The now-deleted above post was an accidentally posted unfinished version of this, I coulda sworn i just chose to edit it instead of an entirely new reply lol.
Addington (TMGC) & The Power of Positioning
TMGC is a hack filled with units whose personal weapons/skills allow them to turn the tides of combat in their favor, but one of the units I find most interesting is one who does not start with any combat potential, nor will they ever get any. This unit is, of course, Addington.
In the freeroam interlude played after clearing Chapter 12: Holy Orders, if you go to a secluded corner by the leftmost stairwell, you will encounter a hooded man (who is totally not Novala from vanilla) offering you his prized automaton for a hefty fee of 7776 gold (for obligatory Thracia 776 reference). Without context, you’d expect this automaton to be something akin to the Fates automatons (who wield bows and saws) or some other cool fighting machine, but the actual product is…
So it kinda looks like the man was trying to scam you. The automaton is just a barrel with some mechanical doodads and a face that’s just a piece of paper with a face drawn on it. Addington can’t even use any weapons and its growths are all 10%. Why would anybody with game knowledge invest 7776 gold into such a unit? Well, there’s more to Addington than meets the eye.
So let’s say you deploy Addington just to have a 10 move unit who can spam shove, but opening the skills menu greets you with this:
This unassuming barrel has access to every positional skill in the game. Addington’s true purpose becomes clear at this point: its not meant to troll you or anything, it’s meant to make it much easier to position the rest of your army.
Most of the positional skills are straightforward enough, having the same effects as they normally would. But the one to write home about is Swarp, which is much more rarely distributed and is perhaps the strongest positional tool in the game. Only Peggy, the earlygame cleric, gets Swarp as a positional skill and only if she reaches level 15 unpromoted (unless I missed something which I very well might have). Swarp is effectively a ranged swap, with a range of Mag/2 (the same as most ranged staves like Physic.), but Addington has a variant that allows him to always Swarp from 5 spaces despite having 6 base magic (either that or the floor is 5).
Swarp is an amazingly versatile ability when utilized properly, being able to act as a psuedo-Rescue staff, get your allies more movement if the likes of Reposition and Smite aren’t enough, perform hit and run tactics, and more. While Peggy’s Swarp is more potent due to her higher magic, she often wants to spend her turns healing or fighting, and Swarping might leave her deep in the backlines, behind your other units. But this is not an isssue for Addington, as it has Canto, allowing it to reuse the remnant of its massive 10 movement to reposition itself after using its tools. This means that it’s easier to reunite Addington with your army or pull it out of enemy range after using its positional tools more aggressively. But even the mastery of positioning is not Addington’s only trick, for it has Summon.
We also cannot forget Addington’s real most important tool, Whirr. When you click Whirr, it makes a funny noise. This is a truly gamechanging effect and may need to be heavily nerfed in the future.
Addington’s Summon skill is described as summoning “something truly fantastic, specific to this unit.”
It summons a crate.
The crate cannot move or be held, but can be targeted by positioning skills.
In essence, this is more of a single-hit barrier. I don’t have a lot to say about this one because it’s more situational overall than Addington’s positioning skills, but the ability to slow a strong enemy’s advance or block a treasure room from a thief is always nice.
In summary, Addington is seemingly meant to be a joke played by Retina, but if you invest the money into this funny little barrel, it can help you gain control of the playing field, a very helpful tool in strategy games.