Partly inspired by the fact that the Khazad seems to have a very low position in the "favourite civ" poll, and partly inspired by this post by Darthcycle:
In the same line of thought, why not change the way that dwarves harvest their environment for food?
In game terms, do not allow dwarves races to build farms but give them another way to harvest food. Some ideas:
- mines also produces 1 food
- allow a new mine type that produces 2 food
- generic buildings that generate 1-2 food, like underground mushroom farms under the city.
- a building that generates food, but requires mountain in the city radius in order to build it. Beetle colony harvested in mountain caves.
This would greatly change the way dwarves races are played. Hills and moutains would become valuable terrain for dwarves races, like forest and ancient forest to elves.
I started to think about ways to make the Khazad civilization more unique and more appealing to players. Right now they are scheduled to get a lot of dwarven units, and while I agree that they most certainly need to look different, they also need to play different.
Since the Luchuirp covers the Craftmanship/Enchantment aspect of dwarves, I think the Khazad, in tune with their slightly darker alignment, could emphasize the "subterranean" aspect of a dwarven civilization.
A number of additions that could be made to achive this:
- Of Darthcycle's suggestions, I believe 1 would be the most simple to implement, but would still have a quite drastic effect on the gameplay. The 1 food could be explained by the ability of dwarven miners to scavenge the tunnels for delicious fungi. Might give them a food penalty for farms to balance it out.
- The Khazad should, as the only ones, get the ability to mine Peaks. Mining a Peak might produce 1 more hammer than a hill. The mine would take twice as long to build. The random chance of spawning a resource when working the mine should be either doubled or tripled, perhaps with especially good chances of finding mithril. This would of course mean that Dwarven workers should get the ability to traverse peaks.
- The Khazad could get access to a new city improvement, a Mineshaft. Only buildable in cities on hills, the shaft would have the same effects as stuff like Elder Council, Market and Obelisk, being cheap to build and providing +2 hammers. Smaller Khazad cities could get a quite good advantage in production through this.
- The Khazad could get access to a new city improvement, called Tunnel Networks(available with Engineering). Tunnel Networks are somewhat akin to Oblivion Gates in function, except that travel does not occur instantaneously, but takes an amount of turn proportional to the distance to the target city. Transcontinental travel is impossible. Target city must also have tunnel networks. During the travel, units are essentially "gone" from the map. If the destination city is taken before the units arrive, they are lost forever(It would seem likely that someone conquering a Khazad city would either collapse the tunnel system, or ambush whoever emerged from it). Tunnel networks might also provide a small defensive bonus to the city.
- The Khazad can build cottages on/in hills?
! BTW it does not make sense for horsemen for their mounted units not to start without combat I when melee units do, does it?
