[Burnsaber]

Originally Posted by kianduatha

Well, I am comparing them. Fire Drakes with Dragon Master are way cheaper, have longer range, more ammo, don't cost upkeep, and are significantly tougher. They're capable of forming a frontline, while Flamethrowers are...not. Well, they can in a pinch, but you have better options once you get into melee.

These guys are summons, you can't just compare the units onene, you have to take into account how easy they are to summon. First of all, Dragon Master + Fire Drake reguires more research (not much, I admit), mage-time from N3F2 mage (unless you need boosters, which makes it reguire even more research). Where as you can just research alt 3 and just start summoning them, no need for extra research or boosters or mage-time from a 5-pick mage. Fire Drakes also have pretty poor accuracy, often causing pretty heavy friendly fire casualties (a problem flamethrowers don't have, you can use them with non-fr troops with no problem). As for frontline abilities, drakes can tank, but that's the extend of their ability. In prolononged melee, they will just fatigue out and die, because they have serious issues dealing damage in melee. (being size 4 and having to solo everything doesn't help). Flamethrowers have higher mr, prot and are smaller size, making them much more difficult to counter with spells (even basic stuff like Sleep Cloud is painful for drakes).

But in conclusion, yeah, you can't form a frontline with them, but that's not really their point (remember that dwarfs are all about working in community & teamwork). They are slightly behind your frontline, throwing flames until they run out and then wading into melee to support your melee frontline with their 14 ap fire damage with 14 attack value + dam 3 bonus attack staffs. I'd say that they're pretty comparable, but flamethrowers are easier to mass. You have a point about there being other uses for your fire gems, so I might go down to 5 gems if more people feel that they're not worth going for.

Originally Posted by kianduatha

Storm Demons are an entire league above Thunderers, between the flying(in storms, too!), storm power, no upkeep, and a nicer ranged attack(theirs scales with strength). Oh, and they're ethereal and take blood slaves, which are renewable.

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Once again, compare the summon spells. Storm Demons are pretty god damned hard to mass (whereas Thunderers are not), and require *much* more mage time. Thunderers also have slightly higher prec on their weapons and ignore shields (although, to be fair, I think that Storm Demons might too, but I'd have to test to be 100% sure). Besides, one more thing going for Thunderers is your lack of other uses for air gems (air level 1-2 items pretty much suck) and air gems are pretty easy to get, even with just a engineer manually site searching, since over 50% of air sites just reguire Air 1 to find. [8 common sites and 12 uncommon ones, to be exact]. And god help if you luck out into a A2 engineer. He can find over 90% of air sites, just by manual searchs.

But in conlusion, I'd consider Thunderers overall performance. Just try them out. You can easily get, say 9-12 of them by turn 18 if you sent out Engineer to site search early. They were just absolutely wicked in my test. Of course, the AI didn't try to counter them, but Thunderers don't really have that many counters. Get lighting resistance or die.

Originally Posted by Graeme Dice

I'm wondering if, now that there are seven playable Warhammer nations, that somebody might want to go and make a total conversion mod. There are a lot of spells in the base game that probably aren't appropriate to the feel of the Warhammer world, and it might be neat to strip the game down and rebuild it a bit.

Wrong thread, try the "Warhammer Nations" thread. That thread is for discussion WH stuff & nations in general, this thread is about the dwarf mod. (not that I'm against the project, but I'd like to keep this thread in the point)