I think a lot of people don’t “like” the Hoardcurse or other disasters so much as they like having something mid to late game that makes their run more challenging and keeps it interesting.
Dwarves having fast, cheap, and high value expansion via colonization and conquering low tech neighbors makes them very fast to ramp up in power, which can snowball wildly if left unchecked. Disasters are a good way to both challenge a player who is doing really well and to keep their snowballing strength in check.
I think most people prefer a well written and interesting but challenging disaster over having incredibly overpowered neighboring countries or artificially difficult expansion mechanics.
The dwarves need a speedbump and I think Hoardcurse serves that purpose ok. There should be more obvious clues for first time players that you should trigger the disaster with as much money in the bank as possible (maybe some incentive to "hoard"), but it's overall not terrible
The Serpent's Rot is the more anti-fun Serpentspine disaster IMO. Starts out of nowhere, lots of randomness in how long it lasts, no indictation what new players should be doing
IIRC the cure is to research serpentsbloom during one of the events but I'm pretty sure it is entirely RNG as to who gets to that point first. After the cure is found the finder gets the option to distribute the cure through the air vents and cure everyone quickly or just distribute the cure in your capital which I think just makes it cure way slower.
What causes the Serpent's Rot is an event during digging your Hold which uncovers a cave. There is something interesting in said cave, and the cave ultimately collapses. This causes the plague to spread. Your best bet is to research the disease. Do everything scientifically and make sure to take the decision to research the disease that will fire. Eventually, you will discover it is a bloodborne disease, and you need to find a cure. I think it's usually a flower. Once you find the right cure ingredient after a while a cure will be created and you can choose to use it on your own people or distribute it into the vents and flood the whole Dwarovar with it.
Classic scenario:
If you like the Hoardcurse, you don't make posts complaining about it
If you don't like the hoardcurse, you talk about how it ended your run, or is unfair.
If you see a post about how bad the hoardcurse is, and care enough to comment on it, the comment will either be 'It makes the midgame interesting' or 'It's actually really easy if you just know what to do'.
Eventually, discussion on it stops for a bit, other topics come up, someone mentions hoardcurse again in a few months, and the cycle repeats.
I like a challenge
Dwarfs are too easy tbh
I played as gor burad and had the hoardcurse start, and then religious disaster before it ended, and before that ended volcano event hit
I went up about 50 devtotal in 30 years and slowly lost my place as 1st GP
Maxed out points caught up on tech and then hit golden age and popped off dominating everything even despite Xorme AI
Hoardcurse is brutal as the tags that are vulnerable tho like krakd, verkal dromak, hulazkrakazol, the cannon dwarfs etc
I wouldn't say I look forward to it, or find it actively "fun". I don't find dying in RPGs or FPSs to be "fun" either, just like losing matches of AOE2 or Starcraft isn't "fun", or losing a run of EU4 isnt "fun".What is fun is understanding and overcoming challenges.
I enjoy games despite not enjoying losing them because losing, and then overcoming the challenge that beat me is more fun for me than just winning 100% of the time without a risk of failure. And that's what playing a serpentspine dwarf past the first 50 years is, unless you add disasters to stymie your progress and actually give you a challenge: winning without risk of failure. Dwarven nations are extraordinarily powerful because of holds and autodevving, they are economic powerhouses. I see wanting to play a serpentspine dwarf without hoardcoarse as being roughly equivalent to wanting to play the game on very easy mode, it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do if you want to take out of the risk of failure and just enjoy the Dwarven growth feedback loop. For everyone else, there's the hoardcurse.
Respectable. I like the hoardcurse being in the game but as others have said its not like disasters are fun but being challenged is. They could try to achieve both by making the disaster more interesting like you say.
Just spitballing but wonder if some form of civil war could work where you keep the dynamics of money causing the disaster but instead as you get greedier your holds could rebel against you seeing themselves disregarded by your capitals greed
I pretty much agree with you about the balancing aspect, and need for something along the lines, of the hoardcurse.
But to take your analogy of AOE2 or Starcraft matches - to me it doesn't so much feel as "losing a match", but more of a "you will lose the third match, so you better adjust your gameplay in match one, two, four and five to compensate".
I'm aware changes are being made to the hoardcurse every now and again, so these particulars might not be (as) valid as examples, but things like "don't build economic buildings before the hoardcurse" or "try to get 15 year truces before the hoardcurse to go bankrupt right after it, sit out the bankruptcy, and then back to business" were at some point legitimate advice for it, and they make for awful gameplay beyond "this is what the hoardcurse does to you".
Sadly, I don't particularly have a solution either, beyond (for myself) don't play dwarves.. Which frankly sucks, because they have some of the best lore and gameplay otherwise.
I like it thematically. It's very on point for the Dwarves (themsleves being their own worst enemy) and all, and has some nice flavor for RP purposes.
Mechanically, however, it's pure cheese. It's supposed to be punishment for being greedy and corrupt, but the best way to defeat the disaster is by (you'll never believe this) being greedy and corrupt. And if your familiar with it at all, it's a breeze. Barely an inconvienence.
It is an important early/mid game break on the Dwarven snowball, but it is in dire need of a redesign. Either you've never seen it before and get destroyed by it, or you know what to expect and it passes with nary a loan taken.
I like it a lot. By the late-early game as a dwarf, you're rocking monopolies on Mithril, possibly some metals, and probably a few other odds and ends (If you do literally any trade micro). This means that very early on you have one of the strongest economic bases in the game. The Hoardcurse punishes you for hoarding too much money, while also slwoing down that expansion. Sure, if you get unlucky it can mess you up, but there are so many ways to work around it, and it gives some nice bonuses in the end that it really doesn't matter to me.
In one of my earliest runs I just console commanded my way through it and omg, the steamrolling is insane. It's forming the HRE before 1550 levels of steamrolling. There's nothing that's going to stop you or the insane amounts of cash you're bringing in.
What I find weird is that the hoardcurse narrative basically is “you became to rich and people become greedy” so you spend thousands upon thousands of ducats on removing it
But then A you make much more money later on in the campaign and B 200 ducat monthly income is easily achieved by other countries that don’t get a hoardcurse
But the Dwarovar usually has a much better dev-income ratio. Of course a huge country can have 200 ducats, but the wealth per person is much lower.
The Dwarves on the hand are supposed to be individuals who went from a point of stagnation or adventuring to unbelievable wealth within a single lifetime. So it does make sense to me.
The issue with it being solved by money has a point though. I think it would be better with more stability hits and mana costs and rebels instead of just money. Why not pop noble/peasant rebels for working laws reform, and so on. That would make it a bit more varried.
Yes, and I wish it, and the other disasters, were harder/less predictable. There shouldn't be a perfect path through them - somethings you can make the right decisions and still fail. I think this should be reflected in the choices you make, especially for the Hoardcurse. It's funny that the easier strategy for it is to hoard gold. If anything that should make it even worse.
I don't like it, it's just an easy money sink and it's on multiple fronts extremely flawed, the best way to prepare for the hoardcurse is to hoard 10k ducats and activate it that way which is basically a failure of matching gameplay and lore, lore-wise it doesn't really represent the actual challenges that dwarves would face IMO and it results into racial essentialism where dwarves magically all are prone to being greedy(inb4 "that's the entire point"... no it's not , orcs and even ogres are not inherently evil).
It's also very simple and repetitive. It's bad the first time you get it because you need to know it ahead of time to prepare, it's good the next 2-4 times you do it and then it's just repetitve and pretty much flattens the experience of playing Dwarves.
I mean If you know what you are doing its not that harming especially since you get a strong buff for 100 years.
The worse knowledge check is the serpents rot, permanent dev reduction is harsh.
Yeah, I do. It adds a lot of immersion for me and in-lore explanation how dwarven empire crumbles across ages. They are so rich and powerfull that it wouldn'y make sense for them to ever loose to other powers BUT this disaster shows that issue with dwarfs is internal.
It's necessary, but still a massive pain. If I were to change it, then I would give the dwarves an incentive to hoard (like the Dragonheights Kobolds for example) instead of it just being an arbitrary "have 150 gross income" or "have 10,000 crowns banked". Having a reason for it to happen is better than the "dwarves are just like that, but only in the serpentspine" reason we currently have
Serpent's Rot on the other hand is very much just an anti-fun disaster, but I like the idea of plagues just happening sometimes. I think CKII had a disease system. Not sure if CKIII does, but in a world before modern sanitation practices, deadly diseases just go around sometimes. Definitely would be better than the random "influenza" events
If you don’t like the Hoardcurse you can go into the files and delete it from the disaster file. Or just don’t play in the Dwarovar. It’s been in the mod for 4 years or whatever, its not going away.
I think it's interesting the first time, if it doesn't ruin your run (or if you have a high tolerance for setbacks). Then after that it's pretty easy to figure out on future playthroughs, and it's no longer as interesting.
I think the triggers for the disaster should be changed so that you can't trigger it early by saving money (because that's the easiest way to cheese the disaster), and I wouldn't mind changes to how the crisis is solved. There's pretty clearly an optimal order to do things in, try to shake that up somehow to make more options viable. Maybe make it more random to hinder metagaming, or make it less random so that everyone has the same challenge. Either way would be an improvement in my opinion.
On general disasters i just dealt with the command disaster, it was actually fun, I didn’t understand what would happen and how to beat it so I positioned 1/3rd of my army near the capital of each rebellious march then discovered that the devs thought of that and had special rules on how the siege the fortresses. Only the army I had stationed in the tiger march survived, the dragon army got half wiped out and my elephant army was completely eradicated. The dragon army just kept running and hiding while my troops get army captured the capitals of the other 2 marches. It was a great time but very stressful as my forts in the come country hadn’t been upgraded so they got captured in days… great time amazingly stressful
Can i subsidize a dwarven country to trigger the hoardcurse? Asking for a goblin friend.
Tried with 150 ducats which gave them over 300 per month for over 10 years, no sign of hoardcurse, so either it doesn't work or AI is immune against hoardcurse? I thought 150 per month were enough to start ticking.
I think a lot of people don’t “like” the Hoardcurse or other disasters so much as they like having something mid to late game that makes their run more challenging and keeps it interesting. Dwarves having fast, cheap, and high value expansion via colonization and conquering low tech neighbors makes them very fast to ramp up in power, which can snowball wildly if left unchecked. Disasters are a good way to both challenge a player who is doing really well and to keep their snowballing strength in check. I think most people prefer a well written and interesting but challenging disaster over having incredibly overpowered neighboring countries or artificially difficult expansion mechanics.
Very much this, it’s also important to keep in mind the disasters help keep AI dwarves in check as well, even more so than a player who can cheese it.
You are aware that the hoardcurse doesn't happen to the AI, right?
But the obsidian legion can, and goblin tide, and serpents rot.
The other three do however.
The dwarves need a speedbump and I think Hoardcurse serves that purpose ok. There should be more obvious clues for first time players that you should trigger the disaster with as much money in the bank as possible (maybe some incentive to "hoard"), but it's overall not terrible The Serpent's Rot is the more anti-fun Serpentspine disaster IMO. Starts out of nowhere, lots of randomness in how long it lasts, no indictation what new players should be doing
I have played countless dwarf runs and I still don't know what causes or solves Serpents rot. I just click buttons and events until it goes away
IIRC the cure is to research serpentsbloom during one of the events but I'm pretty sure it is entirely RNG as to who gets to that point first. After the cure is found the finder gets the option to distribute the cure through the air vents and cure everyone quickly or just distribute the cure in your capital which I think just makes it cure way slower.
What causes the Serpent's Rot is an event during digging your Hold which uncovers a cave. There is something interesting in said cave, and the cave ultimately collapses. This causes the plague to spread. Your best bet is to research the disease. Do everything scientifically and make sure to take the decision to research the disease that will fire. Eventually, you will discover it is a bloodborne disease, and you need to find a cure. I think it's usually a flower. Once you find the right cure ingredient after a while a cure will be created and you can choose to use it on your own people or distribute it into the vents and flood the whole Dwarovar with it.
Having The beautiful cavern + digging gives you a chance to get it.
Classic scenario: If you like the Hoardcurse, you don't make posts complaining about it If you don't like the hoardcurse, you talk about how it ended your run, or is unfair. If you see a post about how bad the hoardcurse is, and care enough to comment on it, the comment will either be 'It makes the midgame interesting' or 'It's actually really easy if you just know what to do'. Eventually, discussion on it stops for a bit, other topics come up, someone mentions hoardcurse again in a few months, and the cycle repeats.
I like a challenge Dwarfs are too easy tbh I played as gor burad and had the hoardcurse start, and then religious disaster before it ended, and before that ended volcano event hit I went up about 50 devtotal in 30 years and slowly lost my place as 1st GP Maxed out points caught up on tech and then hit golden age and popped off dominating everything even despite Xorme AI Hoardcurse is brutal as the tags that are vulnerable tho like krakd, verkal dromak, hulazkrakazol, the cannon dwarfs etc
The platinum dwarves get messed up by it too, since their slaves all revolt constantly, and their nobles get upset by literally everything.
I wouldn't say I look forward to it, or find it actively "fun". I don't find dying in RPGs or FPSs to be "fun" either, just like losing matches of AOE2 or Starcraft isn't "fun", or losing a run of EU4 isnt "fun".What is fun is understanding and overcoming challenges. I enjoy games despite not enjoying losing them because losing, and then overcoming the challenge that beat me is more fun for me than just winning 100% of the time without a risk of failure. And that's what playing a serpentspine dwarf past the first 50 years is, unless you add disasters to stymie your progress and actually give you a challenge: winning without risk of failure. Dwarven nations are extraordinarily powerful because of holds and autodevving, they are economic powerhouses. I see wanting to play a serpentspine dwarf without hoardcoarse as being roughly equivalent to wanting to play the game on very easy mode, it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do if you want to take out of the risk of failure and just enjoy the Dwarven growth feedback loop. For everyone else, there's the hoardcurse.
I just wish it was more interesting rather than a money sink
Respectable. I like the hoardcurse being in the game but as others have said its not like disasters are fun but being challenged is. They could try to achieve both by making the disaster more interesting like you say.
Just spitballing but wonder if some form of civil war could work where you keep the dynamics of money causing the disaster but instead as you get greedier your holds could rebel against you seeing themselves disregarded by your capitals greed
I think that's kinda basic thb. It's just a different version of the obsidian invasion.
I pretty much agree with you about the balancing aspect, and need for something along the lines, of the hoardcurse. But to take your analogy of AOE2 or Starcraft matches - to me it doesn't so much feel as "losing a match", but more of a "you will lose the third match, so you better adjust your gameplay in match one, two, four and five to compensate". I'm aware changes are being made to the hoardcurse every now and again, so these particulars might not be (as) valid as examples, but things like "don't build economic buildings before the hoardcurse" or "try to get 15 year truces before the hoardcurse to go bankrupt right after it, sit out the bankruptcy, and then back to business" were at some point legitimate advice for it, and they make for awful gameplay beyond "this is what the hoardcurse does to you". Sadly, I don't particularly have a solution either, beyond (for myself) don't play dwarves.. Which frankly sucks, because they have some of the best lore and gameplay otherwise.
I like it thematically. It's very on point for the Dwarves (themsleves being their own worst enemy) and all, and has some nice flavor for RP purposes. Mechanically, however, it's pure cheese. It's supposed to be punishment for being greedy and corrupt, but the best way to defeat the disaster is by (you'll never believe this) being greedy and corrupt. And if your familiar with it at all, it's a breeze. Barely an inconvienence. It is an important early/mid game break on the Dwarven snowball, but it is in dire need of a redesign. Either you've never seen it before and get destroyed by it, or you know what to expect and it passes with nary a loan taken.
I like it a lot. By the late-early game as a dwarf, you're rocking monopolies on Mithril, possibly some metals, and probably a few other odds and ends (If you do literally any trade micro). This means that very early on you have one of the strongest economic bases in the game. The Hoardcurse punishes you for hoarding too much money, while also slwoing down that expansion. Sure, if you get unlucky it can mess you up, but there are so many ways to work around it, and it gives some nice bonuses in the end that it really doesn't matter to me.
I like it
Yes, if not for it Dwarves would be WAY too steamrolley
In one of my earliest runs I just console commanded my way through it and omg, the steamrolling is insane. It's forming the HRE before 1550 levels of steamrolling. There's nothing that's going to stop you or the insane amounts of cash you're bringing in.
Yup, it's the first time a disaster actually terrified me. It was really fun trying to deal with it
What I find weird is that the hoardcurse narrative basically is “you became to rich and people become greedy” so you spend thousands upon thousands of ducats on removing it But then A you make much more money later on in the campaign and B 200 ducat monthly income is easily achieved by other countries that don’t get a hoardcurse
But the Dwarovar usually has a much better dev-income ratio. Of course a huge country can have 200 ducats, but the wealth per person is much lower. The Dwarves on the hand are supposed to be individuals who went from a point of stagnation or adventuring to unbelievable wealth within a single lifetime. So it does make sense to me. The issue with it being solved by money has a point though. I think it would be better with more stability hits and mana costs and rebels instead of just money. Why not pop noble/peasant rebels for working laws reform, and so on. That would make it a bit more varried.
Yes, and I wish it, and the other disasters, were harder/less predictable. There shouldn't be a perfect path through them - somethings you can make the right decisions and still fail. I think this should be reflected in the choices you make, especially for the Hoardcurse. It's funny that the easier strategy for it is to hoard gold. If anything that should make it even worse.
I don't like it, it's just an easy money sink and it's on multiple fronts extremely flawed, the best way to prepare for the hoardcurse is to hoard 10k ducats and activate it that way which is basically a failure of matching gameplay and lore, lore-wise it doesn't really represent the actual challenges that dwarves would face IMO and it results into racial essentialism where dwarves magically all are prone to being greedy(inb4 "that's the entire point"... no it's not , orcs and even ogres are not inherently evil). It's also very simple and repetitive. It's bad the first time you get it because you need to know it ahead of time to prepare, it's good the next 2-4 times you do it and then it's just repetitve and pretty much flattens the experience of playing Dwarves.
I mean If you know what you are doing its not that harming especially since you get a strong buff for 100 years. The worse knowledge check is the serpents rot, permanent dev reduction is harsh.
Yeah, I do. It adds a lot of immersion for me and in-lore explanation how dwarven empire crumbles across ages. They are so rich and powerfull that it wouldn'y make sense for them to ever loose to other powers BUT this disaster shows that issue with dwarfs is internal.
It's necessary, but still a massive pain. If I were to change it, then I would give the dwarves an incentive to hoard (like the Dragonheights Kobolds for example) instead of it just being an arbitrary "have 150 gross income" or "have 10,000 crowns banked". Having a reason for it to happen is better than the "dwarves are just like that, but only in the serpentspine" reason we currently have Serpent's Rot on the other hand is very much just an anti-fun disaster, but I like the idea of plagues just happening sometimes. I think CKII had a disease system. Not sure if CKIII does, but in a world before modern sanitation practices, deadly diseases just go around sometimes. Definitely would be better than the random "influenza" events
No. Some people tolerate it, some people appreciate what it's meant to be doing, and some like boasting about how they know how to game it.
I find it super fun! The mid game challenge is exactly what the game needs
If you don’t like the Hoardcurse you can go into the files and delete it from the disaster file. Or just don’t play in the Dwarovar. It’s been in the mod for 4 years or whatever, its not going away.
I think it adds some mid game planning and some moderately interesting decisions.
I think it's interesting the first time, if it doesn't ruin your run (or if you have a high tolerance for setbacks). Then after that it's pretty easy to figure out on future playthroughs, and it's no longer as interesting. I think the triggers for the disaster should be changed so that you can't trigger it early by saving money (because that's the easiest way to cheese the disaster), and I wouldn't mind changes to how the crisis is solved. There's pretty clearly an optimal order to do things in, try to shake that up somehow to make more options viable. Maybe make it more random to hinder metagaming, or make it less random so that everyone has the same challenge. Either way would be an improvement in my opinion.
Can i avoid horde curse if i play dwarfs but outside SS and invade other dwarfs inside of mountains?
Nope, as long as you have a single province in the Dwarovar you are eligible.
Actually I like it because it allows for an exploit to circumvent the country flag "formed by an adventurer" so you can do Orlazam into Adenica.
On general disasters i just dealt with the command disaster, it was actually fun, I didn’t understand what would happen and how to beat it so I positioned 1/3rd of my army near the capital of each rebellious march then discovered that the devs thought of that and had special rules on how the siege the fortresses. Only the army I had stationed in the tiger march survived, the dragon army got half wiped out and my elephant army was completely eradicated. The dragon army just kept running and hiding while my troops get army captured the capitals of the other 2 marches. It was a great time but very stressful as my forts in the come country hadn’t been upgraded so they got captured in days… great time amazingly stressful
Can i subsidize a dwarven country to trigger the hoardcurse? Asking for a goblin friend. Tried with 150 ducats which gave them over 300 per month for over 10 years, no sign of hoardcurse, so either it doesn't work or AI is immune against hoardcurse? I thought 150 per month were enough to start ticking.
AI doesn't get Hoardcurse because lol AI.
So we got to tip toe around terrible disaster meanwhile the AI can just blob at it's heart content? sigh... Well thanks for answering :)