I.... am not sure on the Golem changes. I think this makes them less awesomely useful 
I gotta play and find out though.
The idea is the opposite. Almost no one uses them now, so this is to incentivize people to actually do so while not making them game-breaking, heh.
Yeah, most experienced players avoid them due to the current costs. The AI increase simply was too much. Its why I would only take em if I felt I was insane enough. These changes are radical, but they do make them a lot more useful. Not to forget, one of the golems requires it to be on the frontlines or it dies eventually (can't remember which one).
King
They always seemed to be a Superweapon to me. Turning them into just-another-fortress seems it may ruin their coolness.
Hmmmmm.... I just don't know...
Cept fortresses can only stay in the system they are built in. But I hear you. Originally though, they weren't being used. They needed something fresh to make them more useful. Why rebuild a Golem before this, if you can build another one of your fleets without an AI cost. I am not saying this is good or bad yet because I have yet to play a game with these settings, so this is theory crafting on the changes atm.
And I hear you, too -- I didn't mean to imply otherwise. I fixated on the fortress comparison, which I don't particularly agree with, but it's not like I think this is the end-all change to golems and they can never be changed again.
The one thing that I
am pretty set on, at this stage, is that they
must not have any AI Progress cost associated with them. They were just too risky for the style of people who tend to play AI War, when designed in that fashion; I thought it would work well, but I'm not exaggerating when I say it seems like most of the playerbase never used them in real play, and many seem not to have even tried capturing them more than once or twice for fun. Personally, I know I've never used them in a real game, just for testing and fun, which is a clue right there. Even once they were rebalanced down from being so AIP-costly in recent times, that still wasn't enough for me to use them at all.
Okay, so now we have a superweapon that has no permanent-to-the-game cost. Metal and crystal are easily renewable, and making these cost knowledge makes little sense, so that's pretty much eliminating any possibility of permanent cost -- AIP and knowledge being the only two finite resources.
Without any sort of real cost, and with the ability to repair the golems after their initial activation (which people really seemed to want to keep in past discussions), that gets into dangerous territory. One other thing that many folks could agree on was that superweapons have killed many other RTS games they otherwise enjoyed, as it became a race to get the superweapon first, removing the need for any other strategies.
So from that angle, even these superweapons need some sort of limitation. With no possible limitations in permanent cost, that means it has to be some sort of functionality limitation. But what sort of limits on a superweapon? If I weaken them, then they just turn into oversized starships, which is not very interesting. They might be fun to look at and have a few interesting abilities, but ultimately they occupy the same conceptual/strategic space then, which is lame for something so large.
Okay, so I can't weaken them, and I can't do permanent costs... the only thing I can think of is that they have to be limited in where they can be used. So, I thought to myself, where is the point of using them, and where does it get abusive? Well, most people like to use them either for raiding (by far the most fun thing, sweeping through enemy planets) or as part of general front-line offensives. Some people seem likely to use these as the ultimate defenders, which is very bad as that makes it impossible for the AI to win because the golem is more powerful than anything that might slip through -- hence the warp gate proximity limitation.
But then we come back to the raiding and offense. Going on a spree with a golem is fun, but my big fear with them is that players would use them to rush the home planets of the AI, or other key targets, and would win summarily based on just having the golem. That's when you get into the situation of the game being broken and everyone losing interest in it. That's why they always had AIP costs before, but that led to almost no one using them at all because of the conservative nature of the game.
Also, I really wanted these to be more than just oversized starships, in more than just abilities. These needed to occupy some new strategic layer, ideally. Something not seen yet in the game. Well, so, that led me to the supply thing. That fixes seemingly everything: players can't rush the AI home bases without doing a lot of preparation first, players can still steamroll nearby planets in a very fun way, and it creates a new dynamic where players have to think about connecting supply if they want to keep using their golems on a spree. That golem can still go on a spree, but it has to have a train of colony ships capturing planets behind it.
Does that take away some of the unfettered fun of the golems? Sure. But the only time anyone was experiencing that was when they were "just messing around" unless they weren't really playing a serious campaign. The way I see it, the current solution is slightly less fun, but
way more fun than not using them at all. And if you get right down to it, "unfettered fun" has no place in a serious strategy game. I say that somewhat facetiously, but seriously it's all about the fettering; if your opponent isn't giving you a run for your money, it isn't much fun. Or, well it might be once or twice, but that's it.
Again, it's not that I'm stuck on this way of doing it. I'm open to the fact that there may be an alternate concept that might work. I just don't see it, and it's taken me 8 months to bring golems from their initial concept to
this stage. I suspect this won't be their last evolutionary step in any case, but I'm feeling like this is a hugely positive step for them for anyone who wants to use them in actual real gameplay rather than "just playing around" time.
I'm very interested in hearing reactions to this in actual practice, but at any rate I figured folks might like to know the rationale behind the decisions there. It wasn't idly done, and I've been mulling this for quite a long time. In the end, my perception was that I'm giving the fans what they want, more or less -- as much as I can without breaking the game, anyway.
