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It's not 1:1. It never says it's 1:1 either. It's... random, with the strength of the grove and the strength of the boost increasing the chance/number of spawns that turn.
However, I definitely notice a difference leaving a grove empty vs leaving in a satyr commander vs leaving in a dryad.
And a grove with a set of 4 commanders will definitely pump out units, even if it's a basic grove.
It's only the single strongest boost, yes. And sadly, it's a bit... wonky. The spawns are ultimately controlled by RNG, so even with a good boost on an upgraded grove, you may get shafted one year. Then get a bumper crop the next.
Ok so it would be better to have one grove with a minotaur, another one with a centaur and then another with a dryad or the like?
I only ask becauee I actually have three groves relatively close in proximity and I want to try to max my chances I guess. I actually managed to charm an independent dryad queen on an ancient forest and while I can't use her as a commander, I can park her in a grove for the boost...
Oh no, I only meant that boosts for the same unit type don't stack with each other, but they work independently from other unit boosters.
You can stack the +2 minotaur with +4 satyr, +3 harpy, and +1 centaur. Also see the Pan that have at least +1 to each of these unit types. It would b counter-productive to crate a unit with multiple different types of boosts on it if only one could work at a time.
But a +1 boost from a satyr hoplite commander doesn't stack with +4 satyr boost from a dryad queen.... but it will work independently from a minotaur commander in the same grove.
So 4 different commanders with 4 different spawn boosts in a grove gives you 4 chances to spawn a unit in that grove, per turn. Stronger boosts and a stronger grove will further boost these chances....
But a single boost in a single weak grove can be very susceptible to RNG wonkiness.
There is a really, really obvious divide between people who play SP and MP, and beyond that between people who are just willing to hit "next turn" over and over in SP because they know the AI is too weak to ever finish them off. The reality is that if you play against the AI on anything but the very highest levels, you can pass as many turns as you please with no real consequence, which means that there's no functional difference if a class, strategy, or whatever takes two or three times as long to do things.
And that's why you see some people saying "oh yes the real strategy with the Dryad is to ignore your summons, set up a bunch of groves, put commanders in them and collect freespawn", which is viable... if you're up against the AI, which never really makes any effort to, you know, kill you, and therefore have unlimited turns to set up whatever you want. The fact that the Dryad spends ages setting up a really weaksauce freespawn income (where are you even getting the herbs to create those groves without just hitting "pass turn" over and over?) doesn't matter if you're up against the AI and have essentially unlimited turns to burn.
And, I mean... fine? But it's silly to turn around and then give people advice based on that, because if your strategy only works against the AI then you didn't need a strategy in the first place. If you had enough time to build a bunch of groves and then plant your commanders in them accomplishing nothing useful beyond getting you a tiny trickle of units worth as much as maybe a handful of herbs a year, then you had enough time to just... win the game, with just about any more aggressive strategy. It's not even a strategy, it's just fiddling around having fun with the mechanics and roleplaying.
Which isn't bad! I don't mean to criticize that. If you don't think the Dryad needs to be stronger - if you have fun with her and that's enough - I mean, that's fine. Balance isn't everything and the game isn't primarily designed for multiplayer. But as it is a lot of these discussions are people talking past each other.
And I think it's unnecessary because - while I'm in the camp that prioritizes flavor and fun over balance, we don't need to choose here. You could sharply reduce the cost of every Dryad ritual, give her an additional way to easily cap forests (more cheap easy throwaway commanders, cheap easy access to wandering stupid units, make unowned forests adjacent to her forests have a chance of being captured automatically, etc), and she would still not be that strong. There's no real reason not to do that - it's an easy tweak to some numbers.
Or she could get some additional stuff, which would also be cool! More work, but cool.
But I think that it is worth at least highlighting classes that are weak in ways that can be fixed with easy numerical tweaks, or so future additions to that class can be made on the strong end. That is to say, even if competitive multiplayer isn't the focus of the game, and even if nature and flavor of classes means Dwarves will never be as strong as Necromancers, it is useful to be aware of where things stand.
And right now the Dryad Queen is pretty bad (not the worst class, but near the bottom of the pack); most of the strategies I see people suggesting for her simply don't work there because they are far, far, far too slow to see any return and don't give you enough to be worth it (compared to other late-game classes like the Elementalist) even if you manage to pull them off.
You can't win with summons, either. That was the OP's original rant. He got so close to figuring out why as he ranted about all the thousands in herbs of units he'd throw at a fortified location... only to fail
The summons don't give you anything you don't already have. They don't compliment your "standard recruitment" troops. They don't add strategic depth. They don't make a complete army on their own. They aren't strong enough to bulldoze everything despite this lack of depth. They are just more basic beef melee units for a faction that already has easy access to basic beef melee units.
Which is why going all in on herbs and summons is a losing strategy. At least a druid or other summon faction like the Scourge Lord can buy basic ranged units to back up their melee summons in the early game. Then ride that until they push up a tier and get the good stuff. But mixing boars and satyrs on your front line... it's just more of what you already have. The "white" summons are nice but overpriced... and more of the same frontline beef. Nicer cut of beef, but still beef. Summons just don't fill any gaps in your ranks nor can you make an effective army of just summons.
And if prioritize forests, you won't be able to summon a commander (until you drop 750 herbs upgrading a grove). So you just keep slowly sweeping forests with your starting set... ofc it's a losing strategy.
Nor will you be able to buy commanders to keep sweeping more forests. So where am I getting the herbs to set up more groves? With commanders I buy for gold. The DQ needs to get gold/iron secured before sweeping the forests second. Since you don't have normal troops to buy with gold and upgrading troops isn't that expensive, you use all the extra gold to buy extra commanders. You'll also be grabbing fortified places to upgrade troops into better versions. You still won't have massive armies until late game, but your upgraded units can be very effective.
And the extra commanders scout and sweep forests. Who said anything about smashing "next turn" doing nothing over and over and over again? You have to strike a balance between having enough gold to hire most commanders and upgrade troops while also expanding herb income to get more groves. You can't just go all in on herb income. The summons are for emergencies or to top off troops in the field, but they are not going to be the bulk of your forces.
I can't say it enough: the Dryad isn't a Druid. Both OP and Aquillion keep talking about how y'all try to force the Dryad to be a Druid and it doesn't work. The Dryad is an herb faction, but it's not a standard herb faction... trying to treat it as such is a square peg being forced into a round hole. And yet most proposed "fixes" are just getting out a chisel and ripping that round hole into a square.
You even touch on this. The charm of the game is asymmetrical factions that don't play as carbon copies of each other while giving suggestions to make the Dryad play more like the druid. Because y'all just can't get out of that mindset.
But I notice you said either there - was that a tacit admission that both strategies, currently, suck? And that the Dryad is weak overall? Because that's what everyone is telling you. It sounds like you're admitting that what you're advising, while it is more fun for you (something I can get behind), is not actually... good. It doesn't really work, except against weaker levels of the AI where you have as much time to fool around as you want and any strategy can do something. It won't win you the game outside of settings easy enough where you can win doing almost anything.
Yes, of course, if you set the AI to a relatively low level, you can slowly (over the course of many years) accumulate enough herbs to buy groves, and slowly (over the course of many years) take the fortified areas you need for decent numbers of commanders, and slowly (over the course of many years) hire gold commanders to send out and capture forests that you can use to build more groves to slowly (over the course of many more years) provide you enough freespawn to eventually get the sort of army most other factions had five years earlier is a workable strategy... against the AI, provided you don't set it too high, because the AI does not attempt to kill the player in any systematic way, and is terrible at expanding, and therefore it makes no difference if your strategy is far too slow.
Against players it is completely and totally unworkable. It is not a serious option; they will kill you long before your groves have even begun to show a reasonable return. That is what everyone keeps trying to tell you when they say that groves are, practically speaking, against opponents who are aggressively trying to kill you, effectively just throwing away your precious herbs to accomplish nothing - you need those troops now, not five years from now when your freespawn have finally built up enough to be an army that will still be horrifically weak against what most factions will have built up in those three years. If you waste your herbs on groves against a human player they will (if they are an early-game faction) gleefully march their troops in and take them from you, and you won't have anything to defend them with; or (if they're a late-game faction) they'll gleefully take the time you're giving them to build doomstacks that can effortlessly cut through as much of your freespawn as you throw at them.
On top of this, because the AI is weak and makes no effort to kill you, you absolutely can use the Dryad Queen as a summoner and crush it. It's a terrible strategy, I agree (just like your suggestions are, compared to what most other factions can do, absolutely terrible), but again, any strategy at all will work against the AI at lower levels.
I don't disagree that what you describe is a more fun way to play the Dryad Queen. I don't disagree that it is how I would want the Dryad Queen to win. I assume it is how we are supposed to play the Dryad Queen.
But right now it simply doesn't work against competent human players - not at all. It is too slow, for a return that is not good enough. It's not a matter of simply being asymmetric; asymmetric ought to mean factions play differently but have their own strong points. The Dryad has no strong points. You are weak in the early game, weak in the late game, and the plan you outline is so slow that you will simply die and if you're playing with a teammate they're going to ask you WTF you were wasting your herbs on all game.
I have nothing against players who like to zone out and just play against lower-level AIs without too much pressure so they can do whatever they find fun without worrying about how many in-game years are passing, and I wouldn't want any changes that would threaten your fun for the world.
If your real feeling is "I don't think the game should be designed for high difficulty / competitive play", I don't even really have an argument against that - that is fine. Maybe it shouldn't be. "Just don't play the Dryad Queen in those games" is a valid thing to say, and I suspect the devs might even agree. It's totally fair!
But I think it's still useful to note when factions are slow and weak, in those contexts, because there are still sometimes ways to make everyone happy.
And the Dryad Queen is absolutely slow and weak, and the strategy you are suggesting is also slow and weak and could stand to get some numerical buffs if nothing else, so saying "but you're doing it wrong" isn't helping at all here because the way people play the Dryad Queen is not the actual problem.
If you like the gameplay style you describe, and want it to be viable in mroe types of play, you should be agreeing that it could use tweaks to make it more effective. Because right now it is simply not, and constantly telling people they should play it that way is not going to magically make it better.
Yes, of course the first thing people try when playing the Dryad is to send out the gold commanders and throw down a bunch of groves - it is not (I am sorry to inform you) some deep hidden secret, it is blatantly obviously the way the class is supposed to play. The issue is that people who are having trouble with it are either trying it on harder difficulties than you, or trying it against human players, where its inadequacy is much more obvious - or they're playing on lower difficulties, but noticing that while it can work by taking advantage of how the AI never really bothers to try and finish you off, it's still pretty terrible.
Those things can be fixed, in a variety of ways, without threatening the things you enjoy about the faction! I certainly don't want her turned into a copy of the druid (I'd actually be happy if her druid summons were entirely removed and replaced with something else to make her more distinct), but the point is that as she is right now, she's weak, no matter how she's played. There's no magic secret Dryad strategy that makes her good.
And maybe that doesn't matter? But it is worth noting, and having you leaping into that discussion frantically regaling the numerous highly-experienced players in this thread who have consistently told you how weak she is with the most obvious and straightforward Dryad strategies as though she is secretly stronger than we think is not going to change that fact.
So I feel like things are getting passionate in here, and just so you don't feel like you're arguing with everyone in some uphill debate, I will reiterate some of my take on it, because I feel like these are points we all should be able to agree on, assuming we're all playing the same Dryad.
Dryad can be fun to play, but needs some buffing in order to be viable outside of enormous maps against the AI.
Dryad is very dependent on favourable RNG. While all factions have to deal with RNG, Dryad lacks the ability to hire units regularly, her army generation rate is literally random outside of summoning, but you can't summon if you're building forests because of the huge herb costs, and if you're not building forests you're going to hamper your army generation potential. In comparison, other factions are typically much faster at growing both their army of meat and summoning their strong units.
In my personal experience, Dryad typically doesn't have a capable army until at least year 10, and this is assuming a favourable starting position (I roll maps until I have one because screw RNGesus). This is not viable against a competent human opponent or high level AI. I totally recognize that. Dryad also performs very poorly on medium and small maps for the same reason.
My pointing out it's a snowball faction that you have to be very careful with was more for people who may be reading this and thinking of trying her out, it's not so much for you ladies and gents who have already played tons of Dryad and already know she can't go toe to toe until very late. (and honestly even then, she's a bit underwhelming)
I agree with making Dryad more viable across more kinds of play, and I think it's possible to do that without completely changing her core mechanics and ruining her flavour. The mechanics just need to be tweaked a little to make her more effective across different map sizes and against more capable opponents.
Yes. I did this because I was desperate for commander recruits which I knew I would get if I could just cap a library or temple. Unfortunately for me the ones I discovered were all well-defended.
Not being able to siege fortified locations well is a reality that many classes face. I was feeling it especially badly because I I was in year 3 and had only gotten 1 commander recruit.
The summons are basically the only thing you have when it counts. Map control is established through white centaur stacks.
You will not have the "beef melee" units when you need them. Only when you're already winning. By the time you're ready to get minotaurs in any significant number, you'll already have a Primal Forest and the Earth Mother doing most of the work for you(which is usually not enough).
...Which is where the problem is. I spend gold on every Dryad commander I get, but the rate of Commander recruits for Dryad Queen in my experience is much lower than other herb-classes. The good, FAST commanders are highly influenced by the number of temples and libraries you have. I have since realized that, yes, you do get them even without those buildings, but the rate is low enough to be discounted.
Here's where you are unfortunately wrong. The way you're playing DQ is the way the Devs intended them to be played. Unfortunately the Devs did not balance them properly. Consequently, the way you play - the way the faction is MEANT to be played - is actually sub-optimal and a sure-fire way to lose against other players or more challenging SP settings that other classes can overcome.
None of us "want" DQ to play like Druid. However, every class wants to expand as much as possible and get as much of their unique resource as possible. Like it or not, since the DQ is a herb class, it has to do a lot of the things that Druid (the original herb faction) does: namely send decently outfitted commanders everywhere.
It's not that we want DQ to play like Druid. In fact, I said that I dislike the fact that they even have Minor and Major Animal Summoning, and a gimped, costlier version at that.
It's the fact that right now, they are under-tuned. Their faction mechanic does not give them any sort of tangible benefit early on, and only comes into play as a "bonus" when they've heavily invested in summons to capture the rest of the map.
Basically, there is no escaping the fact that to play them "well", you have to resort to a play pattern that is similar to Druids - spam Call of Gaia and send out white centaur stacks with the few commanders you have to get as many resources as possible and avoid conflict until you can get Earth Mother.
This is like how Druids spam Major Animal Summoning, except that spell is arguably much more affordable, and Druids get MANY more commanders.
To be clear, this is not a pattern that I like. It just performs better than the style the Devs ostensibly intended: making groves and parking Commanders in them, which is a luxury you can only afford to do after you control most of the map.
Just as you accuse me of hyperbole, I similarly cannot take your experiences playing the class seriously. Have you tried playing Dryad in a 1v1 against a competent Emperor AI? A Senator or a Bakemono or the like on a Large size map. How about 2 Emperors? That's something that is readily possible with the better classes, but not very viable with DQ.
How about experience playing a few duels with them?
(I agree it would probably be best to be stuff that makes her more unique; I only mentioned lowering her summon costs because that would be an easy change.)
One idea I had was to have her control spread itself through forests automatically (ie. each turn, she has a chance to auto-capture any unowned, unoccupied forest near a tile she already owns.) Maybe also give her a cheap long-range summon spell that lets her summon some dryad-specific slow-but-strong treant units in any friendly forest. This would make it more viable for her to hang back and build up groves while she naturally expands automatically. Then, when her expanding forests find something interesting or when it needs to be defended, she could awaken the forest there remotely and use that to capture or defend while sending normal units the slow way.
Or maybe let it capture unowned, unoccupied forest hearts - that's only likely to come up in rare situations anyway.
This lets the dryad proxy run around, charming animals, harassing other players, and generally be aggressive without risking the devastating setback that losing the squishy Dryad-commander is.
It also means the early-game players can't just walk into the dryad's capital with a few hobbits and grab an easy win, since a slightly-better Hamadryad tree is now sitting there from day 1.
Could still keep random spawn from stuff like Hamadryads and whatever base-spawn the grove has.
Replacing the free-spawn with a ritual would make the class less confusing (some people in this very thread are confused by the exact mechanics) and probably feel more thematically appropriate than Dryads standing around like Uncle Ben to attract Satyrs (etc.)
And probably get rid of the summon animals spell since the faction is generally more about modernizing and arming strange wild-but-intelligent creatures with human steel than it is about calling upon 'the forest' to strike down enemies (that would be the druid).