Ok, couple of things I've noticed with this patch:
1. Certain siege units are damn near invulnerable; like the battering ram, which has a ton of health, and instantly melts any melee unit that attacks it. And boy are you in trouble if that rolling nightmare grabs power from a ruins tile. Just ONE of those might be able to obliterate an entire city unless you can somehow get a horde of ranged guys attacking it. The rest of the siege units are just absurdly strong.... currently, before the "Woes" are added, it's a pretty bad idea to actually build siege-producing buildings, and even then I'm not so sure.
2. Even WITH siege units though, there's one thing that suddenly seems massively imbalanced, which is defense towers. There's a couple of problems with this; first of all, the defense they give is worthless. The siege attacks are simply too strong for it to matter (and heck, I'm not actually sure it's doing ANYTHING against those), and the defense also doesnt matter against normal units, because they'lre going to take tons of hits to do much damage to buildings ANYWAY. But even beyond all of that.... as best I can tell, there's only one unit in the game that can defeat a tower (not counting gods here), which is the Trojan Horse. Even the strongest of other units would take a squillion hits to pop one of these. Any city with a tower, it's normal buildings can be lost, but unless a Trojan Horse is coming at it, the actual hall will be unbreakable, because that tower will never shatter. And that's just with ONE tower.... let alone more.
3. While I'm still on medium difficulty in my current game (dont want to restart again just yet!), I'm trying to play without smiting buildings at all. Finding this..... difficult. The main problem: A lack of low-level tactical options. There's about four of these: 1, the unit level-up thing 2, Commandment, and 3, placing a ruins tile, and 4, smiting a land tile. These ARE useful, but quite situational. If I've got a city producing too much crap, like, say, the red guys took some big hits from random things, and the blues, who were previously producing at a similar rate, are now stronger and producing WAY too many, well... there's not much I can do to STOP that flow.
And placing buildings somewhere often doesnt seem to help; the only buildings that do anything offensive are unit-producers, and these wont help in many situations, because you have no way to get them to specific areas without dragging the entire army there.... and even then, that's only if you're targeting the enemy side. Not to mention they produce slowly, and doing something like building a new city is a very slow process. If there's a problem like a group of bandits appearing BEHIND a rear city (which has happened a few times), there's next to nothing that can be done about it with normal units (except dragging the entire enemy army behind it, which is unlikely to work anyway). When this has happened, I've pretty much HAD to place mythological units to deal with this, because there's just no other options. All of the normal units are too busy with the constant war in the center of the board. This is making those unit types (mythological) seem abnormally important, and I'll end up devoting like 2 or 3 cities on a side JUST to producing the resources that can summon those things, since they're the only things that can get at specific spots. Heck, even counting the rest of the mythological menus, there's nothing in those that helps with that sort of situation. Now, I'm not really sure how often it's intended that I use the mythological units, but I feel like I'm relying on them a bit too much. But maybe I *am* supposed to be using them alot past a certain point? Heck if I know.
Now, granted, just 3 or 4 bandits back behind a city isnt really that much of a threat, but I've been considering that sort of thing more of a test; trying to find ways to simply defeat something that's back there without using Commandment (because dragging entire armies around EVERY SINGLE TIME something like that attacks seems a bit off to me), and without throwing an angry god at them every time (not that I can yet anyway). And.... yeah, so far it's not happening. Well, not without Ice Giants and the like.
Now it's totally possible that I'm approaching things in simply the wrong way here (which, honestly, is likely what I'm doing! I love strategy games but I can also be rather dense about them), so if there's any tips or such, or something that I'm outright missing that'd be a big help.
I do think though that the siege bit needs tweaking, and that the towers need some changes, to be useful for defense while not having 999,999 health.
