Round table

The banquet continues:

4. Barbarian. The immediate difficulty here is which settings to play with. If using the object disablement that balances territory types by content, then the barb gets as much money on respawn as others (in the original it's less). The game doesn't necessarily become noticeably stronger, but rather more stable; the chances of hitting a financial dead end drop rapidly.

1) Starting breakthrough power is huge and versatile. But it's difficult to manage; losing wolves is easier than losing skeletons or troglodytes. And then the game turns into torture. Plus, unlike the castles of the first three, the barb has wide opportunities to open a second front as early as week 1 — birds+orcs (though birds are usually brought to papa on day 2), ogres+orcs, ogres+behemoths, ogres+cyclopes, etc.

2) Non-bonus power is average. In large hives, flies often attack the wolves themselves, and the barbarian army isn't designed to be hit — weak unit defense and low hero defense stats.
And in large castles, hitting griffins with wolves is inconvenient (it's hard to remove the retaliation). That is, you either need external dwelling wolves/birds, or money for behemoths in the Castle. With one external dwelling of wolves and a well-leveled Tiras, you can chop down a stack of griffins from the first hit on week 2 in a three-castle setup (or leave only crumbs). If nothing remarkable was distributed, then the barb has no significant advantage over other castles in developing castles/hives.

3) In Dragon Utopia there is again a problem — the integrity of the wolves. Dragons love to hit them. You need to calculate forces precisely so that dragons hit the "food" and not the wolves. There were times when I didn't take wolves into Dragon Utopia if the rest of the power was sufficient.

4) Speed is above average — Tiras runs with 9 speed when accelerating, and the chances for speed skills are decent; the only thing that usually doesn't work is navigation — only a 4 point chance for it (swamp-dwellers, for example, have 8).

As a result, you get a specific castle that requires experience, especially in handling wolves. If you're not used to it, it's easy to lose them. Plus, overall the army isn't particularly "meta," being more oriented toward hitting first, which doesn't always happen (mass haste is very desirable, and barbarians are given it quite often). Therefore, only 4th place; Flax turns out to be somewhat more stable and powerful.

Among additional pluses, I can note a very flexible build-up; there are many options depending on the amount of resources and the range of tasks being solved.

Continuation tomorrow ...