The Unicorn Knights and the Knights of Morgiana

Though few in number, the ladies of Bretonnia who have supped from the Grail often form an inseparable bond with the unicorns of the forest. Nigh indomitable in battle, the bond between mount and rider is unshakeable in defense of The Lady.

Updated for new patch (Rakarth)

Welcome to my first published mod! I hope you enjoy both these units in campaign and custom battles, and I’m happy to hear any feedback you have.

Both the Unicorn Knights and the The Knights of Morgiana (Unicorn Knights ROR) may be slightly over-tuned relative to most Vanilla units which is a consequence of the vision I had in creating this mod (see below). Essentially, I was trying to make it as effective as possible without breaking any balancing "rules" so to speak (min-maxing). Ultimately however, I don’t want them to overshadow the rest of the army, I simply want them to be a centerpiece. Feel free to reach out with suggestions for that.

This mod isn’t lore friendly, but it is fun! I did try to make some vague lore-friendly justifications in my vision here and to make the mod as immersive as possible in the abilities and visuals I applied to the units.

TLDR: I made a Unicorn Grail Guardian with a Questing Great Sword cause I’m a giant stat nerd and min-maxer.

One day, I was looking at the spellweavers of the Wood Elves and noticed that for just 100 points you could upgrade the spellweaver from an Elven Steed to a Unicorn. That meant increased speed, magic damage, hit and knock reaction resistance, 40% magic resistance, +16 charge bonus, +7 melee attack and 13% more health for just 100 gold. I then thought, damn, imagine if you had a Heavy Cavalry unit similarly upgraded! The stat junkee in me had to see it in action and thus this mod was born.

I came in with a couple design principles – I wanted to pick the unit that would best synergize with these buffs and go from there. I ended up deciding on Grail Guardians, but the stat junkee in me still wasn’t satisfied. I wanted to get these guys as optimized as possible while only swapping or changing things that reflected changes that CA had made to these units themselves. This led me to optimizing my new Grail Guardian’s weapons, since the Grail Guardian’s puny swords honestly suck ass at their price point. I looked at Questing Knights and was immediately like "yup, that’s what I want." So I swapped off the shield and I had my base unit — A Unicorn Grail Guardian with a Questing Great Sword.

Base cost 1600 + 100 for the unicorn mounts = 1700. I did some logic jiujitsu to avoid feeling compelled to increase the cost based on the weapon switch since Grail Guardians are theoretically more elite than Questing Knights anyways. The Questing Knights items were by cannon their old equipment. It shouldn’t be that hard for them to go track down their old sword from their questing days right?

But there aren’t that many unicorns around, so I decided to shrink my unit size from 45 to 36 (on large unit sizes), sames as Cold One Knights. That’s 0.8 the unit size so I changed the base price accordingly. 1700*0.8 = 1360. So I went with 1350. EDIT: I’ve increased it to 1400 to make it a little less overpowering.

I then set to work on an ROR, cause why the hell not. Gave them some thematic buffs, and wallah you have my unit.

In conclusion, I guess some part of me just felt it would be a point of pride to be able to exploit the balance weaknesses of the vanilla game to make a unit whose balancing roughly followed with Vanilla yet would be dramatically more effective than it had any right to be. Then I found ways to make it look pretty cool too, and decided I’d finally publish something I modded for all your pleasure.

I still have testing to see how well this mod functions in campaign. If you encounter any bugs or have any questions send me a message on steam or comment below and I’ll do my best to follow up in a timely manner.

I used the Unicorn Knight mod by Amulet of Kings to get started here. My mod is pretty far away from what I started with now, but just wanted to give that shout out here.

Also Cryswar for his excellent guides.