Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3

[Tuidjy]

Great idea!!! Lets make it impossible to build too many castles!!! Making each
castle cost 50 golds more than the previous one will really help! And then, we
will have to get rid of Ghost Riders, Phantasmal attack, Imprint Souls, etc...
Good riddance, it is a pain to have to react to an attack in the rear. Of
course, for the sake of Allmighty Balance Himself, we have to get rid of sneaky
armies as well. And, there was an unsung genius who earlier suggested that all
teleporting armies should suffer from plane-sickness for an year or so. That's
awesome too! Or lets just abolish all teleporting spells altogether!!!

Now I have to go have a lie down, but I am sure to be back to enlighten you
about the next steps we have to take in order to balance Dominions II...

[peasant]

Aren't Ghost Riders and other cheap raiding spells "end of game" spells like Wish?

If they weren't powerful, games would stalemate badly. I guess it is a deliberate design choice - to have v powerful offensive spells at the end, to avoid stalemate/ attrition

[tinkthank]

I dont want to argue for or against madcastling, but would just like to add that a rehaul of the fortress choice system during God Creation would be great -- so that, conceivably, other forttress types become more viable and that their in-game gold cost is not necessarily coupled to their build time.

[Chazar]

Yep, I agree as well. I do not mind castling. In fact, since I was raised in the german country side I am pretty used to see a castle around every other corner. Nevertheless, I think that some castle types need to be made much more attractive than they are right now, especially the 4-5 turners!

BUT:
I'd also say that it is ridiculous that a single limping milita man suffices to defend a castle against immediate storming! I'd say that if the attacking force not only breaks the gates immediately on the first turn, but still has the same amount of siege points additionally leftover, it should be allowed to storm immediately. So those watchtowers will still protect a temple against GhostRiders as it currently does, but it wouldnt be such a hindrance to a proper attacking force as it is now (because of long sieges, ghost riders and fires from afar,...)! And nothing would be different for a moderately manned castle having a sensible amount of defense as well.

I would say that anything that encourages attacking with masses of national troops is a good thing. And if it encourages to choose sturdy castles as well, well...

[Edi]

The best fix for the problem of massive use of raiding spells is using a magic site frequency of 25 or less for MP games, then the players will really have to CAREFULLY consider what they use their hard earned gems for. This way summoning anything powerful is a major decision and the role of national units is greatly increased. If you also put research on very difficult, they become even more prominent and you need to carefully consider what to research to maximize your strengths.

Of course, blood nations are more powerful on magic poor maps, but that is not an insurmountable problem either.

On such maps, madcastling is not such an attractive strategy, and massive raiding spell use is not viable at all.

Edi

[alexti]

Even MSF of 40 greatly reduces number of available gems. I have played once at 40 and everybody has noticed how much fewer sites they could find.

[Edi]

I've always found that games on bi�g maps with MSF 40 end up as huge gem hoardings. Try e.g. Faerun with MSF 25 and it's suddenly a lot more challenging.

Edi

[baruk]

Tuidjy said:
Great idea!!! Lets make it impossible to build too many castles!!! Making each
castle cost 50 golds more than the previous one will really help! And then, we
will have to get rid of Ghost Riders, Phantasmal attack, Imprint Souls, etc...
Good riddance, it is a pain to have to react to an attack in the rear. Of
course, for the sake of Allmighty Balance Himself, we have to get rid of sneaky
armies as well. And, there was an unsung genius who earlier suggested that all
teleporting armies should suffer from plane-sickness for an year or so. That's
awesome too! Or lets just abolish all teleporting spells altogether!!!

Now I have to go have a lie down, but I am sure to be back to enlighten you
about the next steps we have to take in order to balance Dominions II...

I was the unsung genius with the planar sickness idea for a selection of the teleportation spells. The troops would only get the "sickness" for a single turn, which would comprise starting any battles that turn with extra fatigue (I had various ideas of how much this should be).

The idea was based on the paratrooper combat penalty you see in some strategy games (I was thinking of Alpha Centauri in particular), combat effectiveness being reduced by 50% the turn of the drop. It seems reasonable that you could call this "planar sickness" and add it to a fantasy game.

I suggested it because I felt it would add something to the game. Obviously it would hurt direct gateway/teleport/cloud trapeze attacks, making them less viable. The spells themselves would remain very powerful for troop and mage movement. I liked the fact that it would give conventional army movement a minor advantage over magical moves. In the late game, it seems pointless to bother with conventional movement and attacks when you can simply 'port your armies where they need to go, catching the enemy before he gets to move normally.

At some point a while back, there was concern raised over the ability of an air or astral Sphinx to 'port to an enemy capital in the early game, seiging the fort and crippling his finances. Illwinter responded in the next patch, by not allowing the Sphinx to cast teleport or cloud trapeze anymore, a crude but effective measure (I am unaware of the current patch status). If early "Sphinx hopping" is considered a valid concern by Illwinter, it seems reasonable to try to think up a more elegant solution. So my "planar sickness" could perhaps allow the Sphinx to regain his rightful ability to cast teleport spells, whilst still preventing his use and abuse as an early-game capital crusher (my suggestion was to give all 'porting troops a 20*sizeclass fatigue penalty at the beginning of all battles that turn, so 120 for the Sphinx).


Funnily enough, I also had a suggestion about castles that I felt would add to the game. At the moment, taking a castle from the enemy takes, at the very least, 2 turns: A turn of seiging followed by a turn of storming. I decided this was an artificial limit imposed by the game system, why not, assuming your army is large enough, allow the seiging and storming of a castle to take place in a single turn?

My solution? Introduce a new order, move and storm. It becomes available when you give an army a move order to a castled enemy province, in the same way move and patrol becomes available when a move order to a friendly castle is issued (this is how it was in Dom 1, can't remember if its changed in Dom 2). An army with this order would move to the province, seige the castle (if successful in taking the province), then storm the castle if the seige successfully took out the defences. If the defences were still up at the castle storming phase, the army would revert to a second new order type: seige and storm. This would allow an army to attempt a castle storming as soon as the castle defences are down, rather than waiting another turn for player input.

nb. The turn order may have to be changed, to allow: movement, then seiging, followed by castle storming (I'm a little rusty on the details of turn sequence).

I feel this would add something to the game, making seige warfare a more fluid affair. At the late game stage, the taking of an enemy castle is a serious and costly undertaking, much of the problem being the turn's grace the defender recieves in between seiging and storming of a castle, allowing spoiling attacks to take place before the castle is stormed. On the other hand, a magically strong defender, with a large castle network, has relatively little to fear. He need not bother garrisonning any of his castles, as he has the single turn's grace that he needs to magically bolster his forces where needed.

My suggestion would make the low defence, ungarrisonned forts weaknesses that can be exploited by an army moving conventionally (magical movement would mean that a "move and seige" order could not be issued along with the movement spell). It would also give very large armies an advantage in that they could take enemy forts quite easily, leaving them less vulnerable to some of the remote attack spells eg. Ghost Riders.

[Chazar]

baruk said:
Funnily enough, I also had a suggestion about castles that I felt would add to the game. At the moment, taking a castle from the enemy takes, at the very least, 2 turns: A turn of seiging followed by a turn of storming. I decided this was an artificial limit imposed by the game system, why not, assuming your army is large enough, allow the seiging and storming of a castle to take place in a single turn?

I can only agree to that idea, but as I wrote before, I think the sieging army should do more than just have enough sieging strength...maybe twice as much as defense is to much, but that is only a minor point!

[Crash]

Some good ideas here.

I kind of like the one about the first-turn weakness after porting/trapeezing.

Would there be a good reason 'not' to have something like that?