So I’ve been thinking about territory, sieges, and adventuring recently while playing the latest beta, and I’ve run into some new, and old problems, and come up with some solutions, partly drawn from new games and partly of my own. The problems:
1 – It’s far too easy to move from one town to another in a couple of turns with three or four units and quickly conquer an enemy settlement before the enemy can see you coming or prepare. If the town is an important one, this can decide a war almost as soon as it begins, especially once you add the garrison and defence bonuses to your invading ones.
2 – Adventuring still gets hemmed in by enemy territory. For all the increased emphasis on exploration, you usually do not see the shape of the map until you have conquered it.
3 – Both the player and AI are massively vulnerable to attack in the early game. A few lucky champions and items in the early game can win you the whole thing if you really want to cheese it, and unlucky monster generation can make some starting positions impossible.
So my solutions are broadly as follows:
You should not be able to occupy an enemy town without troops to police the streets. Champions alone should not be able to do this.
Removing this ability from champions would improve the usefulness of infantry, but, since it would reduce the danger posed to cities by champions, we could therefore give champions the ability to enter other faction’s territory when unaccompanied by troops. This would allow champions to keep adventuring later on in the game, and prevent the potential problems of quest objectives spawning in inaccessible locations.
You should not be able to attack a walled settlement without either A a siege weapon (either a catapult, or troops with ladders and grappling hooks) B an equally powerful monster or C some serious magic or magic item. Enforcing this rule would, providing the player remembered to build a wall, fulfil the same purpose as the Planetary Invasion tech in GalCiv2: giving the player and AI a brief kindergarten period in which to establish a functioning empire before the real wars started, but would also have a believable justification.
Essentially, these kind of mechanics could be easily enabled by giving all troops (and humanoid monsters, like darklings) a “garrison” trait, and all siege weapons a “wall-breaker” trait. A unit with “wall-breaker” would be required to attack a city, and a unit with “garrison” would be required to hold it. Only units with these traits would trigger a territory violation.
I would also impose a minimum time period before the invading army was able to benefit from the city militia. This could be enabled by requiring players to build a cheap, early game building with no maintenance in order to benefit from militia, which would be automatically destroyed on any invasion.
So these measures would more or less fix the problems I mentioned earlier. But it still allows players to take enemy settlements very quickly if they have everything in place and makes blitzkrieg still the best tactic. What is needed for this is a proper, total war style siege system. When I say this I am NOT talking about big, impressive siege battles. Please don’t start debating which game had the best siege battles because we’ve had that thread before.
What I am talking about is simply a system that forces the besieging army to wait a few turn on the world map, between attacking a city and fighting the actual battle. The time involved would depend on the quality of the defences and the number and quality of catapults and other siege equipment. Enforcing this waiting time would give the defending player time to prepare his forces, and maybe bring in a relief force from another city, which is an essential component of any fun siege.
So what do you think?
+8
The idea of adventurers not provoking territory violations is just too elegant of a solution not to be implemented. That would also allow me to create some squire or retainer type units that can follow my champions around on adventures.
I think an easier solution would be:
- Give all cities 2 melee units of (city level) = level 5 city: 2 melee units with level 5
- Give all cities 2 ranged units of (city level) = level 5 city: 2 ranged units with level 5
- Barracks increase the number of melee and ranged units by 1
- Melee and ranged units have the currently researched weapons and armors
- REDUCE THE LUCK IN THE GAME. Powerful items should require killing difficult monsters.
Just curious. What diificulty level do you play? I always play normal and I agree that taking down cities is not that difficult given a strong army of sovereign and 4 heroes. I like the idea that Wizard1200 suggested linking city size to defenders. That may be the case now, I don't know. If not, then some thought should be given to that idea.
So far, my strategy is to build a strong army of heroes and battle as many creatures as possible to build their strengths and abilities, as well as getting better weapons and armour. But, my experience in war, so far, is trying to defend new conquests and my own cities. Not that easy with just the one army.
I'm on standard difficulty at the moment, but this has been a problem since the WoM beta, on all difficulty levels.
Beefing up later game militia is a possibility. But let's be honest, it doesn't change the basic problem that I as a player, can look at a nearby settlement and know exactly what I need to conquer it, and then proceed from my city to theirs in about 5 turns and conquer it with very few preconditions. And I suspect, if the AI was as good at doing this as the player is, we'd be struggling just as much. 5 turns is basically nothing in a game with as many turns as this one. It's certainly not long enough to bring in reinforcements, and if someone does this to you once or twice it's basically game over.
The AI is just not as good at this concentration-of-force stuff as the player, and I doubt it ever will be. It would be far better to change the basic game rules to make this much harder to do. And let's be honest, it's realistic anyway.
Hmmm, good point, but i think if the AI would use strategic spells like firestorm it could counter such concentration-of-force, but that would lead to another problem: unresistable strategic spells.
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