Let's Change Forts

[Ironhawk]

Yeah you cant straight convert. Its too powerful in the early game and still weak in the late game. Having a fort add +10 to effective value of PD could be interesting.

Personally, I still think that the only thing you need to do to fix forts is to invert the costs. Make the fast forts expensive and the slow ones cheap. That way, if you really really want that fort up 2 turns earlier, or in a key mountain prov, you can do it. But otherwise, you will take the slow and steady route to build the fort that is "traditional" for your nation.

[thejeff]

But inverting the costs won't happen. It's not thematic to make the largest slow to build forts cheap.

It could be rationalized as thematic to give cost/speed discounts on a nations "traditional" forts. C'tis is much better at building in swamps so they get a good fort there for the cost/time of a lousy one. That would actually be a decent bonus, not a penalty as it is now.

[Zeldor]

The problem is that in real life C'tis would have really big population in swamps. So it would make sense to build city there. Now they get expensive Fortified Villages.

National forts could give Growth bonus. +1-5%, only when a said nation controls that fort. Stackable with normal Growth of course.

[Ironhawk]

No, I disagree thejeff. IMO, inverting the fort costs is more likely to actually happen than most of the suggestions in this thread. The reason being that it would take only a moment of JK's time to switch around a couple of integers, instead of coding up some new formula.

And things being thematic doesnt really concern me - you can make anything "thematic" just by wording around it properly. What matters more is giving interesting choices to the player that promote more fun and better gameplay. This does both.

[thejeff]

It may be easier, but while being thematic may not concern you, it does seem to concern both devs.

I can't speak for them, of course, but the impression I've gotten is that this is a thematic issue for them. Maybe thematic isn't quite the right work. Suspension of disbelief issue?

[Chris_Byler]

I like the adding admin to PD idea - the whole amount is excessive, so what about adding half? Half admin would never be more than 30, which would rarely be more than the cost of the fort itself (actually, I don't think any of the admin 60 forts are buildable at all).

Except it shouldn't be explicitly added to the purchased amount, it should be added at the last minute when the actual PD forces are generated for a battle. That way it doesn't matter whether you buy the PD before or after you build the fort (but on the other hand, someone who conquers your fort gets the fort-PD for free, in addition to whatever PD they immediately buy for cheap.)

That still only benefits nations with worthwhile PD, though. Unless someone implements a mod that gives all nations reasonably decent PD, or Illwinter reviews the PD system and replaces/adjusts PD for the nations with useless PD.


Another option would be to simply standardize construction times (probably 3 turns), while leaving the cost differences in place. Twice as many laborers build twice as big a fort in the same amount of time. You could still build in bad terrain to get a cheaper fort, but you wouldn't get a faster one, and you'd still have low admin and be relatively easy to siege/storm.


Another option would be to add a second commander slot to all forts over X admin - which would include capitols - but that's more of a radical change and might require coding changes too. It would help with the "I don't care about the fort itself, I just want to build more mages" problem, though. One good fort is cheaper and arguably more defensible than two crappy forts; if it was also just as good for making commanders, as well as troops, it might be the preferable option.


If the problem is big enough, more than one of these solutions might be appropriate.

[Sombre]

Didn't we already have this topic? I'm totally burned out on this subject now. I've been ranting about it for a while.