Total war and war spoils should be a trait any culture can have

[Simacan]

Its a weird balance on the reavers that they're very locked into one play style because of this mechanic. But the strangest part is that, to me anyway, conquistadors which the reavers seem to be themed around always struck me as more of the "Conquer and subjugate" rather than "pick over the spoils"

The mechanic feels more in line with barbarian culture, fall of rome kind of deal. Would fit with chosen destroyers... "War machines - no starting whispering stone, total war option in diplomacy and access to war spoils - chaos affinity" would fit pretty well on barbarian, and chaos could use a few culture traits that don't give evil.

And honestly, just let the reavers make cannon without the spoils, hell, give all the cultures a couple more base units to round them out a little. Industrial should have cannon and feudal would fit with musketeer style units.

It feels like broad mechanics were packaged into one faction to use as a selling point for the faction alone, rather than simply adding those units and mechanics more broadly as part of the DLC

[The Big Brzezinski]

I got the opposite impression; spoils are basically useless. It takes a lot of gold to earn a useful quantity of war spoils. If you have a lot of gold, you don't need war spoils because you can just spend the gold on units replenishment, grievances, and trade deals.

So far my best reaver run has been all about building and maintaining as large a military as possible. Order and materium with a little nature for natural recovery. Lots of gold, fast healing troops, tier one and two army compositions.

I just got done knocking over a dragon lord. I have thousands of spoils sitting around, doing nothing. I can't spend them to consolidate power. I can't use them to make up for the lost investment in my cities. The magelock cannons I could buy aren't part of my army composition, which is now mostly dragoon and overseer blobs on spiders (makes for a lot of captured units I end up not recruiting). The two vassals I do have were earned using whispering stones and pacification, not with war spoils. I guess I could spend them to push up allegiance on my new conquest vassals, but I can do that for free with whispering stones already.

I'm assuming I'm missing something, that there's some big mechanic that you need spoils for and I'm overlooking. Right now, though, Reaver just looks like a crappier version of Dark. Hot Topic goths posing as nihilists.

[Simacan]

I don't disagree that the spoils lose their value, but I feel thats why they don't fit well with materium, materium has a bunch of ways to make gold. The main utility of war spoils is to hire defeated enemies after a battle, which when you combine that with chaos traits that produce extra units after a battle, it means you could have a good murderball system where if it was a culture trait you could bump it up in power a little.

Your army would end up being this hoard that is taking constant losses while also pulling in more units, sort of like a mind control focused deal.
Sort of why reavers are weird. They would benefit from being brought more in line with other cultures rather than being tied to this one specific mechanic.

[Blanch Warren]

the only other culture that practices slavery by default is Dark and they eat you, experiment on you or feed you to spiders.