Forums / Questions and Answers / Is using cavemasters worth it

Ive never seen an update to say its changed , however i dont play dwarf so im not sure 

Hi Justanius, is RD coming back? :P

You must do the math, and get the right number per city size with mines and homes right. Once production is max its very worth it

Definitely worth it, not quite as much if you are using 90k cities as you lose some tax, but even then, cavers are good.

Also good having them in armies, means you get more money when pillaging cities.

I don't know why i'm telling you this. Dwarf is my race, they are useless, you should all play human or elf. :P

They don't blow up mines when merely taking towns, last I checked. 

well thats just a really puzzeled response it was years ago when we use to build 90k cities with a different ratio and fill them with cavers so we could have more production in comparison to our cost of troops, as you remember cost of troops was linked to number of buildings. ever since they changed that i thought there is no point of cavemasters anymore....any dwarves in the house with a real example from last era or era before of using cavers?

and DR maybe in the summer ;)

It's a simple sum. In my cities right now, I have a mine production of 16 gold and 12 stone. That is 90k and as close to the mountains as possible. If I take my cavemasters out of the city, that is 11 gold and 6 stone. I don't believe those numbers, because they are rounded numbers.

I believe the numbers in the production tab, because they have never lied to me.

First I look at the gold, my income in that city is, 1,129,638, without cavers, 830,176. The difference is 299,462 and I have 72,589 cavers. That's 4,125 gold per caver. I also have 72,589 mines, so that is 11.43 gold per mine.

So a mine makes 2.77 more gold then a cavers.

The price of a cavers is 1,000, So to make cavers effective (at the gold side of things) the price of a mine needs to be 2,770. So you can make the decision yourself.

Now the stone side of things, my stone production in that city is, 838,118, without cavers, 469,395, difference is 368,723. Same store as above, 5.07 gold per caver, 6.46 gold per mine.

So a mine makes 1,27 more stone then a caver.

The difficulty is putting stone into the equation, I sell my stone most of the times for anything between 0.85 and 0.95, so I will take 0.9 as an example.

The ratio between stone and gold is 6 (in that buildings cost 6 times more gold then stone)(On my account). With this information I can calculate at what building cost you need to switch to cavemasters.

1000 gold per cavemaster, 143 in stone, 857 in gold (building cost ratio). Because I sell my stone for 0.9 this is skewed though. So that factor needs in the stone as well. That becomes 158 then.

If I then calculate how much gold and stone mines make more then cavers I come at a building cost of 181 stone and 2373 gold. So that's then roughly the building cost at which it's optimal to make cavemasters.

Ofcourse, this simple calculation is not the only consideration you have to make. What if your mining city is close to a blocker? You can use is as a emergency army, or in time of need you can use the cavemasters to attack.

But there are more efficient troops.