Races and Attributes
While the choice of race is mostly a matter of preferance, there are a few things to keep in mind that may sway your choice. First, let's take a look at the attribute and a few considerations for each.
- Strength This primary consideration for this attribute is whether you're strong enough to equip items without penalty. Beyond that, every point added will increase your damage by 1% for each point over 25. This may not sound like much but 50% is not inconsiderable for anyone fighting with melee weapons.
- Intelligence Cheaper skills! Every point in this over 10 will cause a 0.5% decrease in the cost of learning skills. (This does not impact the cost of attributes.)
- Dexterity This is your ability to actually hit your foes (+1 strike for every point added and +1 parry for every four points added.)
- Agility This is your speed with weapons. The higher this is, the better the attack combo you can perform. In addition, this can improve your speed and parry skills (+2 or more points speed improvement for every point added and +1 to parry every four points. The speed benefit increases significantly with very high levels.)
- Vitality Every point added increase your health (+2 life for each point.)
- Honor The only significance of this is to meet class requirements. (Actually you get +1 influence for every point but that doesn't seem to have any practical impact.)
Let's ignore class prerequisite issues, since they simply have to be met to join the class (assuming the bug ever gets fixed) and there's no strategy involved in determining them.
Intelligence is definitely useful as it makes it cheaper to buy skills. This is always a good place to put advancement points when nothing else suggests itself or if you're planning to make a major series of skill increases. Pure mages should pump this like crazy, but it starts to get very expensive later on.
Everyone benefits from having a high life score so vitality is never a bad idea. Melee fighters should consider lots of points here.
Dexterity and agility are closely related and both are critical to all fighters. Dexterity should be raised first until you find that most of your blows are hitting your enemy. Stop increasing this when you're comfortable with your ability to hit foes. Agility improves your combo potential and rate of fire. I've noticed little benefit to scores over 30 or so, though I'm not sure of the exact point at which the best combo is available.
If you're playing a melee fighter, strength is a good place to pump points since every little bit of extra damage can help. Other characters need only improve things to meet equipment requirements.
Honor is uselsss beyond meeting class requirements.
Perhaps the first choice you make with a new character is the race to play. Dungeon Lords generously offers nine choices (seven races, two of which offer female characters.) While the manual suggests each race has its strengths and weaknesses, they are all roughly balanced. This is far from the truth!
One of the two big surprises I found in analysing the game data is that in addition to each race having a starting attribute score, each race has a cost adjustment level for each attribute. This hidden and very important score controls how much it costs to improve attributes.
The first thing that jumps out of the data is that urgoths are poorly balanced. While very powerful fighters early on, they are the most expensive to advance their intelligence. Perhaps worse, their dexterity is even more expensive to advance! A fighter who can't hit his foes is not terribly effective. Good thing he can stand there and absorb abuse since he can't deliver it.
The next thing that jumps out is that elven females have a lot of benefits for spell casters. While they are expensive to advance in strength and vitality, they have the cheapest intelligence cost around. If playing a mage, you're going to want to meet equipment requirements and stay out of melee as much as possible, making a lower life not as critical.
Human males are a good choice for a generalist as they posses no real disadvantage at the cost of gaining no real advantage. Human females are penalised pretty heavily on strength and vitality for the small benefit they gain over males in intelligence. Sadly, they're probably a poor choice which means that there is only one option for those desiring female characters. About the only reason to play a human female would be to follow the valkryie/war witch path where a female elf would be hard pressed to meet some of the attribute requirements.
Wyvlans are basically male versions of female elves. They don't posses the great intelligence bonus, but are otherwise roughly equivilent. Thralls are similar to female elves but are even worse off with strength and vitality. Elven males have little to recommend them--the female of the race is superior in non-warrior roles and the male isn't well equiped to handle combat duties.
For pure tanks, dwarves are the best option. They're a bit burdened gaining agility, but that score doesn't need to advance too high. Zaur are a second alternative, but they have expensive advancement for both intelligence and dexterity. The scores aren't crippling though and the character definitely has its appeal.
So in short, female elves are the best spell casters, dwarves are some of best meleeists, and human males make the best generalists. Urgoths and thralls posses real disadvantages. The other race choices are adequate for a little variety.
Incidentally, the useless honor attribute costs the same for all races.
You can read more from Briar at www.landofsnow.com/dungeonlords