Yet another Clamhoarding, Castling Discussion

Originally posted by Boron:
ok this is really brutal i agree
almost no nation has a chance to defeat a telesphinx at turn 7 .
but on the other hand now it is completely useless because it can use no other travel spell too as norfleet said . so less variety in pretender selection .
would it perhaps have been possible to either :
-increase the teleportation gem costs ONLY for the sphinx casting it ?
-forbid teleportation in the enemy capital with the sphinx ?

There are some ideas around. And yes, I will admit the Sphinx as it is right now, is probably my Last choice of pretenders. However, as I said paitence is a virtue. I would rather have it in it's current state than where it was in the interim where something is done to it to be 'fixed'.

[Norfleet]

Meh. The simple solution would have been to disallow the Sphinx to teleport, but let it retain the ability to Gateway or Astral Travel, which are much higher level spells. Thus, a Sphinx could still be utilized in battle, but not merely dropped on people on turn 7.

[Wendigo]

Going back to the OP topic, my take:

The benefits/pros from castling:
-Protection of magic sites, temples, labs & recruitment of indep exhotic mages/troops.
-Increased income (depending on the fort's admin).
-Allows recruitment of national troops & commanders.
-Increased supply & resources (depending on admin).
-Protects troops & commanders from surprise attacks.
-The province cannot be lost in one turn to raiders.

The cons:
-Cost in gold!! while castling your valuable provinces can be beneficial, these benefits are less & less clear the less valuable the province is, as the opportunity costs of investing that gold elsewhere are higher.

-Extreme castling requires a low cost fort to be viable (300 gold ones), and these either have low admin ( Mausoleum & Watch tower, which have the drawback of a serious penalty in early income & resources) or high selection costs (Wizard tower at 120 design points).

-A castled province prevents the owner from immediate retaliation vs raiders via movement/distant summon spells: the defender teleporting mages & armies will show up inside the walls, leaving the raiders a full turn to do whatever they wish. This makes the fully fortified empire very vulnerable to burnt land tactics & multiple strikes:

Strike at 5 or so forts at the same time, does your enemy have powerful enough armies/fliers in range to retaliate (or inside the sieged fort)? if yes tax to 200% & consider moving on, if not consider storming in or pillaging. Do not forget that if you storm the fort you might run into the relief force that just teleported in, so be ready to take some losses.

Only distant attack spells with no allegiance can hit the invaders doing this before they act, but these spells are pretty weak in the early & mid game.

-The defender must be ready to fight & retaliate on multiple fronts, otherwise every single fort lost to a multiple strike will become a stronghold for the enemy in the middle of his lands. The defender must also be able to handle the attacker's main force with his own, otherwise he will lose a fort every 2 turns.

-Domes are counter-productive with this strategy as they prevent the defender from reinforcing magically, so research those army bLasting & province bLasting spells & cast away.


Chew on the above & make your turtling opponent suffer.

[Boron]

good summary wendigo

you can't pillage before you stormed the fort or ?

i agree that getting attacked at 5 forts at the same time is bad . BUT it would be even worse if you had no castles around there because the 5 provinces would have been lost immediately + in mid / late game you probably have in most of them a temple anyway + pd which is lost immediately so - 300 gold or so .

with a fort you only need 1 point = 1 gold in defense in order to see the attacking force
and perhaps of the 5 besieged forts you can retaliate on 1 or 2 immediately and at the others the enemy marches further so no damage at all.
even if he besieges perhaps you are lucky and in one of them he doesn't break the walls at the first turn .

finally for blood nations it is especially important to castle . especially abysia can fly in a devil army quite early which has thnx to the demonbreed a range of 3
otherwise the valuable blood hunters would either be slain or if it is a weak attack like call of the wild , ghost riders .....
at least the blood slaves captured this turn are most likely wasted for battle spells like summon imps

so ihmo for blood hunting nations especially castling is a must while e.g. ulm may benefit more from not castling everything for better troop production ( at least early - midgame )

[Wendigo]

Originally posted by Boron:

you can't pillage before you stormed the fort or ?

There's no point in pillaging if you are going to storm the fort. You only pillage what you cannot hold.

i agree that getting attacked at 5 forts at the same time is bad . BUT it would be even worse if you had no castles around there because the 5 provinces would have been lost immediately + in mid / late game you probably have in most of them a temple anyway + pd which is lost immediately so - 300 gold or so .

Not necessarily worse. If you have no fort in those provinces you can teleport/cloud trapeze your pretender or a small mage force on one of those 5 armies & waste it. Full castling is not always the optimum choice, definitely not if you cannot defend vs a multipronged attack.

with a fort you only need 1 point = 1 gold in defense in order to see the attacking force
and perhaps of the 5 besieged forts you can retaliate on 1 or 2 immediately and at the others the enemy marches further so no damage at all.
even if he besieges perhaps you are lucky and in one of them he doesn't break the walls at the first turn .

If you can only retaliate in 2 out of 5 forts you will lose the other 3 (remember, paper walls) vs a competent opponent if his force is big enough to breach. If it's not the provinces will be unusable for income & blood hunts for a while after being pillaged.

finally for blood nations it is especially important to castle .

I'd rather say that castling works better for nations with magically mobile mages that need also multiple recruitment spots (say, Caelum or Pythium), and worst for those nations depending on capitol only troops.

[Boron]

[quote]Originally posted by Wendigo:

Originally posted by Boron:
[qb]
you can't pillage before you stormed the fort or ?

i don't have the option to pillage ?
i now checked if i have it when the gate is breached and you can storm the fort.

but still the pillage option is not available .
on the one hand realistic since most valuable goods are brought to the castle but on the other hand you can't bring everything in the castle + there was a surprise effect e.g. when the mongols / huns plundered in middle ages .


so you can set taxes on 200% but at least not pillage .

or my Version is buggy which i don't believe

[Norfleet]

You can't pillage a fortified province unless the castle is taken. This is certainly another reason to castle: It contains the level of damage marauders can inflict.

[spirokeat]

I've been mulling this over and I'm not sure that there is an overwhelming advantage at all to castling.

I would build a castle for a number of reasons usually.

I need more forts to purchase larger numbers of national non capitol troops, not relevant to all nations.

I want to protect an important province for bloodhunting (the hunters etc), magic site or special recruitable.

Its in strategically good place to start producing new armies from or block the entry of another nation (peninsula provs etc)

So, on one level depending on how costly your castles etc are, you are going to build a number of them anyway.

A castle gives you essentially one turn (generally) of grace on the 'total' loss of a province. This has the effect of protecting a temple or unprotected magetype for one turn also.

Now without going into minute. The various outcomes would seem to be, wait and knack his temple, remaining defenders, fast response army

Move to avoid his fast reponse army, which regardless of their being a castle there will effectively revert back to defender ownership.

The defender can fast response army directly to seiged prov or second guess your next move as hes obviously prepared to face your invading force otherwise this wouldn't be even in his mind.

So, castle or not, your either cat and mousing or planning to nail his force. All thats saved is the temple and any squishies.

Even if you bring in the idea of relief forces or multiple strikes, you will still be facing an army thats built to defend a nation and your either ready for it, or not.

There is of course the immortal defender problem, but even if you take a uncastled province with a temple in it, you still dont reverse the dominion in it instantly so you would have to prepare in advance to cope with immortals regardless of castle or not.

And of course everytime you let a province slip, your opponent is then 'castled' against you. So it would seem that the main advantage is to protect non focal mage types like bloodhunters or site activators.

[Stormbinder]

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:

quote:

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Originally posted by Norfleet:
I place the blame firmly on the fact that they were not beaten frequently enough as small children and did not suffer sufficient hardship and deprivation while growing up.

It's nice to know that you approve of child abuse along with all your other psychological problems.

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[littlemute]

I think there's a right way to beat kids (the way I was beaten) and many wrong ways.

When we would beg for candy at the store we were told to stop, then told to stop with a warning that we would be spanked right there in the store (add the pain to the shame), then, of course, it would actually happen if we continued.

The second way was the worst. I'd do something wrong, like steal or lie or start a forest fire or shoot at people with a bb gun, something fairly bad. Then I was scolded and told to go to my room and come down for 'punishment.' The nature of which was never revealed until the moment of impact. What this does is takes the anger out of it and gives the parent a chance to cool down before laying on hands or the switch.

The whole "go out to the woodshed and find a switch to be beaten with and if it's too small, I'll pick it" gives the parent time to relax and strike the kid without any rage or feelings, simply execution of the logical conclusion to the child's poor actions.

As the kid gets older, you will really have to do damage to have them do anything but laugh at your spankings, so I'd say past 11 or so, no beatings. So what you do is 1) take **** away from them such as telling them when their 13 that when they get their driver's license you will take it away from them for 4 months...the span of time they'll never remember, but you will! ha ha! 2)Make them stand in front of a clock for hours 3)Wake them up VERY early to spread gravel on the driveway or dig a ditch on a saturday morning and keep them working the whole day, not even mentioning that it's punishment, but they'll know.