Olden Era Faction Tier List (Early Access, May 2026)

Tier lists for Heroes of Might & Magic: Olden Era are a moving target. The game launched into Early Access on April 30, 2026, and Unfrozen is actively patching balance, so anything written today is a snapshot, not a law. With that said, here’s where the six factions land in the current build as of May 30, 2026, why each sits where it does, and which ones are actually pleasant to learn on.

I’m anchoring the tiers to the GamesRadar Early Access rating. You’ll find other tier lists that disagree, sometimes sharply, and that disagreement is the honest signal here: the meta isn’t settled. Use this to orient yourself, not to write off a faction you enjoy.

The Tier List at a Glance

S Tier: Dungeon, Temple
A Tier: Hive
B Tier: Schism, Grove, Necropolis

Now the part that matters, the why.

S Tier

Dungeon

The strongest, most consistent faction in the build, and the one I’d point anyone toward who just wants to win. The reason is structural: most Dungeon units have two attack modes, so you’re rarely stuck with a stack in the wrong position. The faction skill, Triumvirate’s Strength, lets your hero swap between Attack, Defense, and Spell Power stances to fit the fight. And the Motley opener, a starting army of all Onyx Dancers, snowballs the early game hard. Flexible, forgiving, powerful. It earns the top slot.

Temple

The other S-tier pick, and the cleaner “good at everything” army. Temple is the Sun Church faction, balanced between offense and defense with strong buffs. Its faction skill, Righteousness, feeds your hero stats whenever an allied creature dies or scores a kill, so fights make you stronger as they go. The roster runs from Swordsman up to Angel and covers every role you need. Nothing about Temple is gimmicky, it just does the fundamentals at a high level, and in a game decided by fundamentals that’s worth a lot. The Zenith hero, who opens with Lightweavers, gives it a strong start too.

A Tier

Hive

The aggressive snowball faction, sitting just below the top. Hive lives on lava, fights with a cheap insect swarm, and sustains through Corpse Eater, healing off corpses so every death feeds the bugs. Its faction skill, Summon Swarm, plants eggs that hatch into Fire Larvae for free mid-battle bodies. The Zoran the Self-Founded opener, starting with two Waurms plus that sustain, is nearly unkillable early. What keeps Hive out of S tier is that it’s more demanding to pilot, you have to play aggressively and use split-stack retaliation baiting well, but in capable hands it’s a real threat. A tier is fair.

B Tier

B tier here doesn’t mean bad. It means these factions are either harder to make sing or a notch less consistent than the top three in the current numbers. All three are perfectly winnable.

Schism

The disruptive, snowballing oddball faction. Schism is the strange-monster army built around suppression and control. Its faction skill, Abyssal Communion, increases how many units you can field as you rack up consecutive wins, then resets if you stall, so it explicitly rewards staying on the offensive. That conditional snowball is powerful when it’s rolling and dead weight when it isn’t, which is exactly the kind of high-variance identity that lands a faction in B during an unsettled meta. Fun, swingy, not the safe pick.

Grove

The strong-but-expensive ranged faction. Grove is elemental spirits and ranger-druids with excellent shooters and elemental magic, but you pay for the quality, the army is costly to field. Its faction skill, Murmuring, hands you a free Focus Charge at the start of combat, a nice tempo perk. When your economy keeps up, Grove’s ranged power is genuinely scary. When it doesn’t, you’re fielding too few of those expensive units to matter. The economic strings are why it sits in B rather than higher.

Necropolis

The classic attrition faction. Necropolis runs undead and vampires built around drain, curses, and grinding the enemy out. Its faction skill, Necromancy, revives a portion of your fallen after a win, so you can wage a war of attrition that the enemy can’t match over time. The catch is pace: Necropolis wins the long game, and in a meta where the top factions snowball and end fights fast, a slow-burn army can fall behind before its strengths come online. Strong identity, but the speed of the current meta keeps it in B. (A handy quirk: its undead stacks always sit at neutral morale, so you never worry about morale failures dropping their turns.)

A Note on Beginner Friendliness

Tier and “easy to learn” are not the same thing, so here’s the new-player lens on top:

Easiest to win with: Dungeon. Flexible units forgive positioning mistakes, and the Motley start carries you while you learn the systems. If you’re new, start here.
Most fundamentally sound: Temple. No gimmicks to misuse, just solid stats and buffs. A great teacher for how the core game works.
Reliable but slow: Necropolis. Forgiving in the sense that you can recover from losses, but you have to be patient, which new players often aren’t.
Save for later: Hive and Schism. Both reward aggressive, mechanically demanding play. Hive needs you to bait retaliations with split stacks; Schism needs you to keep winning to keep its snowball alive. Great once you know the game, rough as a first pick.
Grove sits in the middle: not hard to pilot, but punishing if your economy slips, so it’s a better second or third faction once you’ve got a feel for resource management.

The Honest Disclaimer

This is an Early Access snapshot dated May 30, 2026, and it will change. Unfrozen is tuning factions patch by patch, community tier lists already disagree with each other, and a single balance pass could shuffle this whole list. Tiers are a starting reference, not a verdict on what you should play. If you’re having a great time stomping people with a B-tier faction, the tier list is wrong about you, and that’s fine. Pick the army you enjoy, learn its tricks, and check the in-game unit cards for the live numbers, since those are the only fully up-to-date source.