The Bishop

The Bishop may not be terribly useful in small games but often proves to be the determining factor in larger battles.

The Bishop’s attack causes 1 damage. Given that he has an attack range of 2 that isn’t bad for a holy man but the real reason for having a Bishop in your army is his defense action.

'''The Bishop’s defense action allows him to focus on a target and charge for 3 turns. At the end of 3 turns, the Bishop will either cleanse the target of any and all buffs or will resurrect a dead target, bringing them back with 1 health.''' This action wears off if the Bishop is attacked while charging or if he successfully completes the action. The resurrection aspect is clearly the star of the show but don’t forget that secondary buff-cleansing ability, should you need it. 'Also, if you are thinking about charging the Bishop with your King/Queen in order to speed up the resurrection/cleansing, don’t waste the action. The King’s/Queen’s defense action, Command, only speeds up attack actions, not defense actions.'

When using Bishops, try to stay as far away from the action as possible while still being in range to help. It is often a good idea to exercise some forethought and set your resurrection action on a still-living unit that is down to 1 health already. In this way, the enemy will know, if they kill the unit, it will just be resurrected on the very next turn and attack them but, if they don’t kill the unit; true, the Bishop’s resurrection will be wasted but the 1 health unit will still be able to attack them. This mess will cause opponents to have to retreat and plan a new attack route or suffer the consequences of facing a zombie-like, unkillable foe.

Bishops are also really handy with Executioner strategies. This is because a Bishop can be used to resurrect sacrifices in order to repeatedly feed the Executioner’s transition into blust mode.

On another note, Bishops can sometimes be useful when used to resurrect Thieves since a 1 health Thief can still be dangerous if she can get to the enemy King/Queen or some other vital enemy piece but the issue here is that often Thieves die behind enemy lines, making it near impossible for the Bishop to reach them for resurrection in those instances. Because of that, if you want to support Thieves with Bishops be cautious when deciding to send your Thieves deep.

When countering Bishops, the name of the game is to kill them (obviously) or move the corpse he is focused on (not so obviously) so as to cause his revival action to fail. Further reaching units, especially Marksmen, excel the most at the corpse-moving game and be aware that a Priest can move corpses with his attack just like any other unit.