Rooftrellen
King
Yeah, hypercube. They'll be tricky to play well, but...wow, they look pretty strong. The ability to buy in puppets is huge, but that means only one city will ever be able to actually, you know, BUILD units.
It'll also be an interesting balance with war. You need to conquer to get cities outside of your capital or CS spots, but you probably want to be careful about crippling an enemy early, unless you want a runaway to build up all the land meant for you and him, and if you get a lot of civs that like to go tall...well, I've seen situations where the right combination of civs won't take all the land offered into the atomic era.
I don't know if I want to discount them because they can't settle where they want, have two mediocre UU's (I'd take a pair of gold producing UB's and conquer the CS's myself), and, realistically, need to war to expand. Or if I want to call them boarderline broken by being able, to some small extent, control their puppets.
I see trouble in a few things, though. First, it seems puppets still suffer a culture penalty, so their boarders won't expand so well, unless you take a well developed city. Second, puppets sometimes get stuck trying to build units. When this happens to me, I normally sigh and annex, but Venice will have no such ability. A stuck puppet will be stuck until it decides to change. Finally, buying is expensive. They have no bonus to money making (come on, how...HOW can they not have a UI to replace trading posts? Awesome for a puppet empire), so you're going to have to trust the puppets to build the right thing most of the time (and it seems they also lack the ability to focus puppets on anything, so default focus all around) or not spend any money on rush buying units in what, for your military production, becomes a one city challenge.
I could see them getting tweeked a bit, but it is really so different that we'll need to play around with it a while before we can figure out if it's awesome, balanced, or terrible. My gut says humans will have a hard time, while the insane gold the AI gets will make it really strong in their hands.
It'll also be an interesting balance with war. You need to conquer to get cities outside of your capital or CS spots, but you probably want to be careful about crippling an enemy early, unless you want a runaway to build up all the land meant for you and him, and if you get a lot of civs that like to go tall...well, I've seen situations where the right combination of civs won't take all the land offered into the atomic era.
I don't know if I want to discount them because they can't settle where they want, have two mediocre UU's (I'd take a pair of gold producing UB's and conquer the CS's myself), and, realistically, need to war to expand. Or if I want to call them boarderline broken by being able, to some small extent, control their puppets.
I see trouble in a few things, though. First, it seems puppets still suffer a culture penalty, so their boarders won't expand so well, unless you take a well developed city. Second, puppets sometimes get stuck trying to build units. When this happens to me, I normally sigh and annex, but Venice will have no such ability. A stuck puppet will be stuck until it decides to change. Finally, buying is expensive. They have no bonus to money making (come on, how...HOW can they not have a UI to replace trading posts? Awesome for a puppet empire), so you're going to have to trust the puppets to build the right thing most of the time (and it seems they also lack the ability to focus puppets on anything, so default focus all around) or not spend any money on rush buying units in what, for your military production, becomes a one city challenge.
I could see them getting tweeked a bit, but it is really so different that we'll need to play around with it a while before we can figure out if it's awesome, balanced, or terrible. My gut says humans will have a hard time, while the insane gold the AI gets will make it really strong in their hands.
