How to solve castling effect?

[rabelais]

Originally posted by Chazar:
Just my thoughts though, since I havent encountered "castling" yet and have a hard time to imagine that this is really a useful tactic. Afterall the attacker benefits from a castle as well, so I imagine that it merely disables raids rather than borderline wars...

Heh. Mad castling is EVIL, particularly as Ermor.

If you're ermor... your castles provide very minimal protection, zero admin and zero supply, which doesn't help the attacking force very much.

Since you don't care about pop, you can go all out for pillaging to finance the massive castle builds. All the better to deprive living nations of nonrenewable (and useless to you) resources.

The main point of the castling is to protect the temple, (and therefore dominion and/ or immortality) but in hardcore-VQ land it's also intended to tie down the attacker's army for an extra turn so the SC can be flown/teleported in.

While it is true you can choose not to storm... failing to do so wastes the army/turn. If the alpha SC has been brought in to deal with the siege, you break even on tempo... if not... well...


Rabe,... who thinks castles ought to cost maintenance, (with admin subtracted?) so that purely positional forts (esp with zero admin) are money losers.

Won't stop castle spamming, but it will annoy those who do it.

[Maltrease]

The easiest way to solve the castlting problem (if it is indeed a problem) would be to charge a maintence fee for the castle.

One of the main reasons I build a castle now is in the increased income. You plop a wizards tower down on a province generating 100 coins and it has paid for itself in 20 turns. Plus you get a recruiting center and protection from raids.

If I had to pay 15 gold a turn instead of receiving it, I would build far fewer fortresses.

I don't actually support this change but it would solve the problem. I like investing in infrastrucute that pays dividends down the road.

[Cohen]

I believe raising the gem cost and path level required of all SCs summoning spell, and nerfing some pretenders should be nice too ...

Added to the issue about the Ghost Rider.

I'd improve the effect of scales too ...
Rabe idea is good too.

[ May 26, 2004, 12:20: Message edited by: Cohen ]

[Jondifool]

Well my suggestion does
introduce a temple condition "damaged".

A temple is then automaticly damaged when a provinse is conquered. It takes an comander aktion to destroy a damaged temple.
A new temple can first be build if an enemy damaged temple is destroyed ( to prevent different damaged temples in the same province).

If a province is retaken a damaged temple can be rebuild for halv the cost or what ever cost is appropiate.

[Anglachel]

Or simply not have temples auto-destroy upon conquering of a province. Require a commander to take out a turn to dismantle it much like someone dismantling thier own buildings in thier own province. Make the timing of the dismantling of said building take place after movement and combat giving time for trying to retake the province and protect the temple. Of course this wouldn't really solve castling but would remove the need to use castles to protect temples somewhat anyways.

Just a thought.

[Cohen]

The problem isn't only to defend your temples:

Castles in every province raise gold by admin.
Doubles production everywhere if you need.
Protects your mages researching inside.
Protects your troops from Ghost Rider spell and similar.
Slow the enemy conquer of your territory, giving them 1 turn more to trapeze/teleport their army sllaughtering SCs there.

Probably I'm forgotting something.

[LintMan]

Originally posted by Cohen:
The problem isn't only to defend your temples:

Castles in every province raise gold by admin.
Doubles production everywhere if you need.
Protects your mages researching inside.
Protects your troops from Ghost Rider spell and similar.
Slow the enemy conquer of your territory, giving them 1 turn more to trapeze/teleport their army sllaughtering SCs there.

Probably I'm forgotting something.

I think temple protection is the biggest motivation for castle spamming. Castles do all the things you say, but:
- The typically "spammed" castles is the cheapie low-admin one, so the admin benefits of spamming it are not that great.
- Similarly, for production concerns, you'd probably do far better with single high-admin castles surrounded by uncastled provinces than you would by spamming low-admin castles everywhere.

- You don't need spammed castles to protect your researchers. (Or at least I don't; concentrating researchers in a few castled provinces seems more than sufficient.)

Spammed castles will slow enemy advance, though, as you say. But I'm not sure if that by itself would justify the high cost/effort in doing so for most races.

I like the suggestions to make enemy temples need to be destroyed by a commander, rather than auto-destroyed when the province is taken. At the very least, this prevents Ghost Riders from hitting enemies for a 200 gold temple in addition to the province loss.