The problem of fort types

[Ironhawk]

Are the fort types for each nation moddable in dom3?

[Endoperez]

You can choose which fort nation builds in spesific terrains, but you can't mod the forts themselves.

[Zeldor]

I would really prefer to see fort types to be more important and useful both in economy and battles.

[Sombre]

So we have general agreement. Does anyone have any other ideas on how this could be improved?

I'm sticking with my idea of a flat rate for all non special forts, discount rate for specials. That way the best option is usually to go with your racial fort, next best is somewhere like a high gold or high income province, then finally you still might build a 'crappy' fort due to location (like to protect a lab and temple on top of a special site). So you'd get variety and fort choices would be more intuitive, with crappy forts being the rarer choice rather than the other way around.

[kasnavada]

Does anyone have any other ideas on how this could be improved?

Sure !
- having some national units only produced by specific types of forts ?
- having a reduction in gold or ressources when producing on a specific type of terrain ?

To give an example, for sauromantia, building in a swamp would lead to a significant reduction in ressources that make it equivalent to the ressources made if the terrain a mountain, but only for them (maybe more or less for balance reasons ?).

[Carkaton]

How about fort upgrades? Take c'tis swamp city for 1200 gold 5 or 6 months build time(can't remember). If they had the option to build the swamp fort initially for 800 and 3 months, with the possibility of upgrading to the city if desired for another 400-600 and more build time.

This would allow nations to eventually make their good forts but keep their competitiveness short term.

[Sombre]

But the 'good' forts aren't good. No-one in their right mind would actually upgrade.

[kasnavada]

If the forts stay as useful as they are now, I also agree that no one would upgrade... If the upgraded fort gives special bonuses, maybe ?

I was thinking of this idea : every fort would have the possibility to add an upgrade, that would give special bonuses to it.

Examples of bonuses :
- recruit one type of capitol-only unit (either a commander or a troop),
- reduce magic cost for one school (depending on the background of the race, ie : 10% of forging for ulm ?),
- auto-spawn one (or more) of the race units,
- reduce the cost of one type of units recruitable there (for example, a tower that would reduce markata cost, or minotaur cost),
- increase gold or production from the province,
- act as a second temple,
- something else.

Short of something like this, there is nothing that would make me upgrade... forts are overpriced compared to what they currently offer. Maybe they are meant to be !

[thejeff]

Right, the good forts are only marginally better. By far the most important feature of a fort, is that you can build your national mages and troops there. Second that you have at least one turn's protection from raiders.

Everything beyond that, more admin, more defense, is nice, but only a minor improvement. If the upgrade idea was implemented, I'd be tempted to upgrade occasionally if the upgrade was only a turn and maybe 100 gold. Otherwise, just save the money for another fort.

[Wauthan]

Sombre said:
So we have general agreement. Does anyone have any other ideas on how this could be improved?

If there would ever be a Dominions 4 then forts and battlefields could use an overhaul. In my opinion 'attacking the breach' is not nearly deadly enough. While the defender has an advantage it feels fairly small, and I'm not sure that the attacker risk losing far more units compared to a standard battle.

I've no suggestions that are simple and realistic enough to be implemented in a patch. Mostly because I don't know how hard it would be to implement bonuses or penalties for just one side. But a "cover" bonus seems approriate, which I guess would work like an airshield but affecting all ranged attacks (including spells). Or the wall could function as extra tiles of distance for the attacker, which means only some attacks can actually reach the defenders, until the enemy unit actually makes it through the gate.