Olden Era Grove Faction Guide: Strong, Expensive, and Unforgiving

Grove is the faction that punishes a sloppy economy. When the gold keeps flowing, a Grove army of ranged elementals and druids is genuinely frightening — it shreds enemies before they close the distance. When the gold dries up, you’re fielding a handful of expensive units against a fuller enemy army and losing on numbers. That tension is the whole story of playing Grove, and this guide is about staying on the right side of it. It currently sits in B tier in the Early Access build, which says less about its ceiling and more about how demanding it is to run.

Usual caveat: this is late-May 2026 Early Access, Unfrozen is patching, and exact values move. The roster and mechanics below are stable; check the in-game card for current numbers.

Who Grove Is

Grove is the autumn-forest faction — native to autumn terrain (no movement penalty there, +1 Initiative). The cast is elemental spirits plus ranger-druids, and the identity is powerful, expensive ranged and elemental units. Lots of strong attacks, lots of them at range. The army hits hard and from a distance, which is a winning formula in Olden Era where ranged dominance decides early fights. The cost is that everything is pricey, so Grove leans on your wallet harder than any other faction.

The Faction Skill: Murmuring

Murmuring gives your hero a free Focus charge at the start of every battle. Focus is the combat resource that powers special unit abilities, and normally you spend the opening turns building it up. Grove skips that wait — you walk into every fight with a charge already banked, ready to trigger a key ability immediately.

That early head start matters more than it sounds. Popping a strong ability on turn one, before the enemy has even closed, can swing the opening exchange and set the tempo. With Murmuring leveled up, the value compounds, and Grove’s whole game leans into using Focus aggressively from the first round rather than hoarding it.

The Roster, Tier 1 to Tier 7

Tier 1 — Faun. Your cheap early body. Faun upgrades branch toward an archer or a warrior, so even your tier 1 gives you an early ranged option.
Tier 2 — Hoplet. A solid early-tier creature to round out the opening army.
Tier 3 — Vine Iriyad. A plant-based unit that adds to your line as you climb.
Tier 4 — Naiad. A ranged water embodiment, and a core piece of Grove’s distance damage. This is where the “shoot them before they arrive” plan gets real teeth.
Tier 5 — Herbomancer. A druid caster that brings magic and utility to the army.
Tier 6 — Qilin. A heavy elemental hitter in the upper tiers.
Tier 7 — Phoenix. The capstone. A powerful but hard-to-field unit that anchors a complete Grove force.

The pattern is clear: Grove wants to deal damage at range and through elemental power, with the Naiad and the Faun Archer giving you ranged output that scales into the heavier elemental tiers. Like every faction, most of these have two upgrade branches you can swap between in town — pick damage or initiative based on the fight in front of you.

How to Actually Play Grove

Range First, Always

Grove’s strength is its ranged damage, so build toward it and protect it. Get Faun Archers and then Naiads online, set them up at a comfortable middle distance (remember the penalties — point-blank shooting costs -50%, and so does firing past three hexes), and let them whittle the enemy down before contact. Your front line exists to buy your shooters time, not to win the fight on its own.

Open With Your Free Focus Charge

Thanks to Murmuring you start every battle with a charge ready. Don’t sit on it. Identify the ability that swings the opening — a strong unit effect, a key trigger — and fire it early to grab the tempo. Grove plays from the front foot in combat even when it’s playing patient on the map.

Bait Retaliation to Protect Expensive Stacks

Your units cost a lot, so losing them stings more than it would for another faction. Lean hard on split-stack retaliation baiting: CTRL + click to peel a single creature off, throw it in to soak the enemy’s one retaliation per round, then hit with your real stack for free. Keeping your pricey Naiads and Qilins alive is worth the extra micro.

The Economy Tightrope

Here’s the part that decides your games. Grove’s units are expensive, which creates a hard trade-off:

When your economy keeps pace, you field full stacks of strong ranged and elemental units, and Grove is terrifying. You out-range and out-power most armies and win exchanges before they start.
When your economy falls behind, you simply can’t afford enough bodies. You show up to fights with fewer units than the enemy, your stacks get focused down, and no amount of raw unit quality saves you from being out-numbered.

So Grove demands sharper economic play than the forgiving factions. Secure your resource mines early and hold them. Time your dwellings to land before the weekend tick so you bank a full week of those expensive recruits. Don’t overspend on buildings you can’t afford to staff. And lean on Law Points and Astrology Points to squeeze extra value out of a tighter budget. Every gold piece works harder for Grove than it does for, say, Temple.

Is Grove Worth It?

If you like ranged-heavy armies and you’re comfortable managing money, yes — a well-fed Grove is one of the scarier things to face in the current build, and the B-tier ranking undersells its ceiling. But it’s not a faction I’d hand a brand-new player. The economy punishes mistakes that forgiving factions shrug off, and a single stretch of bad resource management can leave you too thin to recover.

Play Grove when you’ve already got the fundamentals down and you want a faction that rewards tight, deliberate macro with overwhelming ranged firepower. Just respect the cost. The army is only as strong as the economy feeding it.