Bay 12 Games Forum

Symbiotic Blood Worms (1) - FallacyofUrist
Symbiotic Blood Worms, with Shaper Advantage (3) - Draignean, Blood Librarian, strongpoint

Choo-choo.

How about some transportation? Our empire is growing larger and transporting everything on workers is not that practical. I think something like design below can work.

Wagons
Hive adopts its first major technological innovation: The wheel. Various types of wooden wagons are developed to aid in transportation of resources and troops. With no access to horses Hive uses its drones to move wagons both under and above the ground. Additionally, special semi-closed wagons are developed for spitters to increase both their mobility and their protection. (Design goals: increase food\timber\ore production, get a timber using variant of Spitter)

Hunters wrecked them. They need to do a counter design. Hunters kill more than soldiers.

I propose to skip the design phase (this is not a vote yet). I want to de nat-effort spitters, give workers basic wooden weapons, upgrade ravanchers and relocate our reinforcements. Alternatively I am ready to support almost any design that uses wood, because we are sitting on a huge

I dislike development cycle proposal because it looks like - increase cost of hunters, workers and soldiers to get complexity\cost reduction for our elite units. No thanks.

We learned that lesson when MC came out. It turns out paladin secrets are actually pretty decent when you don't have to worry about drawing them, and being able to select which secret you want for the situation is worth the 1 stat point under curve that knife juggler is. Minibot is a stupid card, and I don't think anyone is contesting that, and then there's just not enough room to fit KJ in.

I agree that hydrologist is a good card but... I still think that it is not the deck for it. We have no murloc synergy, we have no stonehill defenders, we have no tirion, there are even anti-synergy with divine favour. It value drops.

Potential tempo gained from Knife Juggler looks way more valuable for what this deck tries to do. Turn 1 Righteous defender, turn 2 knife juggler, turn 3 muster and the board is yours. Turn 3 juggler + lost in jungle or righteous defender is not something weak either.

Put some thought on this "shaped" bones idea

Chitin-wooden tools and weapons
Workers posses a variety of natural tools that are well suited for most tasks. Yet sometimes something more specialized is required. Creating a specialized drone for every manual task looked like a waste of time in the many eyes of the freshborn princess. No, she knew the answer. They must do something that her mother never considered. Create tools. Sure, workers already do some crude tools but stones and bones lack necessary properties. Princess found the solution. She proposed a new type of civilian only drone: Chitinsmiths. This new drone is a simplified worker with a new reinforced chitinous armor. But instead of using properties of the new type of chitin to create a matching armor, through careful manipulation of drone's movements, hormonal releases, symbiont effects,  and other means, new drones are capable to produce pieces of chitin of desired shape, density and hardness. As a proof of concepts, Princess starts with an axe, a tool for cutting trees and humans. Long(for a worker) wooden handle with a chitin axehead on top. Axehead has a sharp chitin blade on one side and a spike on the other. (Desired design effects: Better tools overall, increased timber production, new worker(axe) subtype of unit with some additional timber and manpower cost)

I don't like it much myself, I mostly want a way to use timber, not another way to spend food.

I think the easiest way to start spend timber is a single revision like this.


Armed worker revision
Hive starts to arm its workers with wooden weapons to hit humans and parry their spears. There are no centralized production or predefined designs. It is something workers produces in their spare time between battles. Sometimes it is a mere club, sometimes it is a sharpened stick, sometimes a flat piece of used as shield. Occasionally more refined weapons are produced like stone maces, clubs with spikes made of recycled chitin or short spears that use trophy spearhead.

It should be totally doable as revision and will give some use to timber.

The fact that then we'll need to manually adjust the percentage differences between the two.

I see... You are assuming that we'll have to do something like this:

X% of budget > Unarmed workers - 1.1 manpower cost
Y% of budget > Armed workers 1.1 manpower cost, 1 timber cost

And micromanage that every turn. I expect a completely different thing.

X% of budget > Produce armed workers, when run out of timber, produce unarmed workers with manpower left.

It looks way more logical and similar to how league converts excessive manpower in slaves.
Do you really expect that Iituem will say "You tried to produce more armed workers than your timber allows you. Unspent manpower fizzles into nothingness."?

But the starting point is fundamental to technology. Humans cannot, for example, make guns. Humans + many many millennia of civilisation can build guns

Do you really think that in this game humans can't get gunpowder in few turns if they actively try?

Giant insects are impossible. Magic is impossible. Intelligent design of DNA is impossible. Rapid advancement of technology is impossible. All this is true in real life but not in the game.

Is wooden armor really unpractical? It is quite cheap to strap a piece of wood over chitin and our drones are strong enough to not suffer from the additional weight. Humans tended to not use wood as armor because it is not flexible enough but it is less of a problem for our bugs.

I am still not sold that bows are a bad idea. Workers lose absolutely nothing from using bows. Bows give experience toward heavier stuff like ballistae.

Traps can work. Siege equipment can work. Why do we want to limit ourself only to natural weapons? Why do we want to limit ourself to food as a resource?

Also, dugout canoe's can be a way to start challenging seas