Races, Units, Buildings

[Nelphine]

Yup agreed. They're the ultimate glass cannon, so you only use minimal magic in order to stop them from being glass - and then they're just a cannon.

It's like they were designed for life warlord. Life can buff them, and then raise dead if they do die, with buffs and warlord they get rid of their weakness, and increase the production of the cities to make up for the lack of production buildings.

Incidentally I really want to play nature sorcery barbarians just to get adamantium bezerkers, but I give up too much and can't actually survive the early game.

[Bahgtru]

I find barbarians to be good as they are - providing some diversity basically, not ALL races need to be good at magic.

Anyway if they're a defensive unit they should not have the berserkers' 3 movement, just a remark.

Do you need to remove a unit for this? Hopefully not more spearmen...

Nelphine how would you get adamantium bersies??? You don't have the AG?

[Seravy]

No, we don't need to remove a unit for this, we have free slots left over.
It wouldn't be a defensive unit, it would be a "flame blade on this = bless and holy armor on a berserker" type unit, essentially, to allow Chaos to play the race. It might be a bad idea though - if the unit is hard to kill regardless of the AI's realm while still being reasonably good on the offense, that might be difficulty for the human to deal with if they are unlucky and start near such a wizard. (or maybe not, walls are pretty good at countering medium offense units?)

I think Uranus' Blessing allows using special ores.

[Nelphine]

Yeah, uranus' blessing.

And yeah, the problem is that you can get +7 melee +5 thrown with starting spells and retorts, so this unit simply isn't 'medium' offense. It's better than wraiths. (That's actually why I use halberdiers as my benchmark unit. Toss in adamantium, and beastmen, and you've got a 6 figure, 4 HP, 13 melee, +1 to hit unit, that only costs 60 production and 50 mana. Sure you'll probably spend another ~100 mana to give it a total of +2 to hit, 9 armor with +1 to defend, and 10 resist against most things, but still. That's absurdly good, requires 0 research, and makes even most rares look weak.)

[Seravy]

One thing I noticed in my last game - Jackal Riders don't require stables even though they are an upgrade to Wolf Riders who do. I think we should add that requirement?

[Seravy]

So, we've been shelving dwarves for a while.
I hope the mineral generation changes helped fixing the unbalance caused by doubled minerals, but we'll know this only when the race's turn for testing comes.
Double taxes we already know is excessive, so as a temporal solution I'm making that 50%, which makes more sense anyway, as that means production and gold bonus becomes roughly the same. (gold is still higher because not all production comes from workers)
When the race's turn to be tested comes, we should reevaluate the gold bonus, maybe 25% or nothing works better than 50%, but I don't want to overdo it without testing.

And then there is one new problem - warships. As you can see in Sapher's latest game, warships are effective at moving fast on the map - the one thing Dwarven units are supposed to be bad at. So I believe enabling the race to build these was a huge mistake. I don't mind them having a powerful ship unit, but it shouldn't be moving 4 tiles a turn. For the time being I'm not doing anything as this update needs to be released ASAP, but I think we should consider removing the maritime guild in the next update, and possibly giving the race a new ship unit, Steam Ships, that move slowly but have good combat stats, kinda like a steam cannon.

[Nelphine]

I disagree. Yes the race needs to move slowly, but overland speed is too important. Making any race half the speed of other races effectively cripples them. Now, speed 3 is not half speed 4, but it is noticeable. Races that can't keep up, just end up being dependent on conquering other races quickly, as seen by halflings. So removing warships from dwarves just makes even more undesirable for late game use - they're already early game race, this would just push them further into that role, which I don't think is helpful for a myrran race.

[Seravy]

...I really don't see how slowing a race down at movement makes them more early game. That's completely the opposite of common sense.

That said, a speed 4 transport that works on land is a problem for any race probably, it's just especially bad for dwarves who can build it much easier than others due to all the gold and production bonus they have.
So I see many different possible sources for the problem and paths to take :

-Dwarves reach and produce the ships faster. So if early game speed is the issue, disallowing them there is a solution.
-Wraith Form is cheaper and available earlier than Flight (and even more than Wind Walking). Maybe it should be uncommon? But its other function, weapon immunity, is specialized to be effective at early game.
-Maybe ships being able to essentially function as wind walkers is the issue in general? Wind Walking is rare for a reason, yet the other effects you can use on ships are 2 uncommons and a common. If so, I don't really see a solution unfortunately. Moving the spells all up to rare is obviously bad, disallowing ships to work on land means we lose the "flying warship" strategy altogether which would be sad - I mean using the ships to fight, not to transport units - and the buffs making the ship lose "transport" ability works in theory but is impossible to implement, transport isn't a variable ability on units, it's a hardcoded constant for the type.
-Maybe the problem is the speed itself - limited to 3 tiles it isn't so bad but 4 tiles is a big jump in quality and puts it too close to wind walking which you will typically use on speed 4-5 units, whichever is available, even with heroes that's the most common unless you created a move item set to get higher. In this case, reducing warships to 3 moves OR removing their ability to transport and making them a military only unit could be the solutions.
-Maybe warships and maritime guilds are also underpriced? They are definitely cheaper than an equivalent land unit, in fact such a land unit doesn't exist in the game because it would be too good. It's better than uncommon summons - water elementals.
Another problem is the "chain of ships" issue which is unsolvable but essentially makes any ship type work as a transport with infinite range if abused.
Furthermore I observed Sapher abusing ships to carry already done units that cannot move back into garrison, essentially enabling a stack to attack an enemy army outside, then still defend the city against the other stack. This shouldn't be possible but I can't prevent it either :(

[Nelphine]

Early game, 3, or even 2 movement is enough. Otherwise nothing would work. But the later the game, the more the human need speed 4+ to match the numerical superiority of AI.

Right now, the primary reason to ever choose dwarves, is to pick rich minerals, and take the strongest front loaded economy in the game. Their military units are meh and only used for certain things. I generally raze all dwarf cities that don't have at least a gold worth of ore. Warships are one of their only units that are relevant late game, their economy is only relevant with ores, they don't have amp towers.

So, removing warships, regardless of flavor, also removes one of the few reasons to have a dwarf city late game if it doesn't have ores.

[Bahgtru]

Uhm... How do physical units get to stay on wraithform ships? Maybe wraithform ships should only transport wraithform units? Or wraithform shouldn't work on transport if that's too hard to implement. I've used it too and it always feels like a trick.