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[Pilsu]

There isn't a single reason the zerglves need steel quality rope reed armor. Nor does it make any sense. Why would ANYONE bother with steel? Oh right, Mary Sue elven magic must be needed to refine the Agalea Phlebotinum plants

If they're weak combatants, make them spawn in larger numbers. Tip their spears with obsidian and remove the toy swords

[Mikademus]

It's a valid point, though. We don't want to ruin too much flavor.

On the other hand, elves kinda suck one-on-one right now.
...
The idea is to make them more powerful and less zerg-like, while still retaining flavor and differentiation from the other races.

You want to make them LESS Zergoid?! I want them MORE so! I want them climbing the ceiling, rushing at you from the shadows, swamping you and scaring the dwarfcrap out of you in a shrieking mob of tattooed and scarified savagery, clawing out your beating heart and devouring it in a frenzy. That'd make the elves unique and interesting!

[Tormy]

I'd rather see elves with a wide variety of fearsome war-trained animals. Bears, elephants, hippos, giant eagles, etc.

Yeah that makes sense. If it is true we will be able to define entity pets in the next version, IE. if you want you can mod the elves and "give them" the ability to use those animals in their armies + in the sieges.

[Cheshire Cat]

the hardest thing i have ever fought, ever, was actually a legendary elf who came in with a goblin siege. first few sieges i got had a whole lot of elves wearing some fairly nice armor (iron! unbeleivable...) and mostly wielding iron mauls. wierdly they had awesome stats but did not seem combat trained.

said elf flashed in the legendary way legendary creatures do. but did not have any aparent combat abilites. he got caught in a cage trap before he got to the fighting, so i stuck the cage in my combat pit and set my champions against him. he killed three of them then escaped right through my weapon traps on the door unscathed, then ran through the fortress faster then the speed of light, killing a bunch of random dwarves on the way. he eventually got stuck in the same line of cage traps at the entrance that caught him the first time.

i didnt actually want to risk my one captive GCS on him in case he actually won. so i threw him off my mighty tower of death and turned his bones into bracelents and earings.

in conclusion, yeah, elves can be badass when they have that agility score right up and have some decent weapons and armor. it was seriously like matrix bullet time in comparison to my champions, he seemed to almost outrun the crossbow bolts. so while i am all for giving them better stuff, do we really want to unleash this sort of terror on the world? also, half their problems right now in world gen seem to be their lack of defence from not having a fort to defend from.

also, on the topic of my evil elves, has anyone else got any idea why i got a few of them wearing iron in my first goblin sieges? i know goblins get soldiers of different races through childnapping, but how do they get elf sized armor and stuff? isnt elves wearing iron banned somehow, and if this is the case, how does being captured by goblins change this? and how common is this sort of thing?

[SirHoneyBadger]

I think it's reasonable that elves would have access to a lot of different types of plant-based poisons. That in itself would give them a big advantage.

They might also have access to plants that would quickly heal even mortally wounded elves, and certainly fire-retardant saps are possible, and would be widely used in elven lands.

I totally disagree with the idea that they'd be able to make any plant-based material better than 75 (bronze in it's current form), but 75 isn't really *bad* when you can just grow whatever it is, and never have to worry about scarcity. 50 elves armed with bronze-equivalent gear, and curare-tipped arrows, is worth a lot more than 5 dwarfs armed with steel.

Heck, a shellalagh is a perfectly great weapon, especially if you can give one to the vast majority of your citizenry. And Elves might have things like "longbow plants", "sword bushes", and the like.

Elves aren't really about numbers though, as Granite26 pointed out. Elves are a defensive race, in that aspect not entirely unlike dwarfs. Elves know their lands: they know how to defend them, how to hide in them, and how to fully utilize every single resource contained within their environment. They're just a lot more mobile, and a lot less durable, than dwarfs.

Elven armour would likely be laughable compared to masterwork dwarf steel plate in terms of sheer durability, but it would probably be very light and flexible, and might give bonus resistances to missle weapons, offer great camoflage, and provide some resistance against special damage types, like fire, acid, lightning, and cold. It'd also be a lot more quiet, and again, a lot more generally available, than plate.

Elves, I think, should generally fight mostly as guerillas. They could bushwhack, ambush, lay traps, do a lot of sniping, and try to divide their enemies up.

And I agree about their skills. All the adult elves that exist at the beginning of the game could get atleast one random Legendary skill, to represent the sheer weight of years they've got on everybody.

[SirHoneyBadger]

Another thought struck me: Provided that the elves and dwarfs in your game had good relations, it would be in elven interests (as the dirty tree-hugging hippies they are) to educate your dwarfs on the proper (or atleast, a better) way to harvest lumber. This might involve extracting the core wood of a huge tree, while keeping intact the overall structure of the tree, and not unduly damaging the bark, or killing the living components, and then pitching the wound to protect it against disease. Ofcourse, this would be more labour-intensive, but the benefits would be environmental, and moral.

This might *also* possibly give dwarfs the ability to build fortresses into (and ofcourse, under) stands of massive trees-making them unusual dwarfs indeed-but making for a new fortress type, and new way of playing the game.

This might then be extended outward, making treants and unicorns less hostile, and bettering your relations with elves, not that I see the point of that, but still, a possibility. 

As a somewhat OT aside: dwarfs that expand into unusual areas for them might eventually become dwarf subtypes: forest dwarfs (woodwoses?), as above, ice dwarfs (svartalfr?) that live continuously inside of glaciers, or deep dwarfs that *never* venture aboveground, etc.