Dwarves have dropped their flavorful, interesting factional Ability of Drunkenness for...

Resentful
A unit type that inflicts damage to this unit will take 20% more damage from the next attack this unit makes against that unit type.

... basically a(n arguably) slightly less bad version of the old Human gimmick of Favored/Personal Enemy. Like, yes, they'll 'remember' everything that attacks them, but they also have to be injured each time they want the damage bonus, and while it's large enough that it isn't necessarily drowned out by damage variance, it's still pretty minor. I'm not sure why Dark Side did that. To move away from using Red Sands content?

Racial relations-wise, Dwarves have moved to...

-5 Morale from Orc presence in allies.
-5 from Demonic presence in allies.
-5 Morale from Undead presence in allies.
-1 Morale for Light Human presence in allies.
-5 Morale for Traitor Human presence in allies.
-3 Morale for Light Elf presence in allies.
-5 Morale for Dark Elf presence in allies.
-5 Morale for Zwergr presence in allies.
-1 Morale for Viking presence in allies.

... the same basic xenophobic Light race stuff we saw with Humans. Notably, they also don't get along well with Light Humans.

Zwergr AKA Dark Dwarves, meanwhile...

-5 Morale for Light Human presence in allies.
-1 Morale for Traitor Human presence in allies.
-5 Morale for Light Elf presence in allies.
-3 Morale for Dark Elf presence in allies.
-5 Morale for Light Dwarf presence in allies.
-1 Morale for Viking presence in allies.

... are, much like Traitor Humans, the flipped version of their counterparts, except that they don't care about the 'core' Dark races.

That Zwerg get along poorly with the so-very-useful Traitor Humans is one of many reasons I tend to struggle to justify using Zwerg, and far from the most severe one.

As with Humans and Traitor Humans, Light Dwarves have Of The Light and Zwergr have Of The Dark.


Dwarf/Zwerg
Level: 3
Hiring Cost: 240
Leadership: 85
Attack/Defense: 20 / 16
Initiative/Speed: 4 / 2
Health: 75
Damage: 8-12 Physical
Resistances: 20% Physical
Talents: Running (Charge: 1. +2 Action Points)
Abilities: Of the Light/Dark, Armored (+20% Physical resistance), Vengeful (If the stack is below 50% of its original numbers, it always crits), Resentful

Losing the Drunken mechanics really hurts, but it's nice they've kept their armor. They're also technically one of the better abusers of Resentful, since it combines nicely with Vengeful and crits don't have damage variance (Meaning a Vengeful stack is clearly getting a damage boost out of Resentful), but that involves taking massive casualties. And Vengeful isn't even as good now that crits are only 100% damage instead of 150%. Not to mention that the Viking could boost crit damage further, and no class does that in Dark Side.

Really, if they'd just been given Furious I'd probably rate them as still an okay unit, but as-is you'll have much better options well before you get access to Zwerg. Not even getting into their cost having been bumped up by 20 gold.

Design-wise, the Zwerg is representative of the main color trends of Zwerg units; swapping in red coloration, tending to have dark grey beards, and washing out the rest of the colors. It's not a bad look, but most Zwerg don't really stand out.

As enemies, they can be a problem, but that has to do with a change to Foremen, so we'll get to that when we get to them.


Miner/Miner
Level: 2
Hiring Cost: 40
Leadership: 20
Attack/Defense: 8 / 8
Initiative/Speed: 3 / 2
Health: 22
Damage: 3-4 Physical
Resistances: Generic.
Talents: Running (Charge: 1. +2 Action Points), Strike (Charge: 1. All Miners purge all ongoing status effects and raise their Defense by 10%, but cease to retaliate when attacking. Foremen in the army temporarily increase their Initiative, Speed, and crit chance)
Abilities: Of the Light/Dark, Night Sight (+50% Attack in underground and/or nighttime battles), Resentful

With the loss of the Drunken mechanics, they're basically flatly worse, including that Strike's Defense boost is nearly nonexistent now. Also, inexplicably, Strike doesn't display anywhere except for the lower-right corner you activate Talents from, making it impossible to see unless it's both your unit and its turn.

They're overall a bit better off than they were in Armored Princess, but you have access to such amazing units before you get a hold of Miners, and Miners remain only tolerably decent if combined with Foremen. And the thing is Foremen have been bound less tightly to Miners, further worsening the argument in favor of Miners.

A funny mechanics note: using Strike on a Phantom Miner or a Flames of Passion Miner will instantly kill that Miner stack, since they have a status effect that kills them when it runs out, regardless of why it went away. This has always been true, but it's a lot more likely to crop up since Flames of Passion is essentially guaranteed access and is quite useful.

And yes, the Dark version has the exact same name.


Cannoneer/Cannoneer
Level: 4
Hiring Cost: 800
Leadership: 220
Attack/Defense: 30 / 22
Initiative/Speed: 3 / 2
Health: 140
Damage (Default): 6-10 Physical
Damage (Siege Gun): 12-20 Physical
Resistances: 10% Fire
Talents: Salvo (Reload: 1. A ranged attack with equivalent range to the Cannoner's base, which does 18-30 Physical damage against a single target)
Abilities: Of the Light/Dark, Archer (Range: 7), Siege Gun (Calls the Siege Gun attack against Gremlins and everything else considered to be an 'object'), No Melee Penalty, Resentful

Base damage has lost 2 points to max and 1 point to minimum and so too has Salvo been reduced, bringing them back to their original damage numbers. Otherwise... they've lost their Drunken effects, and that sucks. Resentful isn't exactly great for them, either.

And yes the Zwerg version has the exact same name, just like Miners and Miners.

When you do get access to them for yourself, it's difficult to justify using them over your existing excellent ranged options, particularly since they're still suffering from their dropped Initiative and unlike Warriors of the North they don't have the knockback utility. You'll always have access to Imps and Scoffer Imps in large numbers, for example, and Catapults are available from earlier and still generally more useful for bolstering you in Keeper fights. They're not terrible, just pushed aside by other, more accessible units, which is a bit of a recurring problem in Dark Side.

This includes that they still have the hidden quality that, if not targeting an Object, they only lose 20% of their damage when firing beyond their effective range instead of the usual 50%... but Imp and Scoffer Imp Fireballs don't have range penalties at all, Catapults can potentially spam their Talent to ignore ranged penalties entirely, etc, so even this is less notable an edge now.


Alchemist/Chemist
Level: 4
Hiring Cost: 1100
Leadership: 270
Attack/Defense: 25 / 35
Initiative/Speed: 5 / 2
Health: 170
Damage: 10-25 Poison
Resistances: 25% Poison
Talents: Potion of Poison (Charge: 1. Target a single enemy unit, with an effective range of 8. It takes 5-15 Poison damage and is Poisoned, while adjacent units take 30% damage but still get Poisoned), Fire Water (Charge: 1. 10-20 Fire damage to one enemy unit, with an effective range of 8, and Burns the target), Healing Mixture (Charge: 1. Heals an ally by 15 Health per Alchemist)
Abilities: Poison Protection (25% Poison Resistance), Acid Spray (Ranged attack striking through all targets up to 3 tiles out, melee range enemies can't retaliate, with a 15% chance to Poison each target), No Melee Penalty, Applied Science (When any potion Talent is depleted, it's replaced by a Talent that will add 1-2 charges to the potion Talent in question, with a 50% chance of either possibility. These recharging Talents have no reload time at all)

Notably, Potion of Poison and Fire Water have actually gained a step of effective range! (... in the GoG version, bizarrely enough. In the Steam version, they still have only 7 maximum range) And still only lose 20% damage if thrown beyond their effective range, which actually matters given Dark Side is really fond of really big battlefields.

I'm bemused that the EEEEVIL Alchemist is... a chemist. Modern science: evil! This is even funnier when you consider the plot, where lots of (Light) Dwarves get all offended about how they're chemists, not horrible backwards superstitious alchemists. Though admittedly a bunch of the ones that do this go turncoat, so it's not exactly inconsistent? It's all a bit strange, anyway. I actually quite like the Chemist's color scheme, in any event. One of the better Dark reskins.

They've straight up lost the ability to Magic nuke enemies, presumably due to the Dark/Light split mechanics. The healing isn't even any greater! Their ability to recharge potions no longer deals with a reload mechanic at all, which is nice for letting you keep the pressure on with eg Fire Water against Undead.

An amusing little touch is that Healing Mixture causes the targeted unit to play its 'hooray I finished a stack!' animation. It's a clever way of conveying gratitude for having been healed without having to invent any new animations, even if it works better on some units than others. On a more mechanical note, while the in-game description explicitly claims it won't work on mechanical units, Droids are fair game. Mind, by the time you have access to Chemists your Leadership will be so high that healing without resurrection only makes sense on high Leadership units like Archdemons, and even there is probably not very good, so in the end this oversight is more amusing than anything else, but hey.

Also not helping Healing Mixture's case is that it's bugged so you can't actually recharge it: when you use the charge, it gets replaced with the Talent for making more charges, and if you click that Talent the game will play the animation, end their turn, and have the combat log report how many potions they made... but they won't actually get back the ability to throw Healing Mixtures. Oops.

An easily-overlooked difference is in their AI: in previous games, Alchemists would generally stand wherever they started the battle and use their Talents. (This was particularly flawed in The Legend, since they couldn't recharge their Talents) In Dark Side they'll attempt to close each turn, and tend to prefer using their spray over recharging their Talents. Whether this makes them more or less dangerous basically depends on your army composition.

In any event, Chemists are one of the better Zwerg to consider splashing into your army. They suffer from tending to be pushed aside by Imps and Scoffer Imps like so many ranged attackers, and in some ways the comparison is more directly harsh -Potion of Poison is basically a Poison-typed Fireball, and Fire Water outright does Fire damage and inflicts Burn- but among other points when you're dealing with dragons or Demons the fact that they can spam a Poison-typed splash damage ranged attack suddenly gains real value compared against a Fire-typed one. Same for less extreme cases, like Knights and Paladins presenting decent Fire resistance and no Poison resistance, though unfortunately the game is ordered so you usually won't be getting access to Chemists when you're still fighting Humans with armor on a routine basis. It comes back to relevance in Atrixus and Helvedia, between the Demon fights and the armored Humans, and if you manage to ninja Sea Charts well you can actually get access to a shockingly early supply of Chemists from Sandy Island, so it's absolutely possible to justify using them, it just takes a bit more work than some other units.


Giant/Giant
Level: 5
Hiring Cost: 7000
Leadership: 1600
Attack/Defense: 54 / 60
Initiative/Speed: 5 / 1
Health: 900
Damage: 80-100 Physical
Resistances: 10% Physical
Talents: Earthquake (Reload: 1. Attacks all enemy units, the damage dropping off by 10% per tile out. Base damage is 60-80 Physical damage per Giant, with Soaring units taking only 30% of this damage), Running (Charge: 1. +2 Action Points)
Abilities: Of the Light/Dark, Likes Emerald Green Dragons (+1 Morale if Emerald Green Dragons are in the army), Resentful

Inexplicably lost their Ice resistance, but at least they've kept the Physical resistance and kept Earthquake hitting Soaring units. Losing Drunken effects hurts, though. On the plus side, if you let them get hit by all your enemies, Earthquake will totally benefit from Resentful against all of them at once. That's... not much of a plus, but it's there.

Aesthetically, it's pretty strange that dark Giants embrace the Zwergr red color scheme all the way up to the scales on their dragonskin being red. It would've been sort of an amusing/neat touch if dark Giants had Likes Red Dragons, but nope, they still have Likes Emerald Green Dragons. It genuinely surprises me this got missed, as the King's Bounty games usually have a high level of attention to detail. Dark Side has problems, but this is atypical of even it.

Thankfully, the Giant is the last Zwerg unit to have the exact same name.

Another oddity Dark Side introduces is that AI Giants will pretty much always activate Running... and then use Earthquake without having moved, completely wasting the Running and resulting in a weaker Earthquake than if they'd charged forward. Oops.

Unfortunately, without the other elements Warriors of the North brought to the table and considering how limited the support Zwerg actually get in the final game is, Giants are difficult to justify. I've tried on two separate runs to leverage them, because I really do like Giants as a gameplay piece concept, but they just don't perform that well. This is surprising given that Dark Side is really fond of having enemy battlegroups made of 10 or more stacks instead of the classic 5, and so Earthquake really ought to be more appealing than ever, but it just doesn't work out that way. For one thing, when you're facing the largest stack counts, suddenly things like Imp Fireballs are able to catch their maximum number of targets reliably on the first turn. For another, you've got Spells and Rage and whatnot that are much more useful and effective for handling the mass damage aspect, and it's more important to have units helping take out or disable key oversized/ranged/fast/Talent-based stacks.

At least they got a chance to shine in Warriors of the North.


Foreman/Chief Miner
Level: 4
Hiring Cost: 600
Leadership: 130
Attack/Defense: 22 / 28
Initiative/Speed: 7 / 2
Health: 120
Damage: 13-14 Physical
Resistances: -10% Magic, 10% Fire
Talents: Driver's Whip (Charge: 1. A Dwarven/Zwergr ally below Level 4 gains +2 to Speed and Initiative for 2 turns. The chosen unit will be the slowest member of the army. Does not end the Foreman/Chief Miner's turn)
Abilities: Of the Light/Dark, Night Sight (+50% Attack in underground and/or nighttime battles), Chief (Allied Miners double their Attack and Defense. Additionally, Miners using Strike gain +1 to Speed and Initiative and are guaranteed to crit), Resentful

... that is a really awful Zwergr graphic. I can't tell them apart unless they're side by side!

Losing the Drunken effects hurts them, but on the plus side Driver's Whip has been made a little more general. Keep in mind Engineers (Well, Mechanics when talking the Dark version) have dropped a Level in Dark Side, so this can effect basic Dwarves and Engineers in addition to Miners. (It would also include Repair Droids if they weren't now Neutral...) Huzzah! And... that's it, aside from Resentful being in.

The overhaul to Driver's Whip has the notable implication of finally doing away with a long-annoying element of Foremen: that when it's used by enemies, it can be utterly horrifying because the enemy army can be made largely of Miners with no flaws, whereas for the player the only time it being able to effect multiple units helps in a meaningful way is if you're using Phantom on your Miners or perhaps stealing enemy Miner stacks. In Dark Side Driver's Whip is something to pay attention to, but it won't cause literally every stack to come charging at insane speeds, and I really do appreciate that.

Mind, AI battlegroups often include two Foremen, so they still get to leverage the effect more strongly than you do in real terms, but the disparity isn't nearly so dramatic as in Armored Princess and Warriors of the North.

That said, Chief Miners aren't usually particularly worth fielding yourself. Miners are meh, and while Zwerg-the-unit are better off than, say, Dwarves-the-unit back in The Legend, they're still underwhelming compared to other, better-supported and more accessible options like Zombies and Demons-the-unit, leaving Mechanics as something Chief Miners support you might genuinely want to use... and Mechanics don't care much about the Speed boost, while you're better off using Skills and Items to handle the Initiative boosting. Especially since Mechanics already have a solid 5 Initiative and so don't need tons of support!

At least they got a chance to shine in Warriors of the North, much like Giants.


Engineer/Mechanic
Level: 3
Hiring Cost: 1100
Leadership: 100
Attack/Defense: 10 / 12
Initiative/Speed: 5 / 2
Health: 60
Damage: 4-6 Fire
Resistances: 15% Fire
Talents: Create A Droid (Charges: 2. Creates a Guard Droid or Repair Droid stack in an adjacent tile, type randomly chosen, whose Leadership totals 26-32 per Engineer/Mechanic in the creating stack), Repair (Charges: 2. Heals an adjacent allied machine-type unit for 23 HP per Engineer/Mechanic in the healing stack), Flash Grenade (Charge: 1. Ranged attack which does 2-5 Fire damage to a single target enemy with a 25% to Burn it, and additionally always Blinds for a single turn all adjacent enemy units of Levels 1-3. Has an effective range of 7), Create Blinding Grenades (Reload: 0. Only appears when out of Blinding Grenades. Generates 1-2 Blinding Grenades with a 50% of either possibility)
Abilities: Of the Light/Dark, Fire Thrower (Can fire up to 3 tiles out, hitting all units in a line, with no chance for affected units to retaliate. 15% chance for any given hit unit to be Burned), No Melee Penalty, Mechanic (Allied Guard Droids and Repair Droids gain +5 Attack and +1 Speed, and Flash Grenade is replaced by Create Flash Grenade when out of charges), Fire Resistance (15% Fire resistance), Resentful

I'm not so fond of the Mechanic's visual design, by contrast with the Chemist's. It's workable at the darker angle, but it's a bit too similar nonetheless.

Stats-wise, they're 25% of their old Leadership value, with their stats all massively slashed appropriately. (Aside Initiative and Speed being unchanged) They're also a Level down, as I mentioned earlier. They're also noticeably less effective per Leadership at creating Droids, even before you consider that there's no Neatness/Artifactor boosting effect unlike the previous two games. Their repair rate is technically very slightly better, but this is offset by, again, the loss of Neatness/Artifactor boosting. As with Alchemists, they also no longer have a real reload time on replacing their chucked weaponry.

It's an odd change overall, though not a bad one.

The one caveat to that is that while their price was reduced, it's by... 50 whole Gold. That's less than a 5% cost reduction, making them hideously burdensome to get to full Leadership and horribly burdensome to take casualties with compared to prior games. If you're going to use them, give serious consideration to getting a seed population and then abusing Blood Priestess Sacrifice like crazy to keep their numbers up, because their price-point is completely inane.

The bizarre thing is this is an issue introduced specifically in the GoG version: in the Steam version, they have a much more reasonable cost of 300 gold.

A non-obvious change is in their AI: in older games Engineers would generally stand wherever they started the battle, spawning Droids, hurling grenades, and mixing up new ones. In Dark Side Engineers will actually approach every turn, thus closing to flamethrower range of their own volition... though they still strongly prefer using their Talents over actually attacking, so it's not as meaningful as it is with Alchemists.

The main draw of Mechanics, if you're going to use them at all, is very much Flash Grenades. If you want a Fire-resistant unit capable of summoning meatshields, Demons-the-unit and Archdemons blow them out of the water while being much more accessible and widely useful and better supported. The one point in Mechanics' favor in that regard is that you actually have control over their summons, but that's less important than you might expect. Dark Side is simply not a game where precise control over your summons is essential.

Flash Grenades providing a mass Blind effect is essentially a unique benefit, by contrast... if burdened by being bugged so it doesn't let you reload it on Mechanics. (The Talent for making more simply doesn't appear for them; it functions properly for Engineers) At least it still only loses 20% damage for being thrown beyond its effective range.

I personally have never found them compelling enough -for one thing, the hard fights that last long enough that mass Blind might be more useful than fielding more broadly lethal units lean toward higher-Level enemies, limiting the cases where it actually applies- but unlike a lot of the Zwerg they have something going for them.

As enemies, they're annoying, but more for meta placement issues than anything else. Since Tactics in Dark Side doesn't let you separate your units until it's Rank 2, it takes longer than in prior games to reach the point of being able to do away with the Blind issues at the start of a battle -and since Foremen using Driver's Whip pushes them up to 7 Initiative and 4 Speed, they'll quite often go before your Imps and whatnot. Riiiight around the time you're liable to have gotten to Tactics 2 or a high enough combination of Onslaught and Foresight that you can avoid these issues, you're probably basically done fighting Dwarves. If they showed up later in the game, they'd probably be kind of forgettable.

------------------------------

For whatever reason, you actually quite often get access to Light Dwarven units. This seems to be an accident that was overlooked, as what'll happen is you'll conquer a Dwarven realm and suddenly the shops will add a mix of Zwerg and Dwarven units, biased toward Zwerg. Most likely whoever was setting the shop contents was intending to make them all Zwerg units, and playtesting didn't catch the error. There's not really any reason to use Light Dwarves, but it's worth mentioning that the option exists more meaningfully than you tend to see on Elves and especially Humans.

Unfortunately, while there's some support for Zwerg in the game, it's not nearly as extensive as with Traitor Humans. Part of this is buggy/poorly-implemented mechanics; there's actually two different Titles that provide similar benefits to Nightmare's benefits for Traitor Humans, plus a Title that's widely effective and includes Zwerg in its Leadership slashing and Morale boosting... but as far as I can tell, these Titles aren't properly coded to activate, so in normal play they don't matter. Even so, Zwerg are also just genuinely less supported; the Zwerg-benefiting Titles provide less Leadership reduction and less of a Morale boost than Nightmare gives to Traitor Humans, and there's nothing equivalent to the Item that gives -20% Leadership and +2 Morale for Traitor Humans. All you get is a single newspaper for reducing Zwergr Leadership by -10%, which hey Traitor Humans get their own newspaper for an equivalent effect on top of all their other support.

This leaves Zwerg trying to justify themselves on their intrinsic merits, and with nothing on the level of Drunkenness to boost their relevance. Given that most Dwarven units have always been underperformers/undesirable in player hands...

Yeah.

Next time, we move on to Elves and Dark Elves.

See you then.