Castles are odd, aint they?

[Chazar]

sushiboat said:
I think the consistent thing to do would be to have researching mages who have to defend an unfortified province not be able to finish their turn of research.

I agree with you generally, but the issue is probably more complicated: Even killed mages contribute their research!

This is, of course, a sensible thing from the game-play perspective and allows research to be planned in an exact manner. Another example is item forging: The gems are deducted when the order is assigned, and it would be a major hassle if killed mages would not forge the items as assigned (consider a endgame situation where you forge a lot of things).

So one could argue that a game month isnt a discrete thing, hence there is no single spot in time when all orders are issued. Furthermore armies need time for movement, so battles can be imagined to take place at the end of the imaginary time frame that we players call a "turn", but not all time frames for all units are aligned like the "turn" suggests. Hence the mage starts forging and researching long before and might be done at the end of his timeframe/month when the attack actually takes place...

...so what I want to say here is: I know it is thematically wrong to allow forgers/researchers to finish their doing while also participating in battles, but it really makes sense to simplify gameplay. I think that was the reason for having research and forging coming early in the turn order, despite research already affecting spells cast in later battles...

The castle breaks it somehow and the solutions is currently see are either to restrict lab building to fortified provinces , add a checkbox to mark actively defending (but not patrolling) units [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/Cold.gif[/img] or live with the things as they are... [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/Cold.gif[/img]

Better ideas?