Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3

[Zapmeister]

NTJedi said:

It's not realistic to say castles can exist anywhere with the type of technology used in this game.

Sure, but is realism (or the lack of it) the real issue here? I thought the discussion was motivated by some people's opinion that:

1) Blanket castling is the only way to effectively defend territory; and
2) Blanket castling leads to boring endgames.

So boring endgames is the problem we're trying to fix, and on the face of it, you could do it by making either (1) or (2) untrue.

My preference would be to nip it in the bud by making (1) untrue (perhaps by beefing up PD, but I'm sure there are other ways as well) rather than making (2) untrue, the reason being that strategic placement of castles sounds more interesting than blanket placement.