Thank you for the reverting.
A) There is a group of players who use tactics involving these things.
B) And a smaller group who will cheese it to the ground.
C) And an even smaller group who will be upset that they are allowed to cheese it to the ground.
In the effort to please C you must make sure to not hurt A, otherwise you cause many more problems then you solve.
You bet. Hopefully this restores your enthusiasm?
You shouldn't have caved in on the mountains/lakes part imo, I actually agreed with your reasoning on removing them, it doesn't sound the slightest bit logical for there to be complaints about not allowing them on harder difficulties. (It actually kinda hurts my experience knowing that I could do that) Should ban them from harder difficulties, and allow cheat codes to make them available.
When I first bought this game and was doing tutorial I immediately thought of placing mountains/lakes before the age of monsters, and once I thought about it I immediately thought to myself "That's ALL it took?"
All I could think of doing is adding penalties or increasing the cost to putting your own mountains/lakes, but even then that won't be enough. I think it's justified to not allow them in expert/hard.
I don't look at it as caving on the mountains and lakes part -- I just think that removing that doesn't solve much anyhow, as there are too many ways to do the same thing even without the ability to place them (god tokens, etc). And if it's a problem when you can directly place them, it's going to be a problem downstream with the other issues, too. So why remove something that is fun, while at the same time not addressing the underlying problem? I would rather remove the thing that was hindering the fun, and then spend more time pondering the underlying issue and see if something can be thought up for that which doesn't hinder fun. That's why I did the rollback on the mountains and lakes, anyhow.
The best I've thought of is giving some military units (not the myth ones, but the normal ones) the ability to cross mountains. Or even perhaps certain units can build on / do something to mountain tiles that then enables other units to pass them, albeit slowly? Not that I know how in the heck ancient armies managed to deal with things like mountains and such (or if they did at all). But it does seem a little off to me (from a gameplay standpoint) that they are this sort of absolute and total wall against EVERYTHING.
That's probably a good idea for a way to differentiate some of the basic military units more anyhow, which we're always looking to do. Maybe one barracks unit per side could gain the mountainwalk ability, and perhaps the really slow and direct-attack siege units like battering ram and trojan horse could also get it. Anyone have any gut reactions to this?
On the note of the myth units.... maybe the costs on these guys are too low? I would be very definitely against the "place them anywhere" mechanic being changed with those guys, but it seems that they might be a bit too easy to use.
Dare I say it..... maybe a cooldown? Like the other myth-type stuffs? The cooldown mechanic DID prove to be a very good idea for tokens and god powers and stuff. Though this would be nowhere NEAR as long. After all, the human units have cooldowns too.... hmm. What if there was some building that didn't determine where you placed them, but instead determined how OFTEN you could place them? Like, you have this cooldown, for these guys, but it's reduced by building/doing more of something?
I admit I havent thought that one out too well, but you get the basic concept.
I think that the basic concept of "you are building too many of these, and that's bad" is sound. But I wouldn't want to create an artificial hard cap on them, because that again creates way too many limitations on possible strategies. I feel like the cooldowns falls under that realm. If I want to save up a bunch of resources for mythological units and then spend it all at once when I need it, I think that's a fine thing -- strategic reserves are great.
And I think that if we just straight-up increased costs of mythological units, then that would make the early game way too hard with them while not really addressing the endgame much for those people determined to spam them.
One potential solution that occurs to me is only allowing a certain number of each raw resource producer per town. That number could be something like 5 when it comes to rock quarries and woodcutters, but something more like 2 for seers. That way if you want tons of mythologicals, you also need to have a lot of towns. So there's no hard cap, but you do have to pay a certain price (in town count) to do this. Of course... higher town count means it's harder to lose via obliteration, and this also pushes the towns more towards being generic. I kinda like seeing those towns that are practically nothing but seers.
For mountains and lakes, you already have an algorithm that makes sure a town can't be cut off by smite, so why not apply that to mountains and lakes as well? Every random effect should also check that it's not cutting off the towns when it place mountains or lakes.
That could certainly be done -- the code isn't hard -- but I think that if I did that, the backlash would be severe. Maybe not as severe as the current one, but still up there. And it still doesn't stop the extreme bottlenecking and giant mazes that people could build; which I'm not sure if I'd even want to, on that last.
One thing is that when your units have nowhere to go in terms of not having enemies in sight or a way to get to an enemy town, they currently just stand there. Which is all well and good, but there could be... something else that happens in those circumstances. They show some sort of little "boredom" flag and go bandit after a few turns of being bored? They spontaneously develop the ability to fly after a few turns? Not sure how I could thematically work that last one in.
But basically, not preventing players from walling off SOME towns, but causing Bad Things when they wall off all of them (and walling off just some towns can lead to Bad Things through the natural course of events, anyhow).
The bandit problem is indeed one of a much higher incentive to build monsters, which are a. directly placeable b. not susceptible to local (ie. town) supply shortages c. much more powerful. I think a purely monster build should be possible, but it should be very difficult. If towns could get supplies from other towns, but at a higher cost, then units wouldn't be so susceptible to supply disruptions. Furthermore, myth units could demand tribute every couple of turns or they'd eventually go berserk, joining either the enemy (if he has the resources for it) or the bandits' side, or just attacking whatever is in sight.
The finished goods things between towns is so that you can control what sort of units are built per town, and I wouldn't want to change that. In terms of purely monster builds... I hadn't thought about that, but I guess I see your point as far as that being desirable. Having them demand tribute is a pretty interesting idea, actually; so the more units of that sort that you have, the more ongoing resources you need. Almost like the "cumulative upkeep" cost on some cards in MTG.
Aye. Part of the problem though is that nothing can shoot through the mountain barrier. Most siege units do not need to directly impact a city, they just need to be in position to aim at it, so alot of anti-city attacks seem to happen that way. A chokepoint done with just smite often doesnt prevent them from firing at it, but something done with mountains can (and easily). Even with a single hole in it, it may still prevent the majority of attacks against it. Not to mention that new land cant then appear on the edges of the city in question (which is one of the things that can provide a threat to them, since stuff can then appear on that land).
Perhaps mountains should no longer affect Line of Sight, then? Right now just mountains and towers do that. I think towers should continue to block line of sight -- probably -- but it sounds like mountains perhaps should not.
What if, for every turn that a town center is cut off from any other, a point penalty is applied. Then, iwalling off a town could actually turn into a risky, short turn maneuver instead of cheese. A player would have to weigh the pros and cons to weather an attack with such a trick.
Hmm, that's actually kind of interesting. Although, it would be tough to really decide what is walled-off. Do fortifications count? How about just small chokepoints? How about towns behind other towns? Etc. I think that gets fiddly sort of fast.
Potentially there could be a point penalty whenever X turns go by without human military units being produced in a town. And then with the "boredom" mechanic described above, that might be plenty to solve some of the isolation problems.
I don't think that's a perfect solution, though, and it could get pretty annoying and also hamper town variety.
I think you nailed it. We have a contradiction:
1) Myth units are not "intended" to be an anti-bandit unit.
2) Myth units are the best anti-bandit unit.
Now, the bandit immunity was an attempt to destroy point 2 in order to make 1 the truth by default, but it was a heavy handed way of doing it that didn't really address the underlying problem. The problem being that the mechanics of the game that are meant to be anti-bandit aren't effective enough.
Yes, this is true. But I think that anything that really gets in the way of the ability of myth units to deal with human units is also counter to the generalities of the game. So I think those two points are kind of at an impasse, and we need a sideways solution. Aka, I'm not sure that we can solve this particular problem, and so solving something else that causes this problem to fade from prominence might be a better idea. If the game is challenging even with you stomping bandit keeps with myth units, then the latter is no problem. Furthermore, if you normally need your myth units for something else, but you are spending them all on the bandit keeps, then there's an opportunity cost.
Making the players WANT to deal with bandit keeps so that they can preserve their myth units for something else strikes me as a very preferable thing. Making it an interesting choice, rather than getting out the nerf bat again.
This is a strategy game after all, so you have to allow the player to have *some* level of control over the flow of the game. If it boils down to "it doesn't matter where I place anything because I'm screwed if the game decides I'm going to lose", then it gets less strategy-based and more like luck-based solitaire.
Agreed.
I see. Well there are enough uncrossable tiles in the game. Why not just make it such that mountains can only ever be crossed one tile at a time (without the flying/mountain crosser ability)?
Or in general, just applying a super high movement cost to going across mountains, might do it. Something like a movement cost of 6 or 12 or 20 or something. I would then need to really work on the pathfinding for units to work better with terrain movement costs (which right now are ignored because of the nature in which units move, but that's solvable). The mountainwalk ability (or flying) would then just reduce the movement cost to the usual 1.
