Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3

[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.

[Graeme Dice]

Zapmeister said:
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.

I'd play even more AE Ermor if that rule went in. They are bar none the best at bashing down walls there is. Sure you can send a flames from the sky over there next turn and kill those 3000 longdead, but they can still smash down walls real good.

[Zapmeister]

Graeme Dice said:
I'd play even more AE Ermor if that rule went in. They are bar none the best at bashing down walls there is. Sure you can send a flames from the sky over there next turn and kill those 3000 longdead, but they can still smash down walls real good.

Sure, you'd have to tweak Ermor as well. But given that, I still think it's quite a cool idea, making the mausoleums etc still effective, but only against smaller forces (as you would expect).