BE seems not to effect my max horses

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Originally Posted by Ethan

I know people are going to start yelling about it again - but consider forts as well. Since dwarf has high BE, stables and homes are both comparatively weaker that usual. For offensive mods, this leaves you with... TG. But at high %s (over 20% maybe, and certainly over 30%) the DBE (decreasing building efficiency - if you don't know this yet, study it in the wiki!) really makes them ineffective too. But you can still use forts at lower %s (2:1 TG:Forts is usually safe - 1:1 is sometimes ok even) to make room for "more" TGs that don't suffer DBE as much. The trick is to pick a target defense (talk to your kingdom about this) and instead of using forts to raise your DPA, use it to lower how much defensive units you need to get to the target DPA. (Because they can kill all your pes and ruin your BE in war, and also because NW/A will go up a tiny bit... still raise DPA a small about.) All those defensive units you saved with forts? Make them offense! Now your already high TGs will be modding up an even bigger number!

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lolol, i'll bite...
First, using forts under the assumption that you can choose to skimp on defense is completely counterproductive. If I'm building forts it's because I want more defense and can't possibly train enough army or keep enough at home. If I want offense I'll build TGs or stables, train offense, and if both of those are in place I set up my province to be able to train more offense, rather than build forts. If I need defense, and only if I need defense, I build forts. Your notion of using forts to reduce the number of defense specs used is something that will kill pretty much any province... you'll get hit just as much, and each nightstrike and combat losses will drop your defense even more than they would without the forts.

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Truly optimal static point is often surprisingly close to 1:1 between TGs and Forts for a higher offensive elite race (orc/undead actually get the best static numbers with *more* forts than TGs), but all that yelling about how forts are bad *does* have somewhat of a point. Always aim to be at least a bit "too heavy" on the TGs at the cost of being a bit "too light" on the forts - once stuff starts changing like crazy in war it'll leave you in better shape.

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Game is too dynamic to care about static points, whether you're in war or not... especially if you're orc or undead.

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Also dwarf attacker wants to look at having good hospitals (unless cleric, and even the maybe 5-10%), and probably some solid banks too. Solid WT's also a life saver - and notice how all these use those good % effects. If you build for a bit better durability you might find you only have 20% land to put into straight offense mods... and then you probably just go 20% TGs, or 15% TG 5% Forts. A "breaker" you won't be, and 100 opa isn't gonna be your thing... but if you can just keep hitting with about 80%+ of the "breaker's" OPA, you shouldn't wear down as fast, and so you'll start carrying the load later in the war. Again, talk to your kingdom about taking on a role like that - if your kingdom only ever fights min time wars, you've got a poor race choice this age, but do the best to make a big hitter out of it anyway.

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So with all of those % buildings, do you think forts are still good?

Anyway, last war I did build forts, and they made the difference between being 2x hit and 3x hit... but I didn't build them until after I got ghetto-chained, so I still had some defense left and huge ME mods from being hit so often and so badly, and I was pimping 20%+ TG on top of that. In that situation things change way too frequently to give a damn about static numbers, but I surely wasn't going to be able to train defense fast enough to get to the level I wanted. Being able to use all of my generals for hits and still having elites at home helped my decision to use forts, because the kingdom I was fighting did operate on the notion that they could use forts to replace defense, only to find their forts worthless once all their defense deserted, and their tendency to always suicide. Had I been fighting a good kingdom I would have had to worry about nightstrikes in that spot, but fortunately they stopped trying to put any ops on me after they thought I was down.

Moral of the story... forts are a defensive building, not an offensive one. If you want good defense and your offense is good enough, then by all means use forts. If you want more offense, stick with the buildings that mod offense and after that, economy so that you can keep training offfense or defense rather than hope for forts to work.

ok the point about just picking the wrong race this age stands true,and my kingdom is going for the opposite quick wars 48rs, as many as possible. with war terms dictating an acre difference to decide if 1 side gets the win. so ajusting my build to those conditions. im figuring pump all elites for start of war, then switch to only d specs in war. my all elite army gives me the flexabilty of moving between targets somtimes leaving a huge defence at home. so im figuring on a good number of forts.

my plan for war was to get some good big hits in the first 24 hrs, then slow down shelling a bit with sitching to conquests.
more feed back would be great

The dwarf 6/5 elite has 6 NW. A 5/0 o-spec has only 4 NW. A 0/5 d-spec has 5 NW. Any troops you *know* are going to be defense only should be def specs. Depending on the conditions, it is possible for the lower NW for the o-spec to make it better than the elite as well. Since they are quicker to train up, generally any troops you *know* are going to be offense should thus be o-specs. Dwarf would not be significantly harmed if you removed it's elite entirely.

Short summery - pure elite is bad. All those elites are is NW bloat, so you get worse gains and everyone else gets better gains. Think of every epa as being -1% GS in exchange for "flexibility".


Did I mention 'tis the worst attacking race? Even faery can put out higher "top line" numbers, as in higher OPNW and DPWN. Faery *is* a worst attacker because dwarf has the free build.... but still, when you are competing with the dedicated T/M race for bottom of the barrel in top line numbers, I don't care what mods you have, they aren't enough to make an attacker.


To salvage a dwarf attacker in a 48 hour war kingdom, I would do the following. Much as I hate it, I'd draft up to 70-75%. I'd have high TGs and solid forts (target something like 20-25% TGs, 10% forts). And, bad synergy or no, I'd run 10-15% homes as well. Skip banks, skip hospitals, and probably only run middling GS. In a 48 hour war, top line offense is king, nothing else matters that much.

Your other option is to build enough rax (with your QF) for 5(+) uniques in 48 hours, instead of 4 (get the rax out of the homes first, drop DR by 2-3%). My schedule wouldn't work with that, but if you can handle the weird login times, hitting more is just as good as hitting big.


As I've proven in other ages, any active attacker is an asset at anything other than the very top. My faery/sage attacker had 1 war where I was our *best* attacker, and I did it all by staying aggressive (and using fog to scare them away from me, so I didn't need much defense) and refusing to let a "bad" race stop me. They did have 4/7 elites and 5/0 o-specs at the time though - but even now with their far more gimped attacking, I could be an attacker just fine. Refusal to stop hitting matters much more than a "bad" race. Just cause you shot yourself in the foot by accident doesn't mean you can't run - and in running, you'll still outpace all those that walk. 'Tis just gonna hurt a bit more is all.

Ethan is wrong. nw-efficiency does not matter, at any level of the game, except for honor-whores at very small acres. Mostly elites are the way to go for Dwarf - you will want them when you're chained. Defense specs are okay to have, and offense specs are less bad for dwarf than most races, but when you are chained, having a turtle-capable elite is a huge asset. If your dwarf is planning on not being chained - and dwarves are probably my lowest priority for chaining - then you will still want elites, for the most flexibility in attacking targets and of course space-efficiency.

IMO, flexibility is usually another name for "turtle up and let my kingdom-mates take the hits instead". While after a chain or when trying for UB it might be a good strategy, usually I just call those players lame, and wait for them to rage quit cause we don't coddle their acres in my kingdom. I've played true static defense (an age as DE) and also near static defense (my 2 ages as faery attacker, this age as halfer to a lesser degree). Ya, total lack of "flexibility" sucks. So does -10% BE. You take it cause it makes you stronger anyway.

BTW, space efficiency matters for 2 reasons: 1. high NW/A is like free GS. 2. space efficient =>(usually) more NW efficient.

#2. is the important reason. Sure, 1 is nice to have, but no big deal either way - you can always just use more GS. The fact that land has huge NW is what drives space efficiency concerns. Just in dwarf's case, the NW efficiency *gain* from the 6 offense elite is smaller than the NW efficiency lost by paying 2 NW/offense for it.


% of land taken is based on relative NW. This is a simple fact of the current game. To claim NW doesn't matter is ludicrous.

If hits against me are all resulting in overpop - hell yeah, I'm all for turtling up and letting the rest of the kingdom take hits, where they have to put more work to cause overpopulation. A chain that can't be brought to its logical conclusion is one of the worst things to encounter. Never mind the possibilities of using split armies. Besides, even with sending most or all elites out, berserkers have more raw power per troop - vital when you absolutely need space-efficiency.

Space efficiency matters more because land in this game is a limited resource, and the principle on which chaining is based. Networth isn't a resource in of itself, just an indicator that is useful in deciding who is a good target, for any reason. I've found that people who tweak nw/a tend to be short-term thinkers... there are too many variables that affect nw to make power per networth mean much of anything, and certainly not enough to justify gimping a province economically or in any other way. There are good reasons for dwarves to use specialists, even a pure spec army, but none of them have anything to do with the berserker's high nw weight.