How to Recruit More Units in Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era

Recruiting units is one of the most crucial ways to increase your power in Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era. Getting units starts slow and can feel even slower when you suddenly encounter an enemy with thousands of units.

Here’s a guide on how to recruit more units effectively and turn the tide of battle with strength in numbers in HoMM: OE.

All the Ways to Recruit Units in Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era

There are only a few ways to recruit units, and most of the recruitment comes from your cities. Cities will always have a set number of units to recruit every week. The number depends on your current faction laws and recruitment buildings set up. Even if you construct a building that allows another type of unit to be recruited on the same week after refresh, it’ll still offer units to be recruited, making the first week crucial to actually getting a decent army size early for clearing other camps.

Next, you can also look at other outposts that allow recruitment of a certain unit type, even different from your faction. Capturing these outposts is not easy early on. You have to clear hostile NPCs, which may not be a main priority compared to improving your economy. However, once you get richer, these outposts will help you catapult your army numbers even higher, as long as you remember to recruit from these outposts.

These outposts also refresh every week, and even if you forget to recruit for a week, their number continuously stacks throughout. You do have to get a lot of gold to keep up if you are recruiting from all outposts as well.

Best Strategy for Recruiting Units in Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era

If you want to get the largest army out there, here are the best steps to doing so. First, you must get your economy up and running. Gold is always scarce when you start recruiting more people, so you want a good opener to generate more daily and weekly income.

Second, you want to find and capture other cities as fast as possible. Start constructing income buildings in those new cities and unlock the basic recruitment buildings for each unit type. Technically, you don’t have to keep upgrading the recruitment buildings to allow upgrades on unit types – you just want all the tier 1 units, assuming the city is the same faction as your main city. This is because you can bring a hero to this city, grab all the tier 1 units, and bring them back to your main city for upgrading instead.

If you were able to get cities with a different faction, you can continue building as if it were your main city and build another army, preferably centered on a hero from that faction as well.

Third, look at your Faction Laws and take the army laws that increase growth in your cities. These are mostly on the left side of the army laws section and look like “X growth in your cities increases by X.” They also get some stat bonuses, but you are mostly in it for the increased growth every week. Now, if you take these nodes, it’ll become very expensive to keep up with recruitment every week, especially if you are also upgrading units and recruiting from outposts. However, if you are continuously exploring and grabbing every possible resource every turn, you should be able to manage.

On the right side of the army faction laws, there are buffs crucial to the power of your units, which will be significant when you start building up to hundreds or thousands of units in your army. I’d mostly get these nodes when you are ready to invade and fight the enemy. If you happen to see the enemy before getting these nodes, I suggest fleeing or looking into the power of your hero, army, and artifacts, and see if it is possible to win.

These are the best strategies to recruit a big army, and there could be a little more, like getting an artifact like the “Legion’s Leg,” which are legendary boots that give +50% to all creature growth in all your cities. This is a massive upgrade to your recruitment, but also rare to find.