How to solve castling effect?

[Cohen]

The problem isn't only to defend your temples:

Castles in every province raise gold by admin.
Doubles production everywhere if you need.
Protects your mages researching inside.
Protects your troops from Ghost Rider spell and similar.
Slow the enemy conquer of your territory, giving them 1 turn more to trapeze/teleport their army sllaughtering SCs there.

Probably I'm forgotting something.

[LintMan]

Originally posted by Cohen:
The problem isn't only to defend your temples:

Castles in every province raise gold by admin.
Doubles production everywhere if you need.
Protects your mages researching inside.
Protects your troops from Ghost Rider spell and similar.
Slow the enemy conquer of your territory, giving them 1 turn more to trapeze/teleport their army sllaughtering SCs there.

Probably I'm forgotting something.

I think temple protection is the biggest motivation for castle spamming. Castles do all the things you say, but:
- The typically "spammed" castles is the cheapie low-admin one, so the admin benefits of spamming it are not that great.
- Similarly, for production concerns, you'd probably do far better with single high-admin castles surrounded by uncastled provinces than you would by spamming low-admin castles everywhere.

- You don't need spammed castles to protect your researchers. (Or at least I don't; concentrating researchers in a few castled provinces seems more than sufficient.)

Spammed castles will slow enemy advance, though, as you say. But I'm not sure if that by itself would justify the high cost/effort in doing so for most races.

I like the suggestions to make enemy temples need to be destroyed by a commander, rather than auto-destroyed when the province is taken. At the very least, this prevents Ghost Riders from hitting enemies for a 200 gold temple in addition to the province loss.

[Cohen]

For production it's far better having 1 castle x province, since they double the resources, instead of collecting a % of half of the amount of resources you could have with a castle built in.

You've only to spend more time gathering the troops in one army.

[Maltrease]

I don't think it doubles the resources. It only lets you use the full amount of resources available to the provence.

If I provence has 100 resources you would only be able to use 50 without putting a castle there.

However fortreses will draw their admin percentage from the full resource amount. So a fortified city next to the province would draw 50 resources... and another one on the other side would draw the remaining 50.

So if you place your castles correctly you would not be losing that many resources vs building a fortress in each provence.

This also allows you to draw the resources whre you need them (Heavy calvary for example) where if you built a castle in every provence you would not be able to do this.

[PvK]

I'm not clear what the actual problem(s) are.

Yes temples without castles are vulnerable. I think I mostly like the idea to require them to be torn down, requiring an extra turn by some commander. I'm not sure it's a bad thing the way they fall down now, though. Note too that if this change is made, then skillful raiders will want to bring along "silly" leaders like scouts to knock down the temples while the raiding army moves on at full speed. This will also mean defenders will want to "chase" a raiding army, to reduce those temple-toppling leaders. Also, the AI will need to be programmed to either do the same silly micro-management tactic to raid effectively, or it will be made weaker by either slowing its raiding armies to half-speed so they can take out temples (getting them hit by defending armies), or having them raid without hurting players' temples.

Lots of cheap castles have some advantages, but also disadvantages, such as:

* Costs a lot of gold to put castles everywhere, especially if they don't have administration. What else could be done with that gold?

* Cheap castles tend to have low admin. Empires with fewer castles with high admin, will have more gold income and higher resources to build naional troops.

* Cheap castles tend to have low defense, meaning they can be seiged the next turn. Better castles can often hold out for several turns, allowing a relief army to arrive.

* Cheap castles tend to have few missile weapons. So storming them is about as easy as killing the enemies inside on an open field. Better castles are bristling with missile attacks, which can be expensive and dangerous to storm.

PvK

[Stormbinder]

Originally posted by Cohen:
The problem isn't only to defend your temples:

Castles in every province raise gold by admin.
Doubles production everywhere if you need.
Protects your mages researching inside.
Protects your troops from Ghost Rider spell and similar.
Slow the enemy conquer of your territory, giving them 1 turn more to trapeze/teleport their army sllaughtering SCs there.

Probably I'm forgotting something.

Logically speaking, to solve the mad castling issue there are only 2 possible ways - you have to either made building castles in 100% of your provinces impossible due to game mechanic/rules, or/and you have to make it unprofitable. Each of this approaches could be implemented by several different methods.

[PvK]

But what's the problem?