Arrakis in Dune: Spice Wars is a planet full of mystery, opportunity, and danger. You may find yourself like the Atreides in Frank Herbert’s novel racing to find solutions to best adapt to an untenable situation. To help you ease into Arrakis’ harsh environments, we’ve consulted with the best Fremen leaders and compiled a list of strategy tips for you to heed.
Scout With Ornithopters
Knowing the lay of the land is a resource in itself in Dune: Spice Wars, as you’ll need to exploit the land to best establish your faction and vie for dominance over Arrakis. All factions have access to the humble ornithopter, an air unit designed solely for surveying, supporting the troops, and harvester operations.
All regions will have a number of points of interest that only ornithopters can survey. Each region will have a guaranteed village, which can easily be spotted by either dark brown or light gray land under the point of interest, as this represents hard ground safe from sandworm activity.
Because you’ll know exactly where villages are even without revealing them, it’s worthwhile to use the ornithopters to manually scout secondary points of interest, which reveal interactables or resources that can define an early game strategy, more than knowing the position of any single village. Later, to minimize micromanagement it may be wise to put Ornithopters on the auto-recon mode to scout the map for you.
Prioritize Valuable Provinces for Capture
You’ll need to spend the Authority resource to claim new villages with every claim increasing the cost of the next. In effect, it’ll become harder and harder to simply walk into any region and take it over, so especially in the early stages of the game, before you find ways to increase Authority generation, it’s highly advised to claim regions with the most valuable resource potential.
Spice, then Plascrete and Water
Speaking of resource potential, the most important resource is Spice, represented by locations with purple dust. Spice is vital as players will need to pay a Spice Tax or Bribe every 20 days. Failing to do so will place negative effects on the player, which will hurt in the long run.
Whatever Spice isn’t spent on taxes or bribes will be sold for Solari, the main cash currency in the Dune universe, which is necessary for building construction, unit recruitment, and trade.
After Spice, the most valuable resources are Plascrete and Water. Plascrete is necessary for building structures and for the upkeep of said infrastructure, so it makes sense to have a Plascrete factory in every village, due to its cheap cost and to ensure you can build at a steady pace.
Water is crucial as it’s necessary for claiming new villages and recruiting and maintaining units. If Water production goes into the negative, you can expect rebellions and uprisings across your villages, which will shut down resource production and take the attention away of your military, leaving you vulnerable to attacks from raiders and other factions.
Trade With Other Factions
It’s highly likely that players will run out of a resource, usually Plascrete, Solari, or even Spice, which will slow down development and expansion. Even though technically all factions are at war from the start of any given match, you can still trade with them. The developers included a helpful deal tracker system that easily lets you determine whether a deal would succeed and which resources are in demand to get an optimal trade.
Auto-recall on Harvesters
The Spice harvesting operations of Houses Atreides, and Harkonnen, as well as the Smugglers rely on giant machine harvesters to sift the Spice from the deserts of Arrakis. However, these noisy and disturbing vehicles agitate the enigmatic sandworms and occasionally they’ll come looking to shut off your noisy operations.
Luckily, the Imperium uses aerial carry-all transporters that can pick up harvesters and take them back to safety. All harvesters have an auto-recall option, which will let harvesters evacuate as soon as a sandworm is detected, which will be hugely useful, especially in the mid and late games when you have multiple refineries running across the surface of Arrakis.
Build Airfields in Combat Zones
Since most units have limited speed and your empire can become quite large, quickly responding to threats will become all the more challenging. Airfields are the main way the Imperial Houses and the Smugglers can reposition their forces at a quick pace. Though you likely won’t need an airfield in every village, your most valuable regions and territories that are closest to the enemy will likely see a lot of activity and can greatly benefit from an airfield to promptly get troops to conflict zones quickly.
Fremen players can disregard this point, as they have sandworms for all their transportation needs. Unlike airfields that have limited range and require construction first, the Fremen simply need available Thumpers and sight on the area to where they would like to travel, which gives them incredible flexibility of movement and range.
Supplies are a Huge Deal
For a planet so harsh as Arrakis, food, water, and fuel are hard to come by to maintain large-scale military operations in enemy territory. All units have a supply rating, which defines how long they can operate outside of friendly territory.
Unlike many other strategy games that place only modest penalties for running out of supplies, running out of supplies in Dune: Spice Wars is downright deadly. Once your unit’s supply rating goes down to zero they’ll quickly begin hemorrhaging health and can die within a few seconds, so it’s critical to judge distance correctly and manage your troops’ supplies. Technology and special abilities can help mitigate the drain of supplies, but that’ll be a concern throughout the entire game.
Heal and Replenish Near Villages
The best way to manage supplies is to huddle around villages, controlled or neutral, or around your main base to restock and prepare for the next expedition. Replenishing unit health, however, only occurs when near friendly villages or from unit abilities. A neat trick to minimize supply loss when attacking a neutral village is to first move your assault forces next to the village, restock on supplies, and then attack.
Actively Pillage
Except for the honorable House Atreides, all other factions can pillage settlements for Solari. This is an incredibly profitable way of earning extra cash and for some factions, such as the Smugglers, this is actually a critical action for a victory through Hegemony. Pillaging can be especially useful if there are clusters of villages grouped close together so that you can quickly raid one and then the next while minimizing supply drain and time on the march.
Track Directions of Fremen Raiding Parties
You may not see any at the beginning, but Arrakis is home to a number of neutral Fremen Sietches, which you can detect over time, trade, and later, ally with. However, these Sietches will occasionally send raiding parties towards faction-controlled villages to liberate them from your rule. By carefully observing the direction of movement of these raiding parties, you can get a decent idea of where the Sietch may be located and then work to try and detect it.
Dune: Spice Wars is available on PC.
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