[Suggestions] Limiting city spam and making choosing heroes more interesting in FE and/or LH

Especially with the new fame mechanic and being able to choose one of two heroes as you increase it, I had a thought.

1) Make the current pioneer unit strictly able to build outposts (and/or roads), and also let them act like additional constructors ala GC2 to add upgrades to an outpost if i want the closest city to be working on another project.

2) Give every hero with the governor trait the one-time "settle" ability like your sov has at the beginning of the game so when you recruit them, they have the ability to found a single new city.

3) To make it even more interesting... give each gov hero a bonus for a specific type of city. i.e Gralt the Grizzled gives a 20% production bonus to training units in a Fortress while Maylee the Mageborn gives a Conclave an extra essence slot if that is what the player decides to build with her settle ability. If you really wanted a Town... you could hold out for a governor hero with a town-associated bonus, or just grit your teeth and sacrifice Gralt's or Maylee's bonus for a Town.

This could make choosing a hero a little tougher and give interesting dimensions to gameplay. Do I create one big city and focus on melee and magic heroes to clear lairs and conquer additional cities, or do I hire on governors to build more cities that give me a larger kingdom and more regular troops?

It may require some adjustments for map size, but I find more than 3-5 cities tedious to manage.

Thanks for reading!

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Interesting idea, but I'm not sure how well this would work. What about Henchmen for instance? If the ability to settle comes from choosing Path of the Governor, then they will be even more OP (depending on what resource you need to train them, now that Influence is gone). If the ability is limited to only certain Champions (the only way I know to keep the Henchmen from getting it), then it depends too much on luck. You could get two champions without the ability in a row, while the AI already has settled two new cities.

Still, limiting the amount of cities by Fame could work. Once you reach a certain threshold, you get a Colonist unit to settle new cities. It is pretty much the same idea as yours, but without the need for Champions. However, the biggest question is still how the AI will handle it.

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i don't think an artificial limit is required. afaik, in LH the number of cities will increase unrest empire wide, so there's a mechanic that limits expansion more naturally. when you look at ways to limit city spam in 4X, i think it's a good idea to look at games that had a good solution. i think both civ 4 and civ 5 have good solutions to the problem.

in civ 4, additional cities increased the gold maintenance of all cities, so you basically had to develop a strong economy to afford expansion. new cities were a drag on your economy until they reached a point where they were self sufficient. at the later stages of the game, you generally had enough economic technologies and civics available to spam cities, but in the beginning, overexpansion could stagnate your progress.

civ 5 took a different route. they made happiness a global resource and every new city and every point of population created unhappiness. so you basically always have to weigh vertical growth vs. horizontal growth (aka "is it better to spend 4 happiness on a new 1 pop city or is it better to have 4 more pop in my core cities"). again, over the course of the game you unlock buildings and social policies that basically allow you to spam cities in the later eras if you choose the right policies. this game also had different sets of social policies for "tall" civs that made a few large cities competitive vs. vast empires of mediocre cities.

the unrest system in LH seems to be similar to the approach of civ 4. i think it will work fine if/when they get the numbers right. but that's something that can be tweaked relatively easily (i think) and beta testers can influence that development with their input.

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NaytchSG

Join Date 03/2006

+19

I didn't think about henchmen at all and good points about the unrest mechanic getting tweaked in LH.

That by itself will give the governor class more importance.

Now that Fame is the way you get heroes, how will they rework the Adventurer class? Give them a fame bonus for completing quests? Give them 3 hero picks at fame level up?

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adventurer could also be an XP bonus for champions, or remove the XP penalty from having more than 1 champ in an army. these changes would remove the original mechanic, but keep the general theme of making the faction's heroes more powerful. and henchmen could also be tweaked to be a bonus for the champions. normal champions are single figure units, the henchmen trait could (visually) add a second person to the champion units that basically gives the champion unit extra HP, additional perks, more equipment slots or something along that line.

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