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The banquet continues:
4. Barbarian. The immediate difficulty here is which settings to play with. If using the object disablement that evens out 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 falling into a financial hole decrease rapidly.
1) Starting breakthrough power is enormous and versatile. However, it is difficult to manage; it's easier to lose wolves than skeletons or troglodytes. And then the game turns into torture. Plus, unlike the first three castles, the barb has wide opportunities to open a second front as early as week 1 — birds+orcs (although birds are usually brought to "papa" by day 2), ogres+orcs, ogres+hippos, ogres+cyclops, etc.
2) Non-bonus power is average. In large hives, flies often attack wolves on their own, and the barbarian army isn't designed to take hits — weak unit defense and low hero defense stats.
And in large cons, hitting griffins with wolves is inconvenient (hard to remove the retaliation). That is, you either need external dwellings of wolves/birds, or money for hippos in the castle. With one wolf external dwelling and a well-leveled Tiras, by week 2 in a three-con setup, you can wipe out a griffin stack with the first hit (or leave only crumbs). If nothing remarkable was distributed, then the barb has no significant advantage over other castles in clearing cons/hives.
3) In Dragon Utopia, there's once again the problem of wolf integrity. Dragons love hitting them. You need to calculate forces precisely so that dragons hit the "fodder" and not the wolves. There were times I didn't take wolves into utopias if other power was sufficient.
4) Speed is above average — Tiras runs with 9 speed when accelerated, and the chances for speed skills are decent; the only thing that usually doesn't work out is army speed — 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 highly desirable, and barbarians are given it quite often). Therefore, only 4th place; Flax turns out to be somehow more stable and powerful.
Among additional pluses, I can note very flexible building options; there are many variants depending on the amount of resources and the range of tasks being solved.
Continued tomorrow ...
Wlk777
