Mod: Warhammer Dwarfs, version 0.92 -- Quickfix

[rdonj]

Originally Posted by Humakty

Speaking of those dwarfs archers, they maybe take the heat a bit too easily. I think you can bypass basic melee units altogether, as the shooters have damn good melee weapons, combined with surprisingly high attack skill. They tend to beat the crap out of indies with no support, twenty of them being able to reliably expand versus anything, well you'll take some hits against knights, if you don't bother buying a prospector.

Flanking a dwarven army can lead to sharp consequences !

I wouldn't try this on a player. They're good, but, they still only have 13 protection. And cost 30! resources. All someone has to do to beat them is mass 4 resource short bows.

I'll try moving my crossbows further up and see if that helps any.

[Illuminated One]

Yeah, autoflanking is pretty annoying.

Some spells (destruction or even worse armor of achilles but Gifts from Heaven and Flame Erruption, too - all more or less "natural" choices against dwarves imo) are ridiculously hard to use because of their range/precision issues.
Your only option is to (attack)*x(spell)*y(cast) or something and it's bad enough to only cast one to three spells and risk your mages up close before the AI takes over. Now with autoflankers this becomes impossible at all since you don't know if you move forward or backward. It doesn't actually matter much if that's one or hundrets of miners summoned.

[kianduatha]

Originally Posted by rdonj

I wouldn't try this on a player. They're good, but, they still only have 13 protection. And cost 30! resources. All someone has to do to beat them is mass 4 resource short bows.

But then you ambush his shortbow army with some rangers, who can brutalize shortbows--especially when the bowmen are shooting at random flanking miners.

[rdonj]

That is true, up to a point. Rangers are still probably technically archers though, so if you set your shortbows to fire archers, they won't waste quite as much time on the miners. You would probably still need something to deal with the miners though. I think a lot of weirdness with dealing with the flanking miners could be dealt with just by never scripting attack/fire closest on anything that you don't want to set chasing miners down. Use attack rear for your melee units, and probably fire archers for any ranged units you have. The problem though is you can't really just ignore the miners, they're pretty nasty in melee. So you need to have some method of killing them. A thug or two on each flank would probably be sufficient, more or less.

[Sombre]

Personally I'd just turn miners into standard stealth/siege units and remove the summon from the prospector. I don't think there's a better way to simulate their 'deep strike' stuff. I considered it briefly with the sneaky skaven units like gutter runners who can also use those tunnel attacks, but in the end it just caused too much hassle.

[Fantomen]

Agree with sombre, even though I love to own the AI with prospectors in SP.

It would really be cool to add a remote attack spell with miners instead. Perhaps even make it low in research, easy to cast and remove miners from recruitment entirely.

[rdonj]

I don't think it would really hurt the dwarfs too much to lose them, either. I've been playing with o3/p3 using longbeards to expand, and they're doing comparably to the crossbows. I think I lose units more often, but I still win plenty of battles without any losses, and these armies actually have a decent mapmove on them. Plus I have been recruiting mages (engineers, magic 3) instead of prospectors, so magic is a lot healthier than it was under crossbow expansion.

The unit that I'm actually having the most trouble finding a use for is the runeguard. They're completely unnecessary for the purposes of expansion, though they are tremendously difficult to kill. But the difficulty in massing them makes it a bit hard imo to justify using them as a bless strategy. And the reinvigoration from an e9 bless is barely enough for your big mages to notice. Though they will appreciate it. Actually I think you'd almost want to go all the way to e10 if you really wanted them to work, due to their incredibly low numbers and high encumbrance. Otherwise they are begging to be overwhelmed.

[Burnsaber]

I've been playtesting a bit more and come to the conclusion that Prospectors have to go. The border summoning thing was really intented as a minor boost to give the commander a sort of niche. But, yeah, it proved really much more powerful than I thought. My first response was "Hey, that's sort of cool", and the AI going insane was quite hilarious. It's always nice to hear about unforeseen strategies forming up, it's a sign of "open-ended" nation that can use many different strategies.

But I've managed to playtest a bit more now. The way how the border-summons work is just.. buggy. The way the AI reacts to it just doesn't maky any sense, which is a major immersion downer. Also, fighting against prospector spam could very well prove to be the most frustating thing ever to fight against, since it combines stealth (major annoyance) with combat summons (major annoyance, since you'll have to kill the same miners in each combat). Basing on the talk of this thread, most players seem to base a whole fort(s?) on massing these guys. This really isn't the path I want this nation to take gameplay wise. Conclusion: the bordersummon thing is pretty nifty and thematic, but the game really can't handle it, so it has to go.

Well, on the plus side, this change allows me to bring in a new thematic inclusion from the WFRP books to replace the "Prospector" (without the border summon, his niche is just way too small). Runebearers. They are dwarf messengers who use the dangereous underway to bring messages in order to allow commmunication between the isolated/sieged dwarf holds. Gameplay wise, they will have 10 leadership to lead small miner squads, major mapmove (4), high stealth, all survival skills (they travel underground, ignoring regular terrain obstacles) and a lot of magic slots. Miners will also get the "all survival skills" thing, but I'll bump their rescost to 40 to compensate for the bonus.

This way, the Ranger Champion is the best leader for stealth forces (due to his higher leadership), but the Runebearer can quickly transport items and gems to the frontlines. His one niche will be also to lead the mapmove 3 miners around to allow for nifty defensive tricks.

I'll probably make a new "Miner Ambush" combat spell to still allow some access to the "deep strike" strategy. I'll balance it against to the "Howl" spell.

As for other planned changes, I'll probably make Runeguards a lot more hardcore by giving them the "Runic Ward" instead of the basic dwarf shield. I'll likely bump their gold cost a bit too (60?), since this is a pretty major boost.

[rdonj]

Now that could make runeguards really interesting. I'd love to see that change. An increase in gcost would almost certainly be necessary to compensate, maybe even more than the 10 you're considering. Just as long as the rcost is not inflated too much more, as it is you really have to pray for a great start location to get more than a few per turn maximum.

Also, I agree about getting rid of prospectors. When you got them in large enough numbers, it really wasn't very easy to deal with the freespawn. Even if you could script to deal with them without your entire army going crazy chasing after the miners, the difficulty involved in killing them with the eventually huge numbers of dwarfs you could spawn, would have been a nightmare to deal with in mp. A howl-esque miner summon spell sounds nifty though.

[Fantomen]

Will you give the runeguards a two handed weapon as well?