The problem of fort types

[Sombre]

This is a subject I've been talking about in the IRC channel for a little while.

Generally speaking the admin, defence value and tower weapons of a fort are far less important than the build time and the cost. This leads to the supposedly 'bad' fort types like say swamp fort actually being preferable to build and fort types like fortified cities which cost a lot, and most importantly take 5 turns to build, being neglected. Actually the way things are now, nations which have fort types specialised to certain territory as a reward are actually being punished. Take Ctis. They get to build swamp cities in swamps - this is supposed to be an advantage over the other nations who can only build 'crappy' swamp forts. But the fact is the swamp fort is the far better choice - the added admin on the swamp city is particularly useless given that swamps automatically have low population.

In order for the swamp city to actually be a reward to Ctis and encourage building in swamps, it would have to have the same kind of cost and build time as the swamp fort, while still providing the bonus in terms of admin and defence. Although it doesn't seem that logical, I think the forts should all have equal cost and buildtime. That way you can reward nations by giving them flat out better forts like the cities and so on with higher admin, instead of the current situation where in order to make a nation great at fort building you'd basically just give it low build time low cost 'crappy' ones.

What do you guys think?