Anyone use a Fortified City?

[quantum_mechani]

I think there are really two issues here:

1. People building cheap castles in every province.

I don't think this is a big issue, it is only a real option in long games, and it is only powerfull if the player can back it up with strong armies/SCs.

2. Only a few of the forts are worth the design points.

This is the real problem in my opinion. The watch tower costs no points, while remaining cheap in game (and quick to build), and providing most of the defensive power of other forts. If each of the citadels cost zero points, they would have still in most cases be inferior to the watch tower. The rest of the forts fall somewhere between, but I don't think anyone belives citadels are a good choice as they exist now.

[Jack Simth]

Perhaps one way to make other forms of forts more useful in the end game would be to make them moddable into constructable magic sites - e.g., make it so a Wizard's Tower produces 1 Astral Pearl per turn (or perhaps 1 Air Gem), a Mountain Fortress produces 1 Earth Gem per turn, a Dark Citadel produces 1 Blood Slave per turn, a Mausoleum produces 1 Death Gem per turn, et cetera, and then leave the watch tower doing nothing useful other than it's no-point spammability.

[alexti]

quantum_mechani said:
I think there are really two issues here:

1. People building cheap castles in every province.
2. Only a few of the forts are worth the design points.

This is the real problem in my opinion. The watch tower costs no points, while remaining cheap in game (and quick to build), and providing most of the defensive power of other forts. If each of the citadels cost zero points, they would have still in most cases be inferior to the watch tower. The rest of the forts fall somewhere between, but I don't think anyone belives citadels are a good choice as they exist now.

I agree that #2 is the real issue. I only find watch tower, mausoleum and castle to be useful. In some very rare cases, fortified city may be practical. But I can't see why I'd want one of the other forts. The main reason is that the defensive bonus doesn't worth much. In the early game you don't have neither gold nor time to build those expensive forts and in the later game, their defenses don't make much difference. If the fortification would be able to increase their might as the game advances, that would be interesting, but it's already hard to storm castles in the late game as it is. So I see the only way to make them more attractive - let them cost design points, but reduce their construction costs to be on par with watch tower.

[Turin]

I would add the fortress to the usable castles. It´s almost as good as the castle, but costs 20 design points less.

I agree that the others are pretty useless. So how much should they cost, so that you would choose them?

I would see every castle as viable, if these changes to design point costs were made:
watchtower,mausoleum,fortress,castle,wizardtower unchanged.
hillfortress: -20 points
fortified city: 40 points
citadel: 40 points
dark citadel: -40 points
mountain citadel: -60 points

I´d probably still go with watchtowers in most games, but I might choose the negative point castles if you just need those few extra design points.
The citadel or fortified city would be a real alternative to the castle/fortress, if you want to have an high admin castles.

[Yvelina]

> But how can you even remotely claim to be one of the best players and yet play only a single race?

The same way that the best shot I know uses only Cheh-Zeh pistols. I did not say that I was unfamiliar with the other races, or that I could not play them. Some people, *cough* *cough* feel they need to prove something, so right now they are playing Abysia despite loving air nations. Me, I play for fun, and for me, fun in Dominions II is winning with Vanheim.

On the other hand, I am about to start a team game with randomized races, so I guess I will have to play something else. It will still be an air nation, even if I have to play the Marignon theme on a map that has no seas whatsoever.

> What happened to BF Ulm, which you used to play occasionally?

I realized how limited it was. I used to play Man too... and I dropped it for a completely different reason. I'm studying to be a Powergamer *cue pompous music*

[Chazar]

alexti said:
The main reason is that the defensive bonus doesn't worth much.

That's why I proposed in a parallel thread to just add a "move and storm" command (opposite to "move and patrol"), which just works when defense is exceeded twice by the attackers.

Then big numbers of national troops would have an advantage, since attacking armies would not be delayed by weakly defended watchtowers anymore; while temples would still be protected from ghostriders, teleporters, lone raiding-SCs or mere skirmishing armies. On the other hand, having a siege strength of more than e.g. 320 to immediately storm a 150 defense castle protected by 10 militia without 1 turn delay is not an easy feat as it should be, making high-defense castles more interesting to choose: You can take still take a cheap watchtower, but it would not delay big armies anymore...