# Casters who can teleport go with the army. Thus, if I do send an army somewhere via teleport, then that champion is with them. Given that archery can turn any caster into a pincushion, it's a vast risk to teleport an army on top of an enemy.
# Teleport to defend cities? Same as above, but at the end of the day, you have the ability to shift troops via either one (just the Sovereign) or perhaps even champions with the power to do so. It is not an instance of gather-all-of-my-armies-and-use-them. If people DO teleport around the map, then they are losing the protection that the caster offers in terms of buffs, damage, and what have you - all because the mana to power, say, a lightning storm is being used on teleporting.
# Teleportation is indeed limited. Realize that if the enemy drops an army in on top of you, it won't be a constant thing that happens every turn. Once you take out one enemy army with the teleporting caster, it won't happen again unless another caster teleports in. Meanwhile, if you are victorious, the enemy is weakening their cities and losing valuable magic-wielding champions. It's not anywhere near as bad as what you are going on about time and again.
1 You assume that after teleporting a player will necessarily engage the hero who cast the spell, but that is not necessarily true. One could just use the hero to teleport and then attack with the huge army that was with him, while the hero waits outside the battle.
2 Not sure what you are saying here, but one can have many heroes who just teleport. Teleport would become such an overwhelming game breaker that it would be silly to waste mana on anything else. Heroes would do only that.
3 The problem is that there could ba a stack ANYWHERE ready to teleport so you would just advance in enemy territory HOPING that the enemy is unready. No strategy only luck if he is ready (wherever he is) he will destroy you otherwise you'll win.
Regardingthe things you say about Age of Wonders, I am not talking about gates, because I wuld just make a map where gates are not present and solve the problem like that. What I saw as a game breaker was a particular spell ONLY present in AOW1 (they removed it in the sequel!!) which was very somilar to what we have here. It woulld allow spellcaasters to jump around and became the one and only possible strategy to win (I saw it and all the expert AOW players did too, that's why we are freaking out about teleport I am not crazy, guys)
I definatly agree with you that it should be optional.
I just think that very large single player games could get pretty annoying if your units are forced to crawl around a few blocks at a time. If you have no teleport you need something else so that you don't spend 100 turns just moving your units from one end of the empire to the other.
Not having a teleport won't solve the superstack problem.
But I don't think that the AI shouldn't have one superstack to attack your land, in fact it is normal that if you decide to invade your enemy you do that with a decent army. What I am saying is that the game should encourage to distribute your forces around to have many things going on at the same time in different parts of the empire. That is tipically something all wargame designers struggle to achieve . The problem is that by introducing a teleporting capability you just make that completely unnecessary.
Many wonderful ideas here. Whatever is done with teleporting, make it optional, so players who want it can have it. Everyone can agree with that.
Portals, good idea.
Create a "take me home' Spell: It 'sets' a home tile, one tile that you and your 'friends' can teleport back to.
Naval movement, transport, YES!
What about forced marches, army moves faster but is "tired." William the Conqueror defeated the defending English king, ONLY because that English King had just force marched his army from Scotland to the channel.
Better control over where roads are built. Fix the dirt tracks that wander all over the place - usually in crazy directions.
Invest in better roads that speed travel even more than the x2 in the current ver 1.09e.
I agree with all that (except the teleports\portals off course) Units should go a bit faster, boats should become useful and the AI should learn how to use them (so finally we'll have islands). The "take me home" spell is OK if moves just one units, although again players will use it while the AI will lose their heroes.
In general technologies to move faster should be the solution to our frustration about movement: fast horses, a navigation tech tree that speeds up boats, a road development tech tree... anything that requires strategy and planning instead than instantly move armies around. (com'on teleporting armies is something never seen in any fantasy book, who suypports that is just frustrated about the slow pace this game as at the moment!)