[Fyron]

>The mountain citadel is 100% useles. It is the same as the dark citadel in every way, except that it has only 10 admin instead of 20.

If you fought one you'd see the difference.
They are much stronger from the wall layout and arrow fire (the DC has no fire).

Then the layout needs to be made painfully obvious when selecting your castle type while designing your "player."

I disagree. Storming a medieval fortification the hard way should be difficult and costly, even with only a few defenders. Firing storms of arrows at defenders high on a castle wall protected by narrow stone arrow slits generally has very little effect. There are many historical examples of very small garrisons holding off massive numbers of attackers. This is a large part of why anyone bothered to build them, despite the staggering costs and build times.

Hmm... they were not even close to the wall, but well behind it in the court yard. There were other hidden troops at the wall firing those arrows at me... That is too much of a stretch for me. So is the fact that seiging only seems to open the gate, not scratch the walls.

As for game balance arguments, there are many ways to overcome castle defenses in Dominions. But castles are supposed to present strong obstacles to many. However you can always just take the province and not storm the castle, and starve them out (assuming they are something that needs to eat...).

Or if they have a commander with Nature magic... each level feeds 5 units per turn. Of course, starving them out is not very practical when you have a 40 turn limit in the demo.

Other than flying units, how do you overcome castle defenses?

Seems to me there is almost always a considered reason for the costs, even if it isn't obvious at first.

For some units, yes. But there are several Machaka and Jotunheim (the two nations I tried) units that increase in cost too drastically for what you get compared to the next weaker troop they have.

Maybe with low-morale units and fright-inducing effects (such as dead leaders, fighting monsters, etc), but that's intended. There are many spells, unit types, items, etc. which will very effectively reduce routing. I find the morale system extremely welcome and quite well-done. It would be a lot less interesting and less appropriate if everyone fought to the death regardless of circumstances. Terror and the ability to resist it is a major factor in war, especially when dragons and undead elephants are involved, etc...

But when you have no units with terror, they still route far too quickly...

> Adding the display of the nations' name to the territories they control will help a lot.
Thers a option in map-fliter,just have to press 9,8,7....till u found it.

Nope. None of those got the nation name. There is an option to display the territory name, but not the name of the nation controlling it.