Castles and Citadels and stuff

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Arryn:
Obviously this would be such a dramatic change, and hard enough to code, that it would likely have to wait for a Dom 3, but still, I am a bit surprised that no one appears to have proposed it. Well, until now.

Hard to code? I do not think so. Unbalancing? Probably. There would certainly be a strong incentive to start with a CHEAP fort as a result, since you can always tear it down and build a better one! The short-term gain of a "good" fort, with a benefit you are probably unable to effectively use for a while, is definitely not worth nation points, and Zen's love of the wizard tower would be totally destroyed by this, since it functionally equates a 120 point national cost to a 2-turn semi-delayed start in troop recruitment. The cost of tearing down your starting watch tower and erecting a wizard's tower in its place would not be so great that it would warrant the expenditure of 120 points, as it does now. Certain types of fortification would thus predominate in an environment where you could freely choose what fort to build, and the nation point cost of forts would have to be entirely rebalanced. The actual code would be fairly trivial, rebalancing the game far less so.