Dhem - The Allspring - Version 0.2 (now with pics)

[Squirrelloid]

Holy exponential growth batman.

Ok, in addition to the issues we discussed on IRC, the air elementals are really not ok in the quantities you can acquire them. This is a systematic problem that has to do with them not having any upkeep, so as long as you pay for the mages you can generate arbitrarily many of them.

End of year 2 i literally had 2 thousand of them floating around. I could not hire effective leaders for them fast enough. And that's after casualties from expanding and fighting a war (that the AI was losing badly). Basically, you quickly reach a point where the rate at which you can acquire new territory -> new income vastly outpaces the rate at which upkeep increases. And I totally overdid it, given I couldn't use more than half the elementals I was creating.

On the other hand, increasing cost/upkeep of the mages is not, by itself, the answer. The very random distribution of their paths means you need to buy an awful lot of them to get the useful ones - if upkeep was more than at present you'd never acquire enough mages to get ones that matter. Further, even present upkeep may be far too much, because I was supporting that obscene upkeep burden by stupidly fast expansion.

Further, the way you currently have units and upkeep structured, there's no way you're going to be able to even keep up in research. Fortunately, at the moment, you don't even have to. Unfortunately, that's because what they do is horribly broken.

Basically, free units you don't pay upkeep on is a bad idea. LA Ermor taught us this.

[Illuminated One]

Hmm, instead of a scout give them an immobile magicless immortal with 4 shapes, each shape can summon elementals. Give it an upkeep of 10000 (you'll never have any money). Make their mages (relatively cheaply) summonable (and maybe recruitable for 0gp at their cap only) and keep the summoning in (add some spells for castles, if possible also for labs and temples, and or maybe a high alchemy bonus whenever you want to build something). You get a nation that is not the slighest interested in their population, not even to the extend of taxing them (but also not killing them).

[Radio_Star]

One possible solution to the current dynamic would be to give Speakers the option of a shape change. The career progression, so to speak, would be Page ----> Speaker -----> Overseer; the Overseers would lose the ability to summon and probably some/all paths, keep some research ability, but they would have increased leadership and (much?) lower upkeep.

This lets you put Speaker upkeep sky high to balance out elemental summons, but the ones that can't keep up (low paths) retire to administration and a lower pay grade.

In effect, you get to roll the dice on good paths as often as you want but aren't burdened unnecessarily by the whittles.