Dreadnought skill/race combo

[Flushing]

Been doing a deep dive return to AOW3, which always happens when I watch high fantasy movies/series.

Lord of the Rings/Hobbit, Game of Thrones, and most recently the Witcher. I digress.

I want to play dreadnought and would like to try:

1. Dwarf Fire Mastery with Air Adept.

My thoughts are I can make special Fire immune stacks of First Born and Fire Elementals and drop their atom bomb spell.

Aire adept is just for seeker.

Follow-up question. I hate taking adept air just for seeker. I would much rather adept greyguard or wild magic.

For experienced dreadnaught players is seeker a must?

I see a lot of adept seeker and Greyguard Mastery as "the choice", but that just doesn't seem fun to me.

What are some combos you like.

[Gladen]

Frosting Dreadnought, Air mastery and Expander.

Frost Tanks instead of Fire Tänka creates a a different kind of strategy.

Spread Artic terrain and expand territory quickly. I would say it's very fun,

[NEgative]

I like Goblin Dreadnoughts. Usually the Water Mastery works great with Goblins, but then wetlands are anti-synergistic with Machines do to them not getting the movement bonuses like Goblins. Fire Adept is almost a must to go with these as well.

Other alternative that could work with Goblin Dreadnought is Destruction mastery for the Blight Empire + Air Adept. But then again Goblins need at least the Water Adept, but that depends completely on how many roamer camps are in the starting settings and how strong defenders there are.

Personally I like the early game to be hard PvE and not just easy calculation of which is the easiest fight.

[Staythecourse]

Dread has an effectively infinite mana sink for the early and midgames in manacells, so getting a summon is purely up to taste. I don't see the point of Seeker at all. Only muskets really benefit, and minimally compared to 3 shot multichannel units. Cannon and Flametanks already do full damage at range, and the former already penetrates obstacles. I do really like Expander for Dread though, as fast Builders are very helpful on top of all the little economy bonuses.

My favorite Dread is Halfling. Halfling and Dread cover for each other's weaknesses very well. Machines lack Halfling allergy to melee, and Suppress Nature completely negates their hatred of most climates. You get perfectly happy cities and armies roaming the underground or tundra without needing Elemental terraforming spells. Halfling in turn solves Dread's problem with healing through the Robot/Halfling Engineer interaction. 3 Robots plus 3 Engineers makes a cheap and deadly stack available relatively fast. The Robots feed the Engineers turn one, boosting hitpoints/happiness and thus survivability in turn to repair the Robots, and also rapidly leveling themselves to Fireworks. Halflings also have Ponyriders as dirt cheap early counters to Storm Sisters or Sorcerers. Happy Ponies laugh at supports. And once Eagles get Very Lucky, they provide an airforce with the mobility that machines lack.

That said, neither covers for one particular weakness of the other. Dreadnoughts start slowly, and Halfling starting units are super weak between lack of happiness bonuses and easily oneshotted Jesters being the only source of elemental damage. The 2 problems compound each other unfortunately, making this combo very vulnerable to bad moves or bad luck until the first Robots come out.

I always play with high starting research because I don't like dragging out the initial phase with no class differentiation or the annoyance of missing a critical tier 1 spell in the roulette, which somewhat reduces the problem. I also have a mod that switches the tier and research order of Musketeers and Engineers. IMO that's both more logical and greatly improves dreadnought playability, though obviously some might consider it cheating.

[Iguana-on-a-stick]

I like the combos people have mentioned here. Goblin and Halfling dreadnought are just fun (especially with the racial class unit reskin for nifty looking Goblin and Halfling musketeers). Frostling is interesting, but not my favourite.

Human dreadnought is another classic, and I think slightly edge out the Dwarf because their economy is better. (Dwarf racial governance bonuses are a bit meh, humans get cheap settlers which is amazing. Also gold on water maps from harbours. Late game you can get double merchandise income, though you might want tougher engineers/musketeers/racial units instead)

Humans have tons of armoured troops, especially cavalry, which is very nice with dreadnought bonuses and pistols. They can also get more medals for produced dreadnought machines through racial governance, which can let you build gold medal golems among other things. (Golems become twice as useful at gold medal as they get the defender skill, so this is no minor advantage.) Humans also start with decent healing from priests, which helps early game exploration a lot.

I made my human dreadnought to resemble Klaus Wulfenbach from the Girl Genius comics, which adds to the fun.

For specialisations, I do think Grey Guard Adept is an amazing deal. All the skills are good/great, and the extra defense/resistance is important because it's hard enough to heal machines.

Grey Guard Master is pretty good, but not a must have. The extra gold is nice, Cardinal Culling is amazing, but the rest of the abilities are a bit less relevant to you.

I like fire adept/master (Fire elementals are great summons, skin of oil is the flame tank's best friend). Wild magic is always fun. Expander, as people have mentioned, is a great fit.

My favourite combo is probably grey guard adept/fire adept/expander. No mastery, but you don't really need one, and it offers a ton of versatility.

I also have an Elven Dreadnought I like a lot... but only with the Chivalrous Intentions mod. That mod adds animated statues armed with giant bows and spears to the Elven Dreadnought army, so I field an army of those instead of cannons and musketeers.

[Flushing]

Originally posted by Iguana-on-a-stick:

My favourite combo is probably grey guard adept/fire adept/expander. No mastery, but you don't really need one, and it offers a ton of versatility.

You know what, I like this idea and what Staythecourse said. Screw seeker. I am going to try something different.

I use to dable in some multiplayer and those games end pretty fast. Seeker and muskateers really shine but those fast paced games never proceed beyond early mid-game. Especially in 1v1.

What do you like about wild magic for Dread, I really like lesser elementals and some of their abilities. I may try something totally out of the box like adept wild magic and fire mastery.

Still it's hard to pass on greyguard and expander.

Also, I really really really want find human dread appealing, but I shy away from combos that double, even tripple down on strengths. Human definitely points to Dread. Dwarf to a lesser extent, but I want to try the combos with 100% fire immunity.