are kobolds absolute trash?

[F A T B $ $ $ R T D]

their units are trash with very low morale, and instead of being upgraded as they ARE in mines, it costs gold on top of iron to make a slightly better freespawn
feels like a strange mixed up mechanic of the dryad queen
1. dragons are stupid and LAZY, and squishy
2. no kobold lair-move, so everytime they go home to stack up they waste 3 move points
3. no fast travel between mines, even druids have that with ancient forests
4. their faction info says "prophet, king and shaman collect gems', but it doesnt do anything in-game. not sure if its a bug

[Draken]

引用自 F A T B A S T A R D：

kobold late game is terrible atm, that is if you can get to late game
mines with 2 gems or more are consider greater mines i think

Any mine with a mountain in the picture is a greater mine. Basically all mines except coal mines are greater mines and can be turned into a hatchery/stronghold.

How is the kobold late game weak?

How are your enemies beating your 10 blizzard caster with 500 blue kobold meatshields?
How are your enemies beating your 500 white dragon spawn with a kobold king giving wind guide and quickness to all of the archers?

Edit:

引用自 F A T B A S T A R D：

they can be bought for half the price tho

And kobolds are freespawn, so they don't cost anything.

[Curious]

What if there's no blue kobolds due to poor map gen rng?

[Draken]

引用自 Curious：

What if there's no blue kobolds due to poor map gen rng?

Fire and air also has battle field wide spells if your really need them. I don't know about green. It just takes longer to mass them as each sorcerer needs 300 gems to upgrade. But you absolutely can doomstack them too.

Or you can just snatch a dozens meteor casting sorcerers behind a few hundred red kobolds. That also works for a lot of enemies.

But you honestly can bring that argument for just about any class. What if you start as fire warlock and there are no rubies on the map? What if you start as demonologist and you have only farms and heavy fortified cities around you? What if you play druids and your neighbors are a fire warlock, a enchanter and a scourge lord?

[MagiKarp]

Kobolds' late game is definitely not weak when compared to most classes in the game.

A lot of classes need many casters to stay competitive late game so the Kobolds easy access to casters and the fact they can even upgrade them to level 3 if needed is much better than what many of the other classes have.

That's not even mentioning the fact that many of them need to actually spend resources for their meat shields.

[Necroscourge]

In general, Kobolds have a few design issues that aren't that hard to fix.

1. Kobold chaff armies are not just prone to AoEs, they get outright demolished with AoE. Because non-kobold casters have the ability to cast spells during combat while kobold casters have a whopping range of "4" for all spells learned, they are completely hard countered by most entry level casters with burst spells. Kobolds need their own spells that can actually be cast in combat by their magicians, even if it's just buffs. Maybe a Dragon Spirit spell that lets them cast through the front line chaff?

2. The recruitment chances for their various units feels too low for how squishy they are. Drakes are a little too rare for how extremely important they are for taking critical early game locations like cities and mines. Meanwhile all the kobold characters are overpriced by around 15-25 gold, especially sorcs and chiefs.

I say this because the game really wants you to fling out chiefs with 10-20 kobolds to scout and harass undefended tiles where other roles can brute force their way into cities pretty early.

3. Dragons need to be a little more proactive in their land grabbing instead of taking one tile every 40 turns. By the time they finally go grab a tile, one dragon is NOT enough. It feels like a waste of money, kobolds, and gems in most cases.

4. Cities and Towers are almost a waste for the Kobolds, they don't get special "civilized" kobolds or otherwise rare spawns from cities like other roles do. I wish I could train dragon rats or something there. Anything that would make getting drakes easier!

[Draken]

引用自 Necroscourge：

In general, Kobolds have a few design issues that aren't that hard to fix.

1. Kobold chaff armies are not just prone to AoEs, they get outright demolished with AoE. Because non-kobold casters have the ability to cast spells during combat while kobold casters have a whopping range of "4" for all spells learned, they are completely hard countered by most entry level casters with burst spells. Kobolds need their own spells that can actually be cast in combat by their magicians, even if it's just buffs. Maybe a Dragon Spirit spell that lets them cast through the front line chaff?

2. The recruitment chances for their various units feels too low for how squishy they are. Drakes are a little too rare for how extremely important they are for taking critical early game locations like cities and mines. Meanwhile all the kobold characters are overpriced by around 15-25 gold, especially sorcs and chiefs.

I say this because the game really wants you to fling out chiefs with 10-20 kobolds to scout and harass undefended tiles where other roles can brute force their way into cities pretty early.

3. Dragons need to be a little more proactive in their land grabbing instead of taking one tile every 40 turns. By the time they finally go grab a tile, one dragon is NOT enough. It feels like a waste of money, kobolds, and gems in most cases.

4. Cities and Towers are almost a waste for the Kobolds, they don't get special "civilized" kobolds or otherwise rare spawns from cities like other roles do. I wish I could train dragon rats or something there. Anything that would make getting drakes easier!

Ok:

1. What are you talking about regarding kobold casters only having range 4 for all spells??? If you hire a blue kobold sorcerer they can come with blizzard. A battelfield wide spell that deals cold damage. Which your blue kobolds are all immune to. The kobold casters do not have unique spell books. They use the same spellbooks that other classes have. Red kobold casters for example use the 'pyromancer' spellbook. The same one that the fire warlock has.

2. Dragons boost both the recruitment chance for casters as well as for drakes. So if you want more frost drakes to show up, get one of your blue kobold casters to summon a dragon to one of your mines. The lesser dragons only boost the recruitment chance for their own color, elder dragons boost all colors. Honestly, kobolds have one of the highest chances to recruit their class specific casters for class that I have played. Sorcerers are hireable level 2 spell caster. So them costing a bit more than 100 gold is completely fine. And the chiefs are quite cheap. Especially if you consider that the kobolds don't need to use any gold for their standard units.

3. Dragons aren't there to grab land for you. You get dragons for the recruitment boost and as mine defense. Them flying out and attacking is a bonus. Don't count on your dragons conquering all your territory for you. If you do that you will just get disappointed. Dragons are absolutely worth their very cheap cost. The elder dragons cost more, but they are also incredible powerful and come with two free items.

4. Then don't conquer the cities and towers. As kobolds you aren't really all that interested in them in the first place. Different classes have different resource nodes that are important for them. For kobolds it is mines first and foremost. The other stuff is 'grab later if able'. A druid for example also has not that much use for a city.

Edit: Here have some pictures of one of my kobold armies, I have a few of those, taking a castle because it was on the way.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2628764918
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2628765128

The cost of that army? Around 250 gold.

[F A T B $ $ $ R T D]

引用自 Draken：

引用自 F A T B A S T A R D：

kobold late game is terrible atm, that is if you can get to late game
mines with 2 gems or more are consider greater mines i think

引用自 F A T B A S T A R D：

they can be bought for half the price tho

And kobolds are freespawn, so they don't cost anything.

bakemono are freespawns in mines u know
being half the price is just a cherry on top

引用自 Draken：

4. Then don't conquer the cities and towers. As kobolds you aren't really all that interested in them in the first place. Different classes have different resource nodes that are important for them. For kobolds it is mines first and foremost. The other stuff is 'grab later if able'. A druid for example also has not that much use for a city.

Edit: Here have some pictures of one of my kobold armies, I have a few of those, taking a castle because it was on the way.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2628764918
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2628765128

The cost of that army? Around 250 gold.

you need cities and the likes for trade

[eddieballgame]

One thing that separates CoE 5 from the Dominions series is the option for everyone (AI or Human) to play with the same races.
This allows for 'even' matches for those that fear they are over matched vs other races.
Of course, then the "rng screwed me per my starting position" problem creeps into the conversation, (like it always does for some) so I guess there is always going to be a reason to...complain. :)

[Draken]

引用自 F A T B A S T A R D：

bakemono are freespawns in mines u know
being half the price is just a cherry on top

Oh right, I forgot. Thanks for reminding me.
I still don't think you can make a direct comparison that easily. Especially since you get different numbers of units. And once again, I usually don't spend any gold on standard kobolds. I am not sure I would actually hire more even if they were half the price.

引用自 F A T B A S T A R D：

you need cities and the likes for trade

Fair point about trade. Though I wouldn't say kobolds 'need' trade. Kobolds aren't like some of the other gem classes that they need specific gems. A greater mine will give you gems and access to gems usages for the same gem color. So while trade is nice, it isn't nearly as vital to kobolds as it is to other classes.
So while I really love some early trade for iron to get my first stronghold faster, I would still consider towns less important to kobolds. And once you get a few drakes and/or caster with the gold you saved up by not getting standard kobolds, taking a not too strong defended city is certainly feasible. Or your dragon decides that it can take the city and clears it for you. I had that happen in my last kobold games when I left cities next to mines because I had more important targets to conquer.

[F A T B $ $ $ R T D]

after trying out the dwarves, id say they are very similar to the kobolds but slower, and not as gold reliant as kobolds
and they somehow have fast travel between mines

[Underscorecow]

Kobolds i think are a fairly decent faction late game and are only countered by extremely powerful and tanky casters, even demon lords and elemental lords can beat kobolds that are immune to their elemental types because of spells like rain of blood or earthquake.

But thats just because they can tank a blizzard doomstack or something long enough to cast their own battlefield-wide spells

But a kobold doomstack comes online much sooner than those types of tanky casters usually and the most you should normally worry about is other squishy casters like illusionist with sleeping army or something.


This isnt considering your elder dragons which are kind of your version of a tanky caster but they just sit in your mines and defend + boost recruitment availability of certain units.

[FatDragon]

With some decent amount of mp expirience with em I could pretty safely say - yeah, kobos are bad, maybe not entirely dorf level bad but they have it rough, your tiny scraps of lategame cant really compare to what some other classes have, in the end youre always stuck with a huge bunch of low hp units with low hp casters. Almost any sort of entire battlefield spells or burst 100 ones make your units evaporate en mass before they can contribute at least some form of value. It woudnt be that much of a problem, if you could win early, baron/TK-style, but no, you most often have no shot at it, coz your early game is very mediocre too. Dragons are also pretty bad at anything but boosting spawning rate, and traps, aside from decay ones are of little use due to the very modest dmg. Best you can do is to get flyers and try to win the economy game, but that's also a tough one, as kobs are, again, far from the best in it.

[F A T B $ $ $ R T D]

they are bad but they are still better than dwarves and dryad queen, or are they?
and they are super bad against ambushes
their scouts, which are usually black, does not have immunity to all the lvl3 spells your kings will spam
and you cannot use lvl2 spells because the chaffs will just make you out of range

[Draken]

You are the one to decide how many chaff units you bring.
And you can keep the scouts under a separated commander and keeping them out of the battle altogether.

I can't really comment about multiplayer as I am not playing there, but If I run into an enemy with battlefield wide or burst 100 spells that I don't have immunity against, I usually do one of two things:
1. Ignore the doomstack and instead start sending armies into his backland. Also shadow his doomstack with one or two of my armies to instantly take back everything they left unguarded/weakly guarded.
2. Send in a sacrificial army that causes the aoe/battlefield wide spells to blow up their own units. Then immediately send in some red dragon spawn, black dragon spawn or my favorite, white dragon spawn. The black dragon spawn will likely disease the aoe casters, the red ones have great alpha strikes, more hp and set things on fire, and the white ones just delete isolated targets.

White Dragon Spawn against isolated high hp AoE caster:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2608670814
Green Kobold ambush via baiting with detached leader:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2629936425

[FatDragon]

I pretty much only look at the classes from the position of multiplayer, as playing agains ai you dont really test how good class actually is, its more of the trial of classes+your skill's cheese potentual as high level ai is stupid but cheat out a huge amounts of gold. Players play by the same book so its easier to see wich class is slow and weak and wich is, well, a necro lol.

Kobo's are better then dorfs, a lil bit, but it does not say much as dorfs are awfull rn. Dryad was absolutely fine, being right in a middle of the tierlist in coe4, now she's in a sorry state too. I didnt played her a whole lot since then tho, nore does folk very enthusiastic to pick her vs me, so, cant say exactly how bad she is, proly better then dorfs at least.