I haven't seen this as problem in any of my games.
This can happen in 2 instances I'm aware of:
1) When 2 of your 50% castles border same province. The only castle that takes 50% of neighboring resources is fortified city and he takes lots of money, time and points while OTOH has low defense value. Heck you have to pay 750 gold to make one of these and takes a lot of time as well. This fortification is simply NOT the one you will choose if your playing strategy involves building lots of fortifications. All other fortifications offer either better defense value or more cost/effective economy, while they drain fewer resources and allow you to produce those commanders (which usually cost 1 resource BTW). Ulm is definitely nation that will find fortified city most useful (low gold/high resource units), but other nations …
2) More then 2 castles border same province and drain all resources. This is extremely rare and, since you apparently went for "castle spree" tactic (turtle more like it
) you can build another castle in that province you want to produce your sorceress. Castles don't drain resources from each other so that province will get its resources back (and reduce resources in surrounding castles).
In Dom II there are LOTS of sites with powerful special units (like Grey Knights, possibly most powerful cavalry in game I’ve seen, rivaling even man cavalry – not self healing but ethereal and practically same combat stats). Building castle in such provinces is quite sound tactic even if you have fortified city as fortification, since it will enable you to produce those special units faster and protect that province better from surprise attacks.
IMHO A solution isn't bad (probably the hardest thing would be to program AI to use new feature) but B would increase micromanagement by several thousand %, so I’m against it even more now after so much efforts have been made to reduce micromanagement.
[ October 07, 2003, 15:46: Message edited by: Daynarr ]
Re: Castles and resource-sucking : a suggestion
Hybrid Mode
