Librarys and sages

[Cainehill]

Peter Ebbesen said:
Certainly, early game where research is limited by "I can only recruit one mage per turn in my capital" research is slower, certain research strategies are weaker (such as those based on finding cheap indy mages or based on skull mentors), which means that for short games, research is harder for many of the most popular strategies, but research being harder in general I disagree with, or, to be more precise, haven't seen convincing arguments for.

An example: the abundance of money means that, for most nations, long-term, money based strategies actually allow you to spend a higher fraction of your income on researchers and since the benefits from magic-scale and experience scale just as well in Dominions 3 as in 2, you actually end up researching faster in 3 than in 2 from a certain point in time all other things being equal, since you'll be getting more than 2 research mages for each 1 you had in Dom 2.

Not so sure I agree. Yes, you have more money - but unlike Dom2, it's difficult to go with a strategy of using all your money for mages/forts/temples/labs. Both because you really _need_ troops in Dom3, and because those forts/temples/labs cost substantially more, so you're unlikely to be able to make a _lot_ of forts the way you could in Dom2 with Mausoleums, watchtowers, and Wizard towers. Heck, even the middle range fortifications were substantially cheaper in Dom2.

So, Dom2 you could get a lot of mages cranked out for research pretty quickly. Dom3, sages are seen more rarely, and while yes, there are lots of shamans about, the shamans are pretty poor researchers, _and_ it's what, 900 gold to build the temple and lab required for them? Whereas Dom2, it wasn't that difficult (with some nations at least) to have 3 forts by turn 12 or so, all churning out national mages.

Oh - and in Dom2, your researchers didn't have a _nasty_ habit of dying of old age.