My comment were more along the lines that rather then the game trying to compensate.for the edge strategies, they simply are being eliminated.
First it was mountains. Pursuing a full on chokepoint strategy hinders points a lot. The whole point of score gating was to discourage, but not prevent, this. There have been plenty of ideas purposed to prevent full on isolation of towns. Instead, they have just been eliminated. This is not good enough, but in a game where you are supposed to be creator it just feels...wrong.
Actually, a chokepoint strategy.... or outright barring off an area.... doesnt have to hinder points whatsoever, which was part of the problem with these tactics. You need only protect one town with the unbreakable-type tactic in order to freely win..... which leaves all of your OTHER towns plenty of room to go crazy and spam points for you. It might actually make it EASIER to get points that way.
Not to mention.... the Creator guy in the game clearly isnt COMPLETELY powerful; he still ends up relying on the people quite a bit for a lot of things. There's lots of stuff the player cannot do directly or control directly, so I dont think it goes against the feel of the game too much.
As for the idea of increasing mountain/lake cost, I dont think it'd work. Why? You still only need so many mountains to produce the unbreakable ring or whatever..... actually, considering the current rules and loss conditions, I'm pretty sure you can, technically, do this type of strategy with only FOUR mountains on either side, for a total of 8 to wall up on both sides. This only just now occurred to me, but.... yeah, it'd work. Even if that wasnt the case, and you had to ring an entire town, it still wouldnt be THAT hard, really. You might take some damage elsewhere as a result of the used AP, but.... not necessarily, and chances are you'd finish the ring long before things got bad, at which point it'd stop mattering. Particularly during calmer points.
As for the fixed numbers idea, it'd have to be a bloody small number to really stop the problem.
Also, from a mechanical standpoint, I dont think it's actually necessary at all for the mountains and such to be there, any more than it is for the dead forests to be in there. And the player really does already have alot of options with the tiles that ARE there. Adding them back in just to have them seems to create enough problems to just make it not worth the hassle. Particularly if other things then get changed just because of that (which could then lead to MORE problems).
And one other brief related note: Skadi's "mountains everywhere" token ability, that one can cause this whole problem pretty much instantly. I had cause to use it in my game earlier, and.... yeeeeaahhh. If you've already hit the right score when you use that (which I had), all threat is pretty much stopped once that ability fires off because everything is downright covered in mountains. Figured I'd mention it before I forget.
Enough input from me for now though, I'm off to bed. I'll be interested to see what comes of all of this later.
