Ideas to stop mass castle building for DOM_3

[Jack Simth]

Well, one of the best ways to stop one strategy is to make others equally viable - strengthening the more expensive castles would be one way to discourage Mad Castling. Personally, I like my idea of making them into moddable magic sites - it's even thematic, as it goes with the flavor text of how magic gems form - energy from the stars hits the planet and, in special places, is captured and converted. A designer, knowing of this phenomina, would be likely to take advantage of it, no? It might also allow you to implement the supply production of Fortified Cities that you suggest - the FC produces 50 supply (or whatever, as a Cauldron of Broth) every turn.

[baruk]

Tuidjy said:
Great idea!!! Lets make it impossible to build too many castles!!! Making each
castle cost 50 golds more than the previous one will really help! And then, we
will have to get rid of Ghost Riders, Phantasmal attack, Imprint Souls, etc...
Good riddance, it is a pain to have to react to an attack in the rear. Of
course, for the sake of Allmighty Balance Himself, we have to get rid of sneaky
armies as well. And, there was an unsung genius who earlier suggested that all
teleporting armies should suffer from plane-sickness for an year or so. That's
awesome too! Or lets just abolish all teleporting spells altogether!!!

Now I have to go have a lie down, but I am sure to be back to enlighten you
about the next steps we have to take in order to balance Dominions II...

I was the unsung genius with the planar sickness idea for a selection of the teleportation spells. The troops would only get the "sickness" for a single turn, which would comprise starting any battles that turn with extra fatigue (I had various ideas of how much this should be).

The idea was based on the paratrooper combat penalty you see in some strategy games (I was thinking of Alpha Centauri in particular), combat effectiveness being reduced by 50% the turn of the drop. It seems reasonable that you could call this "planar sickness" and add it to a fantasy game.

I suggested it because I felt it would add something to the game. Obviously it would hurt direct gateway/teleport/cloud trapeze attacks, making them less viable. The spells themselves would remain very powerful for troop and mage movement. I liked the fact that it would give conventional army movement a minor advantage over magical moves. In the late game, it seems pointless to bother with conventional movement and attacks when you can simply 'port your armies where they need to go, catching the enemy before he gets to move normally.

At some point a while back, there was concern raised over the ability of an air or astral Sphinx to 'port to an enemy capital in the early game, seiging the fort and crippling his finances. Illwinter responded in the next patch, by not allowing the Sphinx to cast teleport or cloud trapeze anymore, a crude but effective measure (I am unaware of the current patch status). If early "Sphinx hopping" is considered a valid concern by Illwinter, it seems reasonable to try to think up a more elegant solution. So my "planar sickness" could perhaps allow the Sphinx to regain his rightful ability to cast teleport spells, whilst still preventing his use and abuse as an early-game capital crusher (my suggestion was to give all 'porting troops a 20*sizeclass fatigue penalty at the beginning of all battles that turn, so 120 for the Sphinx).


Funnily enough, I also had a suggestion about castles that I felt would add to the game. At the moment, taking a castle from the enemy takes, at the very least, 2 turns: A turn of seiging followed by a turn of storming. I decided this was an artificial limit imposed by the game system, why not, assuming your army is large enough, allow the seiging and storming of a castle to take place in a single turn?

My solution? Introduce a new order, move and storm. It becomes available when you give an army a move order to a castled enemy province, in the same way move and patrol becomes available when a move order to a friendly castle is issued (this is how it was in Dom 1, can't remember if its changed in Dom 2). An army with this order would move to the province, seige the castle (if successful in taking the province), then storm the castle if the seige successfully took out the defences. If the defences were still up at the castle storming phase, the army would revert to a second new order type: seige and storm. This would allow an army to attempt a castle storming as soon as the castle defences are down, rather than waiting another turn for player input.

nb. The turn order may have to be changed, to allow: movement, then seiging, followed by castle storming (I'm a little rusty on the details of turn sequence).

I feel this would add something to the game, making seige warfare a more fluid affair. At the late game stage, the taking of an enemy castle is a serious and costly undertaking, much of the problem being the turn's grace the defender recieves in between seiging and storming of a castle, allowing spoiling attacks to take place before the castle is stormed. On the other hand, a magically strong defender, with a large castle network, has relatively little to fear. He need not bother garrisonning any of his castles, as he has the single turn's grace that he needs to magically bolster his forces where needed.

My suggestion would make the low defence, ungarrisonned forts weaknesses that can be exploited by an army moving conventionally (magical movement would mean that a "move and seige" order could not be issued along with the movement spell). It would also give very large armies an advantage in that they could take enemy forts quite easily, leaving them less vulnerable to some of the remote attack spells eg. Ghost Riders.

[Chazar]

baruk said:
Funnily enough, I also had a suggestion about castles that I felt would add to the game. At the moment, taking a castle from the enemy takes, at the very least, 2 turns: A turn of seiging followed by a turn of storming. I decided this was an artificial limit imposed by the game system, why not, assuming your army is large enough, allow the seiging and storming of a castle to take place in a single turn?

I can only agree to that idea, but as I wrote before, I think the sieging army should do more than just have enough sieging strength...maybe twice as much as defense is to much, but that is only a minor point!

[Crash]

Some good ideas here.

I kind of like the one about the first-turn weakness after porting/trapeezing.

Would there be a good reason 'not' to have something like that?

[Verjigorm]

Basically, the flaw in the summoning sickness idea comes in when you want to teleport into an enemy state (a common practice) the sick units can't make an attack since they are sick, so what happens?

If they just die, are immediately routed, or simply sit on the province as a double flag (like sieging), teleporting loses a significant amount of flavor (e.g. teleporting your monolith into an enemy state to gain control of a crucial staging point during an attack). This removes some very useful and interesting surprise attack possibilities. I like the idea of sneak attack teleports. I think the fact that your teleporting commanders will be transported sans army is a sufficient penalty. After all, you have to research Thaum-9 in order to teleport with an army (or Ench-5 for Faery Trod in forests only which is very limiting). I like the idea of doing Ritual of Returning/Teleport raids on enemy states. It gives them a reason to defend themselves more adequately instead of simply arranging themselves empty eggshells (armies on the edges, nothing in the middle). It forces opponents to consider a National Guard in addition to their expeditionary forces. You get the same effect with long range summons, but teleporting units are generally far stronger than summons because they must go alone.

The Sphinx-teleport is an obvious weakness. The Sphinx is nigh indestructible early game and should not be allowed to teleport. It is a special exception not the rule. Other pretenders (with the possible exception of the Monolith which is closer to the black side of the gray area IMO) can't usually take on a national army early game. Worrying about early teleports forces you to Patrol provinces instead of just sitting around and ensure that you have a backup base. Besides, early teleport attacks require scouting. He has to find you first and develop Teleport capability (not hard, but I tend to prefer Difficult research as it makes a better game for mercs and nationals) and make sure you don't have the strength to beat him down. Losing a pretender early in the game when priests are low can cost you dearly especially with a pretender that has a diversified magical portfolio. Stealth or Glamour units would be a good way to lure your opponent's pretender into a deadly trap. Manticores that find themselves surrounded by blessed Armor Piercing Vans/Bane Spiders (or just a couple of Revenants with a Level 1 Decay spell) won't be happy with the odds of victory. I've had my pretender decayed by indeps before--which is rare but sucks especially early-game, so I try to stay away from necromancers. Shadow Bolts/Magic Duel can also be dangerous and higher level magics can easily overwhelm a lonely pretender or at least keep him away on the off chance he'll get killed or feebleminded. You kill the big dudes with fatigue--Stellar Cascades is great for killing pretender SCs esp those w/o reinvig. Sleep (because of its MRN feature is less useful), but it's relatively easy to cast and small number of casters have a fair chance of getting the big guy to 100+ fatigue and subsequently trouncing him. Of course this is all provided your enemy is not a giant rock which is where the trouble comes in

[baruk]

Verjigorm said:
Basically, the flaw in the summoning sickness idea comes in when you want to teleport into an enemy state (a common practice) the sick units can't make an attack since they are sick, so what happens?

My idea was to give the sick units a 20 times their size class fatigue penalty at the start any battle that they get involved in that turn. So normal, size 2 troops would start with 40 fatigue, the size 6 sphinx would start with 120. This way you can still use sneak teleport attacks, but with some hindrance.
Alternatively, the fatigue penalty could be based on hit points, so that you would take half your hp in fatigue if you got in a battle the same turn you were ported. That might be fairer considering the lower hp, large size commanders that use teleport and the like, whilst still causing problems for the sphinx.
To clarify a bit, the planar sickness would come into effect only for battles that happen the same turn as the teleport. The troops would have recovered by the following turn, when they would be available for normal movement again.

[PvK]

Back to the topic of castles...

some other ideas:

* One castle might only be allowed to protect one magic site, and to reduce the province income for the beseiger by its administration rating.

* Watchtowers might not be large enough to enclose even one magic site.

* There could be an option to multiply the time required to build a fort. Real castles took years or decades to build, not months.

So, forts could provide places to hide forces and protect a temple and maybe a magic site, but a spam of watchtowers wouldn't have so much effect.

PvK

[Verjigorm]

The 120 fatigue for a Sphinx is really a moot point as he can't teleport anyway (and still shouldn't be able to). Even at that high fatigue, with natural protection of 30 and roughly 500hps (depending on dominion) he'll still end up routing the enemy army unless you have continuous Fanaticism/SoC. Even then, he'll be up and running with his first spell in 5 turns or so. It usually takes an early force forever to destroy one and if you have no 3-priests, your still screwed (Man, Ulm). Why should a Gygja be more penalised than an Arch Theurg or a Demonbred? Wouldn't that penalty serve to unbalance tele-attacks? D2 has an incredibly complicated numeric basis. I doubt that a herd of statisticians could balance it perfectly. There are more obvious flaws like Ulm's lack of late power to worry about.

I'm always up for adding features--especially to the castles which I think are quite underdeveloped. I'd like to see more castle options and maybe more nation-specific castles (like Ermor's). Like PVK says, there could be all sorts of nifty castles. Of course I don't think it should take years to put up a crappy watchtower (don't nerf the WT--it sucks....everyone can get in and your guys starve to death if the attackers stay outside very long). Instant siege might be interesting, but it could be easily countered by putting a single point of defense in the province--unless you also want to make the patrolling forces unable to impede the attackers as well......(nonsense). If I were building watchtowers IRL, I think I'd build tons of 'em too--not too much to a little stone and mortar building or some kind of tree house--makes a nice little staging point for a small band of soldiers, but doesn't offer much protection from the storm of battle

[Vodalian]

Isnt the main problem with castling, the fact that they enable a few decked up SCs to take care of the defence of an entire empire? This is of course accomplished by filling your whole territory with cheap towers, which will slow down the enemy raiders for one critical turn, before you SCs teleport/ cloud trapeze or fly in.
Losing provinces means a lot in Dom2. It is easy for raiders to set the tax level to 200 and run away, causing permanent damage to income. I think a possible solution would be to force players to oversee the tax collection. It makes no sense now that the raiding army can set the tax level to two hundred and leave the province during the same month and still get the pay and deal the pop loss.
I think mobility is what makes castling worth it. Armies have methods of moving instantenously from province to province, making it very difficult to predict what to protect. When you add to this that you can field enough of an army of national troops to protect only a small fraction of your empire ( because of upkeep ), it's no wonder that people train exclusively mages and summons and SCs. Making hordes of castles enables your own highly mobile armies to protect provinces which are under attack, without having to sit there all the time.

[NTJedi]

There's some great suggestions here...

Hopefully one or more can be placed as options before the game starts. This way the gamers can choose before it starts. I'm definitely looking forward to Dom_3.