Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

Even MSF of 40 greatly reduces number of available gems. I have played once at 40 and everybody has noticed how much fewer sites they could find.

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

I've always found that games on bi´g maps with MSF 40 end up as huge gem hoardings. Try e.g. Faerun with MSF 25 and it's suddenly a lot more challenging.

Edi

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

I think that Faerun with any settings will be a micromanagement-fest. Though I'm missing your reasoning about MSF. The less MSF is, the more incentives to hoard and less incentives to conquer... I'd think that with MSF 25 everybody would start hoarding. With MSF 50 it seems that the simple conquest provides pretty decent gem income and gem hoarding is not mandatory and probably is not efficient either (at least in many settings).

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

With only 25 MSF starting the hoarding is much more difficult then with 50 MSF .

So all hoarding effects are delayed . Even Atlantis would suffer a severe slowing in their hoarding because it will take ages for them to produce dwarfen hammers and bringing up the forge is then too costy as well .


Hoarding requires imo the least micromanagement , battlescripting + SC equipping needs more micro .

For forging e.g. 10 clams and stocking them on something you need about 2-3 minutes each turn normally , just recruit 10 scouts each turn .

Only if renaming is disallowed hoarding is painful .

I always name my scouts c for clam , f for fetish , b for bloodstone , s for soulcontract and stock if i stock also other items on them [img]/threads/images/graemlins/Laugh.gif[/img] .
All mages with a hammer get a h as name , all clamforgers are just named clam etc. .

Though from a roleplay viewpoint this is ugly of course it is neccessary . But if you do good naming then even if you forge 50 clams / turn you don't need longer then 10-20 minutes / turn for this .

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

Similarly, all forging and summons are delayed

Battle-scripting and equipping for the major battle is lengthy, but it's a fun part, figuring our what spells to choose, what resistances to add and generally try to guess what the enemy will do and counter it.

However, major battles are relatively rare, and I don't normally re-script small squads that take over empty provinces.

10 clams is not a hoarding. Real pain starts when every turn you have to decide what to forge. And before forging you have to find where to put the current content of your inventory. And soon you start running into a trouble, because your forging capabilities becomes insufficient to equip your commanders. So what do you do? Let your tartarians stay unequipped for now and just forge clams? But then when the war comes you'll have real trouble equipping your 5-10 dozens of tartarian mages (With 7 items per tartarian (unless you GoR spirits and mostra you need 10+ turns to equip them - no good). So every turn you have to reshuffle your inventory and commanders who temporarily keep teh items. Ouch! [img]/threads/images/graemlins/Sad.gif[/img]
If inventory would be unlimited and sortable that would be less of a problem, but the way it stands now, it's a major hassle.

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

<i>Most</i> forging and summons are delayed by MSF. Blood magic is not affected giving a significant edge to nations with good blood hunting ability. Clam hoarders will likely be overwhelmed by demons, imps, and horror attacks before they can bank enough pearls to do anything crazy. Possible exceptions would include atlantis (5 water gems/turn), Pythium with a Daughter of the Land (3 water gems/turn), Nifelheim (3 water gems/turn), etc. A little early Construction research could show a nice pearl income early on.

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

Did you people miss the part about very hard research coupled with low MSF (25 or less)? That's going to screw over everyone, but it also serves as an equalizer that removes a lot of the advantage of blood nations because getting to any kind of serious summons takes forever and then some. Yeah, you can have scads of blood slaves, but you won't have anything useful to do with them except empowering blood mages while you wait for the s-l-o-w research to give you something worthwhile to summon. Unless you are Mictlan which can summon spine devils and fiends of darkness right off the bat, and their nationals suck so much that they are almost a non-factor anyway.

Given the slow research, few sites and lousy gem incomes, those who would rely on hoarding and summoned creatures are going to be dead by the time they would have them because someone who concentrates on getting a decent national troop military up will just steamroller them.

Edi

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

last I checked summon fiend was a lvl 2 spell.That takes only 160 rp and gives you a very good summon for 5 bloodslaves.And horde from hell is only lvl 5 and is an excellent spell.

In addition it´s not as if nations like abysia, bf marignon or jotunheim have bad national troops to go along with the bloodmagic.
I think blood nations are already among the strongest with MSF 50, MSF 25 doubles their magic efficiency.

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

Exactly .

Taking abysia or mictlan in such a setting and you need to only research blood + a bit construction . Some evocation is also nice but basically you only need blood .

I think 50% frequency is the fairest setting because it balances blood + normal nations more or less .

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

Anyway, back to the idea of the fortified city... A city is basically a self-contained production and distribution facility. It may require outside resources to feed itself, but it can make a lot of stuff all by itself, especially if it quarries it's own stone or metals. I think that a fortified city should be the only fortification able to continue troop production while under siege--at a reduced resource value, of course. One may also consider that people keep chickens, various livestock, and have arable soil inside of cities. To reflect this, a fortified city might have a minimum sieged supply value of 50 or so depending on growth scale. That would make the fortified city a much more useful fortification.

>> Oops! Wrong thread--Oh well...I guess mad castling and crappy expensive castles are related though http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif