The problem of fort types

[Baalz]

Some of the suggestions here sound fun, but are immensely unlikely to be implemented as they're fairly significant changes to the mechanics.

It seems obvious that cheaper/faster forts is an advantage. Nobody is arguing that it's almost always better to get cheaper forts. Some nations have an advantage because they have access to a lot of cheaper forts and thus typically have a lot of options as to where to place them. Some nations have a disadvantage because they've got a lot of expensive forts, and often have to make a choice about whether to take a cheap fort in a crappy location or an expensive one where they really want it. This is good, it adds to national variety.

I think the general complaint here is that special fort types are counter intuitively a disadvantage. That's a reasonable complaint, but it seems the much easier solution is to suggest (for example) swamp cities build faster while perhaps re-balancing the fort types for other terrains for C'tis. You don't need special bonuses or whatever to overhaul the system - if C'tis has a choice of building a 3 turn swamp city or a 5 turn fortified city in the plains - guess what? You end up with C'tis generally making a lot of swamp cities. You don't need to worry about admin or resource bonuses...as is well illustrated in this thread those hardly matter at all.