Khazad

Khazad are gold loving dwarves. Their strength is a powerful production: in late game they may get almost double production in any city instead of the +25% of normal Forges. Their great weakness is lack of advanced Archery or Arcane units.

Khazad

Leaders:	Arturus Thorne Kandros Fir
Hero:	Maros
Race:	Dwarven
Allignment:	Neutral
Patron God:	Kilmorph
Emblematic Mana:	Earth Mana
Totem Animal:	Ram
Enemies:	Hippus
World Spell:	Mother Lode
Unique Quality:	Happiness and Production Affected by Treasury
Type:	Civilization

Background

During the Age of Magic the dwarves were not the united nation that they would become in the Age of Winter. Scattered tribes of mountain peoples, they were skilled craftsmen and engineers but had little interest in the areas beyond their lands. Amiable and welcoming, they made perfect targets for the con-men and tricksters of other kingdoms. The greatest works of their smiths and their shapers were traded for trinkets and baubles, or worse, mere illusions that vanished when their creators were gone. The dwarves couldn't win redress from the local lords through strength of arms or force of argument. They had no great armies, and the neighboring rulers pointed out that the dwarves had, after all, agreed to the bargains.

This abuse bred distrust of both foreigners and all forms of illusion and magic. It also pushed them underground. Their formerly welcoming cities built along mountain passes were slowly abandoned for safer under-hill communities. The tribes grew closer, and gradually out of many a single unified civilization was formed, the Khazad. The Dwarves began to ask themselves why they ever even bothered with outsiders.

Towards the end of the Age of Magic, few Dwarves were seen by other races, and it was later said that deep in their under-hill holds, they didn't notice the Age of Winter for three generations. Though this is almost certainly an exaggeration, while the kingdoms of men and elves withered under Mulcarn's onslaught the dwarves grew slowly but steadily. Then one day their gatherers returned from the surface with reports of lush vegetation returning, and snow melting.

Kandros Fir led one group of Khazad out of their cavernous homes, to form cities and trade with the new kingdoms of men and of elves. He does not revere tradition as most Dwarves do; rather, he pioneered arts new to his people: negotiation, appraisal, marketing. He persues trading partners with zeal, by force if necesary, always determined to advance the Khazad's fortunes. Remembering the insults they were subjected to in generations past the Khazad are determined that they be secure as they venture out into the world. Not just the security of high walls and stout hammers, but of brimming coffers and judicious merchants.

While his goals draw him outward, what is unknown outside of a few Dwarven circles is that internecine conflict helped push him and his followers to the surface. Both he and Arturus Thorne want the best for their people, but they are committed to different visions of achieving it. The limits of underground expansion were reached in ages past, and so both leaders must use the wider world to prove their vision for the Khazad in the age of rebirth.

Features

Battering Ram

With advent of Engineering, Khazad melee units are able to cut down some trees and build a simple siege unit while in the field, useful only to crush down the walls of your first conquests.

Technically, a number of melee units in a Forest is able to cast the Create Battering Ram spell. With a delay of 5 turns it will consume the Forest and create a free Battering Ram unit for each melee unit (1 strength but 25% bombard rate). It is a summoned unit, which means it gets the benefits of being empowered. It can also gain experience and get promotions. It can capture workers and cities. It was introduced with Vanilla v0.32

Melee troops

Your strength lies in the melee line. You can't build longbowmen or rangers, and cannot have mages or archmages. While this does limit you in your options, it also means you aren't spread all over the place in your research. This lack of options though also means though that one of your early priorities has to be construction - you will need the dwarven trebuchets to crack heavily defended cities in the midgame. Lategame you can get dwarven druids to do your stack crushing for you, but until then you'll need the trebuchets.

Trebuchet

The Trebuchet is exclusive to Khazad. More powerful of a regular catapult, but exposed to assassins.

Dwarven Cannons

If Khazad manage to field a good number of their terrible Cannons, no city is safe. A regular cannon si unable to kill a unit: an army of 100 cannons and 1 champion, in example, will be capable of killing only 1 unit per turn. Dwarven Cannon are able to kill: an army of 100 Dwarven Cannon may kill 100 unit per trun, and this on top of the regular bombardment and collateral damage. The downside is the terribile slowness that make you extremely exposed to counterattacks.

Vault

Any Khazad city, also just conquered ones, will have the Dwarven Vault building. It is connaturate with their way of life. It may still be burned down in some rare event, but normally it is there to stay. Note that you may not build them.

Vaults give production bonuses and happiness bonuses when full, but unhappiness when empty. The effects change depending on amount of gold per number of cities:

1. Empty: <50 per city --> +2
2. Low: 50-99 per city --> +1
3. Normal: 100-149 per city --> No Effect
4. Stocked: 150-199 per city --> +1
5. Abundant: 200-299 per city --> +10% and +2
6. Full: 300-499 per city --> +25% and +2
7. Overflowing: >499 per city --> +40% , +3 , and +25%

You obviously start with Empty Vaults, a small handicap that should be easily managed. In Early game you have to balance eraly expansion and stocked money. Try to keep over 100 gold per city - no effect from the vaults, but no unhappiness.

In Mid game you should appreciate the Happiness bonus of Abundant vaults.

Late game, you have no excuse not to have your vaults overflowing (500 gold per city), which gives +3 or +4 happy, but most importantly, +40% bonus. You should get there and have also a bit of margin, beacuse any conquered city will raise the requirement. If you have a 10 city little empire, your money range is 500-5000, but a pair of conquered cities will raise that to 600-6000. So to be in the safe side consider a bit less than 1000 per city before starting a conquest war.

Others

• Deruptus Brewing House gives 2 bonus XP for any Dwarven built in the city, so all Khazad units and the RoK heroes.
• Dwarvern workers are 20% faster so its no bother at all to mine all the extra hills.

Leaders

Choose your leader. Kandros Fir is aggresive and financial, arturus thorne is industrius and organized. Each has its benifits, and arturus is generally better when trying for non-conquest/domination victories, while kandros is better when you want to bring the world together under your dwarven fist. Kandros also tends to synergize more with an aristocracy based economy.

Dwarver Forge

Get a minimum of 1 of each metal. The dwarven forge base production bonus is 20% - 5% less than regular forges. However, copper, iron and mithril each add +10% production. This means that with bronze, iron, mithril, 500 gold per city, and a forge in your city, you will be getting a +90% production bonus. Note, until you have iron working, having iron won't give a bonus to this - so having the mines of gal-dur won't help your production until you get iron working.

Hero

Your hero is Maros, unlocked at iron working. On the offense, he is essentially a heroic champion. On the defense, he is a god. Defensive strength of 12, can use metal, +50% city defense, and he can get heroic attack and defense, which with mithril and heroic defense 2 means that he will have a base defensive strength of 18 before any modifiers. Offensively he isn't as awsome, but any city he is defending has no excuse for being taken. Definately consider sending him up the drill line.

Magic

Your adepts, with enchantment, can repair trebuchets and golems and ships. As you aren't the lurchip, the primary thing here is repairing your trebuchets. On the subject of adepts, since they are all the magic that you get, you are going to want to specialize on your level 1 spells. Sun and water, for the usual terraforming, enchantment for an extra 20% strength for your army, life for sanctify, spirit for courage, etc.

Religion

There are two that work best for the khazid - Runes of Kilmorph, and Order. Runes of kilmorph gives you +3 gold per city while running it, and when you're wanting to fill your vaults, thats very nice. Arete sinergize well with the numerous Mines you will have, and in the lategame consider picking Gunpowder early to get another +1 production. Order is what you use when you end up going on conquest, trying to minimize the costs once you have your new cities up and running. Generally you'll probably spend most of your time with RoK, with Order generally used as the backup.

The more you find water in your map, the worse the problem. Dwarves do not like seagoing vessels, as a rule. In the game you have no real impediments, but with your low research getting to Astronomy will be a pain. As often happens to ease the control of the seas it may help to go with the Overlords. This will have several benefits: the ususal power of Cultists, the shift of alignment away from Good, and as a consequence the ability to train druids. And if you promote druids from cultists, you will gain also the Krakens. You may get a good number of Cultists and than revert to RoK, beacuse the Neutral alignment will persist and the cultists will be there to be upgraded as soon as possible. If you decide to confirm your faith to Octopus Overlords you may consider a deroute to get Hemah and get at last a good spellcaster.

Dwarven Druids

You get the Dwarven druid instead of the regular one. The dwarven druid can't terraform (doesn't get vitalize), and has earth mana affinity instead of nature mana. On the other hand, they make up for that by being extremely powerful on the offense. Instead of getting nature line, they get the earth line of spells, wall of stone, stoneskin, and summon earth elemental. But, their strongest spell is Crush - it works like pillar of fire, but does physical damage - its the only spell that can damage magic immune creatures like Acheron.

Myconid

The beastmaster is also replaced by a special unit - in this case, the myconid. This unit is pretty much the same as a beastmaster, but it gets the ability to stun units nearby with its spell.

Mother Lode is a fairly poor world spell. If you are on a fairly flat map, its great for getting a few more hills. That however is its only use.

Balancing considerations

The Kazad may appear totally crippled. No mages, no hunters, no longbows, no horse archers. And to keep your people happy, you need a ridiculous amount of gold on hand if you have a civ of any significant size. Domination is going to be difficult. Rather than depending on longbows you have to rely on an active defense, but when you've got your stack deep into enemy territory, there's no coming back to defend. You will need to leave champions to defend the walls, or have a second stack at home.

You will have no mobile stacks of fireball mages with haste and Mobility. You will need to keep lugging around those slow siege weapons with no Raider attribute. And haste doesn't work on siege weapons.

And the world spell just gives more gold and less food, it is one of the worst world spell in the game.

But consider this: in a game where the most important thing is production, they have almost +100% aganist a normal forge of +25% , on top of super siege weapons and happiness bonus. In early version of the game they were considered far overpowered. They were able to build Mages and they had a good unit to defend cities, the Hammerfists . They has special dwarven mines. With all the extra gold they used to build warriors in every city and upgrade them like mad thanks to have half cost for all upgrades. See https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/khazad-are-overpowered.188521/

See also

Top Ten Tips for Your Favorite Civs