How to solve castling effect?

[Cohen]

I believe raising the gem cost and path level required of all SCs summoning spell, and nerfing some pretenders should be nice too ...

Added to the issue about the Ghost Rider.

I'd improve the effect of scales too ...
Rabe idea is good too.

[ May 26, 2004, 12:20: Message edited by: Cohen ]

[Jondifool]

Well my suggestion does
introduce a temple condition "damaged".

A temple is then automaticly damaged when a provinse is conquered. It takes an comander aktion to destroy a damaged temple.
A new temple can first be build if an enemy damaged temple is destroyed ( to prevent different damaged temples in the same province).

If a province is retaken a damaged temple can be rebuild for halv the cost or what ever cost is appropiate.

[Anglachel]

Or simply not have temples auto-destroy upon conquering of a province. Require a commander to take out a turn to dismantle it much like someone dismantling thier own buildings in thier own province. Make the timing of the dismantling of said building take place after movement and combat giving time for trying to retake the province and protect the temple. Of course this wouldn't really solve castling but would remove the need to use castles to protect temples somewhat anyways.

Just a thought.

[Cohen]

The problem isn't only to defend your temples:

Castles in every province raise gold by admin.
Doubles production everywhere if you need.
Protects your mages researching inside.
Protects your troops from Ghost Rider spell and similar.
Slow the enemy conquer of your territory, giving them 1 turn more to trapeze/teleport their army sllaughtering SCs there.

Probably I'm forgotting something.

[LintMan]

Originally posted by Cohen:
The problem isn't only to defend your temples:

Castles in every province raise gold by admin.
Doubles production everywhere if you need.
Protects your mages researching inside.
Protects your troops from Ghost Rider spell and similar.
Slow the enemy conquer of your territory, giving them 1 turn more to trapeze/teleport their army sllaughtering SCs there.

Probably I'm forgotting something.

I think temple protection is the biggest motivation for castle spamming. Castles do all the things you say, but:
- The typically "spammed" castles is the cheapie low-admin one, so the admin benefits of spamming it are not that great.
- Similarly, for production concerns, you'd probably do far better with single high-admin castles surrounded by uncastled provinces than you would by spamming low-admin castles everywhere.

- You don't need spammed castles to protect your researchers. (Or at least I don't; concentrating researchers in a few castled provinces seems more than sufficient.)

Spammed castles will slow enemy advance, though, as you say. But I'm not sure if that by itself would justify the high cost/effort in doing so for most races.

I like the suggestions to make enemy temples need to be destroyed by a commander, rather than auto-destroyed when the province is taken. At the very least, this prevents Ghost Riders from hitting enemies for a 200 gold temple in addition to the province loss.

[Cohen]

For production it's far better having 1 castle x province, since they double the resources, instead of collecting a % of half of the amount of resources you could have with a castle built in.

You've only to spend more time gathering the troops in one army.

[Maltrease]

I don't think it doubles the resources. It only lets you use the full amount of resources available to the provence.

If I provence has 100 resources you would only be able to use 50 without putting a castle there.

However fortreses will draw their admin percentage from the full resource amount. So a fortified city next to the province would draw 50 resources... and another one on the other side would draw the remaining 50.

So if you place your castles correctly you would not be losing that many resources vs building a fortress in each provence.

This also allows you to draw the resources whre you need them (Heavy calvary for example) where if you built a castle in every provence you would not be able to do this.