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[RPB]

Having polished off Wizardry II in a disappointingly quick time I find myself wanting to keep trying an LP, so I figured I'd dig out an old favorite of mine.

Cavewars is a straightforward 4X style wargame from Avalon Hills. It's simplistic by 4X standards, with only a few resources, a completely linear tech tree (which seems like kind of an oxymoron), and no interaction with other empires beyond killing them.

The simplicity of design works really well, though, and it's a great game if you ignore the crappy graphics. I'm not being a graphics snob here--this is a forum for a developer of ASCII games!--but the graphics are ugly. Not "simple" (although they pretty much are). Not "dated" (although they definitely are). UGLY.

Probably the coolest feature is that the game takes place in an underground cave network spanning multiple Z-levels in a manner which will probably seem rather familiar to DF players. Unlike DF, tunneling is not at all easy here, and you'll mostly be using the world's natural caves and tunnels--but it is still fun as all hell when you tunnel behind enemy lines to ambush them. Of course, when an enemy tunnel suddenly appears in the middle of a cavern you thought was secure it often leads to fun of an entirely different sort.

First thing's first--we need to pick a race. There are 8 different races to choose from, mostly based on various fantasy stereotypes with a couple of curves thrown in. Even though there are relatively few variables present in the game and there's not that much variance in terms of statistics the game does a nice job of creating distinct play styles among different races, so this choice can have serious repercussions.


Gakkar
Think "orcs".
Pros: Very good at weapons research, good population growth, great melee combat abilities
Cons: Terrible at any other research (including the prerequisites necessary to get the more advanced units), pretty ho-hum in combat once ranged weapons are invented, conquered cities lose extra population


Namarie
An Elf by any other name is still a useless hippie.
Pros: Extremely good in all areas of magic research, excellent ranged combat abilities, pretty fast movement
Cons: Terrible at technological research (which makes getting ranged weapons hard), bad in melee, poor defense/HP, tend to break off attacks if they're losing--or annoyingly, winning by a margin that's not good enough


Humans
The traditional "well-rounded" race, sort of.
Pros: Technically they're supposed to be average all around, but since most races are extremely specialized in their research abilities, the "average" humans are just about the strongest race for overall research (true to form, they're not the best in any one area, but they're often 3rd or even 2nd best on most research lines).
Cons: Again, technically they are "average", but their combat abilities tend to be overshadowed by other races since almost everyone else gets some sort of applicable bonus in combat.


Troll
HULK SMASH!
Pros: HULK SMASH!
Cons: HULK NOT AM GOOD WITH THINKING
(Trolls have the best combat special, in that their attacks don't use up as many movement points as other races. Obviously they have very strong base stats, but they're still not that much stronger than most other races, and as soon as anyone researches any weapons tech they get ranged weapons which will render their physical stats partially obsolete.)


Bergbui
Rock people.
Pros: Good physical defense, good at researching cave technology and earth magic, do not need any food ever
Cons: Mediocre at any other research, slow, generally unimpressive in combat despite their high defense, individual cities have a much lower population cap than other races (also note that one of the most important functions of cave technology and earth magic is generating food, so there's not a lot of synergy there)


Dwarf
Given the forum I am posting this on I might have recommended these guys but they are actually a pretty boring turtle-ish race.
Pros: Excellent at researching all areas of technology, unit production uses up less metal than normal
Cons: Horrible at researching magic, slow, and really really awful with ranged weapons (so those fancy guns they research faster than everyone else don't do them a whole lot of good)


Tarchon
Rat people!
Pros: Extremely high population growth (most of which usually gets wasted due to lack of food, but it's good for spamming cheap fodder) units get automatic (but somewhat unreliable) stealth abilities, fast, very good at researching vision magic (scrying and cloaking spells), good with ranged weapons.
Cons: Not very good at researching outside of viewing magic, poor in melee, a little on the fragile side


Advari
Worm... people?
Pros: Huge HP scores, excellent at researching teleportation magic, pretty good at researching in general, get to recover some of the population lost when one of your cities is captured
Cons: Slow, cannot use mounts (makes it hard to mitigate their slowness), terrible at researching transportation technology (which eventually is a prerequisite for military vehicles, which again makes it hard to get around their slowness). Also, slow.
(Teleport magic can help these guys out in a pinch but like all magic it is hugely inefficient, so they're still going to have mobility issues.)



Personally my favorite is probably the Tarchon, but the races are pretty well balanced and they all have nice things going for them. I tend to stay away from dwarves and bergbui for being too defensive (and I tend towards turtle strategies by nature, so that's saying something), but they're very useful in their own ways. If there's a weak link among the races it's probably Trolls, although they're still very playable and their special ability is excellent if the game stays competitive into the midgame. I'm entirely up to suggestions, of course.

[Ultimuh]

If dwarves is in a game, then a dwarf is THE race to choose, atleast here on this forums.. 

[Strife26]

I'd vote for humans.

[Okenido]

Dwarf.

[Poltifar]

I vote Namarie. Lets see how elves fair underground.

[Akroma]

dwarves

I doubt that there are many forums on the internet that are more dedicated to dwarves than this one

[Mephansteras]

Might as well go with the dwarves. See if you can apply any Dwarf Fortress logic to the game.

[Errol]

Tarchon. THey look good.

[RPB]

Unsurprisingly it looks like the consensus is to go with dwarves. If we lose (it's a possibility, depending on how unlucky we are with enemy placement) we might try something else. This is probably going to run a bit long while I explain what we need to get started, so bear with me.



This is the setup screen. I've dialed back the sliders for minerals and food a bit--a little resource scarcity makes things more interesting. Not too much though. Similarly I've scaled back open spaces, which means more narrow tunnels and more head-to-head confrontation.

Below are the AI settings. Like a lot of strategy games Cavewars relies on outright cheating to help the AI out, but it lets you set the AI cheat scale seperately from the AI's "intelligence" which is a nice touch. I've set the AI Intelligence as high as it will go since it's kind of a joke otherwise. AI Handicap is set to "challenging" which is one notch above normal, non-cheating difficulty; the AI definitely needs a bit of a boost, but I don't want it to be overwhelming.

Note that there is actually a multiplayer setting, but it's strictly hotseat and the length of the game pretty much precludes any tactic other than pure zerging. We've got 4 AI opponents, which is both the maximum and the default for singleplayer. We might not necessarily see all of them though, as the AI is very aggressive and does not gang up on the player at all--it's not uncommon that 1 or 2 might get wiped out before we ever see them.



Here's our world map. It may be hard to tell at a glance but yes, it is tile-based. No, there is no grid feature. Counting spaces can get extremely annoying in large, featureless caverns; hell, it can get annoying even in crowded, detailed areas like what we see here. Our starting city flies the purple flag of dwarvishness and is right up against a cavern wall, surrounded by food-supplying mushroom forests of varying density. (Note that although it looks like there are mushrooms in the tile northeast of the city, this tile is empty; the graphics from the surrounding tiles spill over, contributing to our gridless nightmares.)

Off to the right side of the screen is a minimap. Three minimaps, actually. The one in the middle is the floor we're looking at right now, and the ones above and below are for the floors above and below it, natch. It looks like we started on floor 4 (you can see a 4 in the bubble next to the middle map). There are only 5 floors in the underworld, so we're pretty close to the bottom edge but still have some room to play around with.

Around the border of the map you'll see some various statistics and interface buttons. Most of this probably isn't very important right now, so let's take a closer look at our city.



Here's the detail screen for our city (which needs a name, incidentally). Notice that there are only two statistics attached to a city, population and defense. Population is the important one: each point of population eats food and produces labor (the manual refers to this as "toil", although I don't believe this designation is ever mentioned in the game).

We have 4 colored slider bars we can use to allocate the toil our workers produced. Production goes towards building units (this city isn't assigned to build anything yet, so this wasted production rolls over to research automatically. Convenient!) Research should be fairly obvious in function for any 4X vets. Defense raises the city's Defense score, which gives units in the city some vague combat advantage; I can't say I've ever noticed it to be particularly useful. Magic allocates labor to producing magic points for our spells. Magic is expensive and it takes a lot of research to get any really good spells (especially for dwarves, who aren't good at researching magic at all). One of our two starting spells is a somewhat useful scouting spell, though, so it's a good idea to keep at least a little bit of magic production for emergencies.

We've got a few other options but most of them aren't of any use to us right now (the Raze command definitely would not be a good idea), so we'll just go into Build.



Our unit production screen. Basic units are built a la carte: in the upper right-hand corner there are menus for selecting weapons and armor of various metals, and another menu for selecting mounts; each of these will open up a submenu on the left to choose specific items (currently open to bronze weapons, which also includes nonmetal objects, probably since there's not enough of them to warrant squeezing another menu button in). This system allows quite a bit of flexibility in building units, although honestly it's a little pointless as a lot of options don't really have enough variability to make them distinct from other choices. Notice here that iron and mithril are... really hard to read, for starters, but also they're barred out right now since we don't have the technology to use them.

There is also a third option for each metal, "Special". This is for unique units that don't equip weapons or armor, because they don't know any better and could hurt someone but they are still winners in their own way. We'll get to them shortly.

Right now we're looking at producing unarmed, mostly naked dwarves. Since we wouldn't be giving them any equipment this doesn't use up any metal, and its listed production cost of 10 is trivial even for our starting city so it's not a problem to produce 1/turn (this is the maximum unit production any city can have anyhow). As you can see we have a few options as far as actually equipping them with weapons; there's some variety in strength vs. cost, but even the most expensive option we have (swords) doesn't take that much metal or production.

Without researching any weapons technology we don't have any armor we can use, so our only other option as far as basic units go is mounts. Our starting mount is a balthi, some kind of alien jaguar kangaroo thing. Mounting our units will improve our movement speed noticeably and also give them a slightly better melee attack. A sword-armed cavalry unit uses up over twice as much metal and almost five times as much labor as sword infantry, though, which makes mounted units actually pretty damn expensive for us now.

There are two non-basic units we can also build under the "special" menu:



Wizards are a somewhat unique unit; their statistics (and hats!) are determined by the highest level of magic you've researched in any area. Right now we're at level 0 research in everything, so any wizards we produce would suck balls (note that they'd be weaker than our unarmed dwarves, although a bit faster), and they'd probably stay that way since as dwarves we're not going to be researching a lot of high level magic anytime soon. Wizards never cost metal but their production cost is huge, and it goes up with level just as their attacks do. They never get all that strong compared to good old weapons technology, but for more magically-inclined races they're a useful fallback unit.

Engineers are more useful. They are slow and take up a lot of metal (even more than our heavily armed cavalry), but they are absolutely required for several vital functions such as digging through stone walls/floors, collecting metal, and building new cities. We need at least one, preferably as soon as possible, so for now I pump our city's production priority so we can get one in 2 turns (they take up so much production that we can't actually get one out of our starting city any faster).



We have an engineer! Yes, our Bronze Age culture is barely capable of making pointy sticks but for some reason we can build giant drill tanks. Now that we have it we've got some options on what to build, though. The bronze left over in our stockpile is about enough to build 2 more engineers, 10 or so dwarves with swords, or 5 mounted dwarves with swords. Using bronze spears or daggers would let us stretch our metal reserves even further although they'd be less effective, and we can build as many dwarves with pointy sticks as we want (where they get wood from I have no idea). We might want to save some bronze for emergencies, but bear in mind that if we find any bronze at all, even the crappiest vein will dwarf (hurr hurr pun) our starting bronze reserves anyhow.

We're going to have plenty of production left over, so it's time to do some serious research, too.



The "tech tree", such as it is, comprises seven completely seperate, linear branches. The research produced by our cities gets split up among the different tech lines according to these sliders here. This is kinda pointless though as there's really not much point to ever doing anything but maxing out research in one area to get use of its breakthrough ASAP.

As dwarves, magic research is not feasible right now (at this point in the game it generally isn't anyhow, but especially not for dwarves). We do have some options in terms of technology. Weapons tech would get us bows and light armor; this is a no-brainer for most races, but dwarves are so useless with bows that the other technologies are actually competitive choices. Transport tech gets us more advanced mounts with better combat ability--probably not quite as good as we'd get from weapons research, but being slow-ass dwarves any attack forces we have are probably going to need to be mounted anyhow since otherwise they're not going to be able to get very far. Also, once we have some weapons tech and transport tech combined we can also build some siege engine type units. Lastly, cave tech means we can make iron equipment (assuming we find a supply of iron) that's better than the bronze stuff we can build now, and it also would improve our engineers' dig speed (currently an atrociously slow 5 turns to dig out 1 tile horizontally, or 10 turns to dig up/down)--plus iron engineers dig even faster.

So, our options for right now:
What units should we be building?
What technology branch should we research first? (Weapons tech, transport tech, or cave tech only for now: dumping research into magic would be suicide with our racial penalties on magic research.)

[Mephansteras]

I'd say go for Cave tech. Get Iron ASAP.

Also, if we don't have a City name yet I say we use Rinalzas (Ivy Crystal in DF dwarven).

[Boksi]

Iron is very dwarven. Go for it.

[RPB]

Sounds like cave technology it is, then. No one's expressed interest in any particular recruits so I'll just make some basic sword troops. We'll need them for scouting if nothing else, and although they won't be all that impressive in battle at least they won't be pushovers.



A few turns of scouting reveal a couple of neutral cities, distinguished by the white flags. Neutral cities aren't part of any actual empire and are completely passive; they start out with several guards of a random race with random equipment (better than what you get at the start), but don't produce any units and never send them out to attack. Essentially they're free population points for the taking, assuming you're strong enough to conquer them.



Here's a detail view of the stack of units guarding the neutral gakkar city, which tells us we are emphatically not strong enough to beat them. Combat is based on stacks, not just individual units, and as you can see from the empty slots you can have up to 10 units in a stack. Numerical advantage is huge, as it realistically should be, but even if we build up to a full stack we don't stand a chance yet--our swords could barely scratch these guys' defense.

Those humans, on the other hand? They're unarmored and pretty weak physically, and there's only 2 of them guarding that city. They're pretty much toast, although we'll have to spend a turn gathering our scouts together into a sufficiently large stack.




Combat in progress. Combat progresses in rounds, but all units move in simultaneous fashion and act automatically according to very simple AI logic. Individual units move forward until they're within attack range and then they attack until everything in range is dead. Rinse. Repeat. Since everyone here is armed with melee weapons they just march up to the middle and start stabbing each other. It's over in 1 round; we lost a swordsdwarf due to the humans' superior swords, but a 2:1 casualty ratio ain't bad.



Now we have our second city. Cities lose a quarter or so of their population when they're captured, but even so we've almost tripled our empire's population (and therefore productivity). Better still, there's a pretty decent seam of iron within this city's radius--it'll still take us a while to finish research, but once we get our cave tech advancement we'll be able to put it to use very quickly. Our engineer will has to dig it out before we can collect any, so it goes to work on that.

We just inherited a ton of population with no additional food sources, so food is going to start to become a concern shortly. On the minimap you can see the fungus grove around our starting city continues a way down south, so if we build another city down there we can improve our food production a bit. Our engineer is busy with the iron, so I'll set Rinalzas to build another one.

Incidentally, the area revealed on the minimap comprises the entirety of the cavern we're in. In the first picture you can see there's a tunnel down to the floor below us, though, so we've still got room to explore. The yet-unnamed City 2 will produce a few more swordsdwarves for scouting, but we only have bronze left for a couple.

It might not be the best idea to send them in blind, though. Fortunately, the 2 starting spells include a handy scouting spell, so we'll try that out.



Our spell menu. Pretty much all the spells are blacked out and inaccessible right now; we'd need to put in some serious research to get access to more. We can cast Small Map by default, though, so we'll cast it to check out that tunnel down.

(For reference, the other spell you start with is the earth magic spell Eat Metal, which will partially destroy a metal source that you have a unit standing on top of. It sounds like it would be cool for pillaging enemy resources, but really, if you're strong enough to get a unit into the enemy mines you're probably strong enough to kill them and take their mines, so you're spending valuable magic points to destroy resources you could be using yourself.)



Here's what our spell tells us about the bottom of that shaft; they ain't kidding when they call it "small map". It cost us a considerable portion of our magic reserves just to get this; if we wanted to we could really crank up magic production (especially now that we control our first neutral city), but only at the expense of our production and research. Generally it's a lot more efficient to explore by hand and save magic for when you really need it. We probably didn't need to spend magic to map this out at all but we're not going to lose for lack of 1 extra casting, and on occasion it can pay off.

It looks like there's some more food down there (yay) and also a third neutral city. We can't actually see what kind of guards this one has until we actually get a unit down there; we need better viewing magic in order to see units with magic.



Our scouts report the new neutral city is guarded by four reasonably well-equipped bergbui. We'll have to leave them alone for now.

(Neutral cities can be generated with much tougher guards than what we've seen so far; we're actually relatively lucky that we're seeing them only with primitive melee weapons and armor. A more aggressively-oriented race might be able to clean up relatively quickly on these, but it'll probably take us a few research breakthroughs before we can manage against armor like this, even if they don't have very impressive weapons.)



The cavern below us is pretty well enclosed too, although it opens up a bit to the northwest. It has a fair amount of food sources available and some very rich bronze veins, plus a little bit of iron to boot. All told we'll have a nice little base going; we're not in resource heaven but we're not seriously lacking for anything, and we've got a pretty decent chokepoint up front.

Interestingly, the forward scouts have found a tunnel back up to a different part of level 4 not far away from the tunnel we entered through, so we'll have to investigate that too. Outside our chokepoint is a pretty big cavern and it branches out quite a bit, so our scouts will be spread awfully thin for a while here. We're out of bronze so any further units we produce would have to be unarmed and basically useless in combat. With our population it probably won't take too much longer to finish iron research, though, and then we'll have plenty of metal for equipment.

[Duke 2.0]

 What does it take to make a new city? I saw you colonize the site with the fungus and metals on the lower level and make sure you can support a population, particularly so you can get more drilling units to get the full use of those resources.

[RPB]

Building cities is another function of engineers in addition to tunneling. It's essentially free, but takes 5 turns of nonstop work from one of our engineers. We've already got a second engineer building a city at the south edge of our starting cavern, to exploit the rest of the fungus there (our starting city's zone of influence isn't big enough to use all of it). More on that later. First, we make a breakthrough in iron!



Nnnnnot the breakthrough we were really looking for. This makes our starting cavern rather less secure than before, although at least we still have a solid chokepoint there. Our homeland is completely undefended now, so we need to recall some of the scouts we have exploring the bottom floor. At least we found that other tunnel back up; that takes our scouts right into this newly breached chamber.

(Rewalling is only possible through magic, and the spell that lets us create walls is fairly expensive and takes a lot of research, so we won't be able to pull it off anytime soon. Plus by the time we do, our enemies will probably have ways around it.)

Fortunately, the very next turn we make a breakthrough of the other sort too.



We're still limited to the same choices of simple weaponry as before, but now we can make them out of our newly-mined iron, which means we get



With iron weapons it might be theoretically possible to tackle those other neutral cities we found, although it would be one hell of a meat grinder and the only thing we'd get for our trouble would be extra population we can't feed right now. Still, now we have enough metal to make all the swordsdwarves we want, which will help us cover our accidentally breached defensive perimeter. We've got a lot of unexplored territory to cover too.

Our other engineer finishes building a turn later too, so now we have a third city.



It looks different than the others because it's new and tiny; the icon for a city changes based on population, from this crappy little fort for underpopulated cities to giant weird alien metropolis things eventually.

For the most part, population is a universally shared "resource"; generally speaking it doesn't make a big difference where your population lives. Cities are just vessels for your omnipresent "population", used for projecting production and collecting resources. Gathering food is the exception here: a city will only harvest 1 tile's worth of food for every 10 population (it doesn't actually cost us any of our productivity, it just requires this as a minimum threshold). The neutral city we conquered doesn't have any food to harvest within its radius, so we go back to City 2 and use the "ship pop" function to deport half its people to the newly built City 3.

It'll take them 3 turns to get there (this is a constant; any population movement takes exactly 3 turns regardless of distance) so we're not producing any extra food for now, but at least they don't consume food while en route.

Note again that in most other cases population and productivity is spread throughout all cities we control. Unlike food harvesting, collecting our newly-mined iron by the neutral city does drain our productivity, but this is a cost shared by our entire population regardless of where they live. At the very bottom of the screen there's an indicator for Mining % that tells us how much of our total productivity is taken up with mining operations. There's another one for Upkeep %: units we build continue to cost small amounts of labor each turn even after their built, so building lots of high-ticket units can be a big drain on our productivity. The AI loves to spam resource-light, labor-intensive units, so it's very prone to suicide through overproduction unless you bump up the AI handicap a notch or two (which we did).



Some of our scouts have discovered mithril. It's kind of far away, but it has a neutral city prebuilt in position to harvest it (note we still have to drag an engineer over there to dig it out first though). The neutral guards aren't shown in the picture, but it just has a couple of unarmored gakkar with spears. We could probably take them even with our old bronze swords, but it'll take a while to muster enough units over that way. Looks like some nice food supplies over there too, although it's pretty much out of reach of that neutral city (cities can only harvest up to 3 tiles away) so we'd have to build a new city there to use it. Still no sign of proper AI enemies yet, but I doubt this state will last.

Time to make another choice on research:

Weapons technology: In immediate terms we'd still just be getting bows and simple armor, but iron bows are strong enough to be at least marginally worthwhile even with our ranged combat penalties. And armor is just plain useful.
Transport technology: Right now we'd just be getting several special mounts. The combat bonuses they give aren't bad but they're not spectacular. (There is a turtle monster thing available with transport research that gives a decent defense bonus in lieu of armor, though.)
Cave technology: A second level of cave technology would let us use mithril, but this would be useless for us unless we send some swordsdwarves and engineers west to exploit that mithril vein.
 
Magic is still probably not really feasible at this stage; we need more population in order to get the research and production base necessary, and we need more food first to get that kind of population going.

[Duke 2.0]

 Seeing as I'm the sole voice here, I say go for weapons tech. Armor would be rather nice, and iron should last us long enough to get the immediate neutral towns. Of course having never played this I would not know. Still, iron weapons and armor + neutral cities should seem like a good investment for now.