Tip: Template for reducing late game MM hell

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by Squirrelloid

well, building forts mostly allows recruiting of national units and pooling resources. The cost of the castle relative to the gold boost is so low as to be unnoticeable, basically.

True in most cases, and in fact I personally DON'T build forts to increase gold income, but it is a form of Exploit that can potentially increase your gold revenues by up to 25%. The main reason it isn't done is not because the gold increase is negligible but because fort costs are so high relative to per-province income, in a normal-settings game.

I'm AFB, but IIRC building a fort gives you (baseIncome*admin/200) extra gold per turn, so you need to hold a province for (200*fortCost/(baseIncome*admin)) turns in order to show a positive cash flow. Depending on the province that may or may not be worth bothering with. From memory, here's some examples:

130 gold province, Tel City (Admin 40, 1400 gold): +26 gold. You need to hold the city for 54 turns to show a net profit.

390 gold province, Tel City (Admin 40, 1400 gold): +78 gold. You need to hold it for 18 turns to show a profit.

130 gold province, Hill Fort (Admin 20, 800 gold): +13 gold, 61 turns.

390 gold province, Hill Fort (Admin 20, 800 gold): +39 gold, 21 turns.

A 21-turn payback isn't short, but it's in line with the payback times for many buildings in other 4X games like MoM--although of course those games may go on for hundreds of turns and Dom3 usually caps out in the 80s.

Playing on smaller but richer maps (x3 or x4 and high gems) is one way of reducing micro, by effectively consolidating provinces into larger and richer metaprovinces. It tends to emphasize normal armies slightly more over summons/thugs, and it also makes fort-building a strategic option for economic development.

None of this changes the fact that Exploit plays much less of a role in Dom3 than in most 4X games--I'd actually submit that Dom3 isn't really a 4X game at all. It's mostly 2X, Expand and Exterminate, although research plays a big role and the Exterminate phase is unusually rich because of all the unit/spell variety.

-Max