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Hope this is an okay place to put this

To be perfectly clear, I love this game. I love RTS games, and a dungeon keeper style game is amazing. I could talk for a long time about how I wish dungeons were more long-term, like fortresses in dwarf fortress, rather than doing a mission and then restarting after completing objectives, but this game is meant to be RTS and it does a good job at it.

No project is perfect; the combat AI of Underlords is very underwhelming, and control over minion actions (like sounding a full retreat) is also lackluster. However, this issue is supposed to be addressed by the next DLC/patch. So instead, I'd like to call to attention the themes of the Underlord minions.

We've got:

workers (goblins), gnarlings (orcs), Augres (trolls/ogres), witch doctors, cultists, beastmasters (...idk), Crackpot (alchemist), Necromancer, Succubus, Vampire, Chunder (Zelda Goron), spirit (head), Wraith (undead)

Bafu (demon/eldritch?), Oculus (eldritch), Skarg (demon), Shadow (demon(?))

Gargoyle & Sentinal (gothic statue), Ember Demon (Flame Atronach), Frost Weaver (Frost Atronach)

Archon (kinda Lich), Behemoth (Diablo looking demon), Eternal, Colossus

There's no unifying theme, really, besides 'oooh, eeeeviiill'. Don't mistake me, the gathering of evil under one Underlord is cool, but if every Underlord has the same units how is one meant to tell the difference? Sure the ingame reasoning is by color code, but in the campaign fight with multiple underlords, I couldn't really follow who was saying what, as I was too busy playing the game to memorize their distant dungeon cores. Having a unit theme following the dungeon theme would help immensely.

Let's sort through the themes used here: overworld evil (goblins, etc.), underground/night evil (witch doctor, augre, vampire, etc.), demon evil (cultist, succubus, ember demon, bafu, shadow(?), etc.), eldritch evil (cultist, oculus, shadow(?)) gothic evil (statues and vampire), undead evil (vampire, necromancer, Archon). And a big golden Colossus statue.

This setup gave a very Sauron feel of gathering all evil to me, but having the option to have units renamed and remodeled to an evil theme? Even if they're just cosmetic changes, sign me up for a complete replay as an Eldritch Abomination commanding the hive mind of lesser beings. Or maybe I'm feeling goth one day and decide to go for some statues and Dracula-esque vampires (also, no werewolves is a shame). Channel my inner Vulcan and go Augre, have amazing traps and a dungeon filled with half-mechanical monsters.

There are some amazing possibilities to be done with just retexturing and renaming (retexture rooms too, seeing a tentacled abomination reading in a mundane library would be rather disappointing) to fit different dungeon themes, and if it came out as DLC I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
This is definitely an ok place to put anything you want to discuss! We're always prowling forums here and there and I finally found a moment to do some rounds and I certainly found the suggestion interesting and fun. There's nothing wrong with what you're asking and I have to say that most people would love the ability to theme their units and indeed their rooms with their Dungeon Themes. It's something we've discussed in the past and something that has been partially done with Empire Units (See the Heart of Gold campaign and of course corrupted empire units which are simple texture swaps.)

Unfortunately something on the scale you're asking for simply isn't possible for a studio such as ours, and even if we did have the resources to do so this is the kind of thing we'd have to sell separately for a price, and we'd have to ensure we made our investment back on it. In fact in terms of sheer art team investiture, the kind of thing you're asking for would be larger than any single expansion in WFTOs history.

Firstly let's have a look at the Units from the sounds of what you're looking for we'd need something similar to a worker skin which you'll have seen as part of Dungeon Themes, achievement rewards or the to create something like a Worker Skin, which often includes a concept, new sculpt/mesh and texture plus a quick animation rigup (provided they're using the same rig, a new rig is much longer) and maybe some VFX work though we'll excluide that.

So for a worker skin, it takes just over a working week from concept to completion with estimated times of:

~ 1 Working day for a concept - Concept artist
~ 5-7 Working days for the Model to be taken through to completion -3D Artist
~ 2-3 Working days for the texture - Texture Artist

Our team is extremely small we actually only have two permanent artists, and we try to avoid bringing contractors in if we can help it. As such we actually only have a single Concept/Texture artist and a 3D Artist as well as an animator.

That means our internal art is locked down the moment we start putting something into production.

If we were to assume producing a new unit skin is a best-case scenario of 8 Working Days. Then we expand that to the range of basic Underlord Units (the ones that you regularly encounter in gameplay, not including Crucible, MPD or Empire Units) then we're looking at the following numbers:

25 Common Units (Living Units, Titans, Beasts, Elementals, Spawned Units)
8*25 = 200 Working Days

Then if we add all the Dungeon Themes that are primarily associated to Underlords so excluding: Arcane, Dark Arcane, Magnanimous, Empire, Dwarf, Kasita Silver that leaves 8+3 from the upcoming expansion

8*25*11= 2,200 Working Days = 6.02 Working Years excluding any extras such as VFX, SFX, Unit Portraits, Text Assets. This also excludes any additional overheads such as production overheads/organisation, support from the code team and implementation of assets and of course animation support.

Divided between our two artists in the appropriate ratio this would be:

1,375 (3.7 Years) Working 3D Art Time
825 (2.2 Years) Working 2D Art Time

Now obviously these numbers are likely very inflated, I'm sure that are many places we could cut corners given appropriate planning but it's clear that such a feature would be impossible without bringing in additional contractors, vastly increasing the cost of producing any of these assets.

The only way to approach it as such would be small, targeted unit skin packs, priced at an appropriate level to see a good Return On Investment. Unfortunately I don't think there's enough evidence that there'll be enough of a takeup from our playerbase to justfiy this approach, further it might damage our image as the store pages become flooded with cosmetic DLCs.

Reskinning rooms has similar bottlenecks. Dungeon Themes are already the most time expensive single thing that we do and each consists of a number of corridoor walls, ceiling tiles, floor tiles, Dungeon Core, worker theme, door frames etc.

A full Dungeon Theme currently would take about 3-4 working weeks to complete from concept to final state, not including SFX or VFX. Each room in the game consists of a number of tiles, props and walls, adding each room to a Dungeon Theme would as such dramatically increase the amount of work needed to complete a Dungeon Theme.

With 16 basic rooms in the game, excluding bridges (stone bridge is actually already themed!) and assuming each room has about 8-9 floor tiles, 4-5 wall variations and 1-3 props you're likely increasing the work required for a single Dungeon Theme by a factor of 6-8.

Now something that takes a working month would likely take half a working year, again dramatically increasing the cost.

The biggest problem with all this is it leaves us unable to work on anything new, would players truly appreciate us exploring these options instead of expanding the game and introducing new things to the gameplay? I think it would be quite difficult to swing.

With all this said I still believe it's a great idea and I for one would absolutely love to see more variation in units, or tying units appearance to themes. But the work required is extraordinary and beyond the scope of what our team can accomplish at this stage in our development. Perhaps it's something we can explore more in the future? :)