Races, Units, Buildings

[zitro1987]

Dwarves are amazing but they do come with three flaws :
-Slow in combat and the overland map. They can find themselves unable to win against weaker enemies because they just walk away. Cannons can help but only until the fast units take them out.
-They depend on minerals and don't have a purify unit.
-Dwarf cities don't have amplifying towers and produce low power, if you want magic, look elsewhere (or conquer cities from other races. That always works, if successful.)

They are the best choice for military based strategic, but bad for magic based ones.
Oh and their growth is almost as bad as Dark Elves, so spreading them around takes a lot of time.

...at this point I'm tempted to swap the growth values of Dwarves and Dark Elves though. That would also make Dark Elves equal to High Elves.

My interpretation of Dwarves:
I agree with Seravy: they are not a great military race mostly because of their slow movement. Getting high resistance in place of 1 movement is not a good trade off in many circumstances, especially for a myrran race. Their halberdiers are kind of awful. They might deserve an additional hp bonus.

The hammerhand units have 2 movement, but it can still take a while to reach ranged units. When going against hammerhands, a 3mv ranged unit can shoot 8 times. They are competent melee fighters with high damage rating (especially with holy weapon, flame blade or other buffs), but their mediocre armor lets hp get drained quickly against some spells and multi-figure units (especially ranged).

Economy-wise, I'm not sure I agree as much with Seravy. All you need to do is play with alchemist retort, get a bunch of towns, build religious buildings, increase taxes, shift gold to mana. If you play alchemist + archmage, you don't even need to invest in mana - invest most of your power as 'skill' , which is needed to mass-produce summoning units or cast 'endurance' to compensate the slowness issue

[Nelphine]

My dwarf strategy is: high taxes, no alchemy retort. Earn hundreds of gold per turn as early as possible (can be your home city by itself on rich, otherwise you probably need 3 cities. ) you can buy all the important buildings, your workers make the remaining buildings faster, and from turn 1 (again, without alchemist retort) I never ever spend power on mana. On rich games I can actually have the best skill if I go arch mage, even on impossible (And once i had the best skill in impossible even without archmage) Military wise, being slow only matters on the offense. If your economy is the best (which it is) you don't need to attack, only defend. And while ranged units will do damage, often times due to economy/production advantage, the dwarf is a tier ahead - hammerhands against halberdiers, halberdiers against swordsmen.

And you still get full magic to support them because of taxes. (Once up to 12 or 15 cities you start doing dark elf for the population power because you can buy everything usually earning 1000+ gold per turn by then. )

[Seravy]

All you need to do is play with alchemist retort, get a bunch of towns, build religious buildings, increase taxes, shift gold to mana. If you play alchemist + archmage, you don't even need to invest in mana - invest most of your power as 'skill' , which is needed to mass-produce summoning units or cast 'endurance' to compensate the slowness issue

These are tactics meant for the highest difficulty levels, and not something the balance of the race should be based on.
Alchemy wins the game with any early game/military race. It's the strongest retort you can have for them.

Yes you can make mana from gold and have all your power base on skill or research but that power base will be like a quarter of other myrran races, unless you...play on rich terrain and manage to avoid chaos wizards.

[namad]

Are most of you cheating though? IMO balance discussion should only revolve around fair minerals. I know a lot of people only play dwarves on rich minerals. However if you want the game to be perfectly balanced for a normal game, by their very nature this must mean that dwarves are literally the best race on rich minerals.

The only way to change these facts is to change the entire design of dwarven bonus. I don't think I've ever had a perfect dwarven city, although I also rarely play green (and I don't think green is a good match other than transmute for dwarves). The best dwarven city I've ever seen is probably 2 top tier minerals and 1 low tier mineral.

My idea: Make dark elves have +20 or +30 instead of +10 if you want. No need to nerf dwarves imo, draconians are still better. Although this debate just proves further that beastmen are useless because no one has mentioned them once. War trolls got mentioned, as did doom drakes, and dwarves (all when talking about dark elves) however I don't really think anyone even cares beastmen exist. So uh yeah, a redesign of the manticore or some such could be good?

[Nelphine]

Minerals are only important for dwarf caster skill, and early game gold income. (Pre 1406) And since you don't need to be top caster skill, you have to have minerals crippled very early for it to seriously affect you. All other minerals ate just icing on top of taxes and 3 production.

By the way I still am in favor of disallowing farmers markets to dwarves. (Though I wouldn't switch their growth rate with dark elves then.)

That would seriously hurt their growth (taxes) and food (hamlets support MASSIVE dwarf armies due to granary+ farmers market.)

[Nelphine]

My games usually go 'let's do Myrran, and x magic strategy and poor minerals'. What race? Ponder ponder eventually decide dwarf (on poor!) is best. Give up and switch to rich because... dwarf.

Every time I go Myrran that's my process. (For impossible only)

So I'm trying arcanus again.

[Seravy]

War trolls got mentioned, as did doom drakes, and dwarves (all when talking about dark elves) however I don't really think anyone even cares beastmen exist. So uh yeah, a redesign of the manticore or some such could be good?

I had a lot of beastmen cities in that game. I used them to produce magicians which were...almost as good as my warlocks but much cheaper. I also made some minotaurs but stopped playing before using them in combat, I already know they are good. The beastmen cities were the main reason I didn't go bankrupt around 1410 as well, as they had a big population and I could built gold buildings with them. They probably even provided me with more power than my elves due to their number and easy captured enemy cathedrals and such.
Manticores suck though. Even Wyvern Riders are better.

[Seravy]

How about this for Manticores?

3 Figures
+1 To Hit
7 Melee
2 Ranged with 2 ammo
3 Defense
6 Resistance
6 Health
3 Movement
Poison 4, Flying, Weapon Immunity.
Cost 160, requires Fantastic Stables but not Animist Guild.
They are meant to fire poison arrows twice to weaken enemies before reaching them for melee combat.
Not sure if 7 melee is enough or they need 8? 3 Figures are not much.

Ranged is intentionally low to make the poison part more relevant and because it allows the AI to move it forward instead of backward before shooting.

[namad]

wyverns and griffons at 2 figures are slightly stronger. I think 3x8 is too much? or not!

[Nelphine]

Managed to get a game with zero neutral cities on Myrror. Dwarves for everyone! Arcanus Opponent is spamming great wasting too (No towers cracked until at least 2 years great wastng had passed, even with dusjunctions taking it down periodically) But i have 1 whole beast man priest to purify the whole plane!

Sorcery specialty so losing 2/3 of my adamantium (I think there may be a fourth adamantium on the plane but my city there hasn't grown much yet) isn't as painful as it could have been.

Also amusing: four towers on a continent that only fits five cities. (I could have squeezed in six by making them all suboptimal.) I can literally have 1 stack guard all four towers, although I won't since multi pronged attacks would saturate me.