Review of areas for improvement and possible solutions (longer text)

Ideas / Suggestions
Preamble: I followed the game through a long period of time. There are so few good fantasy TBS out there, that I really hoped for a good replacement of MoM and the AoW series. Until now I really like aspects of EWoM, but every time I start a new game and play, I have all the time the feeling that the glue between the different layers is not working and the sum of the individuel parts are not fitting together. In general I have fun for some time until the feeling catches me again. So I want to review the individuel parts of the mechanism already there (and the foundation is great nevertheless) and share some of my thoughts to improve the overall feeling. Refering to Frogboys post, to be honest I will currently not care if this should be part of A, B or C expension - this ideas should be considered by SD themself

Economics
From the background story, the world is barren after a big desaster, food is a very resource and the people are more or less trying to survive. Currently, this is not really recognizable in the game as food (which should be one of the most critical resource based on the story) is limiting city growth (housing anyone) and thats it. What about all the armies wandering around in the later game, as soon as they are out of the barracks they don’t need food anymore?
The other part of economics rely around 90% that you have special tiles within your area of influence. If this is not the case, its not only getting harder to keep up with other kingdoms, sometimes it pushes you back to much.

Therefore, I suggest to review the whole economic system again. Let me go into some details:
Resources:
* Food: This resource should be the base critical resource for everything related to population in the game - beeing it armies and city growth. Currently it is only limiting pop size via housing - and since 1.08 a few building use them as well. This is doesn’t feel natural, it only fights over symptoms. Additionally, food should be considered as a stackable resource, even in long ago history people were able to store basic foods. This would have the benefit that creeps you kill (e.g. wolfs, spiders *bwah* but who knows) could provide food instead of gold.
* Material: Should be a basic resource. Currently, the base resource is gold as you need it everywhere including the basic buildings and wages for armies, etc. If I would have to build up something after the apocalypse, gold would be not so important then rather materials to prepare my basics. This should be reflected accordingly, e.g. basic lvl 1 or 2 building consume materials. Full stop.
* Gold: With the last patch, gold got even more critical. If there are not several gold mines available, the pace in the beginning of the game is very, very low. After having some gold mines, and increase the adventure level, gold is no problem anymore. This should be changed a bit. Gold should be used for wages of higher level armies (not the simple ones) and costs for higher level buildings.
* Iron and higher level resources: They are not needed to much currently as they are only used for high level armies (which is fine) but due to the fact of magic overpower, I normally don’t care about this resources. Would be nice if they would have a better meaning. But I will have a look into this after the general economics works.
* Mana: will be changed with 1.1. Together with this change, the wages for summoned creatures should change to mana needs instead of gold. As I don’t know the details but assume that shards will play an critical role here, I would suggest that maybe the land revived should spend a little (very little) to the mana pool itself. Thinking of Magic the Gathering.
* Tech & Arcane points: as they have their own purpose itself, they are currently fine as they stand.
NEW: ‘Influence’: This resource should be added for acquiring heroes/champions etc. This would support being independend in the start of the game from gold income.

Resource gaining itself:
Currently the system rely heavily around special tiles and afterwards on city improvements which increase the amount on percentages. My suggestion here is that instead of percentages, I would suggest to change it to fixed values. E.g. for each connected gold mine, a market provides +2 Gold income. For each linked fertile land/pumpkin field, a ‘farm’ provides +2 food income. I think you get the point. With such a system the curve from very low to end game isn’t such drastic as this is currently.

Armies / war / heroes
Currently the not perfect split between behaivor of armies and heroes causes some balance problems as well as armies and heroes seems a bit interchangeable negativly towards the heroes.
I would suggest to dislink the treatment of armies and heroes to a certain degree. Armies should not be able to be equipped with weapons / armors from heroes / sov (currently still possible via the trade window). With this small change, equipment for heroes and normal armies can be balanced more easily.

In line with economics: There should be a general need of food supply as wages as the base level. E.g. peasants need only food as wages, higher level armies (e.g. those in need of iron for equipment or ride horses) additionally add gold to the wages.
Example:
Peasant equiped with base stick: 1 food.
High cavalary (horse, iron plate, long sword): 1 food + 3 gold per turn.

Heroes and Sov’s equipment should be only equipable by them, armies should only get equipment during creation or with an ‘upgrade’ feature while in town (similiar to the shop for heroes). The upgrade of armies are more costly than the during recruiting but on the other hand don’t need additional building time to compensate this (instand).

Armies (as mentioned several times before) should have only one armor equipment slot. While generally the feature is nice to but all the different stuff to the armies, while playing this is seldomly used.. normally you create a fighter with a particular outfit and stick to it.. and mostly try to get the best armor available. Ingame, there is no real need for the different types of armor areas IMHO. Heroes still should be kept as they are.. here it makes fun as this option is not used 20 times during one round and can bind the heroes more to the player.

More to come for the other areas -)

Wyl

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