The problem of fort types

[Carkaton]

How about fort upgrades? Take c'tis swamp city for 1200 gold 5 or 6 months build time(can't remember). If they had the option to build the swamp fort initially for 800 and 3 months, with the possibility of upgrading to the city if desired for another 400-600 and more build time.

This would allow nations to eventually make their good forts but keep their competitiveness short term.

[Sombre]

But the 'good' forts aren't good. No-one in their right mind would actually upgrade.

[kasnavada]

If the forts stay as useful as they are now, I also agree that no one would upgrade... If the upgraded fort gives special bonuses, maybe ?

I was thinking of this idea : every fort would have the possibility to add an upgrade, that would give special bonuses to it.

Examples of bonuses :
- recruit one type of capitol-only unit (either a commander or a troop),
- reduce magic cost for one school (depending on the background of the race, ie : 10% of forging for ulm ?),
- auto-spawn one (or more) of the race units,
- reduce the cost of one type of units recruitable there (for example, a tower that would reduce markata cost, or minotaur cost),
- increase gold or production from the province,
- act as a second temple,
- something else.

Short of something like this, there is nothing that would make me upgrade... forts are overpriced compared to what they currently offer. Maybe they are meant to be !

[thejeff]

Right, the good forts are only marginally better. By far the most important feature of a fort, is that you can build your national mages and troops there. Second that you have at least one turn's protection from raiders.

Everything beyond that, more admin, more defense, is nice, but only a minor improvement. If the upgrade idea was implemented, I'd be tempted to upgrade occasionally if the upgrade was only a turn and maybe 100 gold. Otherwise, just save the money for another fort.

[quantum_mechani]

Lets be realistic here, the chances of a major new feature like fort upgrading in a patch are pretty much negligible. Something like Sombre's suggestion, which only changes build time/cost, is at least a theoretical possibility. I still don't think Illwinter would go for it, for the reason that big forts are harder to build.

Probably the more likely way to get something like this accomplished would be to petition for fort modding.

[thejeff]

Agreed, the thematic reasoning that big forts are harder to build is probably what drives this. It's been a problem since Dom2 and the current version isn't as bad.

I do think that allowing a nation's special fort bonus to be the ability to build the same forts more cheaply and quickly in their preferred terrain rather than being able to build bigger forts at the higher price is also thematic.

[BesucherXia]

AFAIK, forts can improve local incomes with a small value like admin/2.
If we increase that scale into some more decent value, (I'll suggest *2 instead) buliding a big city will definitely pay off in long term, just as the forts are supposed to.

[Sombre]

If admin had a greater impact on gold income that would probably help make the 'good/big' forts more attractive, but it is somewhat sidestepping the issue. I'd be in favour of that in addition to the cost changes we're pondering.

Fort modding would be fine as well though. I'm happy to have a go at balancing them and even with the ability only to mod build time cost and admin, with the fort type modding already available for nations you could create an improved/revamped fort system for the game.

[Sombre]

Sorry to bump this but I wonder if it has attracted KO's attention at all.

[Baalz]

Some of the suggestions here sound fun, but are immensely unlikely to be implemented as they're fairly significant changes to the mechanics.

It seems obvious that cheaper/faster forts is an advantage. Nobody is arguing that it's almost always better to get cheaper forts. Some nations have an advantage because they have access to a lot of cheaper forts and thus typically have a lot of options as to where to place them. Some nations have a disadvantage because they've got a lot of expensive forts, and often have to make a choice about whether to take a cheap fort in a crappy location or an expensive one where they really want it. This is good, it adds to national variety.

I think the general complaint here is that special fort types are counter intuitively a disadvantage. That's a reasonable complaint, but it seems the much easier solution is to suggest (for example) swamp cities build faster while perhaps re-balancing the fort types for other terrains for C'tis. You don't need special bonuses or whatever to overhaul the system - if C'tis has a choice of building a 3 turn swamp city or a 5 turn fortified city in the plains - guess what? You end up with C'tis generally making a lot of swamp cities. You don't need to worry about admin or resource bonuses...as is well illustrated in this thread those hardly matter at all.