Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3

[baruk]

Verjigorm said:
Basically, the flaw in the summoning sickness idea comes in when you want to teleport into an enemy state (a common practice) the sick units can't make an attack since they are sick, so what happens?

My idea was to give the sick units a 20 times their size class fatigue penalty at the start any battle that they get involved in that turn. So normal, size 2 troops would start with 40 fatigue, the size 6 sphinx would start with 120. This way you can still use sneak teleport attacks, but with some hindrance.
Alternatively, the fatigue penalty could be based on hit points, so that you would take half your hp in fatigue if you got in a battle the same turn you were ported. That might be fairer considering the lower hp, large size commanders that use teleport and the like, whilst still causing problems for the sphinx.
To clarify a bit, the planar sickness would come into effect only for battles that happen the same turn as the teleport. The troops would have recovered by the following turn, when they would be available for normal movement again.

[Verjigorm]

The 120 fatigue for a Sphinx is really a moot point as he can't teleport anyway (and still shouldn't be able to). Even at that high fatigue, with natural protection of 30 and roughly 500hps (depending on dominion) he'll still end up routing the enemy army unless you have continuous Fanaticism/SoC. Even then, he'll be up and running with his first spell in 5 turns or so. It usually takes an early force forever to destroy one and if you have no 3-priests, your still screwed (Man, Ulm). Why should a Gygja be more penalised than an Arch Theurg or a Demonbred? Wouldn't that penalty serve to unbalance tele-attacks? D2 has an incredibly complicated numeric basis. I doubt that a herd of statisticians could balance it perfectly. There are more obvious flaws like Ulm's lack of late power to worry about.

I'm always up for adding features--especially to the castles which I think are quite underdeveloped. I'd like to see more castle options and maybe more nation-specific castles (like Ermor's). Like PVK says, there could be all sorts of nifty castles. Of course I don't think it should take years to put up a crappy watchtower (don't nerf the WT--it sucks....everyone can get in and your guys starve to death if the attackers stay outside very long). Instant siege might be interesting, but it could be easily countered by putting a single point of defense in the province--unless you also want to make the patrolling forces unable to impede the attackers as well......(nonsense). If I were building watchtowers IRL, I think I'd build tons of 'em too--not too much to a little stone and mortar building or some kind of tree house--makes a nice little staging point for a small band of soldiers, but doesn't offer much protection from the storm of battle

[Vodalian]

Isnt the main problem with castling, the fact that they enable a few decked up SCs to take care of the defence of an entire empire? This is of course accomplished by filling your whole territory with cheap towers, which will slow down the enemy raiders for one critical turn, before you SCs teleport/ cloud trapeze or fly in.
Losing provinces means a lot in Dom2. It is easy for raiders to set the tax level to 200 and run away, causing permanent damage to income. I think a possible solution would be to force players to oversee the tax collection. It makes no sense now that the raiding army can set the tax level to two hundred and leave the province during the same month and still get the pay and deal the pop loss.
I think mobility is what makes castling worth it. Armies have methods of moving instantenously from province to province, making it very difficult to predict what to protect. When you add to this that you can field enough of an army of national troops to protect only a small fraction of your empire ( because of upkeep ), it's no wonder that people train exclusively mages and summons and SCs. Making hordes of castles enables your own highly mobile armies to protect provinces which are under attack, without having to sit there all the time.

[NTJedi]

There's some great suggestions here...

Hopefully one or more can be placed as options before the game starts. This way the gamers can choose before it starts. I'm definitely looking forward to Dom_3.

[Yvelina]

> Isnt the main problem with castling, the fact that they enable a few decked up SCs to take care of the defence of an entire empire?

And this is a problem how? Read this sentance:

Isn't the main reason for castling, the fact that they prevent a few flying, teleporting SCs to lay waste to an entire empire?

And of course, without castles, one could destroy your empire with remote and even anonymous spells. Is it too much to ask from someone who wants to conquer a strong, well developed nation, to actually win a fight or two while doing so?

[Zapmeister]

Yvelina said:
And this is a problem how? Read this sentance:

Isn't the main reason for castling, the fact that they prevent a few flying, teleporting SCs to lay waste to an entire empire?

Quite. Castling is both essential if you want to prevent said empire-trashing, and over-effective leading, as it does, to boring end-games in which 2 castled nations beat their heads together getting nowhere.

The other aspect of the problem is that strategic depth is lost if building everywhere is a no-brainer.

Solving the problem means finding a way to make empires defensible without castling.

[Zapmeister]

How about an over-run rule? If there's enough invading troops to get the wall down in a single turn, then combat with the defenders occurs in the same turn the invaders move in.