Patch Improvements

Cainehill · #1 October 18th, 2006, 03:31 PM

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JaydedOne said:

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Cainehill said:
One improvement that would really be nice : An option to _not_ have any mercenaries show up for the first 10 (or X) turns. An awful lot of Dom2 games had to use "no hiring mercenaries the first 10 turns" as a house rule, just because early game mercs could be so imbalancing.

And it's looking just the same with Dom3 : the nation that gets the first mercenaries is often getting the first three or four mercs, because of the leg up on expansion & thus gold income it gives.

The mercs are wonderful for SP games, but can add too much of a luck factor to MP : getting a full 20-60 temporary troops in place of 3-10 regular troops is a huge boost.

I can readily understand your point and might even agree. I do tend to find that the mercs really -do- make a huge difference in early expansion. That said, one balancing factor might be that the bidding system helps check this somewhat. If I put half of my starting gold towards a mercenary, I'm necessarily also gutting my magic research or my early expansion if I -don't- win the bid.

Which is yet another reason why the person who wins the mercs gets a big leg up : anyone else who bids is generally setback compared to if they hadn't bid. Mind, I'm not sure that losing 4 points of research is gutting research, especially with the longer research times in Dom3.

I think an awful lot of people bid, because of the large advantage, and for a good merc it might just be the person who alchemizes his or her fire gems to bid 415 instead of 400 who wins the mercs.

JaydedOne · #2 October 18th, 2006, 03:37 PM

But then, mightn't a smarter starting strategy for people who know they don't have the money to put out towards mercs (particularly without alchemizing) be just to not bid at all and instead use your money to buy national units?

I agree, though, that it's probably far too much of a no-brainer to hire mercs in the early game. Heck, given their relative cheapness, I tend to default to hiring mercs more often than not simply because of how quickly they arrive. It's perhaps something to be saved for Dom4, but maybe mercenaries should have a delay of a few turns before showing up when first hired or hired away from another nation. Maybe that'd counteract their element of benefit, as I know that I've often felt it a bit cheap to siege a castle and then begin hiring every mercenary band available into that province to quickly blow through the siege.

And hey! It can be up to 8-10 or so research lost, depending on eras or scales.

Okay, okay. You're likely right in that that's not at all "gutting" anything.