Clio (Drums of War)
A decade ago I used to be much more involved in the romhacking community, but then life happened, and I’ve more or less retired from it for many years. A year or so back, however, since my good friend Parr finished his hack Drums of War and I gotta support my friends, I played it as my return to the romhacking scene in about a decade.
Now, I notably dislike armor knights. I don’t like lower mov, and I play fairly aggressively. It’s pretty rare for me to use one in the long term, so come end of act 1 I’ve benched the starting two, and never even recruited Etienne. I’m the kind of aggressive player who likes a bit of bulk, though, since that brings more reliability to my strats in the first place, but I found myself having only Roxelana as my one real tank and everyone else I got kinda squishy. Karolas could offtank sometimes but not quite always enough.
Then enter Clio. Bases! beautiful. Movement! beautiful. Sure, DoW enemy archers do usually default to the 3 range bows, but it’s nothing good positioning can’t play around, especially with her mobility, and come chapter 12 she can just…not have that anyway. She became the second defensive core to my team, and having good enough stats to also do the hyper-aggressive plays i generally like to do. Chapter 12 sees Luthor bringing the iotes equivalent, so then there goes bow weakess too. I remember her being one of the few units on my team come chapter 13 who can go toe to toe to the high stat swordmasters, and chapter 13 also brings the other thing that I think made Clio stand out–Judita.
Clio starts with a high base sword rank and a low base lance rank, which is pretty uncommon for wyvern units and gives her a cool unit identity. While the player do need to invest in lance rank to get her to use some of the better lances fliers commonly want to have access to, I would definitely prioritize getting her A->S sword by chapter 13 as well, because Judita, the S rank sword of the game, is a brave sword. Normally it is a good weapon for Roxelana, but I really like it on Clio due to her higher mobility, allowing for what I like to call gank strats. Clio’s statline also works very well with it–her best stat being strength, but her speed is good enough to get the 4xs on anything that is too bulky to die in 2 hits if need, too. My post-13 strats had very heavy use of Judita ganking and it made my experience of DoW very enjoyable. Clio consistently was easily one of my top units and I’ll just sum it up with this one screenshot (cropped for limiting possibly spoilery content):
