Let's talk about Dwarves

[Raziel]

So, I have gotten back into the game after a bit of a hiatus and this has been the first time I have properly played with the expansion content, so I wanna talk about it. We've already recently had a very interesting thread regarding elves, so I want to do the same thing here with dwarves.

What are some of the strategies you guys have used and/or theory-crafted with the dwarves? What are the ways you can weaponize them?

I haven't focused on them yet myself, but the fact that they auto-enshadow seems like it could have a lot of potential. I have also read that they have a high likelyhood to dislike disorder and that, due to their dependency on gold, they tend to have a lot of it in their civilisations. Taxes do be like that.

These facts seem to be the key to breaching their naturally high security ratings. Still, it seems quite tough to infiltrate their capitol, so that you can steal and plant their crown jewels. The potential seems really cool, though.

As with most things in the game, the small differences between them and the rest of the races can most likely lead to completely different strategies. This is why I'm particularly curious to hear from the people who have some more experience with them :)

[The Grand Mugwump]

Dwarfs are easy to kill with disease since their heroes will do almost nothing to counter it, which works great for feeding death to the elder god from that expansion.

Dwarf heroes are consistently one of the easiest targets to kill if you need an infamous agent. They are even easier than acolytes in the mid/end game since they never recruit minions and don't focus on might very much.

Every single dwarf city has a library, which means every single dwarf city has an arcane secret. If you want to participate in the magical arms race, infiltrating dwarf libraries is an extremely powerful way to go about it without interference from holy orders destroying arcane secrets or competing mages beating you to them.

The dwarfs work similar to the elves. If you shadow the capital, you can turn them all into a dark empire without rebellions. However, the dwarfs are extremely, extremely resilient to shadow. Even moreso than the elves. In order to shadow their leader, you'd need to either completely infiltrate their capital (which takes a long, long time) and then keep stealing all of their gold so they can't cleanse themselves and the location of shadow, or hope for random events which make the leader develop a liking for gold to appear twice. When the leader becomes obsessed with gold, they will stop cleansing themselves and their location of shadow altogether.

HOWEVER, even if you do turn the dwarfs into a dark empire, the cthonians won't stop attacking them. If your dark dwarf empire ever gets into a war, its armies will leave to fight and its unguarded cities will be razed by cthonians while the armies are away. It's an incredibly disappointing state of affairs.

While we're talking about downsides to the dwarfs. One of my biggest pet peeves is when ghasts from the surface travel to the underworld to attempt to shadow dwarf settlements. The dwarf rulers (and their heroes) can routinely remove half of the shadow in a location and all of the shadow from themselves for a very small gold cost. It's pretty much impossible to shadow them passively, which results in the ghasts going to waste for the rest of the game as they forever are unable to shadow their location and its ruler.

Crown jewels are mostly useless. The motivation from greatly disliking the person who has them isn't enough to get the dwarfs to do anything most of the time. Their heroes -might- attack your agent carrying the crown jewels if the agent is alone and has terrible combat stats, but dwarf heroes are also alone and almost always have terrible combat stats too.

That said, one of the funniest strategies is to plant the crown jewels on the chosen one. This will improve the motivation for the dwarfs to join an existing dark empire, and they will sometimes sabotage the chosen one from underground if they stop for a while next to a cavern entrance leading to dwarf cities. It gets even sillier if awareness of the underground reaches 100%, because the chosen one can then travel underground to attempt to build alliance with the dwarfs who all hate the chosen one's guts.

[Raziel]

Those are some great points. I'm most certainly keep those in mind. Is suppressing the Cthonians worth it if you are planning to protect the dwarves?

The ghast thing does indeed sound extremely annoying. Ghasts are such a cool and fun mechanic, so too bad this expansion seems to hinder them unintentionally.

[Talbrys]

I've never been able to harvest dead underground, with the tentacle or agent power. It just doesn't give underground cities with death as selectable with those abilities. Also, out of 3 games now Dwarven kingdoms always shadow themselves without me having to do anything.

Then again, at least the tentacle power is still bugged and only works on like 1 out of 3 cities (surface) so it could just be that bug applies to other abilities and I've only noticed that one. On the topic of the new god it should have a better mechanic for tentacle length too. On large maps you can only reach like half because it's always awakening points +1 which might work on standard size but kinda surprised no thought was given to other map sizes...

[The Grand Mugwump]

Originally posted by Talbrys:

I've never been able to harvest dead underground, with the tentacle or agent power. It just doesn't give underground cities with death as selectable with those abilities. Also, out of 3 games now Dwarven kingdoms always shadow themselves without me having to do anything.

Then again, at least the tentacle power is still bugged and only works on like 1 out of 3 cities (surface) so it could just be that bug applies to other abilities and I've only noticed that one. On the topic of the new god it should have a better mechanic for tentacle length too. On large maps you can only reach like half because it's always awakening points +1 which might work on standard size but kinda surprised no thought was given to other map sizes...

When the game says you can only consume dead within 4 tiles of a tentacle, they mean 4 tiles. Not connections. Those tentacles need to be almost right under/on top of the death to collect it, and then you have to retract the tentacles all the way back to the center to feed on them.