Re: Warhammer Dwarfs, balancetest version 0.6
Ah. I wasn't seeing that thematic issue since I was assuming that castles were not going to be isolated(continuous lines of castles makes for easier defense/combining of forces) so I saw it as one community just getting larger/extending their line of fortification. I see 'few in number' more as a matter of troop/commander ratios.
I was thinking that the high admin was nice for the gold gain. The thought was that you had a pretty strong impulse to make castles on top of the gold/silver mines you encountered(hehe).
But anyways, I'm trying to think about what having high gold/high resource troops actually does. Gold limits how many you can buy in total, and how many you can keep lying around because of upkeep. It limits your mage and castle production, since otherwise they are the main gold sink. Resource cost doesn't do that; it merely limits your rate of production for a given castle and gives/takes away design points from your pretender by allowing or discouraging taking a sloth scale.
So then, high resource cost troops merely mean that from any one given castle, you can't produce many units per turn. Most people agree that production scales are generally not particularly useful after the first two years or so, since you have enough castles to produce the troops you want.
As far as resources go, you have two real options: to make each castle essentially independent, or force the player to cluster castles together to have enough troop production? How fast do you want dwarfish armies to be able to be produced?
Note that all these considerations have nothing to do with absolute resource cost. The only things that matter are differences between units in your lineup, and a comparison between the resource cost of your troops and how many resources your castles provide.
High resource costs for your troops and the castle resource bonus essentially cancel each other out. Well, not quite--it makes indy troops way easier to mass(did we mention that dwarfish infantry is immune to standard arrow fire?) and it neuters your early-game when you have a low dom score. As does giving harder to construct castles. I'm just worried that your momentum is going to be absolutely terrible early game with this setup.
By the way, giving Runesmith better research also deals with Prospector spam. The marginal cost of making a non-Runesmith goes up. And it gives you a bit of an incentive to research up early, because you actually have a chance at getting to the artifacts first(though I personally don't see much use for the artifacts with these guys--they seem more a mid-game nation. Their entire shtick is being able to leverage low-mid research to terrifying effect).
I haven't gotten the chance to play multiplayer with these guys, so ultimately I'm just theorycrafting here. I'd really like a few games to get a feel of what the nation would do under actual conditions before changing the castle types(except for swamp fort...that one has to go). Because ultimately, Dwarfs can just roll over AI opponents like nobody's business, and that isn't really a fair metric.
--Oh, and having sucky/hard to make forts just gives you more of an incentive to be extremely aggressive. With 5-6 turn forts and your siege bonuses, it might actually be faster to take someone else's fort than build one yourself. In Dominions, you're going to have a bunch of forts no matter what. It just seems that a defensive playstyle with mostly national commanders is superior to aggressive play with indy commanders as your troop-movers, as far as theme goes for the dwarves.
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