Atlantis and upkeep/supply

[Nagot Gick Fel]

The Panther said:

There must be a problem with using the English language here, Nagot. I don't understand what you mean by 'many people believe this'. Believe what exactly?

If I understand you correctly, your main issue (when you write "Either ALL summons should cost or NONE should") is one a game balance, and that's OK with me. Yet I know many people who genuinely believe that, since almost all summonable don't cost upkeep, then Trolls (eg) shouldn't cost upkeep - as if there was a rule that ties summonability to (lack of) upkeepness. And thus they call that a bug, or an oversight, or an inconsistency - or, at best, a misfeature.

And you are wrong about one thing. There definitely IS a relation between summoning and upkeep. When you cast Sea King's Court, you will see a major spike in your upkeep costs. That is a CLEAR relation between the two.

Misunderstanding here: what I say is each unit in the game has a cost (which may be zero) and thus an upkeep value (derived from its cost and its holy status). Then there are mechanisms (summoning rituals, 'call allies' or 'reanimate' ability on leaders, dominion/unit/GE auto-ummoning) that give you specific units. But none of these mechanisms alter these units' cost and upkeep values. In your example, the spike is due to the Trolls' upkeep, and only to that: it would be just the same if you had recruited these units at a site - so it's not related to the summoning ritual itself. It could be demonstrated another way: mod Trolls and Troll Kings so their base cost is zero, then cast the ritual: the spike isn't here anymore - therefore the spike isn't related to the ritual.

As for the idea of ALL summons costing upkeep, I suppose it does hurts the undead Ermor themes, even if a soulless cost basis were something like 2 gold. However, it would have the nice benefit that Ermor armies would no longer be able to grow nearly to infinity like they can do now.

Perhaps it would be better if NO troops and NO summons cost upkeep. Let your commanders be the only troops which costs upkeep. The commander upkeep costs would, of course, have to be raised to balance the game properly. This would make building armies a GOOD thing for the entire game, unlike they way it is now.

The real imbalance is one of magic vs economics. When you compare PPP to Dom 2, the most obvious change is the economics took a major hit while the magic system remained the same. In PPP, the most competitive approach was to max economics at the cost of your magic scale (drain 3 was pretty common then - actually it was the default choice for most PPP players I know), and field huge national armies of elite troops with a snowballing effect. In Dom 2 your recruitable troops still cost the same, but your econ is about ~2.5 weaker, so you need to push research more to compliment your forces with summonable troops ASAP. And Lastly, both faster access to summonables, and the bigger hit of unaltered upkeep over a toned-down econ, tend to make national troops obsolete much much sooner than it used to be in Dom 1.