Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3

[Edi]

Did you people miss the part about very hard research coupled with low MSF (25 or less)? That's going to screw over everyone, but it also serves as an equalizer that removes a lot of the advantage of blood nations because getting to any kind of serious summons takes forever and then some. Yeah, you can have scads of blood slaves, but you won't have anything useful to do with them except empowering blood mages while you wait for the s-l-o-w research to give you something worthwhile to summon. Unless you are Mictlan which can summon spine devils and fiends of darkness right off the bat, and their nationals suck so much that they are almost a non-factor anyway.

Given the slow research, few sites and lousy gem incomes, those who would rely on hoarding and summoned creatures are going to be dead by the time they would have them because someone who concentrates on getting a decent national troop military up will just steamroller them.

Edi

[Turin]

last I checked summon fiend was a lvl 2 spell.That takes only 160 rp and gives you a very good summon for 5 bloodslaves.And horde from hell is only lvl 5 and is an excellent spell.

In addition it´s not as if nations like abysia, bf marignon or jotunheim have bad national troops to go along with the bloodmagic.
I think blood nations are already among the strongest with MSF 50, MSF 25 doubles their magic efficiency.

[Boron]

Turin said:
last I checked summon fiend was a lvl 2 spell.That takes only 160 rp and gives you a very good summon for 5 bloodslaves.And horde from hell is only lvl 5 and is an excellent spell.

In addition it´s not as if nations like abysia, bf marignon or jotunheim have bad national troops to go along with the bloodmagic.
I think blood nations are already among the strongest with MSF 50, MSF 25 doubles their magic efficiency.

Exactly .

Taking abysia or mictlan in such a setting and you need to only research blood + a bit construction . Some evocation is also nice but basically you only need blood .

I think 50% frequency is the fairest setting because it balances blood + normal nations more or less .

[Verjigorm]

Anyway, back to the idea of the fortified city... A city is basically a self-contained production and distribution facility. It may require outside resources to feed itself, but it can make a lot of stuff all by itself, especially if it quarries it's own stone or metals. I think that a fortified city should be the only fortification able to continue troop production while under siege--at a reduced resource value, of course. One may also consider that people keep chickens, various livestock, and have arable soil inside of cities. To reflect this, a fortified city might have a minimum sieged supply value of 50 or so depending on growth scale. That would make the fortified city a much more useful fortification.

>> Oops! Wrong thread--Oh well...I guess mad castling and crappy expensive castles are related though

[Jack Simth]

Well, one of the best ways to stop one strategy is to make others equally viable - strengthening the more expensive castles would be one way to discourage Mad Castling. Personally, I like my idea of making them into moddable magic sites - it's even thematic, as it goes with the flavor text of how magic gems form - energy from the stars hits the planet and, in special places, is captured and converted. A designer, knowing of this phenomina, would be likely to take advantage of it, no? It might also allow you to implement the supply production of Fortified Cities that you suggest - the FC produces 50 supply (or whatever, as a Cauldron of Broth) every turn.