stealth_nsk
Deity
1. Saying we cant balance things that grow is saying we cant have cities.
Do you understand what balance is? It means you have strategic choices as none of the variants has obvious advantage. For improvements you have choice between building different things on each tile (plus choose which tiles needs to be worked). So if one improvement grows while other don't, you have obvious choice early game - cottages are better and obvious choice late game - you could ignore cottages.
2. As you said they are not burned to the ground. Possibily pillaging cottages should give more gold so we should think twice before spaming them in frontier cities. Maybe even asigne 1 or 2 units to protect improvements in a city.
This doesn't change a thing. If pillaging destroys cottage to the ground (from Town to Cottage), they become viable target and with more or less smart opponent you'll get them burned in the first war. If pillaging doesn't burn improvement (so pillaged Town is restored back to Town), you lost the only benefit cottages bring to the game.
3. I agree that gold should be more scarce to actualy make you work those luxuries but adding cotages isnt about making gold more abundant. It is about making improvements more fun by introducing the strategic positioning aspect to it. Filing our hearts with joy when we see our babby cotages grow is a plus too.
1. I don't see how it could bring more fun in Civ 5 realities. As I said, the biggest gameplay value of cottages was in planning how to make them protected.
2. Civ 5 makes quite different fun with strategic positioning. It has fort importance and in BNW we'll have 3 civs with UI bringing additional defense (or at least 2 if guess about Chateu bringing defense in addition to culture is wrong). Plus:
- Overall 1UPT combat is about positioning.
- Road maintenance brings additional level to landscape design.
- Cities typically have more tiles than they could work.