[LintMan]

Originally posted by Cohen:
The problem isn't only to defend your temples:

Castles in every province raise gold by admin.
Doubles production everywhere if you need.
Protects your mages researching inside.
Protects your troops from Ghost Rider spell and similar.
Slow the enemy conquer of your territory, giving them 1 turn more to trapeze/teleport their army sllaughtering SCs there.

Probably I'm forgotting something.

I think temple protection is the biggest motivation for castle spamming. Castles do all the things you say, but:
- The typically "spammed" castles is the cheapie low-admin one, so the admin benefits of spamming it are not that great.
- Similarly, for production concerns, you'd probably do far better with single high-admin castles surrounded by uncastled provinces than you would by spamming low-admin castles everywhere.

- You don't need spammed castles to protect your researchers. (Or at least I don't; concentrating researchers in a few castled provinces seems more than sufficient.)

Spammed castles will slow enemy advance, though, as you say. But I'm not sure if that by itself would justify the high cost/effort in doing so for most races.

I like the suggestions to make enemy temples need to be destroyed by a commander, rather than auto-destroyed when the province is taken. At the very least, this prevents Ghost Riders from hitting enemies for a 200 gold temple in addition to the province loss.