Mod: Warhammer Dwarfs, version 0.92 -- Quickfix

[rdonj]

The thing prospectors do that normal PD raiders don't though, is flee rather than dying when they fail. They're also pretty cheap. You're expending a lot of effort to make large enough groups of them to take out significant PD, should your opponent choose to field it. But chances are you'll never lose a single prospector to anything but routing. Except possibly battlefield-wide AoE spells.

As for journeyman runesmiths, well, honestly so far mostly I've used them to run around and build forts/temples... but they are still quite useful in battle. They can cast plenty of decent spells with just summon earthpower. I'm not quite sure why it's a "waste" of a turn to cast, either... summon earthpower is a quite handy buff. The only thing I really miss from them is the rune of grungni (which is only marginally better than legions of steel anyway). But a journeyman runesmith can cast just about every other buff you'd want. Just bring a runesmith around for weapons of sharpness and you're good.

[rdonj]

I realize the AI is a spectacularly bad opponent to test on for this, but I decided, basically, I was going to try to beat the AI with armies of nothing but prospectors. Took O3/P1/G3/L3 with a dormant dom10 brother of war for scales and domspread ability.

For the first phase of the game, I did the two prospector+two rounds of crossbowman production expansion while I built up castles, to produce more and more groups like this. Eventually, when it started becoming too expensive to produce max crossbowmen every turn from every fort, I stopped producing them altogether to focus just on forts and prospectors. I'm now in late winter of year 3, producing 22 prospectors each turn, who in turn generate essentially 88 freespawn every turn... who do 24 damage a hit, screw with opponent scripting, have pretty decent armor, etc. Long story short, swarms of prospectors are entirely capable of killing entire armies by themselves with no losses or even any real danger to them. Maybe if you start bringing real magic into the battles things would change a bit, but I don't think there's much chance of actually getting any kind of real attrition in on said prospector swarms.