Smugglers, Atreides, Harkonnen, Fremen Guide - From games on hard difficulty

I wanted to make a guide on Smugglers in Spice Wars, even though I only played one 11h long round with smugglers on hard - but I think I have some good tips.

Please note that I played blind to not spoil myself and figured out some stuff on the go and some other stuff only late into the game :D For me that is part of the fun. Ultimately I lost the game but that's ok, because applying those tips I totally dominated in the next one.

Update: Added sections for Atreides.
Update: Added sections for Harkonnen.
Update: Added sections for Fremen.

Intro

Hello,

--- NOTE: This guide is outdated and contains incorrect information. Last updated for corrino patch (which is older than 1.0 release version ). I will probably not update the guide. However, if you want to read it anyway, go ahead it contains also useful general advice ---

my alias is SirCake and I'm a serious fan of Dune. I even created a mod of D2k in the past and read all the books.

I wanted to make a guide on Smugglers in Spice Wars, even though I only played one 11h long round with smugglers on hard - but I think I have some good tips.
Please note that I played blind to not spoil myself and figured out some stuff on the go and some other stuff only late into the game :D For me that is part of the fun.
And ultimately I lost the game but that's ok, because applying those tips I totally dominated in the next one.

So I suggest you only read this if you have difficulties with the game or want some hints how to get better or just an oppinion of what is "good" and what is "bad".
Please leave a thumbs up if you like it.👍

The Atreides, Harkonnen and Fremen sections build on top of the Smugglers section, so I suggest you read this from top to bottom.

Lean back and enjoy a spice coffee with me, as I have a lot to say...

Smugglers - Early Game

Because this is such a long game, it is important to have a good start - and a bad start is not worth keeping. I restarted several times until I had a feeling that I had done a good, smooth start.
You don't want to lose any units to sand worms or sand storms, in combat or to supply shortage - activate "automatic retreat" on your harvester, activate "auto-recon" on your ornithopters and when attacking a city, first move your units (even ranged) onto the rock ground, then attack ( with shift-queue) and never look away after clicking "raid" on a village - almost a guarantee you will forget your units and have them die to supply shortage.

To manage all this use the pause button. Excessively! Once you see a unit idle or new event - PAUSE, sort things out and continue.

As adivisors I chose "Bannerjee" (hard) and "Staban Tuek"(hard). Bannerjees bonus for troops to syphon 5% health off of killed enemies was really great for chaining raids, while Staban was less noticeable. I think "Lingar Bewt" with his water bonuses is also very good, while "Drisq" is only good for some cheese early game and generally a bad choice.

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I started off with two additional ornithopters and two scavengers, immediately. The ornis, because scouting is very slow and with smugglers you want to set up an underground headquater fast - I sent it across the map revealing terrain and looking for the spice field of the other factions - here you can establish a underground HQ and steal the spice with the "Bootleg Market" extension.

With the first orni focus on revealing terrain (by just touching the edge of the region) and villages, it's really easy - the rock ground will reveal the locations where to scout. Focus on finding villages, so you can decide which ones to raid and which ones to conquer.
Staring with three orni is risky, because you won't have much money to re-recruit units, so if you are less confident, go with only 2, that is safer. Set the ornis also to "auto-recon".

Some really good village bonuses you will want to look out for:

• Handymen : -60% construcution/upgrade cost.
  
• Ingenious Mind : +20% production on economy buildings.
  
• Former Smugglers : +10% resources from pillaging villages.
  
• Scientists:+1 research limit & +20% research output bonus
  
• Youthful Eagerness :D : +1 recruitment center limit & 20% output bonus

The two militia are for crushing and raiding villages, the first capture should be your Spice field's village and after that a village with a lot of wind power and one with a plascrete +50% bonus. Try to identify some close villages which are not "good enough" even later in game (i.e. no bonus field or crappy village bonuses) and raid them! Don't capture them, you can "skip over" them and capture farther away villages which are better. Instead raid them over and over again :).
Buy a third militia from the money you get by raiding. You get a TON of money by raiding as Smuggler, you can get rich just by raiding and stealing. Do it a lot!

You don't need to worry about the other factions for a very long time because supply is so limited on units. Don't walk into deep deserts EVER, those will consume supply way too fast.

There are some special regions on the map which give extra hegemony, but they always also have some resource bonus on them. Search for those regions which are three or less regions away and closer to you than your opponents and look if tehre are any stacking bonuses on their villages (like "+1 research limit & +20% research output bonus" on top of a "+100% research ouptut" special region). If you find one, try to start capturing villages in that general direction immediately.
It is also possible to find normal villages with really good trait combos, look for them.

In general, you should either capture villages which are close to you (cheap in authority, will give you more build slots and more bonuses) - volume, or regions you really want like those with stacking bonuses, spice fields, special regions, regions with good ally sietch candidates or regions with "rare elements" (those have good mid/late game potential) - quality, or those regions which you simply need because your troops may die miserably in the desert when you send them too far to get to the quality regions!
There is nothing bad about leaving regions unoccupied on your doorstep - for all the game!

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For buildings in villages, there is only one building which is "free" and that one is the plascrete factory. It will produce plascrete and pay it's own upkeep.The only no-brainer building. So you always want that one - it effectively grows your domains potential. Build it first. On top the city extensions also cost plascrete, so if you don't build it early, you may be stuck wanting to build a plascrete factory but having no slot but having no plascrete to pay the extension slot etc.
Trade with the other factions is always a way out, of course, for balancing your economy. Choose the other buildings for "managing your demands" in water, manpower, money.
Stay away from energy cells, influence, intelligence and hegemony for a little while. Buildings for those are expensive and not that useful early on. The research center is quite useful, it should be the first "luxury" you allow yourself on Arrakis. The processing plant with it's +20 credit bonus is really worth it, but it requires the "rare elements" special resource. Building it often resolves the early game money problems.
Don't build any military buildings besides the recruitment office - they are all useless and expensive.


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For research, always start with "local dialect studies" for the reduced authority cost, regardless of your strategy. In general, you don't really need any military technology until late mid-game, but the first one - "survival training" - is also quite good because of the sniper unit it unlocks, and the additional unit movement range you get. Economy or Sociology, one of them should be your early-mid game focus - depending on your strategy. Also Arrakis techs (green) are best to research first, because you cannot get a research bonus on them in the HQ.
Get those as fast as you can:

• "underworld contacts" is a quick research to boost money from pillaging.
  
• "spying logistics" to get more free angents more quickly and for the very good "intelligence agency" HQ building.
  
• "outpost logistics" is awesome because you can choose the locations you want to conquer on the map more freely,
  
• "lay of the land" is also very good, because you will need A LOT of authority to pay for underground headquaters and villages to conquer.

So a lot of choices. In this game I went for "local dialect studies" to start off, then "outpost logistics" and then "Lay of the Land" (that is when early game ended) into "Spying Logistics" and "Riches of Arrakis" because I had a lot of special regions in range.
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For spies it is real simple: Always put the first two (or three if you can) into Arrakis, there is no reason not to do so. You get more villages more quickly and you can take advanage of points of interest on the map and you can spam underground HQs. You may want to juggle spies around later, to always have those Mentats (+50% field resource) and Intendants (+20%) on Arrakis.

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Landsraad is not important at the start. As smuggler in the beginning you can't do much anyway so don't put any bounties (you have to pay those out of your own pocket!) choose the second best thing every second time the landsraad comes up (save up your influence) and hope for the best.

Since the latest patch early game is really quickly over and you'll have 2k hegemony in no time, so if you manage to get there first with enough money to buy the first HQ upgrade, you have had a very smooth start!

Smugglers - Mid Game

After your initial villages you want to look for a cluster of villages which will make up your empire core - those 4-5 villages you will want to stuff with buildings. In the center region build the maintenance center to optimize it's effect. Optimally that cluster is behind your main base so it is not easily attacked.

Besides that, don't invest too much in other villages. Losing such a village is not so bad and you don't need to abort whatever you are currently doing just to save one village which is miles across the map.

To reduce the pesky raids try to find a sietch, trade with it and capture the village of the region. You can also simply capture all villages in your back alley. Generally, only militia is not enough to protect your villages from raids, but if you add one sniper on guard duty it should be enough. Militia is still good because they do not cost upkeep and are cheap. buy the ranged and two close combat ones.
It is quite difficult to build a big army (more than 4 or 5) and you should always think before ordering a new unit - will you be able to sustainably pay its upkeep cost in solari and manpower? If not, then don't hire! The best units for the smugglers are, in order: the snipers, the free company, the drone, the scavenger. The back bone is always the sniper. Those things have so much damage output and for that they are really cheap.

Therefore, half your army should be snipers. The other half is needed because snipers are immediately really, really bad if they get attacked, especially by melee units. RUN FOR THE HILLS if you lose the tanky units in front, because you'll lose all the snipers in a moments notice.

Drones are really good if you need to hire units in defence, because they only cost money in upkeep and no manpower. In need, I often could not hire more units, because my manpower was low - here the drone jumps in.

The free company is good because of the useful trait it has and is stealthed. Together with snipers you have a completely invisible army :)

Wreckers are bad. Their attack is low and all their traits are useless if you think about what and where you are attacking 99% of the time. Merchenaries are expensive in upkeep for their weak attack power, didn't try them.

There is quite some micromanagement potential with snipers and units in general: Pull almost dead units back and send them the close to your village. Back to full health in no time. The snipers you can "stutter step" or move and shoot - especially when attacking villages. The AI is too dumb and you can get away with no damage on your units. Of course sipers are very prone to being eaten by worms because they tend to shoot far from the desert, always keep that in mind.

To make your life simple, enlist scavengers for the "raiding & pillaging parties", they are much easier to manage than snipers and can suppress enemy explosive throwers (those are dangerous).

By now you should have enough Intel, and use "gear sabotage" and "supply drop" whenever you need it in combat. You also want those both ready before a real fight against another faction!

Use "pillage raid" as often as possible to raid a villages and choose the neutral ones in front of your opponents to prevent them from capturing it. "Scavenger team" is situational but worth it if you can afford it.

There are a lot of good spy missions, the question is always whether you can afford them or unlock them. Stay away from nukes, though - those are very heavily sanctioned..

In the mid game you can start thinking about the landsraad - here is how you do it correctly: Spam your underground headquaters to generate a lot of influence with Staban Tuek, you only need the headquaters, but no extension. Also you can build activists quaters together with the "Black Market Branch" HQ building and bribe the minor houses. Or you simply research "Underworld Bribes" and pillage for influence!
If you see any resolution your really want (especailly "facion X gets Y") dump ALL your influence on that one. Spending some influence here or there is a waste, because if you don't get the resolution it's totally wasted. All or nothing.


If there are no good resolutions, pepper some 10 influence here or there and try to guess which resolutions might pass and save the rest. Why? You get hegemony from voting for successful resolutions! The really good Landsraad council positions (250 landsraad standing) you can open up by fulfilling a couple of missions. Judge of the council (really good because of the awesome "landsraad guard" unit - basically "free" in upkeep and powerful, get as many as you can while elected Judge) and Eye of the council (more free spies) are the best.

For buildings: Basically the same as early game, most military buildings are still bad, except maybe "military base" on a frontier with some other faction or "Airfields" if and only if you can afford a bunch of them. Demolish a military base once the frontier has shifted. You are generally better off with military units.
Try to develop the villages according to the bonuses they provide and adapt your playstyle to the resorces arrakis provides you with this way.


The really powerful buildings are in the HQ, if you can use a "infrastructure conrol" landsraad resolution to get those cheaper. Spend your money and upkeep here. You want to be building a HQ building almost all the time. Every building there is a meaningful choice and especially the level 1 district bonuses, which provide a 50% reseach discount(!!!), are awesome. Luckily as smuggler you have four small districts! Plan your HQ buildings accoring to what you want to research next.
The best ones to start with are "administrative hall" and "research center".
Keep in mind that mixed districts provide no bonus at all, currently.

Hiring crews for harvesters is good if you can afford it, especially if you only have one spice field (remember Auto-recall ON!). Research the crew technologies. Spice harvesting is by far the most profitable business on Arrakis. Though apparently as Smuggler, robbing the natives of their riches is also very, very profitable.

I tried to fulfil all the special events like contraband and also the spice bribes, there seem to be some kind of positive effects like or "Dealmaker" or "Underworld Bribes" which randomly varied between +20 and +60 solari (so really important) but I did not understand how this works.
I'm also not sure if it is that important to fulfill the spice bribes or if the emperror will come with his sardaukar if I don't pay :'D

Generally it seemed my income in all materials throughout the game was very volatile, at one moment all was fine, positive income everywhere. On other moments for some reason I could not really figure out everythig went to hell and I was counting my last solaris to somehow balance out the economy.

Smugglers - Late Game

I'll make this short. This game is too complex to mention everythig I learned. By now you should have everything to win. But which way is the best?

Well the assassination one is not my top favourite - you better get a ton of money and prepare to lose most your spies, so it is like shooting yourself in the foot but hey you can go for it. To complete all three levels of assassination you need about 8-10 k of solaris, 12 spies minimum (remember, you will lose some, so better max out with 15+2) and 1,5k of Intel (which is not so much). I'm not sure if you have to be "successful" in those missions or just need to complete them (albeit losing a lot of spies to counter intelligence) and what the consequence of a successful assasination is - I assume the player is eliminated. That would be really powerful, of course. I dont know. I went for the second, easy way because my spy network was severely shaken after two assassination attempts on the fremen and unable to continue on for a third.

Attack the HQ. That is pretty easy. Just keep pushing, conquer all the land bit by bit and then attack the HQ. It takes forever to destroy a HQ so your troops are bound there, unable to defend your realm. Prepare yourself to babysit your units to prevent them from dying, and to spam operations. So you might be unable to complete the destruction on your first try. It is also very helpful to have an airfield nearby to reinforce with fresh troops.
I lost some cities, a spice field etc while someone (probably fremen) instilled a lot of rebellions everywhere and some random Atreides units attacked me. The good thing is that you can afford to lose some cities doing this military push, because you just conquered a lot of land as well.

Poltical Victory. Can't say anthing about this, did not have to defend from it nor attempted it.

Hegemony. I lost to this one. I was second to Harkonnen in hegemony but it seems like this is a way to win the game just by playing it. If you are already very powerful you probably have a lot of hegemony. Tons of money and spice for contraband events helps, I guess. So while you are first in hegemony you can feel great and accomplished ;) (And even more frustrating an unexpected assassination would be :P )

You probably want to disable Hegemony victory in your game, because some events and the "ships" I wasn't able to use because the game was over before that stage.

So thats it. My wisdom from stop-motioning a 11h long game with Smugglers on hard difficulty with Staban Tuek, who is also rated "hard" for the first time.

One day I will be able to play this in real time... maybe. Great game, great potential.
Thanks for reading.

Cheers,
— SirCake

Atreides - Intro

After writing the guide for the Smugglers I played another match, but this time with Atreides. The good and righteous ones (as good and righteous as it get's in Dune...with all the drug addicts). I followed my own tips, adapted here and there to the atreides strength and the result was quite convincing!

No one could stand against the green and black banner, the tide of atreides forces! Again on hard difficulty with Jessica, who is also rated hard, probably because she is basically useless in single player, right now. More on that later...

This is only an additive guide to the smugglers, so I will be omitting topics I discussed in the smugglers secions already.

Atreides - Early Game

I could not have played a faction more fundamentally different from Smugglers. The Atreides can't raid villages! Also the Atreides are arguably the "Landsraad faction" because they start with the highest Landsraad standing. Are all my tips for smugglers then useless for atreides? - No, on the contrary, most is still true.

This time I started with one trooper (close combat) and two rangers (ranged) and no additional ornithopter. Though I eventually did order the second ornithopter and ended up short on money later when I lost one ranger to supply shortage :S

With Atreides you are probably fine with just a ranger and a trooper. The units benefit from each other and focussing one unit at a time is really powerful with this faction. An atreides dream is encountering an unordered army coming at them one by one - focus down the front one in a few seconds and engage the next. Against Atreides, first form a battle line, then engage.

One word on the ornithopter. You can optimize it's use at the start if you aim for the inetrsections of regions in the fog. One wiggle left and right, and you have revealed two regions. This way it takes only about 15 seconds to reveal all regions adjacent to the starting base.

No change in the building and village conquering department - do as mentioned before, especailly building plascrete factories on every. single. village. Even in the late game.

Also it turned out very useful to really focus on conquering all villages to the edge of the map first (in my case only one or two), and not those towards the middle. Reduced raids a great deal.

With atreides you will be doing a lot of "standing around idly" waiting for your authority to fill up for capturing the next village, so that time may be well spent exploring points of interest with your army whenever you can, which is not often and requires attention (remember I lost one ranger to supply shortage, yeah..).

Also Atreides can annex villages peacefully by spending influence so in theory you don't need a strong army to capture a 3-unit-village. I ended up capturing everything with army still, because it takes quite a long time (15 days!!!) to annex peacefully and I preferred to use all influence on the Landsraad instead.


For research I started with spying logistics and counter measures, which was a great idea (more authority over arrakis via spies), but I should have continued with "local dialect studies" to lower the authority cost. The unit you get from "survival training", the "heavy weapon squad" is not that great, so don't hurry to research that one. I instead went for the research again which grants the processing plant, that solved my first financial crisis just in time.

Put the spies to duty as mentioned before. Though with more forcus on arrakis. I ended up with no hard battles and tried probe setup - which is a great tool to reveal all points of interest on a region you just discovered. I sent the orni to a round trip across the map and could use probe setup to reveal those quickly, creating new tasks for my arrakis spies.

The start went really smooth for me and soon I was bathing in plascrete and spent the surplus resources on recruitment offices and listening posts (instead of reserach hubs) for more influence. Influence is a prevalent theme here for atreides :D

..which brings me to the Landsraad. With the highest starting vote count atreides have de facto the strongest Landsaad start. You can use it very effecitvely in the early game! Proceed as mentioned before in smuggler mid game. I managed to extremely exploit the landsraad almost consistently throughout the game to the atreides benefit.

One more thing you should do right away are contracts, because they improve relations and later in the game you want good relations with other factions. Not too many because those cost authority. Two agreements maybe, one in trade, one in research or however you prefer it. They really make a difference.

Atreides - Mid Game

It is especially important to fulfill spice bribes with Atreides, as they gain Landsaad standing with this. I made sure of this by building recruitment offices and equipping my harvesters with one, then two and finally three crew, researching the neccessary technology and focussing on finding and capturig more spice fields.

"Energy markets" is also a technology which solved my mid game monetary problems, very powerful.
In general, you can go for specialized technologies, so ones which are deep down the tech tree in mid game, because with every research completed it gets harder to complete the next. (I think). Choose wisely what to research first.

The "harvester works" building was my first building in the HQ, which I got discounted 50% (saved 750 solaris!) because the landsraad granted me "infrastructure control". How convenient! ;)
Basically you want to build the HQ extensions every time you have this, you can build two buildings in the 20 day period. This way I managed to max out my HQ before the game ended.

To further maximize those almost certainly in your favour Landsraad resolutions, hold off on buying military units or HQ buildings and bulk purchase once you have beneficial resolutions active. Always support restircting resolutions if the pain is manageable for YOU currently, and if there is nothing else good to spend influence on.
It is always better to target yourself with something beneficial than to target one other faction with something negative because there are two more opponents you are not targeting.
Always target the most powerful opponent if you have to target someone and avoid benefitting them (with trade agreements etc), trade with the weakest faction(s).

For units, I think the support drone is quite good (have one) and also the warden (have at least one) and create a heavy weapons teams whenevery you lose a ranger, they are OK in general and really good vs the HQ because they break the armor of the HQ! In general I tried to have 1:1 ranged and close combat, but ranged is not that important as atreides. No unit really stands out or is outright bad.

Build up to 25 used command points as soon as you can afford it (you can increase your command points with spies on counter intelligence) and get the "Judge of the Concil". I think one has to maintain 25+ used cp for one whole landsraad period for the election choice to come up. With your hopefully high influence production this is so awesome ("Landsraad guard" spam)!!

Airports, I have to revise what I said earlier, are quite good, IF you can afford them. But don't build them directly on spice locations, because of the "harvester works" bonus if possible. It allows you to resolve threats in quick succession - provided you win every fight.

Well Jessica ...

In mutiplayer, I can imagine that Jessica will be quite powerful. She has the ability to force other factions to accept a treaty. So players planning to attack the Atreides should get ready to take a serious a hit in their Landsraad standing - Jessica will force a non-agression pact on them just in time and then Leto in the Landsraad will argue with the rage of the righteous how "outrageously, xyz broke the peace treaty!" and how dishonorable all that is - A reminiscence to one of the books ;)

But in single player, I did not find a use for her. The AI will accept your treaties all the time anyway.

Once you hit 10k hegemony, Atreides gets really ridiculous...

Atreides - Late Game

With 10k Hegemony you can take any "Charter" or council position, without having to fulfill the requirements for it. Usually it is really difficult to fulfill these - and you have to maintain the requirements as well. But Atreides doesn't care - just get elected everything and collect all the bonuses! I can't understate how powerfull this is. It's too good. Your job is to produce so much influence that no one can deny you those positions.


Luckily atreides also has a very powerful HQ building, the "council chamber" which increases influence production by ... 30%!!!! ... AND allows you to cancel any negative resolutions active on you in the landsraad screen. You really can't compete with the atreides in the landsraad. O.O Get this building and don't miss out on the statecraft 3 bonus.

With all this in place I had an easy time in late game, except for the "idling and waiting" part mentioned earlier which slowed me down in crushing my enemies and driving them before me. Basically I could often do nothing more than wait.

Once I was worried though - My army had just captured a spice field from the smugglers and my close combat units ran out on the sand to meet some insurgents. I don't know what I was thinking to look away, but when I then saw ..and clicked ..and responded to the worm sign event ..and ordered my units to move for rocky ground it was already too late. I just saw 6 (six!) of my nicely bunched landsraad guard/warden army get swallowed by a worm.... you can probably imagine my horror!

But why am I telling you this? Because of course immediately the formerly friendly Fremen attacked with a big army (must have been 10 units or so) and I scrambled to rebuild some troops and sent everything else in my realm via aircraft. Did not look good. But the Atreides/Landsraad army with all their stacking bonuses plus "gear sabotage" and "supply drop" absolutely whiped the floor with the Fremen fighters, was not even close.


Atreides late game armies are gooood.
If you have to face an Atreides opponent, don't attack into this Atreides body of steel. Try to split them up and attack in small groups where their bonuses do not stack as hard.

So this time I am able to share some knowledge on political victory because that is how I won that game. Basically you need a very high landsraad standing ("easy" for Atreides) and when you get elected "Dune Governor" a 30 minute timer starts to tick down. You only need to avoid the "loss of rights" resolution, which cancels all charters, or a governor re-election.
I'm not sure what happens if regions are returned to neutral state or losing Landsraad standing, because that is one of the preconditions for Dune Governor to be electable, but I assume it is irrelevant once you are elected.

I decided to play on a little after victory and found another interesting fact - mercenary fighters you get from the "economic lobbying" research or for beeing Smugglers with 10k hegemony have almost instant training speed and have 750 supply. That is five time the amount an normal army has! You can send those across the map deep into enemy territory and capture a bridgehead for your airfields and then resupply with more instantly trained mechenaries. It's a little bit pricy though.
This swarming of unrelenting Atreides forces reminded me of another passage in the books ;)

So that's it, another bunch of tipps - and this time it's proven that if you master them a victory on hard mode is definitely possible. :)
Thanks for reading.

Cheers,
—SirCake

For your statistics: Game time was about 3.5h, real time about 7h, so I have to ramp up my APM by at least +100% to be able to play this in real time. :D

Harkonnen - Intro

Hello,

this guide extension for Harkonnen, again, builds on top of the other two.

Because my reader GhostLight mentioned that Smugglers was his/the most difficult faction and I had not much difficulty with Atreides I thought that maybe I could try to play this game without the pause button this time - like it would be in multiplayer.

...the result being that I wanted to quit the game multiple times (and also did) due to stress overload :D I won't focus on giving tips for the RTS mode. I just advise to not play in RTS mode, it is in my oppinion not as fun as stop-motioning with the pause button :)

This took multiple attempts and unfortunately I am not 100% sure I had hard difficulty selected on the try I finally won (I don't know where to look it up when in-game), I suspect it actuall was not hard difficulty :/ But from the games I played (at least most were on hard) I can share some knowledge.

Harkonnen - Army Inventory

I want to start with the army of Harkonnen. For me, the whole concept of their army doesn't make a lot of sense - they actually benefit from taking damage and losing units and have some units and abilities explicitly forcing that issue. The "gunner", the "stealth probe" and the "combat drugs" spy mission. The gunner damages friendly units while attacking and the stealth probe can hardly be considerd a combat unit at all because it has very low health and "wants to sacrifice itself" to place a 20% damage buff on friendly units.

When multiple of your units are starting to die, 99% of the time you are going to lose the whole fight anyway and units are not exactly free to re-train either. It takes time to re-train them and also even more time to get them to the location where they need to fight. The problem in Spice wars is often that you cannot move your army away for a location, because if there was no army there, the opponent would conquer it. So what is the point of burning through your units just to get a 20% attack bonus or similar, and then lose one or more locations to the inevitable counter attack? And if you manage to anihilate the enemy army, then also probably the masochistic traits did not play a big role in the fight either.

If you can follow me through on those arguments, stay away from building your strategy around sacificing units: Don't choose the advisor Iakin Nefud, don't use combat drugs on your main army, don't build and throw away stealth probes just for the bonus, don't use the gunner to damage you own units if you could avoid it.

Harkonnen, however, have one of the best early game and late game regular units while the choices in mid game are not so great. The "Trooper"s trait is awesome and ensures that you will always win your fights vs village milita and the "house guard" is just a better version of the trooper. They are "automatically good" when it is a close fight.

The "vanguard" is just a merchenary without the useful instant build ability and reduced command point requirements and has instead low health and low armor. Not that great.

Engage ranged units in close combat so they cannot focus down your low health units and pull low health units or units under focus fire to the back lines. You actually want almost no ranged units in your Harkonnen army because this means less units to be able to hinder the enemy ranged units from focus firing your own units. Stealth probes are not close combat!

Harkonnen - Early Game

Build two troopers at the start and add more troopers so that when attacking a village you always have equal count of units, always operate on the bare minimum - remember - it benefits you to have close fights. Annex, build buildings and pillage like a Smuggler and always max out on militia. With Rabban as advisor your economy will quickly boom.

I picked Piter de Vries as second advisor and he gave me some headaches and also influenced in a major way how I played the Harkonnen. I think Piter is a great choice.
Here is how you utilize him: At the start also build a stealth probe and an ornithopter. This will almost bankrupt you, so you have to pillage somewhere (use your first orni to look for villages). Send the probe and second orni across the map and look for non-village and non-region-resource points of interest. Collect them all with your stealth probe/orni. You will find spice, solaris, ornithopters, hegemony, plascrete long before any other faction can recover those resources.

The strong point here is that you can collect the stuff requiring "send your army to investigate" with your stealth probe! ANYWHERE ON THE MAP, with no risk of sand worms involved.

This of course also opens the ability to do a classical RTS "rush" on an enemy village across the map - buuuut it doesn't work :D I tried it. You need too many stealth probes (around 6) and lose too much health on the first attack and they are too slow and basically your opponent would have to be the "peacfull annexation atreides without army strategy" player for this to work..

You can complement your army with some stealth probes, using Piters "early access" ability and building one fuel cell factory. It will save some manpower which you can then spend on harvesters. But as mentioned stealth probes are not great combat units.

The headache comes from what to research. Because, with Piter, you want all of it at the same time. I went for "spectral imaging" first to further boost and utilize my many onithopters, then, again," structured warehouses" or money and "defense sysems", because of the harkonnen economic bonus for militia.


For that same reason I decied to build mostly "research hubs" as my rare and expensive buildings.

I did not pay too much attention to the Landsraad with Harkonnen, I just did it "quick and dirty" with the tips already given in the Atreides section. Choose one, dunk all. With moderate success. Harkonnen also gain Landsraad standing from sucessful spice bribes.

Harkonnen - Mid Game

There is not much to add in mid game which I haven't said elsewhere already.

Harkonnen should have a very strong economy, because of the militia bonus and the oppression ability.

With the ornithopters and stealth probe collecting resources all over the map you'll also have a considerable second income and shloud be fairly rich (but only in the mid game).

Because you have 4 or 5 militia on every village, you don't need to worry about raids and even attacks are difficult for the opponents. So you can concentrate on attacking, pillaging and expanding your empire. :)


I don't think the "Instill fear" research is working properly right now, so you can skip that one.

It is imperative to get the "house guard" unlocked quickly, because all the Harkonnen mid game units are so bad and the power of your army will quickly diminish in comparison to the other factions. You may lose the game just because of this.

Harkonnen - Late Game

For buildings in the HQ there are some notes for Harkonnen: The "Barracks", which you get with "Ground Command" is especially useful for Troopers and House Guards, because they can stay alive longer on low "HP" (because what "low" is gets redefined by the bararcks). Also Harkonnen can get a double attack bonus (+4) with building 4 military buildings on two 2-size districts. It is really good for Harkonnen and plays towards their strengths.

Unfortunately I did not have the time (literally) to try the spy missions while sacrificing a spy. It seems really good for the "CHOAM share"(8k solaris less!) and "political audit missions"(240 influence less!). Not so much for assassination, unless you really have 15 spies already and are spy focussed. Because you need to maintain the requirement for executing the assassination missions still. The missions are certain to stay undetected, so the final assassination can be really surprising (->multiplayer).

Because I researched a lot of dune enviroment developments (the green ones) early, I felt much less restricted by authority than in the Atreides game. Though I still had to choose my acquisitions wisely.

My victory was acieved by using fremen mercenary points of interest I had revealed earlier to attack from many angles and also using them together with my army to conquer a base near the opponents HQ. I established an air field and military base as well as a full stock of milita + oppression for quick building before starting to attack the HQ from there.

Noone could escape the crushing power and wealth of the Harkonnen...


Thanks for reading.

Cheers,
— SirCake

Fremen - Intro

Hello,

here again for the last missing part of this guide - the Fremen!

I did this on insane difficulty, and with Chani and Stilgar selected as my advisors (both rated "hard"). And with some pride I can say, that it only took me one attempt - without loading :) Althought that game was very challenging and took decisive changes when I realized my planned strategy would not work out.

I will be omitting topics which I have covered in the other guides, again, so you might also want to read the other ones for more basic tips.

Long live the fighters!

Fremen - Early Game

So, again, like with Harkonnen - my strategy was completely determined by the advisors I chose and turned out to be a good idea in early and late game, while in mid game I had some issues. We will get to that.

The Idea was that I would move huge distances with my troops through neutral territory and would only capture villages with spice fields, if possible. That would then maximize the effect of Chani, she gives intel per adjacent neutral territory (that is why I wanted to leave "gaps" in my territory, intentionally) and also Stilgar who produces +1 auhority for each spice field exploited.


To make this possible I would need troops which can move through huge distances of arrakis - so supply-related technologies were on top of my shopping list. I went for "Desert Mastery" first. Though I think "Dune Wanderers" and "Survival Traning" would have been sufficient because "Desert Mastery" only gives a bonus in deep deserts. Later in the game I also got the "Recycling Vats" and "Command Post" HQ buildings which also cater towards this as well.



For starting units, two orithopters to quickly find additional spice fields and two "Warriror"s for conquering villages. Warriors are so amazingly strong! You can send one vs a village with 2 inhabitants and 2 vs a village with three and you will win the fight! Their downside is the very high command point cost but that only comes into play in mid and late game. Also they cost a lot of manpower.

The "Skirmisher" is bad for fighting - it gets focussed down by neutral units and doesn't add much damage.

I can see that the "Infiltrator" is a good unit, because it only costs 2 command points and you can have a huge mass of them stealthily approaching an enemy village and annihillating the defenders in a matter of seconds with the damage bonus they have on their first attack - but they have so little health... You may be forced to use them because relying only on warriors alone will result in a very small army - possibly too small to defend everywhere.

I had hoped to use Chanis second ability in the Landsraad, but in my whole 6-8 hours of playing I only got the choice to instil rebellions three times! And it also costs auhority each time and more authority later in the game (140 was the hightest I encounterd). The problem is that you only get the choice when a Landsraad resolution is not targeting a faction specifically (i.e. not on "infrastucture control"), and in my game almost all resolutions were "faction targeting" :/ That doesn't make Chani bad (unlike Jessica), but less useful than I expected.

The Landsraad is really a lost cause for Fremen. They don't have any votes, can't get any - can't get any Landsraad standing, don't have the political audit spy mission and are excluded from Landsraad council positions/Charters by default. You really start to feel oppressed by the Harkonnen and Atreides when playing Fremen, grinding your teeth, feeling rebellious and hateful against the ruling class. The only way to affect the Landsraad is through raw amassed influence.

I had one shining moment in the Landsraad when I dumped 500 influence to prevent the Atreides from getting judge of the council - and that's it. The rest was suffering.

Fremen - Mid Game

If you manage to scout them, there are actually so many spice fields that this strategy can work. I captured three additional ones as 3rd and 4th and 5th village and already gained +6 or +7 Intel with Chanis ability. This means you have enough of an Intel income to assign your spies to Arrakis or elsewhere and to spend it relatively freely on the good spy missions.

I wanted to continue doing this village hopping and also had the neccessary authority to do it, but unfortunately the smugglers were so massively annoying, repeatedly attacking the spice village on their border that it was absolutely impossible for me to get enough time to capture another spice village. Before long, I maxed out on 500 authority and when the Harkonnen also started attacking in the center of the map I had to change plans.


Theoretically, you can use the thumpers and sand worm to transport to remote locations to conquer them, but you may also need to get back. So it is very situational if you can do it. Also the thumper sandworm transport is very clunky to use. You can't see where the worm can move beforehand and you can't transport out of combat and also the area where units get picked up is very small. I refrained from using it unless I really had to - the supply of thumpers is also very limited. To sum up, the thumper sandworm transport is great for agression and very poor for defense (in contrast to the airfield network, which is great for defense but often not useable for offense).

Since I could not expand more and was actually losing ground and battles, I changed plan and captured the villages I had spared before and focussed on strenghtening the army. The Fremen have an enormous hunger for manpower, especially if you start losing units, and command points, because the good units consume so many of them.

The military technologies can help here, also the command post military building is really great for them. I bought that one first. For other buildings on the HQ, the "Bazaar" is amaaaaaazing. It doubles the bonus of a completed district and also counts as a building of each type. If you build it in a 1-slot-district you will get +40% research speed on everything, except arrakis research. You can go for all kinds of shinannegans with this one. But, to further drive the point I also went for research center on another 1-slot-district and ended up with about double base research, +30% research overall and +60% research speed (basically the same thing) on economic research. Needless to say, I got ALL the economic research, early in that game. "Spreading the faith" is a really good technology which suits the fremen playstyle, get it quickly.



The "Fedaykin" is the unit you want to get. It is so ridiculous it can beat three neutral militia alone (provided you engage the ranged units in close combat)! You can send one of those guys across the map and capture a spice village, easy.

If your numbers are high enough, the Fremen army is unbeatable. I had countless battles in the late mid game and late game, and unless I did some stupid mistakes I always had the upper hand, because the Fremen units simply do not die. You can also build lots of "ceremonial caves" to boost the attack power of units. Hegemony also boosts attack power when over 10k. And because of the extra Intel income "supply drop" and "gear sabotage" were ubiquitous. I wish I had researched "Stealth Gear" earlier than I did. Liberating villages, getting 1k each, walking all over the map with units and straight attacking the Smugglers sietch with half warriors and half skirmishers (just for armor breaking) eliminated the first player. Two more to go.

Fremen - Late Game

Here is where Chani showed her beauty again, I could continue with the initial plan and soon had five spice villages and an Intel income of +36 to +44! It is alo great that you can ally with sietches anywhere on the map and that those sietches will provide +2 influence income each with the "Sietch Network" technology. The "Al-Gaib Temple" HQ building will improve bonuses from trading with sietches as well.

Basically the game was so long (4h in game time) that I got a lot of bonuses and synergies going. The CHOAM branch building as well with two spies on CHOAM will give a +50% bonus on spice solari income. That together with five spice fields made me rich as Croesus. Not even mentioning spice silos and "Shai Hulud Temple"s.


The Fremen economy is like the Atreides army, it has a lot of stacking bonuses and synergies and should not be underestimated.

I wanted to defeat the Harkonnen like I had done with the smugglers, by attacking them. But I gave up that plan soon after. The Harkonnen base had 20 or more armor and 40'000 hit points. The hitpoint bar barely moved even after stripping all the armor with skirmishers! This is so ridiculous.. I guess the "Enhanced Fortifications" HQ building is a really good deterrent against conquest victory after all. I decided against smashing on the fortress walls for like 15 minutes and attempted a hegemony victory instead. All you can do is walk around the HQ and liberate every village nearby.

Atreides got me worried, because of the "Dune Governor" political victory and Fremens unability to do basically anything in the Landsraad. This is why "Spreading the Faith" is so important. You MUST prevent AT ALL COSTS that the Dune governor prerequisite gets fulfilled, and it is more easily done when you get rewarded with 1k solaris each time you liberate a town.

At 20k+ hegemony it got ridiculous again. Both Atreides and Harkonnen were spamming rebellions, hell, even I was spamming rebellions! I have no advice against rebellions. It's just a really powerful major anoyance one has to deal with. You can't protect against it. Here, the remote villages are especially vulnerable - I was lucky enough it did not get exploited too much. Literally dozens of attack, spying, landsraad, worm sign notifications per minute popped up.


Also Atreides and Harkonnen really started pressuring hard on 20k+ with armies, I think that may be a threshold where they get really mad at you. At one point I almost lost the grip on victory, when I lost about half of my spice villages and had grown complacent, temporarily. But, buying full priced CHOAM shares at 10k each for about five times throughout the game finally gave the Fremen the much desired victory.

With the Bazaar and the tier 3 economic bonus this also seems very much exploitable!

Thank you for reading. This was the last and final part of this guide.
Kudos to you if you managed to read through all of this :D
I sure did enjoy figuring out this game, hope you do as well.

Please leave a thumbs up.👍

Cheers,
— SirCake

23. of May Patch

Well, one day after finishing this guide a major update came along. :D

I'm still loving it :) - now I can re-explore parts of the game and have a good reason to re-play some of the factions.

There are major changes and I will be re-checking the guide to remove misleading information (I will do a strike through so you can easily identify the corrected information.). Just give me a litte time. Though most of it is still true. Only the new exciting stuff is-to-be-evaluated. Can't wait to deploy the Smuggler HQ-Undergound-HQ!

One thing which I already can add is that the "Investment Office" building you now get from "Local Dialect Studies" research is really, really good! I never really paid attention to the bonuses the villages give you, but with the investment office you have the chance to triple (x3) that bonus! And it's upkeep is real cheap.
I would suggest to look for good villages even harder now. With the "community update #2" this became more of a late game technology, so this is reflected in my new ranking:

My favourite candidates to tripple so far (top is best):

• "Hard Workers" +20% resource production→ +40% additional. If you are moderately lucky this one is on a village with a resource field bonus, which is pretty common. Stack all the production here :)
  
• "Strong willed" : Manpower Production +2 → +4 additional ! (better than spending 14 Solari on +4 man power in the recruitment office for sure)
  
• "Way of the desert" : Army Exp. +20% → +40% additional (really? wow.)
  
• "Connections" : -5% authority cost to annex → -10% more.
  
• "Strong network" : +1 Intel → +2 Intel (a cheaper data center)
  
• "Merchant" : +6 Solari → +12 additional Solari! (almost not worth it)
  
• "Desert Miners" +8 plascrete -> +16 more (not worth at all, it doesn't even stack with the minerals field bonus)

There are other bonuses, but those do not scale well or are situational.

Cheers!

29th of July patch - Community Update #2

The community update #2 patch has brought a lot of balance changes.

One of the changes moves the investment office down the tech tree, to the third level, so it is only available after researching outpost logistics/underground networks/instil fear, which means it now requires a dedicated research effort (~28 days) to get. It's not worth going for it now right away unless you aim for the "mass expand" type of playstyle anyway.

One small change with big impact is that the "handymen" village bonus now also affects the plascrete cost to unlock additional building slots - which makes this bonus for me the best to look for on a village in early game now (without investment offices). You save 450 plascrete total for the building slot extensions and also 50% plascrete on every single building, amazing.
Second best without investment offices is still "Strong willed" (+2 manpower).
The new weakling is "desert miners" - I mean plascrete is almost free anyway so +8 plascrete doesn't do a whole lot.

One maybe unintentional change the devs introduced was that the high power of the "Infrastructure Control" resolution is now EXTREME :D Why? Because HQ buildings now take less time to complete, so you can cram building three HQ buildings into one 20 day resolution period! That saves you up to 2250 Solaris and 750 plascrete!! Try to get this resolution with everythig you got! It is insanely good!

One more thing I noticed is that "Embassy" HQ building is probably at least as good as the "research center", and more flexible. With two research agreements you can get from 4 base research to 10 research in no time which is actually better than the reserach center (at the small cost of -20% authority of course).
For me that makes it the best one of the starting buildings in single player.

22th of September Patch - (Corrino Update)

At last, the Corrinos make an impact on Dune! Epic :D
And the patch not only makes a major change in adding Corrino, it also completely alters the game with many changes! It's not the same game anymore, you win differently, and you also have to play differently.

(Besides the very obvious change, but I did not play Corrino yet)
One big gameplay changer is the two bonuses on villages instead of one. Where previously you wanted to choose villages wisely because of scarce resources - now you want to expand like a madman. More villages is better, choose the close ones which are cheap in autority. Every village gives you at least some kind of useful bonus and no longer did I feel restricted by resources like manpower or plascrete, I instead had way too much of them.
This means you will want to expand quickly and also place some costly buildings earlier as before to consume the surplus. In general it makes the game a little easier to play.

With the increased complexity in multiplayer the information flow now is totally overwhelming on 1.5x speed, you may want to play on 1.2x instead. Keep in mind that the host can change the speed during the game.

One more important thing is that it is now two times as likely to get an insane combo on special regions. You should scout early for those regions and take a look at the villages if they have some stacking bonuses on them. In my game I had "Secret Holders" on top of "Mount Idaho" which means you can create 2 Data Centers there and get +20% bonus and also get the bonus from Mount Idaho which is another +100% bonus. That single region had an output of +10 Intel!
So keep an eye out for those special regions and try to get them if they have stacking bonuses.

This time there are so many changes that have repercussions in how to play the game, that I probably have to rewrite the entire guide, except for the basic topics. And, obviously, a new chapter for Corrino! :)

Cheers

[SirCakealot]

@Embuscade -- probably not, no. I am open for co-authors but probably a new strategy guide with less text would also do the trick.

[Embuscade]

Will you now be editing your guide with the arrival of version 1.0? There are several of you proposing guides, perhaps you could get together to create one big guide to govern them all?

[SirCakealot]

Thank you @kyklish for pointing those out, but I'm actually not interested in fixing typos. This text has epic length and it is hard enough to update the informations it contains.

[wiwashabu]

do you have a way to reduce the bribe tax once its already high. I wouldnt be able to reduce it.

[SirCakealot]

@Farside, I had Staban Tuek, just because he was rated hard and Bannerjee (more loot and also plascrete loot). But to be honest, all the "easy" advisors seem good for Smugglers. No miss here.
They all integrate well into the playstyle mentioned in the guide.

For Atreides I chose Jessica(hard) and Duncan (cheaper village annex cost and double relationship gains with sietches).

[Farside]

I appreciate the smuggler guide. You did a very good job laying out the strategy and mechanics of the faction. The smugglers are one of the factions that aren’t discussed very much.
I watched a few videos on them and they do seem more challenging than other factions.

Of course there are still bugs in the game that need to be addressed that will buff some of the military units and nerf others like the Freman. In my opinion i think the dev’s need to rework some parts of the research tree. Some of them appear broken or don’t work the way they are supposed to.

I am curious which advisors did you select. I’ve played the other 3 factions so I have a pretty good handle on those. Thanks again for the time and effort you invested in this guide.

Atreides, definitely Dune Governer path.

[GhostLight]

Wow! The Smugglers was my most challenging game yet, but I did it. Definitely a very unique play style. Thanks again for the tips. High five!

[SirCakealot]

Also please rate this guide. 👍

[SirCakealot]

Thank you :)
I added more sections about the Atreides. Now it is certain that those tipps applied will give you a good chance at winnig a hard game.

[GhostLight]

Thanks you for doing this guide. The Smugglers were last on my list of factions to play, and like all the factions in Spice Wars, they are turning out to be very unique, interesting, and fun.