I'm curious about these guys - dont have time to play a new fort atm. Are they fire dwarves or something, I take it? Do they burn other dwarves/your fort?
Sound like a great way to actually get rid of the (IMO) ridiculous undeads in the new version, assuming the collateral damage isn't too heinous.
They're little bearded tornadoes of flame. Assuming you can control them, they're pretty fantastic against sieges, but try not to mix them with your other dwarves as they're a massive friendly fire risk. They're awesome versus undead, as they burn away the corpses. Also effective for breaching magma tubes and killing dragons and wyverns, since they're completely immune to fire. Other, future ritual units (water comes to mind) may also have fire immunity.
What of the Armok based religious creatures? Lacerators and Hands. Just something I'm wondering.
I'm trying to work the ritual tree from the ground up, starting with the minor gods, then moving towards minor servants of the more important gods, building up to major servants of the more important gods. Armok is at the top of the heap, so expect to maybe see lacerators in the upcoming tier 3, but hands will definitely be in tier 4.
Tier three of the ritual tree is going to involve temple construction and the blessings of the elemental Old Gods. The temple component foundry will be involved in the construction of these buildings, but the majority of the tier will be structured like so...
Temple of Water (Temanat, water and ice)
Temple of the Twins (Kerox and Lemox, earth and wind)
Temple of Light (Gisthel, light)
Temple of Shadow (Pharis, darkness)
Temple of the Orphan (Bartoth, lightning)
Temple of Origin (lesser units of Visthel, Armok, Pel, Voruk, and Kogut)
... that would round it out to 12 possible units, counting emberlights, assuming I can differentiate between their abilities enough to get that many (I probably can). Tier four would introduce an additional five or so, but that's further down the road. Where it's really going to get fun is balancing all of this. I have some FUN ideas in mind.