I think the whole feature of faction being immediately destroyed when their sovereign is defeated on foreign territory is making the game too easy atm I had a fun game going on Ridiculous difficulty, with the AI having so much troops that it was actually challenging! But then the poor bastard decides to make a countryside journey with his combat rating 200 army right through my territory. I teleport my combat rating 1000 army next to him, and there goes his 10+ city empire and countless armies up in smoke in an instant I had all my troops in this one army, while the AI had spread its troops into many, many smaller ones. I had three cities against his 10+, and his power rating was about three times higher than mine. There's no way I should win so easily.
I see a couple of solutions:
1. When an AI sovereign dies, their heir becomes the new sovereign. Would be a nice feature I think, and make the royal lineages much more important. If there's no heir, the faction is destroyed or splits into several city-states (minor factions).
or
2. Make the AI very careful about when it decides to travel in foreign territory! This isn't even the only time I've had this happen, right now the AI seems almost suicidal in its travels. Earlier in this game I even saw it travel through my territory alone! Didn't have teleport back then though.
or if nothing else works
3. Just remove the feature and let AI sovereigns retreat even if defeated in foreign territory.
I don't really like the third option, since I think the whole "Mordor crumbles when Sauron is defeated" idea is cool I just think it should be much, much harder to achieve (on the hardest difficulty in the game at least). Would be very cool to see both 1 and 2 implemented, and I'm sure we'll see at least no.2 when AI begins to get some updates
What do you think?
Agreed. I generally suck at 4x games - yet I was able to defeat -two- massive empires that I had been sandwiched inebetween (and with very little rescources) just because the enemy sov's wandered into my territory while we were at war. I also hate the way the cities just instantly vanish - personally I'd rather seen a succesion system or some improved Sov AI with the sov-less cities turning into a minor nation rather than just dissapearing.
Have some sort of resurrection shrine in the capital city that will revive the sovereign after some number of turns, during which his troops will have low morale (or some other suitable penalty to keep players from being reckless). That way, the only way to kill the sovereign is to destroy his resurrection shrine before he resurrects. And if the sovereign is alive and the resurrection shrine is destroyed, have it be rebuildable at any city so that you're not screwed if it happens to get destroyed early. And make sovereigns extremely resilient and difficult to kill without overwhelming force.
That sounds a lot like wizard towers in AoW 2 and Shadow Magic Me like.
I agree with the "heir taking over" idea, I remember one of the random events in GavCiv 2 was the leader of a civ being assassinated on one of my worlds, and that for me really was like "Whoa holy crap" awesome.
Interesting coincidence. I was actually drawing inspiration from the hero altars in WarCraft III.
What's also interesting that in AoW 1 when a faction leader died, that faction was defeated instantly! Though there it didn't matter where the leader was killed, so it was rather worse than this. (AI was also very poor and never improved. Stardock can easily do better )
I agree on the sucession and think it could even be combined with a holy shrine approach where the sovereign e.g. loses essence badly when defeated in battle. Maybe he could be saved like that only once. Killing the enemey leader should hurt his civ badly but not make it disappear.
Heh, agreed. Before Elemental came out, I was playing Gal Civ 2 and saw the assasination event for the first time (and it was one of my allies that got assasinated) and was caught completely off guard. I hope they add something as cool as that eventually.
I thought that was supposed to happen already. e.g., if the heir is part of your faction, you get control of all their cities immediately. Maybe it's buggy? (haven't been able to test it yet)
Really? I've never seen it happen, so if it's supposed to be there I guess it's bugged. Or I've just been killing heirless sovereigns all this time... (unlikely) Has anyone had this happen? Really nice if it's already there and "just" bugged
Love this idea.
Don't like the current mechanic because it really discourages you from using your sovereign offensively later in the game. Want to lead the charge, so to speak? Bad idea since if you get a bad defense roll and get one-shot, it's game over. (Yes, that happened to me.)
I'd like to see the "if the sovereign dies, but has an heir, the heir becomes the new sovereign" solution, but I wouldn't want to change the basic idea. It affects the human player equally, making it dangerous to send your own sovereign against an enemy city, so I'd like to keep that, but the heir thing is a good idea.
if you have children it should not end the game
But then you have to make heirs a bit difficult to get. Otherwise players will always have an heir waiting just in case.
love idea 1 about if no heir make city states
I would also like to see the defeat of a sovereign have a political effect. Perhaps a simple toggle "If you destroy an enemy sovereign, then the surviving heir immediately proposes a cease-fire".
You don't have to accept, but it could be an excellent way to end a war with a decapitation strike, if only temporarily. It would prevent wars from continuing interminably as you repeatedly kill sovereign after sovereign.
Actually, perhaps a mix of the two. The soveregin is a valuable asset and if killed you lose a lot of mana and etc. Perhaps when killed the first in line would assume the kingdom, and after a couple of turns they could "chanel" or be "posessed" (flavor text perhaps?) with the powers of their predecessor, gaining a portion of the ealier soveregin's powers (but not 100%, so there's a penalty) on such a way that the sucessor is at first never as powerful as the predecessor.
Then if the soveregin has no sucessor, his cities get split on smaller city-states or whatever (perhaps groups of 3-4 cities each) led by his former champions.
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