Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3

[Edi]

The best fix for the problem of massive use of raiding spells is using a magic site frequency of 25 or less for MP games, then the players will really have to CAREFULLY consider what they use their hard earned gems for. This way summoning anything powerful is a major decision and the role of national units is greatly increased. If you also put research on very difficult, they become even more prominent and you need to carefully consider what to research to maximize your strengths.

Of course, blood nations are more powerful on magic poor maps, but that is not an insurmountable problem either.

On such maps, madcastling is not such an attractive strategy, and massive raiding spell use is not viable at all.

Edi

[alexti]

Even MSF of 40 greatly reduces number of available gems. I have played once at 40 and everybody has noticed how much fewer sites they could find.

[Edi]

I've always found that games on bi´g maps with MSF 40 end up as huge gem hoardings. Try e.g. Faerun with MSF 25 and it's suddenly a lot more challenging.

Edi

[alexti]

I think that Faerun with any settings will be a micromanagement-fest. Though I'm missing your reasoning about MSF. The less MSF is, the more incentives to hoard and less incentives to conquer... I'd think that with MSF 25 everybody would start hoarding. With MSF 50 it seems that the simple conquest provides pretty decent gem income and gem hoarding is not mandatory and probably is not efficient either (at least in many settings).

[Boron]

alexti said:
I think that Faerun with any settings will be a micromanagement-fest. Though I'm missing your reasoning about MSF. The less MSF is, the more incentives to hoard and less incentives to conquer... I'd think that with MSF 25 everybody would start hoarding. With MSF 50 it seems that the simple conquest provides pretty decent gem income and gem hoarding is not mandatory and probably is not efficient either (at least in many settings).

With only 25 MSF starting the hoarding is much more difficult then with 50 MSF .

So all hoarding effects are delayed . Even Atlantis would suffer a severe slowing in their hoarding because it will take ages for them to produce dwarfen hammers and bringing up the forge is then too costy as well .


Hoarding requires imo the least micromanagement , battlescripting + SC equipping needs more micro .

For forging e.g. 10 clams and stocking them on something you need about 2-3 minutes each turn normally , just recruit 10 scouts each turn .

Only if renaming is disallowed hoarding is painful .

I always name my scouts c for clam , f for fetish , b for bloodstone , s for soulcontract and stock if i stock also other items on them [img]/threads/images/graemlins/Laugh.gif[/img] .
All mages with a hammer get a h as name , all clamforgers are just named clam etc. .

Though from a roleplay viewpoint this is ugly of course it is neccessary . But if you do good naming then even if you forge 50 clams / turn you don't need longer then 10-20 minutes / turn for this .

[alexti]

Boron said:

With only 25 MSF starting the hoarding is much more difficult then with 50 MSF .

So all hoarding effects are delayed.

Similarly, all forging and summons are delayed

Boron said:
Even Atlantis would suffer a severe slowing in their hoarding because it will take ages for them to produce dwarfen hammers and bringing up the forge is then too costy as well .

Hoarding requires imo the least micromanagement , battlescripting + SC equipping needs more micro .

Battle-scripting and equipping for the major battle is lengthy, but it's a fun part, figuring our what spells to choose, what resistances to add and generally try to guess what the enemy will do and counter it.

However, major battles are relatively rare, and I don't normally re-script small squads that take over empty provinces.

Boron said:
For forging e.g. 10 clams and stocking them on something you need about 2-3 minutes each turn normally , just recruit 10 scouts each turn .

10 clams is not a hoarding. Real pain starts when every turn you have to decide what to forge. And before forging you have to find where to put the current content of your inventory. And soon you start running into a trouble, because your forging capabilities becomes insufficient to equip your commanders. So what do you do? Let your tartarians stay unequipped for now and just forge clams? But then when the war comes you'll have real trouble equipping your 5-10 dozens of tartarian mages (With 7 items per tartarian (unless you GoR spirits and mostra you need 10+ turns to equip them - no good). So every turn you have to reshuffle your inventory and commanders who temporarily keep teh items. Ouch! [img]/threads/images/graemlins/Sad.gif[/img]
If inventory would be unlimited and sortable that would be less of a problem, but the way it stands now, it's a major hassle.

[Verjigorm]

<i>Most</i> forging and summons are delayed by MSF. Blood magic is not affected giving a significant edge to nations with good blood hunting ability. Clam hoarders will likely be overwhelmed by demons, imps, and horror attacks before they can bank enough pearls to do anything crazy. Possible exceptions would include atlantis (5 water gems/turn), Pythium with a Daughter of the Land (3 water gems/turn), Nifelheim (3 water gems/turn), etc. A little early Construction research could show a nice pearl income early on.