Castles and Citadels and stuff

[Arryn]

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:
This was actually proposed Last November in this thread , but it's a good idea to mention it again probably.

Thank you. Patrik and Apoger have good ideas. I also have grumbled (to myself) about having to pay the entire price of a building up front. But doing so is common in strategy games; exceptions like MOO3 are rare. If you could pay for cities at 150/turn you'd probably see more players use them.

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Arryn:
Obviously this would be such a dramatic change, and hard enough to code, that it would likely have to wait for a Dom 3, but still, I am a bit surprised that no one appears to have proposed it. Well, until now.

Hard to code? I do not think so. Unbalancing? Probably. There would certainly be a strong incentive to start with a CHEAP fort as a result, since you can always tear it down and build a better one! The short-term gain of a "good" fort, with a benefit you are probably unable to effectively use for a while, is definitely not worth nation points, and Zen's love of the wizard tower would be totally destroyed by this, since it functionally equates a 120 point national cost to a 2-turn semi-delayed start in troop recruitment. The cost of tearing down your starting watch tower and erecting a wizard's tower in its place would not be so great that it would warrant the expenditure of 120 points, as it does now. Certain types of fortification would thus predominate in an environment where you could freely choose what fort to build, and the nation point cost of forts would have to be entirely rebalanced. The actual code would be fairly trivial, rebalancing the game far less so.

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Norfleet:
There would certainly be a strong incentive to start with a CHEAP fort as a result, since you can always tear it down and build a better one!

You wouldn't necessarily be able to tear the fort down. Even if you could, starting with a watchtower instead of a castle would put you far enough behind that most nations that you would struggle just to catch up, let alone match their enemies. Mictlan, R'lyeh, and C'Tis are just about the only nations that can afford the production hit from taking a sloth scale or a fort with less than 30% admin.

[Arryn]

If you paid for the fortified city with DPs, that's what you begin with, and you can build anything up to and including that type. You just wouldn't be limited to only being able to build that expensive choice as you are now in Dom 2.

It would be a bad idea to permit buying a cheap fort during god design and allowing the building of better forts in the game. A really bad idea. IMO.

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Arryn:
If you paid for the fortified city with DPs, that's what you begin with, and you can build anything up to and including that type. You just wouldn't be limited to only being able to build that expensive choice as you are now in Dom 2.

Well, what defines "up to"?

Do you mean in cost paid, so that paying for a Wizard's Tower means you can build all fort types? Or do you mean their order on the fort list, starting with Mausoleum and working up to Mountain Citadel, so that somebody taking the (godawful) Mountain Citadel would be able to build any fort?

[Gateway103]

One possibilty I suppose is to have a "preference" and/or "discount" for a choosing fortification type. This could be faster build time, cheaper cost, morale boost for garrison units, so on. And penalties otherwise.

Alternatively, you can restrict possible type placement based on terrain. E.g. all are buildable at grassland, but Fortified City/Mausoleum not allowed in Forest, so on... While a nationally choosen type ignore such restrictions (or is buildable but are higher prices than normal).

My apology if these ideas were presented already.

-Gateway103

[Arryn]

Originally posted by Norfleet:
Or do you mean their order on the fort list, starting with Mausoleum and working up to Mountain Citadel, so that somebody taking the (godawful) Mountain Citadel would be able to build any fort?

This method.