Dwarf merchant

[freddieflux]

Recently started up as dwarf merchant. Received total ghetto as my new hood.
We recently voted a monarch and are now cleaning inactives.
My goal for now is to grow to 1000 acres or more and just build a solid strong province. Being merchant i want to help my kd as much as i can
My grow build right now is:
10% homes
10% farms
20% banks
10% armories
20% guilds
15% towers
5% stables
10% WT

Currently at 55% draft, while slowly training elites, 1,1 raw tpa and training wizards.
Some questions:
- General numbers i should try to aim for?
- Do I need ospecs? Assuming I dont need them, what is a good dspec to elite ratio to aim for? Currently at 3:2 dspec:elite ratio which i feel is very bad... (I got scared and trained too much dspec OOP)
- Grow slowly everyday or try to boom hard and hope to not get hit? I've been growing slowly at a steady pace (+/- 15-20 acres/day) while building military and building books.
- Considering science: I have roughly 10 bPA on Income, housing, food, t/m sci. What do u feel is most important to invest in right now?
- What is the main advantage of having +30% BE? How to use it to maximum advantage?

I'd like to hear your critique and advice, considering i havent played dwarf before.

[Lestat]

The increased BE means you can draft harder and still have decent BE. Reach your target land size ASAP, then draft super deep. Go for maybe 7-8 DSPA and as many leets as possible.

[noobium]

don't like merch on dorf. dorf has a lot of selfspells they want to cast and a good shot of using their mana for offensive magic, but they will want an attacker perso to be competitive with orcs, undeads, avians, and humans militarily. cleric and tact work really well on dwarf. only other personality i would consider is mystic, and that's still a pretty hard pick to use.

forget about offspec - elites are so much more useful. 3:2 elite:defspec seems to work nicely at high draft rates (80+), lower would build more elites. since zerks make decent defenders, you'd only be sending out everything when necessary. it's very likely that you'll be able to keep 50ish dpa home while sending 70ish opa out, often enough to score two taps on an attacker at the outset of war.

the main advantage of +30% BE? dwarf can choose their build to do just about anything well, and they have the best defensive buildings out of anyone. the latter becomes particularly important in longer wars, especially since the dwarf can set their build for free. the former has the side-effect that dwarves don't do any one thing to the extent other races can, particularly attacking.