Maybe if you wanted to run it as an Orc, less kills, less speed and less gains totally did not invite to that, insted it was the one race to run without farms and where you sort of needed to ballance it on a higher defense. It was ideal to shell kingdoms and in lower tier warring kingdoms but less so in situations where opponents could chain them, still they could serve a purpose of stalling chains on other team members since you could build it to a fairly decent defense and still have room for a strong offense. The one thing they was not was core material, you would really only want a few arround with orc backup or something else, and trying to make up for their speed with tactician was a mistake.

I ran shells where we had dryads, the first age I was war hero and passed 6k acres as the 2nd biggest only because I did not explore that age, the second age Elit ran war hero and crowned over 8k acres, the third I ran Paladin and crowned on nearly 9k acres after beeing cowed by Tetra and his team of the 1-3 biggest humans on the server at the time, I do not think it a coincidence that we could pull these results without using tactician a single time, but I suspect they retired it on the main server partly to bring it back in a bit once genesis launces, then I'd suggest trying it out, just don't expect dryad smash since it was not designed that way.