Who thinks pioneers should be (possibly a lot) more expensive and not exempt from wages?

Pioneers should remain cheap or else Arcane Monolith will be way overpowered. Arcane Monolith is already a huge advantage. Playing Pariden I only build pioneers to build cities and steal all the AIs Shards with Arcane Monolith.

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Quoting Zygwen,

reply 26

Pioneers should remain cheap or else Arcane Monolith will be way overpowered. Arcane Monolith is already a huge advantage. Playing Pariden I only build pioneers to build cities and steal all the AIs Shards with Arcane Monolith.

Arcane Monolith isn't a "huge advantage", it is a Biblically overpowered spell. The fact that it can be cast at range to any place you have ever seen before... Sheesh. Heck, you can even USE it to explore if you want to spend the mana. It needs to cost way more than it does AND have a range limitation.

I like the idea of Cities being more of a ZoC producer and Outposts becoming defensive things more than Zerg Rush Expansion enablers.

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IMO, Pioneers should cost more. The mad rush land grab early game is not fun. The best part of this game is the initial exploration and conquering of the wilds. I find that with .913, the AI is more prepared for the monsters, and so the map gets stripped of all the fun stuff like treasure and quests in nothing flat and AI cities and outposts pop up like suburban residential developments. More expensive pioneers would mean less pioneers built = slower urbanization.

The same could also be said for Pariden's nifty new spell the Arcane Monoloth (?) that creates an outpost. I played as Pariden and completely spammed outposts on any resource that wasn't nailed down. Considering that this spell helps you claim shards that help you get mana faster that helps you cast this spell more often, it should cost more mana to prevent shameless Paridens from spamming outposts. I quickly had over 2K mana and had just about every unit I owned buffed to the max. Maybe that is the desired effect.

Last, and not really all that related, the idea of city improvements that have benefits that scale with city size is a great idea. Especially on bonuses that are not directly affected by population, like research and gildar (and maybe even some of those too). A bonus of X * CityLevel would make a level 4 city equal to 4 level 1 cities with the same improvement. OC, maybe the cost to build should scale too, so that if you build it early it costs less and then grows with the city, but if you build it late it costs more to get the multiplied bonus. This kind of thing might make larger cities more of an option.

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Quoting Yazari,

reply 12

I am neutral to making pioneers have maintenance costs. I think there are multiple approaches to balancing pioneers (and horizontal growth). I am eager to see what changes Beta 4 has in store.

The following are some additional ideas/approaches to balancing the pioneer spam:

Make city size and growth (bonuses/structures) matter a LOT more

Allow buildings to be built faster and their bonuses to be bigger.
Allow city ZOC to expand faster (currently, I get more territory under my control faster through pioneer spam)
Provide movement increase options for Tall Empires and/or change the way roads are handled...

Reason: By spamming cities I can move at rapid rates due to roads between distant cities, they cost nothing and are built instantly across unexplored tiles with a low level tech. This is a HUGE reason why I plop cities everywhere, even if they will be destroyed (the roads stay). There is no other road building mechanism.

Make creating cities costly
Make creating outposts costly
Make pioneers cost more population / take away from city growth in a significant way

I spew out pioneers because horizontal growth provides more benefits at a faster pace than vertical growth (city development). Even if there were an economic cost to spewing pioneers - I would still be looking at spewing out pioneers to the extent that my economy could tolerate...

If City Growth mattered (a lot more) and if pioneers cost enough population or otherwise delayed city growth in a substantial way, I would be less apt to build pioneers in most of my cities and a lot less likely to use them as manna batteries, meat shields and scouts... Heck I might even consider protecting them

Quoting Malsqueek,

reply 27

Arcane Monolith isn't a "huge advantage", it is a Biblically overpowered spell. The fact that it can be cast at range to any place you have ever seen before... Sheesh. Heck, you can even USE it to explore if you want to spend the mana. It needs to cost way more than it does AND have a range limitation.

I like the idea of Cities being more of a ZoC producer and Outposts becoming defensive things more than Zerg Rush Expansion enablers.

Quoting DexCisco,

reply 28

IMO, Pioneers should cost more. The mad rush land grab early game is not fun. The best part of this game is the initial exploration and conquering of the wilds. I find that with .913, the AI is more prepared for the monsters, and so the map gets stripped of all the fun stuff like treasure and quests in nothing flat and AI cities and outposts pop up like suburban residential developments. More expensive pioneers would mean less pioneers built = slower urbanization.

This, this and this.

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Quoting Malsqueek,

reply 27

Arcane Monolith isn't a "huge advantage", it is a Biblically overpowered spell. The fact that it can be cast at range to any place you have ever seen before... Sheesh. Heck, you can even USE it to explore if you want to spend the mana. It needs to cost way more than it does AND have a range limitation.

Maybe make:

ZoC 1 tile

Can be destroyed by anyone with or without war.

Cost more with each cast

Increased upkeep per existing monolith, Or limit the times it can be cast through out the game.

Roads:

Return to the builders unit?

Several turns to construct one tile of road... dependent on terrain.

Faster roads with the more "man hours" invested.... IE larger builder units, or more of them, tech....

Outpost battles:

Anyone remember those old Nintendo games of "historical accuracy"? Some of those battles rocked because of the obstacles like Walls and Gates.

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Quoting Jansious,

reply 30

Maybe make:

ZoC 1 tile

Can be destroyed by anyone with or without war.

Cost more with each cast

Increased upkeep per existing monolith, Or limit the times it can be cast through out the game.

It really needs to be something to the tune of 1 upkeep on top of 20-30 mana for the cast, and limited to 1 casting per turn. That puts it at a time cost of approximately 10-15 turns, which is roughly equal to the early game time cost of a pioneer, plus the benefit of not using the production queue.

As an alternate to the "once per turn", if it were capped at 1 monolith plus 1 per shard controlled, it would make it largely a shard acquisition device, yielding a net 1 mana per turn for the caster, and helping further identify Pariden as a magic-focused nation.

I'm torn on the 1 ZoC thing, since having 2 ZoC does help limit encouragement of Pioneer spam, but it also devalues cities.

It is hard enough to keep your outposts as is, though. I would not like to see them as something you could break without declaring war. Otherwise the AI would break them just because they could. Heck, I know I would. Every time.

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Quoting Kantok,

reply 21

I think this question is useless until we see what the city changes hold and if there are any associated outpost and map generation changes. Those are big issues. This is a balance issue. There's no point in worrying overly about balance until we have all the major systems in place, which we don't at the moment.

Kudos for pointing this out.

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StevenAus22

Join Date 06/2010

+110

Good point.

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Do it like other games.

Cities should have administration costs. You should need to keep them happy. If they aren't happy, (say high unrest), they rebel. A rebelling city could turn into a monster lair that fires off rebel troops of the appropriate type.

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mqpiffle

Join Date 10/2010

+44

Pioneers should cost WAY (like, totally) more resources to train. They should also have some sort of wage. They should also be designable, like any other unit.

EDIT: And no discussion of game mechanics is ever useless or pointless. That's (partially) why these forums exist, to discuss game issues.

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