The real advantage of Drisq as an advisor giving you 1 level of info on everybody is that you always know where their territory is, even through the fog of war. Combined with her ornithopter speed buff, that means you can fly over and start scouting them immediately at the start of the game and start installing underworld headquarters. And Smugglers don't care about distance from main base when annexing territory so you can grab territory right next to opponents from across the map as soon as you can get troops there (if you take Lingar Bewt that's a lot of extra water to keep your units supplied for long journeys), as well as any choice unique provinces like the polar region, and let any bad provinces near your main base remain permanent pillage victims. IMO with Smugglers you aren't really incentivized to go for a domination win as your first choice because if villages change hands or their controller dies you lose their underground HQs, so you knock out a decent chunk of your own economy every time you kill somebody. You actually benefit from keeping everybody else alive with stable borders, and you can manipulate the balance of power between the other players through treaties and your underworld HQ buildings to keep anyone else from running away with the game, so you're better suited to try for diplomatic and economic victories. Paying your spice tax gives you an influence income so Smugglers can become surprisingly strong in the Landsraad as the game goes on and of course they're all about making money so going for a CHOAM victory is natural.
Smugglers have always been my favorite. What I personally like doing is playing them like Venice in Civ V, lots of isolated but powerful villages and sniping spice fields or Special Territories. Makes for really interesting gameplay having little pockets of territory dotted around the map.
I love how lore accurate the game is. With all the politics and backstabbing. It's not just military victory. It's much more Game of Thrones. Not Command and Conquer.
I would say that the solari income at the end is a lie, cause most of your income was from the other factions so with the other factions being gone you then are spending more than you are bringing in, either way by the time it calculates it you already whooped their butts
Most likely it's not incorrect, because the reason that you spend more is because your income source is gone. You are not stagnating in solari production. You are losing production instantly once the faction is gone. The downward trend will always be there. As a smuggler your potential for income will always be highest when there are more factions in play. The only reason that the trend is so volatile is due to the pillaging from villages which will most likely alter the economy graph due to a sudden influx of solari tipping the scales and causing the trend to temporarily invert. Just a thought though. I haven't got the source code to read through and identify the exact relation between pillaging and the economic graph.
I used to play Dune: The Battle For Arrakis on Genesis and the Sega CD version of Dune and I loved both games a lot. I've never played any other Dune game, but I decided to try this one to see how things have evolved since then. It seems like it's going to be cool once I get the mechanics, but there are so many different functions and variables that I feel like I have to read some books to fully understand everything lol. The fact that I'm not used to any other game of this genre doesn't help either. I could be wrong, but I get the impression it's going to be a lot of work to start having fun, which was not an issue with the old games. I liked the simplistic nature of those games and I would love to see improvements on that experience without necessarily getting to this level of complexity.
Keep playing! You will get it and learn all the functions as you go. Once you learn all of the paths to victory and how to achieve them... the game is phenomenal!
Does anyone understand how to get the Smuggler technology Security Details to work? Its supposed to spawn 3 mercenaries near your base when you use bounty on a resolution and it passes, but I can't get it to work. Have tried on many resolutions and no mercenaries ever spawn.
Like Game of Thrones? Dune invented the War of Assassins long before GoT ever existed. Although TBF the War of the Roses happened long before either :-) Also, I gotta be honest, I switched off once you started taking flagrant advantage of the AI. That’s probably a personal quirk and it is what it is - and you get a comment to feed your algorithm levels anyway - but it just made the game uninteresting.
Question: Why is it so darn hard to program a competent AI(not talking about passive bonuses) in games like these? I don't think I've seen a single clever one in all the 4x games I've played(last 30 years btw).
If you are in a Truce with a faction you are assassinating, you can use the assassin to kill enemy units being sent to remove the infiltration cells without going to war.
So many Speedrun Videos, a lot of jump cut.. Only a few fun Let's play series, I guess its time to say goodbye.. bye Pravus Good luck with ur Channel new format.. 👋😊
