WEAPON. RESEARCH.
There is more to life than making bigger guns to kill people with! There is also coming up with magic spells so you can kill people with your big guns in creative ways.
Wait, no. We're dwarves. I guess for us it pretty much is just bigger guns.
Here's what our starting cavern looks like nowadays, showing off some of the upgraded city icons. Whenever a city crosses a population threshold the game displays a little kind of popup-book-style animation of the city folding itself flat and then springing back up as the newer, larger type of city. It's pretty cool the first time you play and are watching as your cities grow into cool new forms, but then the game insists on playing this animation
every. single. time. a city goes past 50 population, or 150, etc. Unlike most of the game's animations, you can't skip it, either.
An engineer just finished digging this tunnel through several tiles of wall to connect our territory on the bottom floor better. Since the enemies all appear to be
up and not down this is unlikely to ever come into play, but our engineers don't have a lot to do right now. The bronze engineer is collecting bronze by itself--you can have engineers collect metal themselves if there's not a city nearby to do it for you. It's usually better to just build a city, especially if there's more than one tile with metal, but again--our engineers have nothing better to do at this point.
Since someone mentioned it, I went ahead and researched a level of earth magic after we got our cave tech up to level 3. The Kavet's Hole/Ladder spells let us dig tunnels up and down instantly, so it's time to take those human SOBs down! By comparison, even if we wasted our extremely limited mithril supplies to make a mithril engineer, it would take 6 turns to dig up or down without magic.
(Beetle Plague is like Eat Metal, except it wrecks food sources instead of metal. In other words, it's still useless.)
Huh. The humans seem to be pretty far behind the tech curve. It's possible these are just their obsolete dregs but I'm not seeing anything more advanced around either.
Even our obsolete units are making short work of the human forces.
That doesn't stop them from trying to put together a counterattack. They're so weak that they're hard pressed to take down our single naked swordsdwarf scouts without casualties, though.
Our scouts find a human engineer trying to tunnel its way to safety. You won't escape that easily, puny hu-mon scum!
Horrors! Hippies from the deep!
This might explain why the humans were so backwards; they were probably bottled up in that cavern and strangled. The elf wannabes don't seem to be any better off, though. We burn their city to get rid of the hippie stench and move on.
It turns out there were worse things than hippies lurking in those depths. The depths above us.
These are a couple of summon creatures, and from the red flags I think they're controlled by... tarchon? Kind of an odd development path to see them take. It looks like they only have 1st and 2nd level summon spells from what we can see. The 2nd level ones are tougher than what the humans and hippies had, but still quite weak. Which means
THEY ARE SCREWED.
We haven't fully explored the offshoots of this new cavern, so it's possible the hippies are still alive off one of its branches. Given how weak they were they can't have too much territory, though. The tarchon look to be a bit stronger but still nowhere near what you'd expect for this stage of the game, so we're going to find one of two things:
1. The four AI empires have been at each others' throats all game and have mostly been too busy with back-and-forth fighting to make any progress; or
2. Having cut through the humans, elves, and soon presumably the tarchon we're going to find something much bigger and badder that had been holding the other three down.
Still, we are doing quite well. Earlier tech levels tended to give us options with a tradeoff either between cost and power, or power and range; level 4 weapons gives us both, with a choice between sniper rifles (more raneg, less power), assault rifles (less range, more power), or submachine guns (strictly weaker than assault rifles, way less cost). Even better, we get spiffy future armor that gives a lot of defense without costing movement (up until now we've been sticking with the level 1 breastplates; the intervening levels of weapons tech give chainmail and plate armor that have movement penalties on them unless you make them out of mithril, but that takes a LOT of mithril and we don't have much.)
It's looking like this might be a short game unless the 4th AI enemy is decently advanced by this point. We got rather lucky with our starting setup. Anyhow, more choices for research now:
-The 5th and final level of weapons tech would give rocket launchers, which end up being a huge disappointment; they take forever to research, are hideously expensive, not that much more powerful than the modern rifles we now have, and impose a movement penalty on our already-slow dwarves. On the other hand, ROCKET LAUNCHERS.
-Transport technology would give us increasingly advanced artillery. Nothing very impressive at first, but later on we would get mobile assault vehicles.
-Cave technology gives us more food. We're doing great for food at the moment, but it's hard to tell whether we're going to be in it for a long haul here.
-Earth magic means more terraforming options.
-Summon magic means crappy irrelevant monsters.
-Viewing magic means faster long-range scouting.
-Transport magic means teleportation.
