Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

I've seen lots of Posts complaining about the mad castling strategy or mass castle strategy. Here are some ideas for developers on stopping the mass castle building for games:

1) Have a percentage of provinces where no castle-types can be built because of the land. Example= some provinces near the sea, swamp provinces, and some mountain provinces. Also waste provinces take longer building time. This idea is realistic as well.

2) Have each castle-type built cost more gold then the one previously built. Not realistic but effective.

3) Have each player only able to build X amount of castles. X determined by the number of provinces on the map divided by 20. Examples=
70 provinces would be 4 castles.
400 provinces would be 20 castles.

4) Have each player only able to build one castle for every 5 provinces owned. So by turn 15 and a player owns 15 provinces that player can only build 3 castle-types.

5) Have spells which can destroy the land so no castle-type can be built. Such as: Level_5 Alteration (5 water)(10 water gems) Adds the swamp characteristic to a province where castle-types cannot be built.

These are just ideas since it shouldn't be possible to build a castle-type just anywhere... unless MAYBE magic is used. Also by having castle building limited means castle locations will be more strategic instead of mass building cheap castle-types. Hope this helps.

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

6) Make it so that mass castling isn´t necessary, because of useless pd and cheap raiding spells like horde from hell and ghost riders.

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

Is castle building that much of a problem? I never build more than about 5 castles in my games. I always need the gold for more important things.

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

YES Ghost Riders is way too powerful... hopefully adjusted with Dominions_3. This spell is Banned for the multiplayer games I've been doing. Also I witnessed Ermor max out research and still not cast this spell.

I also agree about province defense... I'll make a post within the "The Dominions 3: "Wishlist" " sticky for improving province defense.

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

Well I just wanted to point out that in a game where raiding isn´t so effective, building mass castles would be a stupid strategy. Right now every province with a temple, 3+ gem income or more than 50 gold/turn needs a castle once conjuration 9 is researched.

In a regular war mass castling doesn´t help much. You won´t be able to man all castles and it just takes one more turn for the attacker to grab the castle.
In a way mass castling without enough troops makes you an attractive target, because the attacker has much more to gain.

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

Yeah, I don't see why mad castling is considered a problem at all. It's an effective defense against powerful raiding spells, but you still need manpower to defend them against significant enemy forces.

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

Speaking as someone who, by turn 50, tries to have a castle in every province she ownes, I do not see why people complain, and why something should be done about it.

First, let me make clear that I play exactly one race, and it is the penultimate raiding race - Vanheim. I use sneaking armies, I use remote anonymous spells, and I most certainly use teleport attacks. If I follow the reasoning of the most vocal opponents of ubiquitous castles, I should hate them... but I do not.

If someone can afford the castles, they deserve to be safe from my raids. If they go overboard with them, and spend too much, they may have a hard time fighting me off.

So can someone please explain why we should not have them? By the way, I study in Strasbourg, and I have probably seen twenty castles or ruins in a radius of twenty miles. I would not be surprised if there are twenty others I do not know about. Castles worked in history, and castles work in Dominions II. Watchtowers serve as an answer to raiders, Castles and Fortified Cities help with ressources and income... I do not think anything is wrong.

And yes, I have fought people who make tons of castles. In my present game, I eliminated Cohen, and had to take five castles before turn twenty to do so. I think that he should have invested in mages, rather than in castles. Later in the same game, I took out Caelum. They had one of the stronger castles, but they took exactly as long as Abysia's, because I had shakers and cleavers. Part of the game, why should we change it?

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

Yvelina--

It would be nice if Castles weren't as necessary, that's all.

I think province defense should be doubled in effectiveness, and the more expensive castle types (mountain fortress, citadel, fortified city) should be made much better and/or slightly cheaper. In this way, people might actually choose those types of castles, and castles would be naturally limited due to the cost.

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

Is there any actual need for any anti-mad-castling measures? Inefficiency of it should be enough. Has anybody seen mad-castling non-Norfleet player to win MP game? So far, every MP game I've participated in (excluding ones with Norfleet), total of about 2 dozens, has been won by non-mad-castling player. 1 castle per 4-6 provinces seems to be the most common ratio for the winning side if the game reaches late stage (if it's won earlier, there few castles usually).

The main problem with the castles that I see is that they are too good as a defensive measure. In late game, to storm the castle, your army has to withstand Flames from the Sky and Murdering Winter, dozen sets of ghost riders, then enemy's kamikaze squad (typically with something like wrathful skies) and only after that it reaches the main battle in the fortress. Big part of it is that the gems are likely to be already expended by that time which makes the final battle difficult (unless some creative scripting is used to retain some gems).

This issue makes the late game pretty slow, because instead of taking big losses in the storm, winning side usually prefers to slowly grow its advantage rather than storm.

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

I don't think that castling needs to be diminished. Watch towers and Mausoleums can only slow you down and prevent you from horroring, ghosting, or imping your way through someone's land (which IMO is equally as cheesy as castling--that is if I considered either one cheesy).

I don't agree that Ghost Riders is too powerful. After all, it is a 9th level spell. I wouldn't tone it's effect down, but I might add a skull or two to its usage to try to keep it Pretender-only or require a significant investment in gems to make a caster. That would curb castings to 1 or 2 per round.

Province defenses are weak, yes, but consider what a province defense generally is in reality. It is a militia--armed peasants with a little training defending their homes. It is in my opinion that PD shouldn't be powerful (i.e. Wizards shouldn't be dropping meteors on your army every time you take a province). PD should, however, have much higher morale and maybe a bit higher stats (like a berserk bonus or something). If you were defending your home from an Ermoran invasion and you knew that your family would be slaughtered and turned into mindless zombies when you ran away, would you flee like a little whiney wussbag? Probably not...

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

Sounds like the best fix to me. Sure it's not "realistic" but what is in a game with undead, demons and all manner of strange beasts?

Perhaps in this fantasy realm the "real men" stay home and only the less fit have to travel outside their realm. Who knows?

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

I don't think the cheap castles are overpowered so much as the more expensive ones underpowered. I think a good solution would be to give special bonus to each of the less used castles. Dark Citadel could spawn skeletons, normal Citadel could recruit two commanders per turn, Fortified City could draw population from other provinces, ect..

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

That is a good suggestion, although I wonder why population draining is a good thing. Maybe an additional growth bonus would also do...

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

Nah don't dare to reduce castling .

Please do not even think of nerfing clams or even abolishing all hoard items .
The same for castles . Fortunately most other ppl agree http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/biggrin.gif .

Maybe you could completely reform castle building by allowing a player to chose an individual castle by designing it ?
Example :
You have 3 base Versions of a castle : small , medium , big . They give 10 , 25 and 40 admin and cost e.g. 0 , 20 , 50 design points .
Now players can buy additional towers for their castles and place them in the castle designing where they want .
In the battle tactics screen you can place your troops on your castles walls/towers where archers gain +3 precision , + 3 to attack and all troops gain +5 defense .
You can select from various towers and other toys like x-bow tower , ballista tower , mine field sourrounding the castle etc. . All those toys cost like 5-10 extra designpoints .

This would enchance the depths of castle fights quite a lot http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif .

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

In reply to Boron: I do not think that full custimisation is a good idea. There are always some exploits so everyone will end up with the same castle. I think quantum_mechani's proposal encourages much more diversity!

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

Great idea!!! Lets make it impossible to build too many castles!!! Making each
castle cost 50 golds more than the previous one will really help! And then, we
will have to get rid of Ghost Riders, Phantasmal attack, Imprint Souls, etc...
Good riddance, it is a pain to have to react to an attack in the rear. Of
course, for the sake of Allmighty Balance Himself, we have to get rid of sneaky
armies as well. And, there was an unsung genius who earlier suggested that all
teleporting armies should suffer from plane-sickness for an year or so. That's
awesome too! Or lets just abolish all teleporting spells altogether!!!

Now I have to go have a lie down, but I am sure to be back to enlighten you
about the next steps we have to take in order to balance Dominions II...

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

Aren't Ghost Riders and other cheap raiding spells "end of game" spells like Wish?

If they weren't powerful, games would stalemate badly. I guess it is a deliberate design choice - to have v powerful offensive spells at the end, to avoid stalemate/ attrition

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

I dont want to argue for or against madcastling, but would just like to add that a rehaul of the fortress choice system during God Creation would be great -- so that, conceivably, other forttress types become more viable and that their in-game gold cost is not necessarily coupled to their build time.

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

Yep, I agree as well. I do not mind castling. In fact, since I was raised in the german country side I am pretty used to see a castle around every other corner. Nevertheless, I think that some castle types need to be made much more attractive than they are right now, especially the 4-5 turners!

BUT:
I'd also say that it is ridiculous that a single limping milita man suffices to defend a castle against immediate storming! I'd say that if the attacking force not only breaks the gates immediately on the first turn, but still has the same amount of siege points additionally leftover, it should be allowed to storm immediately. So those watchtowers will still protect a temple against GhostRiders as it currently does, but it wouldnt be such a hindrance to a proper attacking force as it is now (because of long sieges, ghost riders and fires from afar,...)! And nothing would be different for a moderately manned castle having a sensible amount of defense as well.

I would say that anything that encourages attacking with masses of national troops is a good thing. And if it encourages to choose sturdy castles as well, well... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

The best fix for the problem of massive use of raiding spells is using a magic site frequency of 25 or less for MP games, then the players will really have to CAREFULLY consider what they use their hard earned gems for. This way summoning anything powerful is a major decision and the role of national units is greatly increased. If you also put research on very difficult, they become even more prominent and you need to carefully consider what to research to maximize your strengths.

Of course, blood nations are more powerful on magic poor maps, but that is not an insurmountable problem either.

On such maps, madcastling is not such an attractive strategy, and massive raiding spell use is not viable at all.

Edi

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

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

Well, one of the best ways to stop one strategy is to make others equally viable - strengthening the more expensive castles would be one way to discourage Mad Castling. Personally, I like my idea of making them into moddable magic sites - it's even thematic, as it goes with the flavor text of how magic gems form - energy from the stars hits the planet and, in special places, is captured and converted. A designer, knowing of this phenomina, would be likely to take advantage of it, no? It might also allow you to implement the supply production of Fortified Cities that you suggest - the FC produces 50 supply (or whatever, as a Cauldron of Broth) every turn.

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

I was the unsung genius with the planar sickness idea for a selection of the teleportation spells. The troops would only get the "sickness" for a single turn, which would comprise starting any battles that turn with extra fatigue (I had various ideas of how much this should be).

The idea was based on the paratrooper combat penalty you see in some strategy games (I was thinking of Alpha Centauri in particular), combat effectiveness being reduced by 50% the turn of the drop. It seems reasonable that you could call this "planar sickness" and add it to a fantasy game.

I suggested it because I felt it would add something to the game. Obviously it would hurt direct gateway/teleport/cloud trapeze attacks, making them less viable. The spells themselves would remain very powerful for troop and mage movement. I liked the fact that it would give conventional army movement a minor advantage over magical moves. In the late game, it seems pointless to bother with conventional movement and attacks when you can simply 'port your armies where they need to go, catching the enemy before he gets to move normally.

At some point a while back, there was concern raised over the ability of an air or astral Sphinx to 'port to an enemy capital in the early game, seiging the fort and crippling his finances. Illwinter responded in the next patch, by not allowing the Sphinx to cast teleport or cloud trapeze anymore, a crude but effective measure (I am unaware of the current patch status). If early "Sphinx hopping" is considered a valid concern by Illwinter, it seems reasonable to try to think up a more elegant solution. So my "planar sickness" could perhaps allow the Sphinx to regain his rightful ability to cast teleport spells, whilst still preventing his use and abuse as an early-game capital crusher (my suggestion was to give all 'porting troops a 20*sizeclass fatigue penalty at the beginning of all battles that turn, so 120 for the Sphinx).


Funnily enough, I also had a suggestion about castles that I felt would add to the game. At the moment, taking a castle from the enemy takes, at the very least, 2 turns: A turn of seiging followed by a turn of storming. I decided this was an artificial limit imposed by the game system, why not, assuming your army is large enough, allow the seiging and storming of a castle to take place in a single turn?

My solution? Introduce a new order, move and storm. It becomes available when you give an army a move order to a castled enemy province, in the same way move and patrol becomes available when a move order to a friendly castle is issued (this is how it was in Dom 1, can't remember if its changed in Dom 2). An army with this order would move to the province, seige the castle (if successful in taking the province), then storm the castle if the seige successfully took out the defences. If the defences were still up at the castle storming phase, the army would revert to a second new order type: seige and storm. This would allow an army to attempt a castle storming as soon as the castle defences are down, rather than waiting another turn for player input.

nb. The turn order may have to be changed, to allow: movement, then seiging, followed by castle storming (I'm a little rusty on the details of turn sequence).

I feel this would add something to the game, making seige warfare a more fluid affair. At the late game stage, the taking of an enemy castle is a serious and costly undertaking, much of the problem being the turn's grace the defender recieves in between seiging and storming of a castle, allowing spoiling attacks to take place before the castle is stormed. On the other hand, a magically strong defender, with a large castle network, has relatively little to fear. He need not bother garrisonning any of his castles, as he has the single turn's grace that he needs to magically bolster his forces where needed.

My suggestion would make the low defence, ungarrisonned forts weaknesses that can be exploited by an army moving conventionally (magical movement would mean that a "move and seige" order could not be issued along with the movement spell). It would also give very large armies an advantage in that they could take enemy forts quite easily, leaving them less vulnerable to some of the remote attack spells eg. Ghost Riders.

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

I can only agree to that idea, but as I wrote before, I think the sieging army should do more than just have enough sieging strength...maybe twice as much as defense is to much, but that is only a minor point!

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

Some good ideas here.

I kind of like the one about the first-turn weakness after porting/trapeezing.

Would there be a good reason 'not' to have something like that?

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

Basically, the flaw in the summoning sickness idea comes in when you want to teleport into an enemy state (a common practice) the sick units can't make an attack since they are sick, so what happens?

If they just die, are immediately routed, or simply sit on the province as a double flag (like sieging), teleporting loses a significant amount of flavor (e.g. teleporting your monolith into an enemy state to gain control of a crucial staging point during an attack). This removes some very useful and interesting surprise attack possibilities. I like the idea of sneak attack teleports. I think the fact that your teleporting commanders will be transported sans army is a sufficient penalty. After all, you have to research Thaum-9 in order to teleport with an army (or Ench-5 for Faery Trod in forests only which is very limiting). I like the idea of doing Ritual of Returning/Teleport raids on enemy states. It gives them a reason to defend themselves more adequately instead of simply arranging themselves empty eggshells (armies on the edges, nothing in the middle). It forces opponents to consider a National Guard in addition to their expeditionary forces. You get the same effect with long range summons, but teleporting units are generally far stronger than summons because they must go alone.

The Sphinx-teleport is an obvious weakness. The Sphinx is nigh indestructible early game and should not be allowed to teleport. It is a special exception not the rule. Other pretenders (with the possible exception of the Monolith which is closer to the black side of the gray area IMO) can't usually take on a national army early game. Worrying about early teleports forces you to Patrol provinces instead of just sitting around and ensure that you have a backup base. Besides, early teleport attacks require scouting. He has to find you first and develop Teleport capability (not hard, but I tend to prefer Difficult research as it makes a better game for mercs and nationals) and make sure you don't have the strength to beat him down. Losing a pretender early in the game when priests are low can cost you dearly especially with a pretender that has a diversified magical portfolio. Stealth or Glamour units would be a good way to lure your opponent's pretender into a deadly trap. Manticores that find themselves surrounded by blessed Armor Piercing Vans/Bane Spiders (or just a couple of Revenants with a Level 1 Decay spell) won't be happy with the odds of victory. I've had my pretender decayed by indeps before--which is rare but sucks especially early-game, so I try to stay away from necromancers. Shadow Bolts/Magic Duel can also be dangerous and higher level magics can easily overwhelm a lonely pretender or at least keep him away on the off chance he'll get killed or feebleminded. You kill the big dudes with fatigue--Stellar Cascades is great for killing pretender SCs esp those w/o reinvig. Sleep (because of its MRN feature is less useful), but it's relatively easy to cast and small number of casters have a fair chance of getting the big guy to 100+ fatigue and subsequently trouncing him. Of course this is all provided your enemy is not a giant rock which is where the trouble comes in http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

My idea was to give the sick units a 20 times their size class fatigue penalty at the start any battle that they get involved in that turn. So normal, size 2 troops would start with 40 fatigue, the size 6 sphinx would start with 120. This way you can still use sneak teleport attacks, but with some hindrance.
Alternatively, the fatigue penalty could be based on hit points, so that you would take half your hp in fatigue if you got in a battle the same turn you were ported. That might be fairer considering the lower hp, large size commanders that use teleport and the like, whilst still causing problems for the sphinx.
To clarify a bit, the planar sickness would come into effect only for battles that happen the same turn as the teleport. The troops would have recovered by the following turn, when they would be available for normal movement again.

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

Back to the topic of castles...

some other ideas:

* One castle might only be allowed to protect one magic site, and to reduce the province income for the beseiger by its administration rating.

* Watchtowers might not be large enough to enclose even one magic site.

* There could be an option to multiply the time required to build a fort. Real castles took years or decades to build, not months.

So, forts could provide places to hide forces and protect a temple and maybe a magic site, but a spam of watchtowers wouldn't have so much effect.

PvK

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

The 120 fatigue for a Sphinx is really a moot point as he can't teleport anyway (and still shouldn't be able to). Even at that high fatigue, with natural protection of 30 and roughly 500hps (depending on dominion) he'll still end up routing the enemy army unless you have continuous Fanaticism/SoC. Even then, he'll be up and running with his first spell in 5 turns or so. It usually takes an early force forever to destroy one and if you have no 3-priests, your still screwed (Man, Ulm). Why should a Gygja be more penalised than an Arch Theurg or a Demonbred? Wouldn't that penalty serve to unbalance tele-attacks? D2 has an incredibly complicated numeric basis. I doubt that a herd of statisticians could balance it perfectly. There are more obvious flaws like Ulm's lack of late power to worry about.

I'm always up for adding features--especially to the castles which I think are quite underdeveloped. I'd like to see more castle options and maybe more nation-specific castles (like Ermor's). Like PVK says, there could be all sorts of nifty castles. Of course I don't think it should take years to put up a crappy watchtower (don't nerf the WT--it sucks....everyone can get in and your guys starve to death if the attackers stay outside very long). Instant siege might be interesting, but it could be easily countered by putting a single point of defense in the province--unless you also want to make the patrolling forces unable to impede the attackers as well......(nonsense). If I were building watchtowers IRL, I think I'd build tons of 'em too--not too much to a little stone and mortar building or some kind of tree house--makes a nice little staging point for a small band of soldiers, but doesn't offer much protection from the storm of battle http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

Isnt the main problem with castling, the fact that they enable a few decked up SCs to take care of the defence of an entire empire? This is of course accomplished by filling your whole territory with cheap towers, which will slow down the enemy raiders for one critical turn, before you SCs teleport/ cloud trapeze or fly in.
Losing provinces means a lot in Dom2. It is easy for raiders to set the tax level to 200 and run away, causing permanent damage to income. I think a possible solution would be to force players to oversee the tax collection. It makes no sense now that the raiding army can set the tax level to two hundred and leave the province during the same month and still get the pay and deal the pop loss.
I think mobility is what makes castling worth it. Armies have methods of moving instantenously from province to province, making it very difficult to predict what to protect. When you add to this that you can field enough of an army of national troops to protect only a small fraction of your empire ( because of upkeep ), it's no wonder that people train exclusively mages and summons and SCs. Making hordes of castles enables your own highly mobile armies to protect provinces which are under attack, without having to sit there all the time.

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

There's some great suggestions here...

Hopefully one or more can be placed as options before the game starts. This way the gamers can choose before it starts. I'm definitely looking forward to Dom_3.

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

> Isnt the main problem with castling, the fact that they enable a few decked up SCs to take care of the defence of an entire empire?

And this is a problem how? Read this sentance:

Isn't the main reason for castling, the fact that they prevent a few flying, teleporting SCs to lay waste to an entire empire?

And of course, without castles, one could destroy your empire with remote and even anonymous spells. Is it too much to ask from someone who wants to conquer a strong, well developed nation, to actually win a fight or two while doing so?

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

Quite. Castling is both essential if you want to prevent said empire-trashing, and over-effective leading, as it does, to boring end-games in which 2 castled nations beat their heads together getting nowhere.

The other aspect of the problem is that strategic depth is lost if building everywhere is a no-brainer.

Solving the problem means finding a way to make empires defensible without castling.

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

How about an over-run rule? If there's enough invading troops to get the wall down in a single turn, then combat with the defenders occurs in the same turn the invaders move in.

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

I'd play even more AE Ermor if that rule went in. They are bar none the best at bashing down walls there is. Sure you can send a flames from the sky over there next turn and kill those 3000 longdead, but they can still smash down walls real good.

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

Sure, you'd have to tweak Ermor as well. But given that, I still think it's quite a cool idea, making the mausoleums etc still effective, but only against smaller forces (as you would expect).

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

I would still support that overrun rule which promotes Non-SC, Non-teleport troops and stronger castle types!

I mean, Ermor AE can be strong at sieging: Undead never tire to tear at the walls or to catapult themselves over the fences... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif And if it doesnt work out, well then making mindless bad at both defending and sieging seems to me to be a minor sacrifice...

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

I was thinking that being able to take a castled province in a single turn could be a might overpowered, eg. if you have a large flying army, you could be taking a castle every turn, whilst the defender splits up his forces, or gambles, in order to try and defend them, in the same way he would if his provinces were unforted.

To make things a little less harsh on the defender, I came up with a mild variation of the "over-run" idea. Castles can still be seiged and stormed in the same turn. However, the "move and storm" order is only available when moving to a friendly-controlled province (obviously that has an enemy fort under seige). The "seige and storm" order would be unchanged.

Basically, you would still have to spend at least 2 turns trying to take the enemy fort: the first turn to take the province initially, the second to storm the castle (once the defences are at zero). However, there would be no artificial delay between the storming and seiging of the castle.

I think this way round the attacker would be bolstered by gaining the option of holding back his main castle storming force until the castle province is taken (saving them perhaps from a pre-storm magical barrage). The defender's castle network would still protect from raids, whilst being more vulnerable to concerted attacks. Any of the defender's "seiged" castles would be at risk of capture by the following turn, regardless of the state of its defences.

nb. In the event of enemy forces occupying the beseiged province in the same turn as a friendly army arrives with "move and storm" orders, the friendly army will still attempt castle storming if victorious in the battle.

Optionally: any army not beginning its move in the same province as a specific enemy fort could recieve a 50% seige penalty against that fort.

Another option: a potential benefit of a commander's aptitude to leadership could be access to more orders, such as "move and storm", "seige and storm" or even the discarded "hold and attack enemy commanders".

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

Alternatively, the smaller fortresses (mausoleum, watchtower, wizards tower) could be roofed, which negates the flying siege bonus.

EDIT: Oh, I see. You're referring more to the mobility of flying forces rather than the siege bonus. Fair enough.

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

Yep, my thinking is that big flying armies with their strategic move 3 would become the next Cheesy annoying tactic, if the province take, seige and castle storm were doable in one turn.

The seige bonus for flyers I imagine derives from their ability to fly above the fort and drop heavy rocks on it, roof or not. With no roof, perhaps flyers could storm the castle without knocking the walls down, as in the HoMM games.

The seiging system in Dominions superficially resembles that of the Total War games (shogun, medieval etc.), where there is also a 2 step process to taking a castled province: taking the province, then seiging/storming the fort. The difference is that in Total War, you can attempt to storm the fort any time you want, there is no defence value to knock down first. Laying seige to the fort over several turns has the effect of causing severe attrition to the defenders inside (about 10 to 50% losses a turn), until eventually you gain control of it automatically when the defenders surrender, or when all have starved to death.

The Dominions castle seiger has it tough, comparatively, needing to breach the defense value before being allowed to storm (the order to storm, as discussed before, only being allowed to be issued the turn after the defences hit zero). The rate of defender attrition during seige is comparitively slow (1hp a turn once they pick up the disease affliction), and easily bypassed by the use of non-eating forces, which would include all commanders.
Add to this the potential for strategic magical nastiness as an effective tool against both seiging forces and un-forted provinces, and you have a recipe for blanket castle coverage as a simple, effective tactic.

Re: Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3
 

Again it seems that the reason for mad castling is it's far better price/performance vs. PD.

If PD were boosted considerably then people would castle less.

For example ( and I *NOT* am asking for this change ) if PD were composed of 1 abombination per point of PD I would wager that people would buy a lot of PD ( and games would be very boring ).

Edit: Whoops said I was asking for 1 abomb/PD point. That's insane. I meant *NOT*. I do think PD should be boosted though.