How to Recruit Units in Flowers and Deities

A Flowers and Deities run is a recruiting problem disguised as an arena game. You will see 125+ unit types across 15+ races if you live long enough. You will field maybe eight stacks that matter. The skill is not “buy everything the Tower flashes.” The skill is knowing which pipe a unit came from and whether it can wear the items you already forged.

This page covers the pipes. Combat use sits in How to Play. Value judgments sit on the Units Tier List.

The Tower is a gated shop

The city Tower sells units, some spells, and the occasional summon ritual. Prices are gold, sometimes crystals. Early offers are peasants: axemen, extra slingers, a ritual that looks like a unit until you read the tooltip. Later offers include veteran versions of your tribe and strangers from other biomes: Corn Spirits, Underworld Rangers, Temple Greatbows, Shielded Temple Warriors.

Shop quality follows Reputation. After a stretch of wins the high priest promotes you, leaves a pouch, and the store level ticks up. That is the moment heroic and later legendary recruits become legal. If you sit on 40 crystals “waiting for the shop to get good” while your current line is naked, you have inverted the loop. Win nodes to raise the shop. Do not starve nodes to protect a shop that cannot roll the unit yet.

1.0 says the Shop and Forge were greatly improved and that additional Favors from Reputation are larger, which enables bigger late battles. Translation: promotions are not flavor text. They are the unlock curve. Track them on the campaign tracker if you like seeing the grid.

Slave Hunting and conscription

The store promise was always “defeat them, and conscript them.” Launch notes make the verb concrete. Slave Hunting is available after certain battles: you capture enemy units and add them to the army. That is how a lizardkin roster grows a noble legion, a barbarian club line, or an underworld horror without waiting on a Tower refresh.

Treat captures like draft picks. A captured thunder priest can trivialise a boss and also brick your identity if you now need magic items you never forged. A captured jaguar demon is a frontliner with a charge you must respect in deploy order. Put captures on the active bar only after they have a slot and a job.

Lower-tier Undead in 1.0 gain the Slave trait. Advanced Undead pick up a slice of Desecrated Weapon. Those lines want different ornaments than a living dodge tribe. If you mix them because they looked cool in the capture screen, you will own two half-kits.

What “recruitment uses” and squad size mean

Tooltips talk about squad size and recruitment uses. Next Fest notes are useful here even if numbers moved: Fallen Nobles traded squad size for a second recruitment use; Temple Nobles got more bodies and a higher cost; Feathered Nobles gained a second use and lost some armor penetration. The pattern is that some units are a one-and-done elite and some are a refillable pack.

Ranged units were globally tuned at launch: fewer recruits per purchase, plus one second on the attack interval. Demo muscle memory that stacked cheap darters will feel thinner. Veterans still matter, as the recorded Tribal Survivor run showed when veteran poison darters suddenly looked like a different unit.

Always check Favor cost against the current cap. A four-cost stack you can only drop once in round one is a finisher, not an opener. A one-cost rain heal can be the better Tower buy because it makes every other stack live longer.

When to refuse a recruit

Skip the purchase when:

• You cannot unlock a slot for it this visit.
• It duplicates a job you already over-serve (third club if you have no reach).
• The spell version of the card is what you needed, and you misread a ritual as a permanent squad.
• You are one promotion away from a shop level that will make this common look silly.

Buy the unit when it answers a hole the last series revealed: no stun into shields, no magic into a priest boss, no Reach into a spear wall. Then immediately open the loadout and steal gear from the unit you are retiring. Unequip first or the game will hold the item hostage. The demo run wasted minutes on that exact trap.

Backgrounds, now visible in the shop, tell you where a soldier came from and which combat skills they carry. Fallen Nobles gained unique skills in the 0.8.1 demo line. Read the background before you assume two “spearmen” are interchangeable.

For origin-shaped shopping lists, use starter builds. For slot costs and quality upgrades, use the Forge guide. If you are still in the first hour, Getting Started is the slower version of this advice.