Originally Posted by HoneyBadger
PD is a really neat idea.
An idea that, on the face of things, is pretty powerful.
It's simple to use and understand, with zero micromanagement. It gives you dirt-cheap, instantly built, maintenance free troops and commanders that are basically "fire and forget", and protection from spies.
It's even got separate slots for modders to add units the Nation in question might not otherwise gain access to.
As a concept, it's got a lot going for it, and it really should do more than it does, and be a larger part of the game, and overall strategy.
I wouldn't say that it's useless, but, as an aspect of the game that's been promoted as one of the better things about Dom3, it's leaning heavily towards the shallow/ignoreable side.
I always put a few points into PD, if I have any leftover gold lying around. At worst, it functions as an "early alarm system", and lets me atleast get one good look at an attacker, before it's defeated.
If someone wanted to go to the trouble, it would be great if the PD for the vanilla Nations could be upgraded (and maybe balanced across the board) to a point where you'd get more meaningful results out of it. Even though it's maintenance-free, you should still be getting close to an even trade for what you could have bought with it, in terms of units, due to the PD's immovability and "hands off" nature.
I kind of wish Kristoffer and Johan might still look at this someday, atleast to give us some more modding tools/options, since the way PD currently works is really a genius idea. It's just not fully harnessed yet, being just a little underdeveloped, and strategically weak as an option.
I don't think it deserves to remain in it's current form. There's lots of ways it could be turned into a more useful and integral part of the game, without making it into something negative (without encouraging extreme turtling, without slowing down the game, etc.).
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