[baruk]

Graeme Dice said:

If I've spent several hundred gold on a castle, why should I not be able to use it for defense?

You still get the defence value of the castle. All that has changed is the attacker gets the option to storm in the same turn defences drop to zero. The storm castle part of the order is ignored if defences are not yet down to zero (probably need to mention this for more clarity).

baruk said:Commanders and units that have travelled using gateway, teleport or cloud trapeze will now suffer from planar sickness. If said troops fight a battle the same turn as their "jump", they start with a fatigue penalty: 20 fatigue times the size class of the unit.

Graeme Dice said:Again, what's the point of this change?

The teleport spell was taken away from the Sphinx, as it was considered unbalanced being able to port one's Sphinx onto an enemy capital in the early game. I wanted to find a way to give teleport back to the Sphinx, whilst making teleporting it onto a capital a more risky prospect.
The planar sickness idea is basically a paratrooper combat penalty transplanted from another game. It just seems to make sense to me to give teleported troops some kind of fatigue penalty.

baruk said: There is nothing worse in the game than when the AI wrongly chooses to ignore my orders. I would rather it followed my orders, and suffer the consequences. I can always change my orders, but I can't easily compensate for what the AI might do.

Graeme Dice said:No, it's far worse to have all your gems wasted when a person sends a single casting of arouse hunger at your armies before they attack.

Yep, thats annoying too, my change to gem usage takes care of that, however. The idea is to render gem depletion sorties a turn to turn concern, rather than a cheap disruption tactic.

baruk said:My solution: mages start each battle in the same turn with the number of gems they started the turn with. For example, if I give my mage 3 gems, he will start each battle in the following turn with 3 gems.

Graeme Dice said:Do you have any idea how overpowered this is? You've just tripled the number of gems that any mage will have.

It would only be tripled were the mage in that example to fight in 3 battles that turn, and use all his gems in each battle.
The gem usage boost would be the same for everybody, in the same way as gem producing items can be made by everyone. For a potential exploiter, the trick would be to have your gem carrying mage engage in multiple battles a turn (which is why I wouldn't have it apply to death matches). Arranging things so that your mage fights several battles in a turn may be tricky, even with potentially 11 battle rounds a turn.

baruk said:Limit the total gem output from each type of item on a per province basis.

Graeme Dice said:I've got a better idea. People should stop whining about gem generating items and play on smaller maps. I'm starting to get really frustrated with the people who want to change the game to make it yet another fantasy strategy game where magic doesn't have any significant effects.

I've never whined about gem producers, they are probably fine the way they are. A change is as good as a rest, they say. My suggestion is to make life for the hoarder a little more interesting, by having to spread his generators out a bit among his provinces, or push dominion a bit more. I like to try and think of ways to link important game mechanics to dominion strength, its nice for it to have a little more impact on the game.
With such a change to gem producers, I don't think that they would be rendered insignificant, many hoarders would barely notice any difference in gem output.


Good questions nonetheless, my original post could probably be somewhat clearer.