Advance Notice: New Buildings

Brids17 wrote: Dakota Strider wrote: Currently some players cast small blights on themselves, just to prevent opponents from casting a worse blight upon them.  That is a sign that game logic in this regard is flawed, when players have to manipulate game mechanics for protection. How is that not a form of balance? You have to use large amounts of mana and take a hit on a type of resource production in order to defend against it. And now when new buildings costing resources per hour, keeping a blight on yourself could hurt more than it did before. If anything, this could help balance that out a bit more as losing a percent of your resources may actually have a little bit of consequence.

Brids, perhaps we have some miscommunication, because I totally agree that blighting yourself (to protect yourself from worse blights) is hurting yourself.  And as you point out, these new buildings could make it even more painful.

But, I am not calling that balance.  Basically that means you have to harm yourself to keep another player from harming you worse.   Blights that reduce a portion of your crops, or basic resources are bad enough.  But the blights that most worry about, I assume, are the ones that kill or destroy mass amounts of advanced resources.    What I would call balance, is spell research that would allow you to Identify the casters of all hostile spells (current Identify spell does not do that), and schools of magic that would only take mana to defend your cities, and not the equivalent of a blight in resources.

As I mentioned before, GM Stormcrow had said those ideas were going to be incorporated.: 
...4.  Add new schools of magic to the magic research tree.  Divination and Abjuration.  
  a)  Divination would include the Identify Caster ability already in the game.  It would include spells of various power, some that would give various amounts of information on a town that has a Divination spell cast upon it.  It could also possibly be used to detect spells that are cast within opponents' cities.   
  b)  Abjuration would include Dispel Magic, and be a school of spells that would protect your cities from hostile attacks.  Lower level spells may reduce some of the incoming spell damage.  The stronger the Abjuration spell, the more they can defend your town from.  The strongest Abjuration spells could possibly reflect some of the hostile spell back upon the caster.  The most powerful should require a very high amount of mana, so as to make it difficult to maintain constantly.  Instead they would most likely be used only during times of war, when attack is imminent...


I apologize for the length and frequency of these replies, but if there is misunderstanding, I want to make it clear.  I think its great, that there are new buildings.  It will add a lot to the game.  But there is a glaring problem with the Instant Blights in the game right now, and before anything is added to the game to make those stronger, I really believe that the defenses to these attacks should be incorporated first. 


Edited by Dakota Strider - 15 Sep 2011 at 22:39

White Beard wrote: The only players that will have any benefit from this is the attack happy bunch, the rest well we are left out in the cold and have to wait for the  " it is comming soon " Nice way to keep the game balanced. There is nothing there for increased production, nothing for adv res, nothing for defense. And we still can't make a desicion until we know what the rest of the buildings are, so yeah well done

The militaristic buildings are there for defence equally as much as attack, as for production we have sovereignty for that, or are you claiming the more aggresive players have been long ignored and the production based accounts privaliged through sov buildings?

Food, population will be very interesting with the new buildings.  It may make cities 9 and 10 easier to get or harder to get since population is based on food consumed by the buildings.  if we tear down high food T1 buildings for low food T2 buildings, city expansion may be slowed. (imagine that this is part of the balancing that is happening)

Edited by hydraa - 15 Sep 2011 at 23:55

Looks fantastic and I look forward to it all coming out. One criticism tho. All the aspects of the new specialisation improves the game except for millitary. The new changes will basically mean that each city will only produce and maintain one unit type and will therefore only attack with one unit type. A system whereby a player was rewarded for having a spear wall infront of archers would be very nice.

HonoredMule wrote: That was already the optimal case previously.  The value of per-city troop specialization based on production is only being increased a little, and for anyone with 3+ cities it's an easy pill to swallow.  Furthermore, it has always been tactically superior to choose at most 2 but more likely one type of troop for a particular engagement, which means having diverse armies only makes them less effective.