Quote:
Tuidjy said:
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...
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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.