For Delves I felt as if the slaves were largely just a number go up thing and little else to it. Maybe if they rolled out the blood night mechanics to all of the Delves with different rewards based on your faction or something. Though originally the Blood Nights always flet like more of a looming deadline. Don't do enough and you'll start weakening. Same deal with Malus too, gotta keep your supply of potion ingredients going or you'd go batshit. Though now Malus' effects for the potion are far less odious.
Been trying Lokhir out and I think the biggest issue with the dark elves slave mechanic when compared to the chaos dwarfs is that it's just not all that interesting.
It's kind of the worst of both worlds to me in that you feel this constant pressure to keep your slave intake going, but you also don't feel the benefits of doing so all that much.
Even if I keep my slave numbers high I still find myself hurting for gold early on because all you get from slaves is a flat increase to your economy buildings, and if you run out of slaves the same buildings just run on low power mode until you get more.
Chaos dwarfs have really highlighted just how lackluster a lot of races mechanics are.
That being said, Lokhir himself as well as his faction are a lot of fun though.
I really like the focus on Black Arks, even if they can be really finicky with things like transferring units to and from them, or the fact that they can't reinforce at all unless they are maintaining a blockade on a coastal settlement and if the garrison chooses to sally out your black ark won't reinforce if it's your lord on land being attacked, or vice versa if it's your black ark being attacked.
Once I understood some of this the black arks became pretty fun. I really like how you can use them purely as support for your land-based armies, which allows for things like replenishment while raiding or sieging if you use the black ark expansion stance or whatever it's called, or they can work kind of like the ogre camps where you can field really expensive armies early on that you just shove in the black arks to vastly cut down on their upkeep cost.
I think when I first tried the dark elves I totally misunderstood what the black arks were, and just assumed that they were a temporary unit that you just used for the bombardments, which would definitely explain why I dropped them pretty quickly
