The problem of fort types

[Sombre]

So we have general agreement. Does anyone have any other ideas on how this could be improved?

I'm sticking with my idea of a flat rate for all non special forts, discount rate for specials. That way the best option is usually to go with your racial fort, next best is somewhere like a high gold or high income province, then finally you still might build a 'crappy' fort due to location (like to protect a lab and temple on top of a special site). So you'd get variety and fort choices would be more intuitive, with crappy forts being the rarer choice rather than the other way around.

[kasnavada]

Does anyone have any other ideas on how this could be improved?

Sure !
- having some national units only produced by specific types of forts ?
- having a reduction in gold or ressources when producing on a specific type of terrain ?

To give an example, for sauromantia, building in a swamp would lead to a significant reduction in ressources that make it equivalent to the ressources made if the terrain a mountain, but only for them (maybe more or less for balance reasons ?).

[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.

[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.

[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.