions you can include in your bg, and the IS font bonus has a similar effect but to a lesser extent. increasing the flexibility of those battlegroups.


Stalling and getting to the late game

The nature of tortun champions have a direct incidence on the gameplay you have to unfold to achieve their maximum potential. Tortuns are focused on create a progressive nora disparity between you and your opponent to finally overwhelm him with it. This process takes time, so your bg have to be able to hold a long game and take advantage of your extra nora while at the same time making your opponent less likely to turn the game or rush your shrine or win the game by any mean he's trying to, the only way to accomplish this is by including more champions than regular bg's, to be always able to turn your nora advantage in board advantage, cementing your victory and increasing the nora gain rate.
More than once I found myself without champions to deploy after a long game, and I always include around 18 champions. Of course, making a bg that is focused on a long game makes it less eficcient in the early game against bg's designed for matches no longer than 15 minutes, so you have to be wise and you have to balance your late game potential with adequate responses and counters needed to survive the early game. What you have to remember is that when nothing happens in a turn, you are winning, as your late game bg will perform better than your enemy's normal bg the higher the turn count is. For that, you want the turns to pass without great events most of the time, to do that you have to do is what is known as stall the game.
Stalling the game is something that can take many different forms, but the ultimate end of it is the same, make the game as long as you can without entering noticeable engagements with your enemy. One way to stall the game is by threatening your adversary with severe loses in case of advance, a tortun broadside ready to barrage, a pigmy ready to instakill anything that approaches, a battle mystic immune to ranged attacks closing over his frail attackers that are trying to get a hit, and a lot of other examples. Other thing you can do is engage your champions on skirmishes that ends without real losses to you, for example, let it damage a champion that will be healed later, or sending him a free summon from the portalmage or a nora shielded unit to maximize the nora spent per time gain. Remember, getting to the late game is your only way to win and for that stalling is essential.
Stalling the game doesn't means, in any way, letting pass opportunities to gain a clear advantage over your enemy, it only means to minimize the chances of your enemy to take that decisive advantage over you. If you are pushing hard, you open yourself, and that can be the chance to your enemy to kill one or more of your champions and begin to dominate the game from that base. Not pushing hard doesn't mean not to capitalize your opponent's mistakes or a situation where you have a clear chance to get a successful skirmish, maybe your opponent didn't draw a good melee unit, and you can go forward and engage his ranged champions or kill them with your battle mystics or gunslinger to get a early victory, or any situation like that, but always keep in mind that is safer for you to keep options closed and let your bg's lategame potential decide the game.
Another thing essential to stall and successfully survive the early game is counter deploying, get to know your champions, learn where they success and where they fail, have a wide array of options to deal with most situations and don't let the enemy to have the upper hand with a champion that counters yours. In the early game, don't be hasty to deploy your winning methods, it's better to counter deploy wisely and to form a strong base to protect yourself and only then begin to work for the win.
Remember that every bg has their own particularities, and they will be analyzed in each respective case, but these general comments will be helpful for every tortun bg you make.

 

Battlegroup Building: Analysis

Full faction K'thir Forest

The most powerful tortun battlegroup nowadays. The +1 speed of the KF bonus absorbs all the problems tortun's have capturing fonts and increases their effectiveness a lot, allowing you to play tortuns as if they were a normal battlegroup or you can also take advantage of it to include some of the slowest tortuns and not suffer their problems as hard as in other decks. The font bonus is also hepful with all the ranged units tortuns have.
When you are building a FF KF bg, The +1 speed allows for more friendly builds of bg's without the difficults of low speed, or you can choose to include the slowest champions that you'd be normally reluctant to use knowing that their low speed won't hinder you as much as before.
KF forest (in)famous tactic of spell spamming aoe's can be replicated in this bg to his optimal state, as you have a good source of nora shield on favored.
For those who don't know, this tactic consist on waiting to your opponent to clump his champions and then hit the highest number of champions you can with thorn collection, hitting also your own to maximize the refund, and it's better if your champion or champions have nora shield on. The huge refund allows to cast another Thorn collection for the same refund and then cast another aoe to finish the job.
K'thir forest have a very complete set of spells, relics and equipment that will allow you to make a balanced bg without any downside in what tools respects.

Full tortun meta bg

BG to familiarize with tortun champions that plays like a normal bg, this bg have to special late game potential besides nora generation but it doesn't have any real problem either. A build that new tortun players should try before going on to more slow and strongly late game oriented bg's.

Meta BG

Meta Variation BG

A BG taking advantage of external support to capitalize the most on the strenghts of the tortuns. This BG is centered around a variety of combos to get the most of your champions: epochal sages hastening broadsides while providing global support with Divine Favor 2, premonition and drudgery, taskmaster speeding and boosting all your troops and providing melee presence in a range heavy bg with command: charge. Privateer slam paired with pin down and carnivorous vine for extra knockback damage, pygmy + nora shield, time slip + CA: devastate, nora shield + spell spam. The variation includes occuli slag, combined effort and catharsis bloom to generate a lategame win con with nora gen.

Efficiency bg

Bg focused on the cheaper tortuns to have a strong board presence early and generate nora faster with tortun's trade. This bg is far more vulnerable than the meta bg in the early stages but as a stronger lategame potential. A particularity of this bg is the combination of 2x tortalleon pygmies, 2x favored and 2x portalmage, as was noted before, favored's nora shield it's great when used on pygmies due to his high hp, this group of champions is designed to exhaust your enemy's resources sending him a lot of pigmies, both real and summoned, preferably nora shielding them. Your enemy will waste time and nora dealing with your monster while you build up your army in peace. Notice also the time splip to exploit the inclusion of real pygmies.

Range spam bg

Bg focused on deploying a huge amount of ranged tortuns to overwhelm your enemy. It is weaker to rush that most bg's and is obviously vulnerable to range counters. If you are fighting against another range heavy bg you will have the advantage due to tortun battle mystic and tortun gunslinger antirange abilities. Tortalleon pygmies and portalmages are charged with providing a wall for your ranged champions to hide behind. Minelayers are for detection and captains and privateers provides a shorter range option, also, privateer's slam is useful to disengage your ranged tortuns

Budget tortun bg

Well a decent bg without any expensive rare or exotic, is a good place to start to gradually incorporate more expensive runes as you get them.


Full Faction Forglar Swamp

FS bonus grants you extra 6 nora every turn, it's not as useful as a +1 speed on all your champions but is good enough. FS better options are related with water based support, so we will focus on this when talking about FF FS, There are little reasons to run FF FS tortun battlegroups as tortuns find the use of split heros and the bonus ap from half KF bonus more useful than 3 nora a turn.

Aquatic support FS BG

Here we have a standard tortun battlegroup with the aid of tide master to help with water generation, and with the inclusion of knockbacks options alongside poisonous fumes and hungry mire. Flood is a perseverance counter also. The point of this bg is getting the most out of undertow and drown and make some combos with slam and repeater's explosive attack and poisonous fumes/hungry mire.


Forglar Swamp/K'thir Forest

The classical tortun split is where tortuns feels better to the long time player, lots of flexibility, the use of heroes, and all the combined goodness of FS and KF. When choosing which avatar to run. It's recommended KF, as the mobility is useful for ranged tortuns and the fonts are totally covered in new terrain when captured, and that helps to avoid being screwed in some maps. I will present a serie of example bg's with some particularities:

Meta tortun bg FS/KF

This battlegroup is based in the most solid tortuns available, to minimize the problems that could be presented, the support is standard. KF's aoe's, cleansing emerald, FS single target damage and some control options make for a very versatile bg

Meta tortun variation bg FS/KF

This one is a tiny variation of the meta deck, adding a module formed with 2x tortalleon pygmy, 2x tortun favored and 2x tortun portalmage, it's basically a way to always have a tortalleon pygmy or two in the front line to absorb all the attacks your enemy does, favored helps healing and nora shielding the pygmies to get a lot of nora back, to place the module I removed 1 privateer captain, 1 fishkisser, 1 corsair and 1 groundpounder, risking more with my early game and my potential need of counters.I Also replaced escape magic with time slip to take advantage of the included pygmies.

Aoe damage bg FS/KF

Aoe damage variation bg FS/KF

This battlegroup is designed to take full advantage of your enemy's position mistakes and exploit them with tortuns capables of damaging groups of enemies at once. The champions that carry this bg are Tremir Craghide, 2x tortun mortar and 2x tortun grenadier, I also added 4 aoe spells to be able to combine the champions area damage with kf's spell spam to fully capitalize the mistakes to make powerturns. Tremir's full potential is shown in this bg, so you have to try to keep him alive at any cost. More than once I losed my mortars and Tremir early and I had to stall the game for a hour untill they came off cooldown. The variation bg includes the pygmy/favored/portalmage engine mentioned before.

KF/FS Knockback

Another module you can add to your FS/KF battlegroups is based on knockback, privateer captains provide slam, repeaters provide supressing fire and explosive attack, minelayer is for detection and his mines. Poisonous fumes and flood complements the synergy.

 

K'thir forest/ Sundered Lands

This is the most popular split for tortuns outside their natural, and that is because the tremendous synergy between the characteristics of tortun champions and SL support. For a start, sl bonus makes your already hard tortuns even tougher, with a damage reduction that works like tough, and it's not affected by strike of any ignore DEF clause, second, SL is known for his powerful powerturn spells, one of these spells, quickening, and his single target variation, quicken, have the particularity of giving a free additional attack when a champion attacks under the spell's effect. If you remember, I said that tortuns high damage and high nora generation per attack made was balanced around the fact that tortuns won't be able to attack much with their low speed and ponderous, this means that quickening and quicken bypass a main point around tortun's power balance. The rest of the spell, equip and relic set is very friendly to make splits also, having at disposal any tool you need for your bg.
I will explain two main types of KF/SL bg's:

The first one is the classical build.

Meta tortun KF/SL

This bg is specialized around holding the game and make a sudden powerturn to end the game. When playing SL splits I prefer the mortar over the repeater as mortar is able to take advantage of quicken to fully exploit the situations where it can damage more than 1 unit. The non tortun additions are the broodmothers, providing detection and AP generation, Berserkers, bringing speed and melee power, mengclan lords, who supports the tortun offensive and nora advantage and matriarchs and doctors, that is a good late game healer, opposed at the portalmage, who is better early on, also, there is the buildup potential through the stat increments of cocoon and mutation. With transfusion, invigorate, pull and quicken, getting pygmy kills is easy, and you should look constantly to get them.

Mortar buildup KF/SL bg Mangleshell

This bg has a heavy focus on generating a winning condition on the late game, doctors and matriachs can provide substantial stats buffs to your tortuns as the game develops, and with the portalmage, you'll have a constant source of summons to stall and finally overwhelm the enemy. Rage bands also gives you a good buff and violent to buildup your mortars into unstoppable machines. The elements to do a powerturn still exist in the bg, but there isn't a absolute reliance in it to win.

Sand Tortuns KF/SL


A variation of the classic split, this deck focuses on the potential surprise damage provided by dunewalker's mantle to perform powerturns, Dune walker's provide much needed sand support and the SL lineup include 2x myx matriarch, with the eggs, they can provide enough sand to ease the work of the dune walkers. In this bg, the possibility to get surprising rushes with mortars to finish a shrine or to get key kill with a pigmy is increased significatively with the mobility that dunewalkers add to your army.

A variation that can be made to any KF/SL bg is including a spell spam module, with 2x thorn collection, burning sand, acid storm or firestorm. It's recommended that you don't double up on the SL spells, so you can take full advantage of the DoT's. Including 1 of burning sands and 1 acid storm top of the 2x thorn collections would be enough. Remember that in presence of sand, it's better to cast burning sands first, so you don't lose the adittional effect when the thorn collection overrides the terrain with vegetation.

Tortuns / Forsaken Wastes

Forsaken Wastes is a faction that is characterized for a exellent set of support that gives unique tools to any bg. Things like loss of life, decay or chopping blocks are game changing and they have no equivalents in other factions. This tools have their price, as changing the game for your opponent implies changing it for you too, so if you want to play a forsaken wastes split, better be prepared to learn a new style of playing.
Tortuns/FW splits can be differentiated between normal and attrition based, the normal bg's are a lot easier to play with as you will simply use the FW spell set without changing your gameplay a lot, to learn to play attrition is a different thing however, and you will lose many matches before you master it.

Normal bg:

FS/FW Tortun bg


Everything standard, I always like to have corsairs when I'm playing woth bokors, as the combination of tariff and soul collection makes for a death punishment module, with your enemy losing nora and the globe every time he loses a champion. Another thing I like about FW spells is that they make killing single champions very easy, with loss of life from soulreave, essence drain and steal life no champion can stand for long against you, a weakness I experimented in my other bg's.

Atrittion bg:

The main thing that defines attrition are chopping blocks, unholy tomb and tome of hate, playing them all is difficult, as they have a combined cost of 145 nora and occupies 4 spaces on your battlegroup, and with that you lose flexibility in your support choice. The most difficult interaction from the three are the chopping blocks, but they are also themost powerful of them. To begin playing chopping blocks, you'll basically want ways to damage single enemy champions rather than groups of them, for that reason, If you like champions like the granadier, the mortar or tremir, you will find that those champions, although amazing, aren't the best for the job in a attrition bg. Two great out-race champions for attrition bg's are Sarinda and obsidian venger, great both of them cutting your enemy's healing and sarinda also spreading the denied heal among your champions, with a minimum of 1 point for each. This little healing is useful to counter the small damge tome of hate and unholy tomb do to your troops. Sadly, these two runes are very expensive and there is no clear replacement for them filling the same role, if you lack one of these, choose a rune from the FW list I made knowing that it won't fill he same role.
The winning condition in this bg is a bit different that in the rest, instead in go forward looking for the victory, the victory radicates in the relics, as them will give you the advantage and finally the win with enough time. For that reason, your opponent's only chance to avoid being slowly killed is to rush you, and you will have to be prepared for that, no rune or combination of runes will be able to negate the effects of the combined relics, so your opponent has to rush, and he will do it while he still has the advantage, in the moment where your relics didn't paid his price yet and you are 50-150 nora down. Having your opponent come at you it's great, tortuns will benefit a lot from this, as lots of bg's will be simply unnable to pass your defenses, but this is only true if you are properly prepared for that, so knowing when to deploy the relics to begin the engine is a key knoweledge you'll have to learn to be successful playing attrition.
I prefer FS over KF when splitting with FW because Mangleshell is far better than Tremir when playing chopping blocks , he's able to shutdown enemies with frightful blows and intimidation and he's better at lowering a single champion's hp at range. Another reason I prefer FS is backfire boon, if you deployed the relics in a good moment, your opponent won't be able to breach your defenses with whatever he got in the battlefield, and waiting for reinforcements will give you time to gain the advantage trough the relic's effects, so the only chance he has to quickly turn the board in his favor before you absorb the tempo hit is playing some kind of powerturn with the nora he saved. This powerturn will come in the form of a spell almost always, and if you can stop this spell, and in top of that heal all your champions for 15 points, your enemy will simply surrender.
KF has at his favor the newly added catharsis bloom, that can create zones of healing that work exellent when turtling, and will keep your tortuns at top. The effect will be helpful also to negate the damage the relics deal to your non-undead champions.

FS/FW Tortuns attrition

KF/FW Tortuns attrition-

The champion line up is changed to avoid low hp champions, I prefer gunslingers to take the place of mortar because they hit really hard and adds range hate with counter attack range, while protected by stalker's shroud, they can take out any ranged opposition trying to take them down

 

Tortuns / Ironfist Stronghold

If themes were categorized into factions taking into account only his game play, tortuns would be undoubtedly a IS theme. Trying to keep units alive, slow build bg's and phalanx gameplay is basically a definition of IS, as is of tortuns. If you want to make a split with IS you will find that the support available to use is more than pleasant to work with, also, alongside runes, IS brings two very needed boosts on key aspects of the tortun game: font bonus greatly helps with the slow speed of most tortuns and IS split bonus helps you to survive spells, a very good thing when your units are clumped to take advantage of tortun's trade.

Some example bg's:

Tortun FS/IS Relic guarding: This bg is focused about getting a strong board position and take advantage of the cheap buffs that IS equipment provides.

Tortun FS/IS Gibs : This BG is focused around setting up nora assisted kills surprisingly along the match, eliminating enemy units one by one. This makes it stronger in 1 against 1 situations than most tortuns bg also. The main synergies here are the AP generation for the broadsides, tortun inventors's skewer and bane blast, PHS coupled with soften, mark and warcry, sentry's retreat to hop behind the enemy and send them towards your units with instill panic and tortalleon pygmy with might of ironfist.


Tortun KF/IS Flux : This BG is focused around area damage and gravity flux. The area damage in tortuns comes mainly in the form of fire and physical damage. The fire area damage dealers are tortun mortars and grenadiers that can see his damage incrementated with drive, forge hammer and battlemaster from guard tower. Privateer captains provide relics that works to proc relic guardian and to defend from undesirable mele. Privateers by itself helps with slam to position enemies in close formation. The physical area damage comes from thorn collection, favored's tidal wave and Tremir's cannon barrages, and their damage is amplificated by strip armor. GRE excels in this bg as they can heal from you physical bombs.


Tortun KF/IS Mortar/Spell spam : This is a variation of the bg from above, including a stronger equipment module to generate nora and support tortun mortars. The addition of ironfist collector, armory and 2x horn of orders gives you a total of 5 equipments increasing also your hidden threat range and not depending on GFlux to get good amounts of damage. Leoss magnate provides with healing and support, haste is extremely powerful when used on mortars or pygmies and magnate's blessing is great against melee. Veilwalker shows her full potential in this bg: Cast: despoil to grab globes and protect your army in a big permanent DMZ, Blood for nora to help spell spamming and with lots of ways to heal her, hex to provide champion control, and tariff to punish your enemy's losses.

Pico's/OJFTW's FS IS deck

I think it is useful for the guide to have decks made by other people with different insight on the runes. Here is a FS/IS bg by OJFTW focused in gaining a inmense nora advantage with tortun's trade and spiced with tricks and combos of his own.

OJFTW FS/IS Tortuns

Rune choices explained by himself:

Collector : recycling a horn of order leaves the tortun without ponderous for free, it's also good for relocating mines and artillery markers from the privateer captain

Metallic Slag: tank with hallucinogenic and fascinate to mess with positioning and enable mortar's attacks, cannon barrages or a mine/marker trigger

Tortuns / Shattered Peaks

SP provides with everything you need to do a split, excellent relic based cleanse, a powerturn spell, good aoe's, nice support champions and unique mechanics. When making a SP split, knockback is the first thing that comes to mind, and you can use FS spells to get the best out of it, also, several tortuns provide or benefit from knockback so there is the bg.

Tortuns FS/SP Knockback super repeater.

The SP champions are mostly for support, mud elemental because he's awesome with his tankyness and hungry mire, general for front line support and to provide speed, voil transporter provides detection and mobility mostly. In the support section we have anti spell with conduit, a powerturn with alacrity, cleanse, spot removal and a aoe, the other six slot are for buffing your tortun repeaters, equip them with the cyclops eye belts, and cast a zealotry and havoc's touch over them and keep them protected. A slow advance of a formation with the repeaters in the inside it's the key part of the strategy. The other part of the synergy comes from the poisonous fumes, with all the knockback present, poisonous fumes becomes a very cheap spell with the potential to deal lots of damage.
Notice the inclusion of fishkissers to benefit from the interaction between manic and slam, or to use ol'sok in them.

Tortuns SP shrine sentence


A line up focused in setting up an unavoidable shrine kill with ritual of binding, packing up with everything SP has to offer in terms of denying opponent's efforts, for that, whispers of the mind, voil jester to annoy with divert, deflect, book burn and rock trap also, goliath fesh is here to add a third removal, ussually you'll want to use everything at the same time, but there are some maps like grove of ashes were a early onus will gain you a font and a good position, so it's worth to take the risk. Getting the mortars into shrine range may be impossible given some maps, so you have to win by other means or use zeventrech as your split hero who doesn't have that problem. This bgs are really fun, and if you get your mortars into the kill zone, it becomes a guess play where your enemy tries to remove your mortars and you have to do whatever to avoid it.

Tortuns / Savage tundra

The synergy between savage tundra and tortuns comes from individual champions rather than a deeper matter, savage tundra is heavily focused on ice and snow, and lots of the spells and other abilities hinders tortuns as much as your enemy. However, a good, working battlegroup can be made, following the example of a general buff battlegroup:

Tortuns ST/KF Gift of Vitalize

You will notice the speed buffs that lonx beast tamer's vitalize combined with arctic gift can be really interesting, with pseudo 8 speed mortars and pygmies, and 9 in the case of captains.
Yeti trackers are there to stall and support as stealth units with declare target and they also help to hold back your tortuns until you have drawn your arctic gift. The weapons of this battlegroups are the added pressure of the speed of your boosted tortuns with the amazing support potential of lonx beast tamer and trackers and single champion powerturns with tortalleon pygmies and mortars supported with ferren hideout, keeneye crown and coordination tower.

Another kind of battlegroup

Tortuns ST Wish

Leaving behind the arctic gift and vitalize dependence and focusing more on standalone champions, it's more aggressive about board control and has more ways to punish with a pygmy combo, swap can be used to introduce a enemy champion into range abusing of whisper's ethereal ability, double hideout to maximize your chances and the possibility of using three wishes on your summoned pygmies for a surprise attack. Gunslingers are also top targets for three wishes as it will make them nothing short of beasts

Tortuns / Underdepths

The main synergy between tortuns and UD come from the excellent sources of mass fire damage that tortuns have: the mortars and grenadiers, this, alongside a special group of runes that allowed UD bg's to build a winning condition around a ability(fire bomb) that only two of their champions have, is more than enough to make a bg.
The construction of this bg is fully explained here, you have to be keen to take advantage of positional errors of your adversary and exploit them with fire bombs or mortars and borghas / ember wasp. There is also the synergy between puppet masters and battle mystics and mangleshell, stacking dread and mystic push, and the AP transferrence to mortars. The rest is taking advantage of all the good UD has to offer, like sacrifice or orb of protection, remember to be always ready to go all or nothing for the shrine with sacrifice and price of victory, the combined damage of mortars and fire volatility chains will not leave you hanging.

Tortuns FS/UD Mortar push

APPENDIX

Knockback guide – Go to http://poxnorafans.wikia.com/wiki/Knockback_Guide
Manic – Go to http://poxnora.wikia.com/wiki/Manic
Pull and Relocate - Go to http://poxnora.wikia.com/wiki/Pull_&_Relocate_Guide

 

Done with this.

 

Sticky.

 

I bother you a lot for information (sorry about that) but you seem to know a lot of the split factions. So hopefully my last ask for advice, this is a Tortun build.
http://www.poxbase.com/#!/deck/c2c5AchYCo7CyDCyACyUco9CimCo8cufs6=s5s6Ts5-s1as4Ks54s80r3nr2YrUE2w

Is it alright?

 

Hello, first, you are running 17 champions, but 4 of them are 5 speed and one you don't want to deploy early. I would run only one portalmage, as one is all you can afford to deploy early, and later they become a dead slot, and I would replace one or both repeaters with mortars or gunslinger.
I would also include at least 1 tortalleon pygmy, as they are key for me stalling and killing tough champions, also, they synergize better with strategists.
Now, from your support, I would change backfire boon for regular backfire, as it should be enough healing with portalmage and angel.
I would remove strategic retreat because it doesn't have any utility in his current form, I would replace it with poisonous fumes, to damage champions and to synergize with the knockback sources on your bg, for the same reason I would repace brambles with a second poisonous fumes, as it brings a similar level of control but with much more damage potential, and that should do it.
http://www.poxbase.com/#!/deck/c2c5AchYcyPCo7CyDCyACyUco9cyFcimco8cufs1s6Ts5-s1aS46s4Ks54r3nr2YrUE2w

 

Updated with the recent changes, new UD split battlegroup added.

 

Added new FS/IS split:
Tortun FS/IS Gibs : This BG is focused around setting up nora assisted kills surprisingly along the match, eliminating enemy units one by one. This makes it stronger in 1 against 1 situations than most tortuns bg also. The main synergies here are the AP generation for the broadsides, tortun inventors's skewer and bane blast, PHS coupled with soften, mark and warcry, sentry's retreat to hop behind the enemy and send them towards your units with instill panic and tortalleon pygmy with might of ironfist.

 

tortuns are like the giant tortoises of the sea, because of their exquisite taste they have been hunted to the brink of destruction.

their teenagers are ninja.

 

bump for glory

 

I love the look of KF/FW Attrition. But making one is a big investment for me ( Don't have Vengers, Bokors or Privateers). I must ask, how viable could it get? Say, I know what I'm doing, at what rank would the Battlegroup be?
Thank you for the feedback!