Olden Era Dungeon Faction Guide: The S-Tier Pick and How to Play It

If you want to pick the faction that wins and stop second-guessing yourself, Dungeon is the answer in the current Early Access build of Heroes of Might & Magic: Olden Era. The GamesRadar faction rating slots it at S tier, and most of the community agrees it’s one of the most consistent, hard-to-misplay armies in the game right now. Tier lists shift between patches, so treat that as a snapshot, but the reasons Dungeon is strong are baked into how it’s designed.

I’ll walk through what makes it tick, the roster, the faction skill, and the absurd Motley opener that single-handedly explains a lot of the hype.

Why Dungeon Is So Strong

Dungeon is mud-native: no movement penalty on mud terrain plus the home-terrain first-strike edge. The army is a mix of dark elves, beasts, and dragons. But the thing that actually sets it apart from every other faction is this: most Dungeon units have two different ways to attack.

That flexibility is the whole pitch. A unit that can switch between, say, a melee swing and a ranged or reach attack lets you answer whatever the enemy does. The opponent clumps up, you hit them one way. They spread out or hang back, you hit them another. You’re rarely stuck with a stack that’s in the wrong position to be useful. In a game where positioning and initiative decide so much, having units that can flip their attack mode mid-fight is a quiet but enormous advantage. That adaptability is why Dungeon feels “honest” and stable, you almost always have a good option.

The Faction Skill: Triumvirate’s Strength

Dungeon’s faction skill lets your hero shift between three stances, each boosting a different stat: Attack, Defense, or Spell Power. You pick the stance that fits the fight in front of you.

The value here is that it applies broadly, your hero’s Attack and Defense stack onto your creatures, so leaning the Attack stance makes your whole army hit harder, while the Defense stance shores up a fight you’re trying to grind out, and the Spell Power stance turns you into a caster when that’s the play. One faction skill, three answers, swap as needed. Confirm the exact bonus values on the in-game skill card, since EA tunes them, but the mechanic is simple and always relevant.

The Roster, T1 to T7

1. Troglodyte (T1)
2. Infiltrator (T2)
3. Onyx Dancer (T3)
4. Minotaur (T4)
5. Medusa (T5)
6. Hydra (T6)
7. Cave Dragon (T7)

The Onyx Dancer deserves a callout because it’s arguably the most important early-game unit in the faction and the centerpiece of the strongest opener. The top end, Hydra and Cave Dragon, is your late-game muscle. Pull up the in-game unit cards for exact stats and the specifics of each unit’s two attack modes, because those are exactly the kind of numbers EA keeps adjusting.

The Hero That Defines the Faction: Motley

If you want to understand why Dungeon is S tier in two minutes, start a run as Motley. Her starting army is entirely Onyx Dancers, and her specialization keeps those Dancers scaling as the game goes on. That’s not a small perk. The Onyx Dancer is a strong early unit on its own, and opening with a full army of them lets you steamroll the early neutral fights that decide how fast you snowball.

One real catch to know: Motley starts with an Attack stat of 0. That sounds alarming, but it’s an easy fix. Get her to a building that boosts Attack early (a Pauper Knight Order, for example) and the problem evaporates. Until then, lean on the Dancers’ own stats and pick fights you can clearly win. Once her Attack is rolling, the snowball is brutal.

There’s also a control angle to the Dungeon kit worth flagging: tools like Twilight can lock down enemy ranged units, shutting off the stacks that would otherwise punish your advance. Pinning the enemy’s shooters while your army closes in is a recurring Dungeon win condition.

Why Ranged Units Win the Early Game

Here’s the strategic core of an Onyx Dancer-heavy opener, and it generalizes to a lot of Dungeon play. In the early game, before stacks get huge and armor stacks up, dealing damage before the enemy can swing back is everything. A ranged or reach attacker hits the enemy stack while it’s still walking toward you, chips it down, and never eats a retaliation for the trouble.

A melee retaliation rule makes this even sweeter. Each enemy stack only counterattacks once per round, and ranged attacks generally don’t trigger that counter at all when you’re hitting from distance. So an army of shooters like Onyx Dancers gets to whittle the enemy down on the approach, and by the time melee actually connects you’re already ahead on the trade. Win the approach, win the fight. That’s why opening with a board full of Dancers is so oppressive: you’re getting free damage every turn the enemy is still closing the gap.

Two things to respect about ranged attacks, though. Shooting an enemy that’s right next to you takes a big penalty, and firing across long distance falls off too. So position your Dancers to keep range without getting stuck in melee, and don’t bother sniping from the far edge of the board when you could step in to a clean mid-range shot. Check the unit card for the exact range falloff in your build.

Don’t Dilute Your Morale

The same army-building rule that helps every faction helps Dungeon too: a single-faction army gets +1 Morale, and each extra faction you splash in costs -1 Morale. Good morale can hand a stack a bonus action, which for a tempo-driven, hit-first army is a real swing. As nice as some off-faction unit you find might look, keeping the army pure Dungeon is usually worth more than the raw stats. Resist the urge to mix.

Putting a Dungeon Run Together

The gameplan, start to finish:

• Pick Motley if you want the strongest, most forgiving start, and beeline an Attack-boosting building to fix her 0 Attack.
• Use your two attack modes. Read the enemy’s position and pick the attack that punishes it. This is your edge, use it every fight.
• Win the approach with ranged damage. Onyx Dancers chip the enemy down before melee even starts.
• Cycle Triumvirate’s Strength stances to match the fight: Attack to push, Defense to grind, Spell Power to nuke.
• Lock down their shooters with control tools so your advance is unanswered.
• Keep the army pure Dungeon for the morale bonus.

Dungeon is the faction I’d hand a new player who just wants to win while they learn the systems. It’s flexible enough to forgive mistakes and strong enough to carry a sloppy early game. In the current Early Access build, it’s the safe S-tier pick, and it earns the ranking.