Best Chaos Dwarf province city setups & build orders?

[Pimpin Pippin]

After all the balance patches what are the current best Chaos Dwarf province city building setups & build orders (raw resources, weapon production, etc)?

Especially important are the first two or three provinces, since early game tends to be the toughest.

I am unsure should i always make a new Dark Tower when available, and how soon should i start my first factory.

I am also unsure of how valuable Convoys are in the very early game, since you generally lack ALL the resources as you are building up armies and mines and factories and dark towers.

[KoboldUtopian]

I usually go full materials for the first several provinces. There's no need to get weapons until you can actually build the more expensive units (and you won't need them for a while anyway). Dark Towers too, since you need to start building those up.

I use convoys to get materials. It's easy to get enough gold and labor from raiding and sacking but not much you can do to make up for materials until you have more cities.

[Nylan]

May or may not be optimal. I always tried to slap a factory into my first province though. Get some extra weapons going early for if a big convoy payout is an option. Convoys can make a lot of gold between selling arms and purchasing slaves. More provinces means more places to sell slaves from, which is very profitable. Convoys trigger battles, get more slaves out of those, as well as post battle loot and items for your generals. Later game you will likely have more enemies, so having those convoy leaders ranked up and with (hopefully) better units can be important.

If a dark tower is an option i'd always pick it. More influence, so more dark tower rewards. You always want to be climbing that ranking to confederate the competition. Get their lands and all of their seats and associated bonuses. Pain to sort after, but it can be a huge boost. Towers are also where you can boost hero capacity, at least the caster and Centaur are worth it, not so sold on the engineer.

I'd usually keep resource production over 1000 a turn. Before adding a new factory and lowering that add a new outpost. Loved most of the landmarks, generally they were a lower cost slave per resource or resource per arms option, and can be built beside those anyway, so try and find room for all of those.

Seems like the factories had minor settlement defenses where outposts were field battles.. If you take a settlement and think you might get attacked the next turn you might take that into consideration, maybe your force is all infantry and can hold chokepoints better than a field. Or maybe you have mostly guns and need a large open field. If it's a tier 1 settlement converting it wont lower the level anyway, so just take your pick there.

[Zeek]

I dedicate provinces to either mining or factories (and the tower). I hardly ever mix them.

The first province I always dedicate to mining because you need materials more than arms in the early game.

My second province is usually factories, but with the money building built first.

I'll then alternate back to mining but generally you're gonna want more mines over factories as the materials are used more than arms until much later in the campaign.

Convoys, in early to mid game, I exclusively use them to trade money for slaves, because again you need those materials to get your recruit buildings built and main tower tiered up. Once I have a good arms surplus I'll trade them for slaves.

[KoboldUtopian]

Originally posted by Zeek:

I dedicate provinces to either mining or factories (and the tower). I hardly ever mix them.

Doesn't one of the factory buildings reduce the slave use of the mines though? (or maybe the other way around)

[Zeek]

Originally posted by CoerciveUtopian:

Doesn't one of the factory buildings reduce the slave use of the mines though? (or maybe the other way around)

I don't think so.

There's a factory building that increases raw material output by like 10% or something, but it's not really worth building since you loose out on a mine.

[SpeaksTooFast]

Been a while since I played them but I made it a point to have at least one factory and tower in every province that could support them (major settlement and at least 3 total). The factory building that boosts material production was nice and the settlement itself is more defensive which can come in handy on less defended borders. This made it a lot easier to maintain public order which made everything else run smoother. The tower also increases hero capacity and some other stuff at higher tiers and if my public order was high then I didn't need as many labor camps.

Once I got into the mid/late game I think I did go factory heavy in a few provinces but that was at the point where I was already getting more raw mats than I was reasonably capable of spending otherwise.