Specifically Goblin Green, it seems to me that when i join a game of many factions, goblin is always the last picked, my last three games in a row i came in last and goblin was all who was left in 6 player games =/ Is it the speed? That they take too much micromanagement ?
Perhaps they are not a tough warrior race like the dwarves.
Wondering if you have stats to show which races are most and least preferred, then create a poll to find why
I donāt collect that stat, but we should. Would help us work out what races need to me more fun!
I feel like Goblins without cards are just very weak, relying on base troops is very difficult, and many of their mechanics rely on playing many many cards. I think theyāll be very strong with very large deck sizes
Yeah, I think, like trolls, as we tried to make them fun we may have actually made them a little overpowered.
If the player has a few dealers then goblins are best picked first so you can make the most of their ability.
But if you only have the starting cards i can see why they might not be inviting.
Taking into account their speed if you look at the nearby settlements you can use cards from the other races easily.
One of the other issues with goblins is the goblin bow base unit. It is half the cost and power of the elf base unit but costs your cities twice the value.
So to make a unit of equal strength as the elf one takes twice as long and uses 4 times the gold generation.
From what I can tell, itās basically what you outlined here.
Goblins have very weak base units, only middeling population and high gold generation, so they are pretty much the worst choice for the foundation of a regular army. Meaning you either need to play with a pretty weak army, or rely heavily on heroes. And since heroes have relatively low combat power and rely on a lot of micromanagement, they can be quite hard and time-consuming to play.
Also, you canāt really form a big late-game army like the other races. You would need to sacrifice a massive amount of income, or risk losing large numbers of heroes.
And donāt forget how the Goblin settlements are the most expensive after the dwarves. With dwarves, you get a lot of revenue and strong units in return (not to mention the nightmare of a blighted dwarven fortress), but buying a Goblin village just isnāt worth it early-game if you can get any other settlements.
Well, for Elven and Troll factions its worth buying one or two to compensate for their own low income, but unless you have a massive income deficiency it isnāt really worth it.
Trolls are ALWAYS worth it given the low valor cost i think
Aran is clearly a very accomplished Goblin himself, and heās said basically all I would on the subject. Goblins can feel unsatisfying without a pretty solid deck, so they do frequently get picked later in public games. But they are very popular with the players who have accumulated the cards to make full use of them.
I do think their base units could stand to be a touch stronger. Not enough to overshadow their heroes, since thatās what makes their playstyle so unique, but maybe a slight buff to their ranged attack or something would make them more appealing to newcomers.
Maybe increase their ranged shot to 6X, from its current 4x?
That would still make it weaker than the elven units (8*X), but make them a bit more punchy.
Alternatively, up their base strength from 6 to 8. That would make them less squishy, and we can also make the goblin zombies a bit more punchy (as opposed to the current situation where, theyāre mostly punching bags).
One more thing to mention, outside the goblin cards i could only see two rogue cards.
Elven berserker and scarface orc.
I recently saw the rogue lord being used effectively in a 12 player game but it would be nice if there was a bit more synergy between races and card types
1 Like
I have to say, Goblins are pretty much my favorite race. They require a good deal of micromanagement due to their speed, and a solid deck to be effective with tho-and you need more than just gob cards, as they almost always work better using the income and cities of other races to fight for them. 
Maybe I should try to write a guideā¦
Anyway, to compare them with Elves.
Training two Elf units for 12 hours gets you 600 str unit with a pow 400 ranged attack, for 550g.
Training two Gob units for 12 hours gets you 300 str unit, pow 200 ranged attack, for 250G
Otherwise, same population and speed of movement. Same strength in the end, almost same cost (goblin being slightly cheaper) but they take double the amount of time to train to get the same result. Gob cards alone have very few direct strength boosters, making them a poor thing to invest in if you want a big army. As written above, you also burn alot of income to do so.
ā¦
An easy solution might be to reduce goblin training time to 3 hours. I mean, if an individual unit is half the strength of itās counterparts, it makes sense to be done in half the time, right? That would drain standing gold faster, but Gobs have cards that specifically allow them to pursue a ānomadā style of gameplay-siphoning gold from immortal kills and graveyard burning.
This is the problem i had with them, the amount of time and population drain it takes to make a goblin army for defense is insane, very bad on the defense. I feel like heading for nearby Dwarf/Orc/Troll cities asap to actually get some muscle. Wouldnt be so bad if Goblin Ravagers and Rodent Riders were so weak by cost
Maybe if goblins had a way to replenish troops ? Goblin Scavengers that turn dead bodies into replenished troops?
yeah, would be nice to find some kind of unique way to make the better.
3 hour training time is not crazy though might make them a little more micro-managy. In sp most players are jumping 6 hours every turn anyhow. We would have to let you queue them up.
Actually, one thing thatās not really happening right now, was for goblins to take better advantage of those flat general bonuses. Where you get +1 or +2 for each population.
Goblins are cheap per person, you can get a lot of population together for not much gold. Perhaps the basic unit needs to have more goblins in it.
This is an interesting point, though Iād also go the other route and say they should have more ways to make use of having relatively cheap militarized population. With only a single +3 General, itās just not very meaningful to have lots of Goblins, no matter how easy it is to get them. But I have a lot of thoughts on this and I hope youāll read them all, because this post got away from me a bit. 
Two Visions
I think what it comes down to is that there are two competing visions for the Goblins, both implemented partway.
- High Value Heroes: This is the vision thatās most realized in the current game.
The key facets of this vision are:
- Big Gold Generation
- Weak base units
- Potent but highly specialized Heroes
- Plague of Imps: This is what Jay is talking about above, which is not seen much except in Nightmare (where you have to fight with everything available) and public games (where players may have fewer heroes).
The key facets of this vision are:
- Cheap generation of weak, but innumerable, base units
- Efficient buffs when applied to the huge swarm
One Viable Option
The best possible scenario for me would be for both of these approaches to be legitimately viable. Iād love to be able to go into a game and decide which of these playstyles Iād like to try out, and build the right deck for the job. However, there are basically two facts that totally kill the Swarm strategy in the current state of the race:
- High-value civilian population: Each civilian is 2G/d, and there are only 400 civilians in a 3-settlement group. Better than Trolls/Elves, but Humans and Orcs have over twice as many people to work with, and they train twice as fast.
- Limited available buffs: āLimitedā as in only the Bigwig. A grand total of +3 to the army.
Goblins have a cool niche at the moment as the back-line gold-generators with a bevy of special-purpose āfixerā heroes for lots of different challenges. Itās extremely fun. But because their economy is so dependent on their civilian population, and because that population really canāt be put to use effectively as a military horde, itās also the only viable strategy. If you can never train Goblin Bows, thatās always the best plan, because theyāre too expensive in the long run. Donāt believe me? Thought Iād get through this post without math and/or tables? Think again!
| Race | POP | STR | Flat Cost | Cost/STR | Daily Cost | 3d Total | 3d Cost/STR |
|---------|-----|-----|-----------|----------|------------|----------|-------------|
| Trolls | 25 | 450 | 150 | 0.333 | 25 | 225 | 0.5 |
| Orcs | 50 | 600 | 300 | 0.5 | 25 | 375 | 0.625 |
| Humans | 50 | 500 | 250 | 0.5 | 25 | 325 | 0.65 |
| Dwarves | 40 | 640 | 200 | 0.3125 | 80 | 440 | 0.6875 |
| Elves | 25 | 300 | 225 | 0.75 | 25 | 300 | 1.0 |
| Goblins | 25 | 150 | 125 | 0.833 | 50 | 275 | 1.833 |
This table sorts the races by the total cost, after three days, of training one unit, divided by the strength of that unit. Sort of a āhow expensive is it to make a melee army out of this unitā comparison. Itās critical to include the future cost of training a unit, because while all units draw down your gold-producing population, they donāt do so evenly. Well actually, most of them are surprisingly very even, with one unit of most races costing 25 Gold per day. Exceptā¦ the Dwarves and Goblins.
The Dwarves, at least, are extremely sturdy, and actually arenāt much more expensive after three days than Orcs or Humans thanks to their low up-front training cost. Goblins, however, come in dead last on this table by an enormous margin even before factoring in future costs. When you consider the mitigating factors that arenāt represented, like availability and efficacy of army buffs, the Goblins suffer even more, as they lack in both of those categories as well.
And to Jayās point that Goblins can get a lot of population together for cheap (I havenāt forgotten), I think I just have to disagree with you. This one looks good for the Goblins until you include a couple days of lost gold, and then it all falls apart immediately (though when weāre only looking at cost/individual, the same is true for the Dwarves).
| Race | POP | Flat Cost | Cost/POP | 3d Total | 3d Cost/POP | 5d Total | 5d Cost/POP |
|---------|-----|-----------|----------|----------|-------------|----------|-------------|
| Humans | 50 | 250 | 5 | 325 | 6.5 | 375 | 7.5 |
| Orcs | 50 | 300 | 6 | 375 | 7.5 | 425 | 8.5 |
| Trolls | 25 | 150 | 6 | 225 | 9 | 275 | 11 |
| Elves | 25 | 225 | 9 | 300 | 12 | 350 | 14 |
| Dwarves | 40 | 200 | 5 | 440 | 11 | 600 | 15 |
| Goblins | 25 | 125 | 5 | 275 | 11 | 375 | 15 |
What To Do?
If the Huge Swarm of Weak Gobbos Strategy is to be made viable (and as I said, I think that would be very cool), the big problems need to be addressed. My āmust-havesā list looks like this:
- Must be quicker to produce: 25 units at a time is much too slow when theyāre weak units.
- Must be more numerous overall: 400 civilians per settlement grouping just isnāt enough to build the kind of army weāre talking about.
- Building a large army must not hamstring the economy: either the gold-generating heroes would need buffs, or the population would have to be less valuable as civilians.
- The army must have more buffs available to it. Whether this is in the form of Generals, or general-like units that get stronger for ever Goblin Bow in their army it doesnāt matter, but to be relevant in a swarm, there must be a way to take advantage of the large military population.
Besides this little list of demands, I do actually have a concrete suggestion.
Retool the Goblin settlements and base unit, but go hard in the opposite direction. Let each civilian only produce 0.2 Gold, put 2000 Goblins in the big settlements, drop their individual strength to 4, take away their ranged attack and put 100 individuals in each unit. Give them a couple more army-focused effects. Make it attractive to unleash the horde, rather than āpossible as a last resort.ā I think itās totally possible to make the āhuge masses of individualsā thing work, but itās got to be easier to do it with Goblins than anyone else, or Iāll just keep on happily playing the Orcs every time I get a hankering for basic units.
Thanks for the good analysis!
When we were designing the game, we wanted to each race have its own thing. Goblins was always a vaguely - cards and deck manipulation, sneaking and trickiness. They are also the gold producers for the greenskin team.
We never really wanted them to be āthe hordeā That was always supposed to be the orcs.
But having said that, Iām open to increasing goblin populations and reducing the daily gold production of each goblin.
We could also boost the population of the uncommon goblin warband card from 50 to 100. Perhaps we could make him common and the assassin uncommon.
Changing the base goblin warrior would be a much bigger change and would need careful consideration. I dont want thier bow attack to rival the elves - but I dont want them to have a weak ranged attack.
Well that part you did perfectly! 
Iām all for all of this, and I think you did a great job with each of those goals. I think the Goblinsā trickiness & card shenanigans puts them in a great place and I really enjoy playing them.
The fact of the matter is that newer players simply wonāt have the decks to be really successful with a card-focused race; thereās no way around it. If thatās going to be their core identity, they will inevitably remain an āadvancedā race, and thatās okay! In fact it might be good to officially steer new players to the races where they might typically find more fulfilling play. You could probably call the whole greenskin team āadvancedā and be done with it. Iām basically picturing an old arcade game banner on the Join Game screen for players below XP level 3 or something.
