[Stormbinder]

Originally posted by Zen:

So you are saying you can't accrue the costs and apply it to the same cost to an Army and have the Castle's clearly be a more valuable choice?

>sigh< I don't think it would make sense to continue this line of discussion further - we are clearly arguing in circles here.

I have to say you have completely lost me here Zen. How can you possibly devalue Temples importance by making them harder to be burned down??? Same with dominion switch effect - if would make dominion *less* mutable, not more. Have you really read my Posts before replying to them? Your arguments here are clearly contradict your own position.

It devalues them because noone would burn down a temple they would have a reasonable chance to reaqquire. Thus any temple built would stay built baring extraneous circumstances (akin to how Labs are only built down if you plan on losing a province and want to limit the use of an opponent resupplying gems/summons etc). So Temples would mean less because instead of requiring you to defend them, you could just go back and retake it when you felt the need/inclination to.

This is bad logic. Unlike with labs, which indeed stay in place forever unless you are planing to lose province for good and decide burn it, you can bet your *** that the enemy will try to burn your temple down if he can, with scouts/raiders/whatever, as soon as it captures your province. Therefore you have to recapture it immideatly, not "sit back and recapture when you have need/inclination". And doing this may not be as simple as before, since now the enemy have strong motive to hold for your province for at least one more turn, to finish his "scorthed earth" tactic. And since unlike yourlelf he can bring the reinforcements from all neighborhood provinces by using "friendly province movement", and he can do it first (unless you try to counter it with remote summons/teleports), he may very well pull any number of nasty surprises on you - since now he have a motive to do it.

If you understand how Dominion works you might want to look at that. Temples provide instant Dominion pushing force. So when taking a province that has a temple in it, suddenly you are doing a dramatic shift in the Dominion struggle in that province,

Wrong. You are still not getting it - NOTHING changes dominion-wise, until the *next* turn, when you have opportunity to burn the enemy temple to the ground. So there is no "dramatic shift" or *any* shift in dominion when you take enemy province with the temple, it can only happen in a turn after that, when/if you'll succeed of burning it to the ground.

Thematically speaking, think of medieval priests and monks hiding behind strong walls of their monasteries while war would be raging all around them. Happened all the time historicaly during dark ages, that's why so many medieval monasteries and temples looks like fortresses. These were a brutal times of constant warfare, similar to the Ascension wars.

and you are allowing
instant use of Blood Sacrifice.

No longer do you have to actively push your dominion by using resources, you simply have to defeat provinces with Temples to push it and go your merry way.

Not to mention the thematic reasons.

You are asuming here that you are allowed to perform blood sucriface in enemy temples. But who said you should be allowed to do it? Thematically speaking , you should first convert the temple to your god (or burn it down and build new one) before you are allowed to have any benefits from it, be it "dominion push" or "blood sacriface".

If it is implemented this way that this argument of yours is also not valid.

[ May 29, 2004, 03:54: Message edited by: Stormbinder ]