Halfling Dreadnought advice?

[[APE] Barnacle]

Hey folks, I'm still pretty new to this game and mostly play versus the AI but I enjoy finding odd/interesting hero combinations. One that stuck out to me recently is a Halfling Dreadnought since they get the Party Robot instead of Golem, and have the potential to put sidearm pistols for Eagle Riders.

Where I'm getting a little hung up though is on what specializations to pick and how to approach overall strategy. I think Fire Adept makes a lot of sense for fireball and skin of oil (domain of the sun might also help I guess?) but idk beyond that. Maybe Expander? I also haven't yet tried Grey Guard and it seems to be a decent fit here.

Regarding units I figure I'll be focusing on Adventurers since they're cheap and effective, Nightwatch and Pony Riders are armored so I'll use them heavily as dreadnought, Musketeers are always good, and the aforementioned Party Robot and Eagle Riders. Most of which can't be produced en masse until later on, so I guess a more passive early game is the way to go?


Any advice or tips definitely appreciated! Even if that advice is "halflings are bad dreadnoughts lol"

[GreyHuntr]

Suppress Elements works well with the Halfing's morale. Using mostly machines also makes Halfing physical weakness less of a problem. Grey Guard is very useful for Dreadnought, especially Cardinal Culling in the later game to counter unit spam. Air has Seeker Enchantment that makes musketeers more effective. Fire or Destruction can be useful since they have direct damage spells, but you can live without those.

[neil]

Seeker is one of the best spells in game IMO
But for a dreadnught it works on Cannons as well
So watch them put out 40 damage a shot.

Either way make sure you bring Engineers along to reload Muskets/Cannon etc

[KBz]

depends on your game. all expansion or only golden realm? greyguard is exclusively eternal lord. but i agree on the fire adept because they have arguably the best summon unit, the hellhound which can replace your fragile pony rider. air adept with seeker is also a plus.
In the condition you have eternal lord, how about going all in and use shadowborn adept for life drain on all unit. Highlight on the world all (yes, including your machine) on melee. so, fire, wind, and shadowborn adept for me.

[[APE] Barnacle]

Thanks for the suggestions so far.

@Kingbangerz I should have specified that I have all expansions. I do like shadowborn (playing as Evil is fun too) so I'll consider that. Cardinal Culling at master grey guard looks amazing though...

Also, clearly I need to try out Seeker in Air Adept. Sounds like it makes cannons even more hilariously good.

[★ Spaceflash ★]

dreadnought halfling is actuallya good combo. Most has been said already, but they also field a unique version of golems that can heal (its called the party robot prototype).

[Iguana-on-a-stick]

Grey Guard is the best specialisation for dreadnought, since most of the keeper/shadowborn upgrades only help melee units. Improved critical chance is great for your artillery. (Even though it's hard to raise machine morale.)

And Cardinal Culling is the ultimate anti-spam spell. (It even stacks. Unless you have mods that change this. Your opponent will surely regret building that manticore doom-stack if you cast Cardinal Culling twice.)

Generally for Dreadnought I like:

* Expander. Not only do you rely on economy in general, but you need Builders like no other class. You need roads to compensate for all your slow ground units. You need Repair Machine to deal with battle damage. (Builders get this skill if you build them in a city with a Master's Guild.) Getting 36 movement builders is a godsend.
* Fire Adept. Early game is your big weakness. Getting a good summon makes a huge difference. The other spells are also great. Once you get Flame Tanks Skin of Oil becomes a killer spell.
* Air Adept, for the reasons already mentioned.
* Grey Guard, for the reasons already mentioned

I would also keep an eye out for Sorcerer heroes. Their spells are very helpful for your armies. Particularly their healing spell, which is one of the very few ways to heal machine units.

For Mystic City upgrades, your number 1 priority is the Crystal Tree, which lets you build the enchanted armoury for hefty defense upgrades for almost all your units. Flowrock Quarries are great for boosting machine hitpoints, Trading Posts are good for making Engineers a bit less squishy. (Luck also helps.)

[Move2Bastyon]

Earth Specialisation seems pretty good too, because you will already get nice economy boosts from Racial Governance

Slow is fantastic spell to isolate high threat targets so you can smash them from range. Stoning and Stone Skin also compliment nicely in the right situation. Earth Elemental too, provides you with the front lines you will need with regrowth.

And Partisan has War Anthem which can be a huge asset in your battles weakening your enemies damage to you since you have lower HP is nothing small

I'd go full economic Racial Governance and expand aggressively, that is the Halfling strength. So you can put out numbers. Happiness events happening twice as often is insane for your economy and research, try to get there as fast as possible.

[KBz]

just an additional note: this is AOW3. there is no strictly correct way, so don't beat yourself up and try solutions then find your own favored solution. It all boils down to preference.

[[APE] Barnacle]

Originally posted by Kingbangerz:

just an additional note: this is AOW3. there is no strictly correct way, so don't beat yourself up and try solutions then find your own favored solution. It all boils down to preference.

This is very true (and one of the things that I love most about the game) - there's no one singular "right way" to approach a playthrough.

I think for now I'll give Grey Guard Master and Air Adept a go. Cardinal Culling and Seeker seem wonderful.

[Staythecourse]

Seeker, and thus by extension Air1 really isn't that useful for halfling dreads, or really dreads at all. Most of their likely ranged attacks have no damage falloff at range, and Cannons in particular, do piercing damage, so you can generally pull off full damage even against enemies behind walls.

[Janusz Biznesu]

Is that an oxymoron?

[icepac]

A bit late to the party, I know !

Depending on map size, I would go for Creation since it will help keep your city happy using the environment which is Halfling strong point. If you are deploying engineer it hugely help with their survival especially in late game!

Also I not a fan of Grey Guard. Scale has several drawback for a Dread :
1- Unless you cast it everywhere which will sunder your mana, as stated your units are slow so you're creating a bottleneck for yourself...
2- As stated it is real hard to get morale of machine up. Combine that with the headache of having unit with the buff in first place (see #1) it is really not a lot of bang...
3- Scale is not guarantee to fall on your lap in early game and the rest of Grey Guard early abilities are not very useful to you.
4- You already have the deadliest unit in the game. Firepower is not what you are lacking as soon as you can get musketeers which is pretty early.
5- Agreed Cardinal Culling is awesome... But by the time you have it's too late one way or the other... Either you have the economical upper hand and you are spamming your own units which are the best in game and therefore you should not have a problem with someone else's spams (given AOE PBAOE is your middlename) OR your opponent's corner the market and will have ample tools to deal with your 1 'I win button'...

The idea of Dread is you are in a race to get your econ up and running as strong / quick as possible. Once that's done you become impossible to stop...
So you're looking for anything that helps the former and should ignore the latter

my 2 cents

[Iguana-on-a-stick]

Originally posted by icepac:

1- Unless you cast it everywhere which will sunder your mana, as stated your units are slow so you're creating a bottleneck for yourself...

A] upkeep of the spell is only 5 mana. Very cheap.
B] you want to concentrate production in a few cities anyway, to benefit from essential upgrades from Crystal Trees, Flowrock Quarries, etc.

3- Scale is not guarantee to fall on your lap in early game and the rest of Grey Guard early abilities are not very useful to you.

Yeah, it's annoying if Scale doesn't come fast. But it's not a deal breaker. All of the other abilities are very useful to you.

* Flourishing Balance (The default skill) - extra population always helps and it's free
* Shield of Dispassion - great even without Scales. It gives +1 resistance to ALL your units regardless of alignment.
* Essence Harvest - Underrated skill. This will give you LOTS of extra casting points while clearing sites, which is very helpful if you have a summon from your other specialisations, if you want to move around your Mana Fuel Cells, or just want to cast more combat spells.
* Voluntary Union - Only helpful when going to war, but incredibly good then. Half absorb time means your conquest starts to pay for itself much faster.

4- You already have the deadliest unit in the game. Firepower is not what you are lacking as soon as you can get musketeers which is pretty early.

Uhm, no. There is no such thing as too much firepower. You're not one-shotting things without critical hits. And besides, the defensive buffs are arguably more important.

Besides, whether the Dreadnought's units are the greatest in the game... eh, arguable. They're extremely good at blasting enemies apart under the right circumstances, but those circumstances are more tricky to engineer than for other races. Particularly in clearing high level sites I find them not as efficient as Warlords or Theocrats.

But in sieges they are great.

5- Agreed Cardinal Culling is awesome... But by the time you have it's too late one way or the other... Either you have the economical upper hand and you are spamming your own units which are the best in game and therefore you should not have a problem with someone else's spams (given AOE PBAOE is your middlename) OR your opponent's corner the market and will have ample tools to deal with your 1 'I win button'...

This argument is true for ALL late game skills. It's an argument against taking Mastery skills.

That said, even if you do have the economic upper hand, this spell will still help you more in the mop-up phase than comparable master level spells.

The idea of Dread is you are in a race to get your econ up and running as strong / quick as possible. Once that's done you become impossible to stop...
So you're looking for anything that helps the former and should ignore the latter

That's pretty much true for all classes, except perhaps the Necromancer. (Who can just get the giant army whilst skipping the whole "economy" step)

But the way to get economy up and running in this game is to expand early and quickly. And here skills like Essence Harvest and Voluntary Union really do help the speed of your expansion, whilst unit buffs like scales/shield help you clear more sites faster. Not to mention the economy passive bonuses you get. (Master Grey Guard nets you less in the way of useful spells, but +5 gold per city does add up.)

A setup like Fire Adept (for summons/damage), Grey Guard adept (for casting points/unit buffs) and Expander (for general economy boosts) is a great pick for Dreadnoughts, I think. It essentially achieves everything you want for them.

[icepac]

Hey Iguana, long time no arguing...
Will give this a shot for ol' time sake :)

Ok so first several disclaimer :
- As I said, it depends on the context. I state that the context here is a medium to large map where a game can go 100 + turns. On small map I would argue that Dread is irrelevent because you are mostly going to deploy race unit with a few marksman / engi...

The idea in such a game is to get your econ rolling fast as possible so you can mass produce machines and overwhelm everyone...
By that time your only vulnerable units are going to be the engineer who can easily be slain.

The math is 2 engi + 2 -3 machines or 2 machine + hero is almost as good as 5-6 machines and MUCH cheaper...

So with that in mind :

Originally posted by Iguana-on-a-stick:

A] upkeep of the spell is only 5 mana. Very cheap.
B] you want to concentrate production in a few cities anyway, to benefit from essential upgrades from Crystal Trees, Flowrock Quarries, etc.

That is only true if your econ doesn't allow you mass production and you need to produce 'elite' unit which is early mid-game...

Originally posted by Iguana-on-a-stick:

Yeah, it's annoying if Scale doesn't come fast. But it's not a deal breaker. All of the other abilities are very useful to you.

* Flourishing Balance (The default skill) - extra population always helps and it's free
* Shield of Dispassion - great even without Scales. It gives +1 resistance to ALL your units regardless of alignment.

Machine aren't that susceptible to spells (no mind control, no morale debuff etc. ...)
So that leaves your engi and heroes... Would MUCH rather spells / abilities that are focused on them and gives way more than +1 Like those you find in Creation Magic...

Originally posted by Iguana-on-a-stick:

* Essence Harvest - Underrated skill. This will give you LOTS of extra casting points while clearing sites, which is very helpful if you have a summon from your other specialisations, if you want to move around your Mana Fuel Cells, or just want to cast more combat spells.

Yup incredibly helpful... if you are a caster (Grey Guardian is my #1 choice for Archdruid)...
If you find you're low on C.P. as a Dread, you're doing something wrong IMO ...

Originally posted by Iguana-on-a-stick:

* Voluntary Union - Only helpful when going to war, but incredibly good then. Half migrate time means your conquest starts to pay for itself much faster.

Very piddling advantage for a Dread... once you start rolling you don't really care about rate of absorption because in the end you will get them all ! I mean who's going to attack a city defended by them great engine of destruction ?!

Originally posted by Iguana-on-a-stick:

Uhm, no. There is no such thing as too much firepower. You're not one-shotting things without critical hits. And besides, the defensive buffs are arguably more important.

Besides, whether the Dreadnought's units are the greatest in the game... eh, arguable. They're extremely good at blasting enemies apart under the right circumstances, but those circumstances are more tricky to engineer than for other races. Particularly in clearing high level sites I find them not as efficient as Warlords or Theocrats.
But in sieges they are great.

Again I think you're talking small map or early game here... Because clearing a site with 2-3 cannons or flamethrowers is a breeze !
Also, the idea here is to give up some of that firepower to get protection and help for your weaker units as I explain at the end...

Originally posted by Iguana-on-a-stick:

This argument is true for ALL late game skills. It's an argument against taking Mastery skills.

That said, even if you do have the economic upper hand, this spell will still help you more in the mop-up phase than comparable master level spells.

Agreed that this spell is super helpful, no arguments there... Again, this would be WAY more helpful to a class that doesn't AOE / PBAOE like birds sing... So that was my point...

Originally posted by Iguana-on-a-stick:

That's pretty much true for all classes, except perhaps the Necromancer. (Who can just get the giant army whilst skipping the whole "economy" step)

Not really... I find that the summoners in general Sorc, Arch can get out of the gates a whole lot quicker than the producers Warlods and Dread. They do tend to run out of steam by late mid game tho...
For me 2 exception that are not worth discussing are Necro and Rogue because they are O.P. compare to rest

Originally posted by Iguana-on-a-stick:

But the way to get economy up and running in this game is to expand early and quickly. And here skills like Essence Harvest and Voluntary Union really do help the speed of your expansion, whilst unit buffs like scales/shield help you clear more sites faster. Not to mention the economy passive bonuses you get. (Master Grey Guard nets you less in the way of useful spells, but +5 gold per city does add up.)

100% agree with First statement... Already explained why I don't particularly agree with the rest. All those Grey Guard spell / abilities are great for everyone, but I would argue they benefit Dread the least of them all...

Originally posted by Iguana-on-a-stick:

A setup like Fire Adept (for summons/damage), Grey Guard adept (for casting points/unit buffs) and Expander (for general economy boosts) is a great pick for Dreadnoughts, I think. It essentially achieves everything you want for them.

Expander is a MUST for Dread down pat... hard!
Again on a short game / small map I can def. see how fire would play a role, but then you aren't really playing Dread are you... Strat of Fire summons work for all class and of course Sorc and Arch are way better at it

Personally, I would go for Creation - Master + Expander

Idea is your humanoid units are your high value member throughout the game . Both the comp and human players are gunning for them 100% of time :
- Early game : Marksman + Engi provide the bulk of your firepower but are literally paper tigers
- Late game : Engi + Heroes are your high value resources. The best bang for your buck value in the game is a fully levelled out Engi in a Dread army, hands down! So if you can protect your Engies so that they get their gold star, that's a huge plus

So Creation is full of goodies to that end :
- Bless : You're hafling, morale increase your chance to dodge. And compare those def stats to your + 1 resistance !
- Holy Cure : Healin for those low HP fellows
- Cleanse the Land : Had to settle on blight, no problem ! Remember that Halfling are all about happiness, so this is huge and is usually available pretty early...
- Condemn killing : Engi are so tasty you are bound to lose 1 or 2 per fight. You exchange the loss of your engi for a 100% guaranteed curse on the killer. Also, console yourself because you also have :
- Resurect : Even tho I maintain you have the very best deployment in the game, if you have engies around you are bound to lose units... This will bring 'em back! Also works on Heroes

Remember tho, I am not talking about a small map / fast game, and we are talking about Hafling Dread here...

Glad to see you still have the fire Iggi !!

Always Huge respect man !

[Iguana-on-a-stick]

Heh. It's indeed nice to think about these things from other perspectives.

I suspect this is partially a playstyle thing. I play on the same sorts of maps you are talking about (large, lot of players, game lasts up to turn 80-100 or so) But you seem to be producing Dreadnought units in ALL or most of your cities. I only ever, even in the late game, produce it in a half dozen optimised cities. I either can't afford to build more, or I don't need to.

I don't understand how you can "not need" tougher units. +4 defense and +2 resistance on a Flame Tank or Golem is just as much a force multiplier when you have 2 as when you have 20 of them. The thing is you can only bring 3, maybe 4 stacks to a battle. So there's an upper limit on how much numbers help. At this point, having 4 stacks of tough units is a lot better than 6 stacks of weaker units. (Since I won't lose the tough units anyway, so I don't need reserves.)

And as for keeping Engineers alive... that is precisely why I want that Shield of Dispassion and Enchanted Armory.

Meanwhile, I'd argue that Creation magic is not that helpful for Dread:

* Holy Cure - doesn't work on most of your units. And Golems can heal your engineers if you're a halfling dread.
* Cleanse the Land - you can already ignore all penalties with Supress Nature
* Condemn Killing - I have never cast this spell and never will. I don't want to avenge my units, I want to avoid losing them. So getting critical hits on my initial volleys helps a lot more than a curse after the battle is almost over.
* Resurrect - okay, now that would be sweet to have, but it's also very late game by which time the same argument against Cardinal Culling applies here. And it requires a mastery.

But if you are producing units all over the map and fielding dozens of stacks and don't care much about individual losses anymore (I always care, even if technically I don't need to any more) then your strategy makes more sense.

There's only one point I really disagree with: on resistance you say

Machine aren't that susceptible to spells (no mind control, no morale debuff etc. ...)
So that leaves your engi and heroes... Would MUCH rather spells / abilities that are focused on them and gives way more than +1 Like those you find in Creation Magic...

Machines have one big weakness: Shock damage. Other elemental damage can also hurt them more easily than physical damage. Having more resistance helps compensate for this.

I also disagree with the "Druid does summoning better" argument. I mean... well, yeah. But that's why a Druid doesn't need Fire specialisation. It is there precisely FOR classes that can't summon natively. And giant machine army + summoned units is much more versatile than just a giant machine army.

Casting points are a great resource for any class, and a Dreadnought who is not leveraging magic is at a disadvantage, just as a Druid who is not leveraging production and economy is at a disadvantage.

But again, this is a difference of playstyle, I expect.

However, casting Skin of Oil on an enemy hero who is standing in front of a Flame Tank is almost worth taking Fire magic for by itself. :-)