About lairs

What are the different results from exploring a lair? What's the difference between a barrow, a dungeon, a ruin, a goblin fort (apart from spawning different units)? I think it would be very helpful if a list of possible events was provided.

Each lair is harder, offering more penalties but better "good" results. The following is off the top of my head, so any errors = its 7am on block leave.

Barrow: Lowest level. Defended by skeletons, spawns skeletons. Can spawn the various Big Bads if you are very unlucky. Most good events are negligible. Can be safely explored with a stack of warriors.
Ruin: Mid level. Defended by lizardmen, spawns lizardmen. All of the bad results, but can pop a tech or a GP if you are very luck. Explore with heros or axe-men
Dungeon: Top level. Most of the giant Bad stacks spawn here. Decent chance to pop GP, religious units [which can be used to found a religion]. Explore with leveled heros.

Goblin Fort: spawns only goblins. Seems to function like a ruin, so early in the game if the Goblin Archer wanders off seize the terrain and hold it to prevent future spawns.
Shipwreck: Does not spawn anything, results similar to ruins but drawns from a smaller list so that only sea units can pop.

All lairs get better results when exploring them with a high level unit, so don't go popping dungeons with a turn 3 scout. If your enemies are exploring them around you, aggressively defend them [declaring war if need be] to keep the dreaded Azer or Ogre spawn on turn 20. A good rule of thumb is to park a unit on top and wait until you have a stack ready to explore them to mitigate bad results.

As far as I know, only shipwrecks draw from a different event list. The rest are just weighted differently. Its possible to explore the dungeon with a level 15 unit and get the same event as if you explored a barrow with a level 1 unit.

There are only two tiers of lairs, as far as exploring go: normal and epic. Epic lairs are aifon isle, bradelines well, broken sepulcher and pyre of the seraphic. Everything else is a normal lair.

There are five types of results. BigBad, Bad, Neutral, Good and BigGood. Normal lairs can pop any of these, epic lairs only BigBad and BigGood. As HadesScorn said the higher the level of the unit exploring the higher the chance of a better result. It's still largely random however, to be certain to get good results you'd need a unit of at least level 74 (normal lair) or 54 (epic lair)!

For spawning units lairs on water use one list, lairs on land another.

BigBad: ALWAYS spawns a unit. With a good promotion. Plus henchmen.
Barrows can spawn skeleton/pyre zombie henchmen.
Ruins can spawn lizardman/gorilla henchmen.

Bad: Mostly bad promotions, sometimes units. Can kill level 1 units.

Neutral: Stuff like mutation, portals, catching the unit in a cage. Can spawn units.

Good: Mostly adds promotions, can also do stuff like give gold or spawn religion disciples. Some things (like disciples) disabled on water.

BigGood: Things like resources, golden ages, spawning friendly units (like great people). Some things disabled for water, some things disabled for land, mostly resources and units.


The chance that a lair is destroyed is based on the result. Generally speaking the better the result the bigger the chance of the lair being removed. BigGood has a 100% chance to destroy it.


All possible events are in CustomFunctions.py. The chance of the different types of results being triggered is in CvSpellInterface.py.

I usually am hesitant to explore lairs with heroes, due to the "your unit was never heard from again" result.

I set a unit on barrows, ruins, and goblin forts close to my starting area (so they won't spawn baddies and annoy me, with raging barbs on, I have enough coming out of the fog and I don't need any more).

For the lairs that are to be found further out, I'll explore barrows and ruins pretty early, even with a low level scout. For whatever reason, I've always left the dungeons for late in the game, as something just told me they could give better results.

One game, I've gotten adventurer promotion (don't know if it's in base so disregard if not) and proceeded to pop a savant, GP, and a tech, all in succession and before turn 50 or so. That was great.

I've also popped an 11 Earth Elemental on turn 4. Needless to say, I lost interest in that game pretty quickly.

Bootsiuv said:

I usually am hesitant to explore lairs with heroes, due to the "your unit was never heard from again" result.

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Several versions ago Kael made it so that that result will only happen to level 1 units. Exploring with a hero before you buy a single promotion would be idiotic, but in general exploring with heroes is not so bad. The worst you'll likely get is giving your hero Crazed/Enraged/Demon/Unholy Taint/Diseased/Withered/Rusted/Poisoned/Plagued. Most of those can easily be removed, and the others have some upsides.

MagisterCultuum said:

The worst you'll likely get is giving your hero Crazed/Enraged/Demon/Unholy Taint/Diseased/Withered/Rusted/Poisoned/Plagued. Most of those can easily be removed, and the others have some upsides.

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What is the upside of crazed? And there is no cure! I mean, I can cure the Plague, I can change units to undead or worse AND be back (with Wonder), but but I am stuck with the bonkers forever?

It does not have an upside itself, but its downside is that it gives Enraged which does have the upside of making the unit stronger on the attack (even if you cannot choose what to attack).


Also, in my version Spirit III has a second spell that removes Crazed/Enraged/Burning Blood. I find that fits the precept better than any of its current spells, plus makes the promotion useful beyond the single-use-per-game Trust spell.

I also let the Pool of Tears remove those promotions.

Yeah, I really really dislike Crazed/Enraged like that. I think the idea of having the unit get stronger but go wandering off by itself is great. It's just that when there's nothing nearby for it to attack, that basically means you've lost the unit permanently, which is enormously frustrating for an effect which is already quite harsh, but entertainingly so. And even if you have the cure, the unit is still lost because it will always refuse to cooperate. I think it'd be a great effect if Enraged started to have a chance to wear off after 30 turns or so. But as it is at the moment, it's so annoying that I usually just mod it out of my games.