[Squirrelloid]

Holy exponential growth batman.

Ok, in addition to the issues we discussed on IRC, the air elementals are really not ok in the quantities you can acquire them. This is a systematic problem that has to do with them not having any upkeep, so as long as you pay for the mages you can generate arbitrarily many of them.

End of year 2 i literally had 2 thousand of them floating around. I could not hire effective leaders for them fast enough. And that's after casualties from expanding and fighting a war (that the AI was losing badly). Basically, you quickly reach a point where the rate at which you can acquire new territory -> new income vastly outpaces the rate at which upkeep increases. And I totally overdid it, given I couldn't use more than half the elementals I was creating.

On the other hand, increasing cost/upkeep of the mages is not, by itself, the answer. The very random distribution of their paths means you need to buy an awful lot of them to get the useful ones - if upkeep was more than at present you'd never acquire enough mages to get ones that matter. Further, even present upkeep may be far too much, because I was supporting that obscene upkeep burden by stupidly fast expansion.

Further, the way you currently have units and upkeep structured, there's no way you're going to be able to even keep up in research. Fortunately, at the moment, you don't even have to. Unfortunately, that's because what they do is horribly broken.

Basically, free units you don't pay upkeep on is a bad idea. LA Ermor taught us this.