Dwarves feel a little bit poor

Delusionist#2224

I played a fair bit of dwarves after this rework and after assessing them for a bit they do feel quite poor. Their army prices are fine, but the problem lies elsewhere. They just do not earn enough money to pay for their super high-priced constructions.

Generally speaking, dwarves are a faction that only really earns money from income. Their lootmoney is fairly low, and even if they still earn some money from sacking settlements, getting 12000 for a tier 4 settlement will only afford you 2 t3 settlement upgrades each costing 5000 gold. They can reduce this cost by 10% via edict, 40% for belegar, 10% through tech and 15% for a grugni lord. The problem: This is only the case for settlement buildings and only if you have Belegar and confederations are haard for dwarves. Building a tier 3 toolmakers guild in a yellow region with edict and grugni lord will take 24 turns to return its investment. Sacking a tier 3 settlement will afford you 1 such tier 3 toolmaker upgrade, just not very much.

Furthermore, income from some buildings feels weirdly low. Most buildings take around 20 turns to return their investment. There are two solutions for this: either lower the ridiculous construction costs or increase income. The two options regarding income are increasing building-income or increasing loot-income. Increasing loot-income would be an easy fix for the issue. If we want to increase building income, I would suggest buffing gold and beer income.

Beer has a price of 13 gold per unit. A fully upgraded hostely chain produces a walloping 12 units, resulting in an income of 156 gold from trade. This is fairly low. Don't get me wrong, the brewery in Karak Dromar is still incredible, producing 100 kegs and hence 1300 income, a fair reward for going out of your way and dealing with the Von Carsteins, I believe. But that's about the only good way to get good income from beer. Increasing the value to 20 gold and increasing production to 8/14/20 and increasing value to 20 would make this feel a little bit fairer. If this was done, the landmark should probably be nerfed a little bit to maybe 70 tons production or sth like that.

Gold. Gold is great, it gives you some oathgold, thane recruit rank and even lord recruit rank at tier 4. However, it really doesn't earn you that much money. Gold earns the same amount of money as a toolmaker does, adding a whopping 3/6/8/12 crates of golden trinkets for 16 gold per crate resulting in 48/96/128/196 gold income. This doesn't really feel like golden income, especially when considering the fact that each upgrade takes at the very least 12 turns to return the investment.

Delusionist#2224

Btw: While construction costs for dwarves are normally fairly expensive, they become ridiculous when considering settlements in even yellow territory. Since reductions and cost increases are additive, you cannot even really reduce these. On top of that, exorbitant construction times further delay return of investment. So yeah, fairly expensive stuff