Is it really hard being green?

From what I can tell, it’s 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 can’t 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 don’t 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 isn’t 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 isn’t really worth it.

Trolls are ALWAYS worth it given the low valor cost i think

Aran is clearly a very accomplished Goblin himself, and he’s 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 that’s 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, they’re 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

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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. :stuck_out_tongue:

Maybe I should try to write a guide…

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.

An easy solution might be to reduce goblin training time to 3 hours. I mean, if an individual unit is half the strength of it’s 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 ‘nomad’ 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 that’s 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 I’d 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, it’s 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 you’ll read them all, because this post got away from me a bit. :blush:


Two Visions

I think what it comes down to is that there are two competing visions for the Goblins, both implemented partway.

  1. High Value Heroes: This is the vision that’s most realized in the current game.
    The key facets of this vision are:
  • Big Gold Generation
  • Weak base units
  • Potent but highly specialized Heroes
  1. 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. I’d love to be able to go into a game and decide which of these playstyles I’d 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: “Limited” 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 “fixer” heroes for lots of different challenges. It’s extremely fun. But because their economy is so dependent on their civilian population, and because that population really can’t be put to use effectively as a military horde, it’s also the only viable strategy. If you can never train Goblin Bows, that’s always the best plan, because they’re too expensive in the long run. Don’t believe me? Thought I’d 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 “how expensive is it to make a melee army out of this unit” comparison. It’s critical to include the future cost of training a unit, because while all units draw down your gold-producing population, they don’t do so evenly. Well actually, most of them are surprisingly very even, with one unit of most races costing 25 Gold per day. Except… the Dwarves and Goblins.

The Dwarves, at least, are extremely sturdy, and actually aren’t 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 aren’t 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 Jay’s point that Goblins can get a lot of population together for cheap (I haven’t 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 we’re 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 “must-haves” list looks like this:

  • Must be quicker to produce: 25 units at a time is much too slow when they’re weak units.
  • Must be more numerous overall: 400 civilians per settlement grouping just isn’t enough to build the kind of army we’re 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 doesn’t 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 “possible as a last resort.” I think it’s totally possible to make the “huge masses of individuals” thing work, but it’s got to be easier to do it with Goblins than anyone else, or I’ll 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 “the horde” That was always supposed to be the orcs.

But having said that, I’m 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! :smiley:

I’m all for all of this, and I think you did a great job with each of those goals. I think the Goblins’ 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 won’t have the decks to be really successful with a card-focused race; there’s no way around it. If that’s going to be their core identity, they will inevitably remain an “advanced” race, and that’s 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 “advanced” and be done with it. I’m basically picturing an old arcade game banner on the Join Game screen for players below XP level 3 or something.

Why cant Goblin bows be as good as Elf ones aye? :stuck_out_tongue: Many more arrows, and maybe they’re poison!..uh… HOLY poison, that kills zombies.
Maybe need less purely math balanced stats and some more asymmetrical ones, like what if Goblins could HIDE in swamps or forests to avoid battle like a flying unit? Or just had bonus damage while inside/shooting into certain hexes? It makes sense to deal less ranged damage to anyone in a forest hex right?

Maybe something goblins need is a card to help them recycle Heroes who die so they can return the card to the deck. Right now its a real pain to make armies that rely on multiple types of heroes, even a 20% loss battle can take out critical units as opposed to replacable infantry

What about increasing short bow mana cost a little and reducing cooldown to 6 hours. Make them differents from the elves and give their basic troops a little more delayed oompf. And/or make them 20 per stack at the same power, reducing the stress of training on their little greenconomy.

I’m reviving this thread with some new thoughts; hopefully no one minds! As I said last September, I think it’s totally fine to have a few “advanced” races that are a little less beginner-friendly due to card specialization and so on. I also should say that I like where the Goblins currently are. However, I’d like to revise some of my earlier “requirements” for a melee strategy to work for the Goblins. I’ve pared it down to two must-haves from four.

  • Must be quicker to produce: 25 units at a time is much too slow when they’re weak units. This can be ameliorated just by updating any problem maps. More towns = more production speed.
  • Must be more numerous overall: 400 civilians per settlement grouping just isn’t enough to build the kind of army we’re talking about. Same here. More towns = more population.
  • Building a large army must not hamstring the economy. Still true.
  • The army must have more buffs available to it. Still true. To take advantage of high population, you’ve got to have more than a single +3 buff.

Specifically, I’ve come up with three Hero ideas to help make such a strategy more appealing regarding these requirements, in a way that I think meshes with the Goblins’ existing Trickster identity. Not that I think the viability of this kind of strategy is critical; I just think the more varied each race can be, the healthier the game is overall.

Goblin Royalty (rework)

The existing Goblin Royalty card is theoretically one of the few heroes already helping in a “horde” strategy by providing Gold without relying on civilian population. The problem is, the cost for his ability is huge, and on a very long cooldown. It’s also only slightly better than the Valour exchange rates: once a day you get an extra 50 Gold for your 10 Valour — yay? He’s just not usable in a practical sense, especially since if you’re training lots of Goblin Bows, that’s where most of your Mana is probably going anyway. I feel he’s due for a rework.

  • Cost: 200 Gold
  • Total Strength: 12 (unchanged)
  • Speed: 3 Hours/League by Road (unchanged)
  • Ability: Royal Tithe: In a town with no deployment cooldown, each Goblin in the Goblin Royalty’s army steals 0.5 Gold from a civilian (no one gets robbed more than once). Set the deployment timer for 10h. Costs 3 Mana. 10h cooldown.
  • Discussion: Rather than a prohibitively expensive (and frankly boring) Gold generation machine, let’s give the Royalty a reason to go around and visit his empire!
    Obviously the values for his cost, benefit, and cooldowns will need balancing, but this felt like an okay place to start.
    • His Gold generation is capped by both the size of his entourage and the size of the local populace. The math is basically gold_gained = 0.5 x minimum(goblins_in_army, civilians_in_town).
    • With perfect micro, the Goblins in his army produce 1.2 Gold per day, but 1 Gold/day is probably a better estimate. So they’re about half as productive as they would be as civilians.
    • His efficiency breaks even (matching the Valour exchange rate) at 60 Population & Army; 3 Mana -> 30 Gold.
    • A 200 Gold up-front cost puts him on the pricy side for Goblins, especially since it will likely take a day or two just to break even. But his long-term value is very high.
    • His best-case scenario is placing a 600-Goblin army on a Fortress with 600 population, where with perfect micro he can generate 720 Gold/day, for the price of ~7.2 Mana and the inability to deploy there.
    • The Deployment timer gets set to 10h instead of 6h both as an additional penalty, and so you can’t use two Royals to extract Gold from the populace four times a day.
    • Alternative cooldown costs are also possible, but a Production cooldown push doesn’t make a lot of sense when you’re gaining the minimum per-civilian value, and affecting the Training cooldown runs counter to the goal of encouraging the training of lots of Goblins (plus it may be difficult from an engineering perspective, as that’s not a mechanic that already exists).

To make use of the fact that it’s cheap (in the short term) to enlist lots of Goblin population, the Goblins need access to more General-style units that give army buffs. The Bigwig alone simply doesn’t cut it. Rather than try to add a bunch of new Goblin Heroes for this purpose, replacing the existing specialists that give the Goblins their identity, why not see if we can’t use the Generals that other races already have? To that end, I’ve got two new Hero concepts to make it more appealing to bring off-race Generals into the army. Obviously a new Hero is a tough sell: needs new art; replaces an existing hero; etc. I’d say probably just one of these would be sufficient to make the Goblin army a lot more interesting. Both is probably overkill; both in one card seems like it would be way too strong.

  • Let other Generals keep up with the Goblin army. At the moment, only the Tactician can do this, but what if you could kidnap invite an Ironshell Sergeant or Outcast Warchief to join your main army without sacrificing mobility?
  • Let Goblins benefit from race-specific bonuses. Defending a hapless Dwarven settlement? Send someone to listen in on their Stout General and get that +8 bonus for all your archers, too.

Wagon Hawker (new Hero)

  • Art: A panicked Troll riding in a madcap open-top trailer loosely tethered behind a Spider, or strapped to a sledge being dragged along by spider silk.
  • Cost: 200 Gold
  • Total Strength: 120
  • Speed: 3 Hours/League by Road
  • Ability: Wild Ride: The speed of target Hero in the same location as the Wagon Hawker increases to 3h/League for 12 hours. 10h cooldown. Costs 4 Mana.
  • Discussion: If you’re making a basic-unit army with the Goblins instead of some other race, it’s because you love their unique flexibility and mobility. I’ve never once seen someone put off-race buffs on a Goblin army, unless it’s defending an off-race town for a fight or two. The loss of mobility simply isn’t worth it. But if that weren’t an issue, things change a lot.
    • The Wagon Hawker effectively gives you access to six “new” buffs: Butcher, Jolly Tavern Keeper, Outcast Warchief, Vicious Sergeant, Scarface Lord, and Ironshell Sergeant, as well as things like the Mountain King, Tangle Mage, Banner units of all races, and control like the Bridge Witch.
    • You need one Wagon Hawker per additional off-race Hero in your army, and you have to pay to keep them moving quickly. Those wagons aren’t very sturdy.
    • You can only speed up Heroes. This is basically mandatory, to keep every other race from grabbing a few of these and whipping up 20k Troll stacks at 3h/League.

Master of Disguise (new Hero)

  • Art: Several Goblins assembled into a loose approximation of the Humans’ Mighty General.
  • Cost: 175 Gold
  • Total Strength: 60
  • Speed: 3 Hours/League by Road
  • Ability: A couple of options here:
    • Greetings, Fellow Humans!: Goblins in the army of the Master of Disguise are treated as all races for the next 12h. Costs 12 Mana. Restores in 18h.
    • When In Purplebog: While in a (populated?) settlement, the Master of Disguise may change the race of all Goblins in his army to the race native to the settlement (speed and basic unit strength are adjusted accordingly). Lasts 6h (or [12h or until they leave?]). Costs 10 Mana. Restores in 8h.
  • Discussion: Both possible abilities have the same intent: temporarily gain the benefits of other races. They result in some interesting differences, though, in my opinion:
    • Greetings, Fellow Humans!
      • You can wander the map with an enormous, mixed-race army if you feel it’s worth the speed penalty.
      • Potentially grants access to many more buffs at a time (if you manage to get a Mighty General, Brute, Desert Maiden, Elven Princess, and Stout General all in the same place, you’re in for a whopping +34 extra strength).
      • Requires absurd planning and deckbuilding/cooperation (via card & town donations, etc) to make good use of this potential.
    • When In Purplebog
      • High versatility at a lower cost (if you’re not using it too much).
      • No deckbuilding shenanigans required to take advantage of the ability. Since Goblins are the weakest melee race, temporarily giving your Goblin Bows the stats of any other race’s basic unit is an automatic strength improvement, even without a race-specific buff.
      • Maximum benefit is lesser, but requires less investment.
      • I go back and forth on whether or not the change should end when you leave the settlement. I lean towards persistence, so you can’t just turn into Trolls for combat and then scamper away at normal speed.

Anyway, I think that’s quite enough from me for now. Anyone have any thoughts? :grin:

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Speaking purely from intuition/taste, there’s too many factors going on in this ability. Needs a version that only has one direct cap on yield, presumably number of goblins in army since that’s what we’re trying reward.

As for general query… well, here, I’ll try brainstorming some options.
-Power that boosts the minimum strength at which each unit in the army fights (Say, to 10 or something)
–What if it was minimum of X*2 strength, where X is the number of goblin heroes in army?

-Goblin Hero that’s more like Giant, strength boost of X*4 (or something) where X is population of their army.
–X is total number of living goblins you control?
–X is number of goblin heroes within 4 leagues?

-Abilities which somehow rewards spamming a series of lone units at an undead horde.
–Give all goblin units within X leagues a 4h version of spider’s webs.
–Each time goblins die in an Undead Victory within 2 leagues of Hero Unit, surviving Undead units are subject to strength 300 ranged attack. (flavor: He’s handing out grenades.)
–Each time there’s an Undead Victory within 2 leagues of Hero Unit, all surviving undead fight at -2 strength. This effect lasts 48 hours and stacks.

-Power that boosts all goblins in army by +5 when the undead army’s headcount is lower than the living one.

@DrBwaa I like the idea for the Disguised goblin…if only because the artwork, fluff and ability is so gobbo it fits.

As for Goblin Royalty…personally I agree with Dagda it is a lot of factors going into it.
It should be reworked yes but I believe we should give it similar abilities like the Human Cowardly Noble. Perhaps increase the gold yield per 10 valour and decrease the cool down.

Personally i believe when a unit like the Noble or the Royalty recruits a settlement or monster they be able to either get it with a discount or get some valour back as a reward.
Makes them more useful then just sitting there at your cities and doing nothing.

-Draft Mercenaries. Ability that instantly raises one basic unit from any settlement hero is located at, even if unclaimed, and unit is owned by you and obeys orders… but any survivors despawn back to civilian population (in nearest available settlement of that type, if one exists) in 12 hours. (6? 24?)

(dunno if that last one’s relevant to desired outcomes, sorry)

Hmm. Fellow Humans is… tricky from a rule clarity standpoint. For example: Blood Moon. Are they getting 3 +6 bonuses and 3 -6 penalties? What about Gryphon Horn dwarf guy, do they get his buff? Do they retain his buff once Fellow Humans buff ends?

Best bet could be taking all the General cards and labeling their passive abilities as being Leadership abilities or something, so that this ability can reference that?

Other ways to reward diversity:
-Give another goblin unit in the army of the (heroname) +1 combat experience for each type of non-goblin race (orc, troll, human, elf, and dwarf) that army contains. Recharges in 21h.
-Goblins in the army of (heroname) fight at +X strength, where X is how many races that army contains.

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You could do a goblin rework that really doubled down on potential deckbuilding mechanics, more like (say) ascension or something. Add more mechanics for bouncing cards back to your deck, goblin cards that give perks when you play them, and more mechanics that incentivize playing as many goblin cards as possible. Maybe more card advantage stuff, like how Blue cards can stack or search through the deck in Magic?

-Imagine a hero who gained +50 strength for each goblin hero played, and could expend all that accumulated strength as a magic ranged attack.
-What if instead of +50 strength, each Rogue played made Rogue Lord grant an additional +1 strength to all goblins in his army?
-Draft Mercenaries ability, described in prior post. Instantly raise a basic unit or maybe play a card, but any survivors despawn in 12 hours and refund your money. (or just gave a partial refund/discount when played?)