WTF? Gold?!

[KissBlade]

see ... that's what confuses me. I had thought they wanted to stop the castle spamming technique. Instead, I find it even easier to do so as I can ALWAYS recruit a mage and still almost find time to build castle every other turn.

[DominionsFan]

KissBlade said:
see ... that's what confuses me. I had thought they wanted to stop the castle spamming technique. Instead, I find it even easier to do so as I can ALWAYS recruit a mage and still almost find time to build castle every other turn.

Yep, that is why I say, that mages should be even more expensive, especially because of the huge gold income. Perhaps the best national mages should cost ~600-800 gold.

[Daynarr]

Building few castles is not really spam, and that is what it's being suggested.
Why stop castle spamming anyway? Castle spamming was bad in SP because AI didn't build forts so it was almost like cheating. Now AI will also castle spam if he has enough money (on higher levels he will very often have money).

In MP it was just another tactic you or anyone else could use.

Note that castle, temple and lab prices also doubled so it's not really that easy to castle spam.

[KissBlade]

I don't want to get into the balance of castle spamming + mass maging for nations with better non capitol mages but rather I'd like to go back to the original point that there are nations with purely heavy troops (aka Jomon) versus nations with the ability to switch with both and even having their most gold expensive troops be up on par or even better than most nation's resource heavy troops. (Van, Jotun, Ryleh, etc)

[Morkilus]

The TC AI out-castled me by a factor of two last game if you don't count fallen capitols. This is a much appreciated feature!

But seriously... don't bring up a "balance" issue unless you have sufficient evidence to suggest there is only one good strategy that is directly correlated to the excess gold available in Dom3. Even if that was true, suggest a change in the parameters for future games you wish to play in. Otherwise, you're just whining. If YOUR gold/resources are not balanced to what you would imagine would be efficient, YOU are the one responsible for picking the wrong scales.

[KissBlade]

Alright, I'll play anyone here in a duel with my blessed van's. And maybe after I trounce your 40 resource troops with them, you'll start seeing things my way?

PS.If Van doesn't convince people since they're supposed to be the elite sacreds, I'm sure my five million lobo guards + illithids later on will.

Plus I've already suggested it, the resource/gold ratio SHOULD be balanced. I thought dom III was supposed to encourage more use of non mage tactics, etc and give nationals more time on the field? Instead, now I see ZERO reason you wouldn't want to recruit your best mage every turn.

[st.patrik]

As has already been stated, the key to the issue you think you're experiencing is that you need to build more castles. Building castles will allow you to build more resource-intensive troops. In essence, building castles is a way of 'buying' resources with gold. as simple as that.

The reason why this is not the same as Dom II castle-spamming is because you cannot control the type of castle you build now, and so it is often times more expensive and perhaps more importantly takes much longer to build than in Dom II.

[KissBlade]

Well, I'll just go with the flow that time will tell. Personally I play all the gold intensive nations most of the time anyway, so it doens't effect me negatively in the first place.

[Folket]

I think the resource gold ratio is better now then earlier since there is now a reason to build light infantery. Slingers have become useful.

The reason not to buil;d your best mages is that you will have gold over to build more castles and labs. Building two cheap mages at two diffrent labs is probably more research efficient and cheaper then recruiting your best mage.

If you are recruiting tons of your best mages to stand and research I doubt that is optimal in the long run.