[aaminoff]

Thank you for doing this. I downloaded the mod, tried a few things in SP, it looks pretty sweet. So, I have some strategy questions.

The basic recruitables are awesome. A commander and 5 (five!) heavy clansdwarfs can take most indy 5 provinces (exceptions being lance cavalry, barbarians, and crossbows). However, I wonder how well they will fare in the mid-game against other players. The trouble is they are counterable: slow and very vulnerable to AP damage. This is the MA, so indy crossbowmen are available. Also battlefield evocs - being slow, the enemy mages get more time to rain down the level 2-3 evocs; being expensive and therefore few, the loss of each one to a spell makes a larger impact. Also skellyspam, or the vast horde armies like maenads or markatas - being few, they can't do enough damage fast enough. Also, they are encumbered. Enc 3 is not too bad, but the best are enc 5 or 7, which will fatigue themselves to sleep against those maenads/skellys. A partial answer to battlefield evocs is that the Runeguards(?) are 50% resistant to everything, but they are enc 7! There are battlefield buff spells which help with resistances, but spells to help with fatigue are high level in N, not a path the Dwarves focus in normally.

Well, so I'm thinking, how about trying something a little more along the lines of Baalz's guide to Ulm. Unfortunately, we don't have access to air, but we do have commanders who even without equipment are almost thug material. I'm thinking of Journeyman Runesmiths as thugs. A golden shield and firebrand are kind of cliche, but the dwarves have great forging advantages and fire and earth happen to be their favorite paths. Compared to a Vanjarl, say, we have no mistform and no cloud trapeeze, but on the plus side our basic armor is better and the items are cheaper. At least they are stealthy so with a bit of preparation one could raid with these guys using standard alternating hide-attack pattern. Journeyman Runesmiths are holy priests, so something like a E9N4 bless, though you might be able to get away with something like E6N4.

One problem we have is the castles are expensive. I don't think there is much to be done about that.

Focusing on thugs instead of national troops buys us dropping production 3, possibly down as far as sloth 3. With sloth 3 and drain 3, that is a lot of design points. How to use them? I would suggest an awake research rainbow pretender; the Dwarves national troops are so good vs most indies that even with sloth3 you can still send out a viable expansion party every turn. So this starts looking a bit like Baalz's Helheim plan, a Great Druid with E9N4 and perhaps another minor bless or 2 and some more paths. Since research is up in the 20s, they wont notice the -2 from drain3 much.

So, does focusing on early research buy us anything cool? One could of course charge up construction to equip thugs as soon as possible, but we don't need the thugs for indy expansion. Sadly, we have no D gems to accelerate research using skull mentors, so research will just have to be done the hard way. Mostly my question is, can the Dwarves be successful, despite their anti-magical lore, as a heavily magic-using nation? Are there cool summons they can get to, either national ones, or standard ones available in their paths?

Another idea I had was looking at the Mother of All. Any time I see a unit with a lot of healing I think of Tarts. So put something like E6D4N4 on her and you have a tart factory, though it requires researching up to conj 9, not all that synergistic with much else. The D income for the Tarts would have to be bootstrapped by the pretender sitesearching and then summoning spectres and other summonable D mages. (fortunately there are plenty of those). Ditto the N income for GoR, although indy N mages are plentiful. In this case you probably have to make her asleep for the points, but again, you can live without the 240 research points the pretender generates in year 1, since there is no magic research that you absolutely positively must get done quickly.

Also, I find it really helps to get into the spirit of being a Dwarf if you take some misfortune scales. You go to open up the new turn, you grumble "OK, lets see what bad stuff happen to us this time".

I don't have a lot of experience, but I am really enjoying thinking about strategies for these dwarves. Any thoughts? Alternatively, am I underestimating the recruitable troops and should just rely on them to last through the mid-game?