Castles and resource-sucking : a suggestion

[PDF]

In Dom1 the way "resource sucking" by castles work is sometimes a pain : taking an enemy castle can suck dry out of resources one of your border provinces, where you can no longer build anything ...(if the provinces had sages or was Amazon, it's a bad news )

I understand the principle, that castles are hub for resources so a % of resources of nearby provinces is sent , but there can be no justification that resources be drained if the ruler doesn't want it and would rather want to build local units !

A nifty feature would be to be able either to

A/ change the resource-sucking % of a castle in a given province, from 0 to the castle Admin % (so the neighbours will keep more of them), or

B/ to be able to establish "trade routes" : these would be "persistent" features, where at the cost of some gold and resource (proportionate with the shipment), you could send each turn a given amount of resources from province A to neighbouring province B .

B is maybe more costly and more "micromanagement" than A, but address more effectively the issue, and I don't think it'll be useful for more than say a half-dozen of provinces, that have neat special units. The rest of the time the "home" units buidable in castles will be preferred.

Well, what do you think of this ?

[Psitticine]

A might be an interesting twist, but B strikes me as overkill for the nature of the game. Even if it were used just for a handful of provinces, I'm not sure it'd be worth the management time.

When a province has special troops I want, I usually build a fortress right there. That way, the province is better protected against enemy invasion, the fort draws in more resources to use right there, and (since many of the special units require a temple or lab) other buildings in the provinces aren't quite as vulnerable to assualt either.

Forts may be expensive, but I'm never adverse to having another hardened point of defense.

[ October 07, 2003, 14:05: Message edited by: Psitticine ]

[Pocus]

Originally posted by Psitticine:
A might be an interesting twist, but B strikes me as overkill for the nature of the game. Even if it were used just for a handful of provinces, I'm not sure it'd be worth the management time.

As time is of the essence now that the gold are soon to be sent, I propose a simple fix, which ask for few minutes of tweaking : do not reduce provinces with more than 0 resources (initially) under 1 resource, even if they are supposed to be 100% drained. With this we would still be able to recrut unarmored mages.

When a province has special troops I want, I usually build a fortress right there. That way, the province is better protected against enemy invasion, the fort draws in more resources to use right there, and (since many of the special units require a temple or lab) other buildings in the provinces aren't quite as vulnerable to assualt either.

Forts may be expensive, but I'm never adverse to having another hardened point of defense. [/QB]

Actually there is a significant drawback to have castle everywhere, when you are a nation which can do faery trod or gateway : you arrive in your castle. If you were to have provinces without castle, then gating against an enemy is generally a 'swat the fly' operation, most often than not a victory, as you know what he have and can adjust in consequence.
I speak from (painful) personal experience

[PDF]

Pocus,
Good idea , why not even make it so that say 10% of resources always remains in the province, rather than just 1 ?

[Psitticine]

Originally posted by Pocus:

quote:

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Originally posted by Psitticine:
A might be an interesting twist, but B strikes me as overkill for the nature of the game. Even if it were used just for a handful of provinces, I'm not sure it'd be worth the management time.

As time is of the essence now that the gold are soon to be sent, I propose a simple fix, which ask for few minutes of tweaking : do not reduce provinces with more than 0 resources (initially) under 1 resource, even if they are supposed to be 100% drained. With this we would still be able to recrut unarmored mages.

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Hmm, this may be affected by something I didn't realize had been changed. Do forts have an Admin value in Dom I? And are provinces allowed to use all their resources without a fortress?

In Dom II, at least, fortresses have an Admin stat that represents the percentage of neighboring resources they can draw in. The highest Admin is, I believe, 40. Most are 20 or 30. It'll take at least two neighboring forts to even consume all the "unusable" resources in a province with no fort of its own.

The other thing is that provinces without forts can only use half their available resources, which is what I'm referring to above, so if I do want to recruit special units from a province, that's another reason it is important for me to put up a fort there.

Maybe all of this is the same as Dom I, but it is beginning to sound like it isn't.

Originally posted by Pocus:

quote:

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Originally posted by Psitticine:
When a province has special troops I want, I usually build a fortress right there. That way, the province is better protected against enemy invasion, the fort draws in more resources to use right there, and (since many of the special units require a temple or lab) other buildings in the provinces aren't quite as vulnerable to assualt either.

Forts may be expensive, but I'm never adverse to having another hardened point of defense.

Actually there is a significant drawback to have castle everywhere, when you are a nation which can do faery trod or gateway : you arrive in your castle. If you were to have provinces without castle, then gating against an enemy is generally a 'swat the fly' operation, most often than not a victory, as you know what he have and can adjust in consequence.
I speak from (painful) personal experience

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Ouch! I haven't experienced that yet. I might suggest a good change would be to tweak those spells so you always arrive "outside", so to speak. It'd make more logical sense, as well as straightening out some of the possible quirks with combat flow.

[Daynarr]

I haven't seen this as problem in any of my games.
This can happen in 2 instances I'm aware of:
1) When 2 of your 50% castles border same province. The only castle that takes 50% of neighboring resources is fortified city and he takes lots of money, time and points while OTOH has low defense value. Heck you have to pay 750 gold to make one of these and takes a lot of time as well. This fortification is simply NOT the one you will choose if your playing strategy involves building lots of fortifications. All other fortifications offer either better defense value or more cost/effective economy, while they drain fewer resources and allow you to produce those commanders (which usually cost 1 resource BTW). Ulm is definitely nation that will find fortified city most useful (low gold/high resource units), but other nations …

2) More then 2 castles border same province and drain all resources. This is extremely rare and, since you apparently went for "castle spree" tactic (turtle more like it ) you can build another castle in that province you want to produce your sorceress. Castles don't drain resources from each other so that province will get its resources back (and reduce resources in surrounding castles).

In Dom II there are LOTS of sites with powerful special units (like Grey Knights, possibly most powerful cavalry in game I’ve seen, rivaling even man cavalry – not self healing but ethereal and practically same combat stats). Building castle in such provinces is quite sound tactic even if you have fortified city as fortification, since it will enable you to produce those special units faster and protect that province better from surprise attacks.

IMHO A solution isn't bad (probably the hardest thing would be to program AI to use new feature) but B would increase micromanagement by several thousand %, so I’m against it even more now after so much efforts have been made to reduce micromanagement.

[ October 07, 2003, 15:46: Message edited by: Daynarr ]

[st.patrik]

The other thing to consider, at least in Dom I, is that it is possible to demolish castles. Not a very frequently used feature, but if a castle (or two) is sucking resources which you want, blow up the castle/s and build another one on the province in which you want to build special units. Expensive and time-consuming (+ a bit of a bummer to destroy castles) but it should get the job done.

[Pocus]

Psitticine : yes same mechanism in doms I. With the fortified city having the highest admin (50).
Pardon me if I led you to believe that the rules were differents in doms I

In doms I there is a deprecated stat attached to castle, which is the supply bonus. In fact castle give 4x their admin value in the province there are in, and a decreasing bonus further.
How is based supply bonus now? Still tied to admin value?

[Nagot Gick Fel]

Originally posted by Pocus:
In doms I there is a deprecated stat attached to castle, which is the supply bonus. In fact castle give 4x their admin value in the province there are in, and a decreasing bonus further.
How is based supply bonus now? Still tied to admin value?

"Supply" is *not* a deprecated stat - it represents the amount of food that's stored in the castle to feed besieged garrisons. Nothing related to sending supplies to neighboring provinces.

[Sandman]

The simplest solution would be for the castle resource-sucking to only apply to unused resources in a province. Building units in a province would take up all the resources available, if need be, depriving the castle of its share.

[ October 12, 2003, 00:19: Message edited by: Sandman ]