readercolin
King
- Joined
- May 7, 2009
- Messages
- 604
4 cities does not massive trade empire make. The maximum number of trade routes, by end game, if you max them all out is what? 6? With foreign trade, long term peace, massive cities, etc, the most I have ever seen out of one trade route is 6 commerce - that was for a calibam city of size 40. All together, that would be 36 commerce, per city, so with 4 cities a grand total of 144 commerce from trade routes. An enclave gets 1 food and 6 commerce after taxation, 7 with choosing financial. All those trade routes amount to 24 or 20.5 (with and without financial leader) enclaves, and that isn't even counting the kurotaes own trade routes - and they can get just as many as these guys, as well as probably being the biggest competitors city size wise.
The reason why I keep bringing up the kurotaes is that they are the most similar people to what you are trying to make. And most people agree that generally, the kurotaes are rather outclassed by most of the other races - which would you rather have, 4 cities that can crank out a unit a turn, or 12 cities that average 2 turns per unit?
The other big thing that I thought of that you will need to worry about is health. With your only health resources being the various sea ones, and needing to work lots of tiles, you will need lots of buildings that increase the health cap of your cities. Another thing - currently kelp only spreads along coast tiles, it doesn't spread across ocean. If you want them floating in vast kelp fields then you'll need to modify that. Though, to solve the health problem, you could make kelp give +1 health like forests do.
Lastly, unit limits. I know that they are difficult to attack. However, having so few cities, all easily disrupted through a few blockading privateer fleets, will probably gimp them more than enough. Most players would never reach the unit cap anyways. And the ones who do are usually in multiplayer, and that limitation would probably lead to them getting steamrolled. Edit: Mages. 12 adepts is a bit whimpy, but whatever. Even with twincast its not like they're that useful anyways. 8 mages however, is, rather weak. Especially, if you're playing a mage heavy game (amurites, svaltar, khadi, thessa, grigori - anyone with arcane). For most non-mage heavy games, I usually end up with 4-8 mages on a small map - more on larger maps. They are doing things like having fireball to bombard city defenses or sitting in my cities casting hope and whatnot. For mage heavy games though, i usually have 20 or so - and thats on a small map before I even have arcane lore. Big maps I may have 50+, especially if I'm playing multiplayer. 8 twincasting mages really doesn't compete at all. Lastly, I would like to point out the grigori. 8 adventurers isn't that tough to get before strength of will. If I was to play a mage grigori game, that would be 8 mages all with combat 5, twincast, my promotion line of choice (generally, death and fire), and possibly heroic defense 1-2 (maybe heroic attack 1-2 for the oldest). Then with strength of will I get 4 archmages and 4 liches. Then summoning 16 fire elementals or whatever and not much usually survives. To top it all, they can they upgrade any melee, archery, or recon unit to a lunnotar (again, available at strength of will), and lunnotar have channeling 1-3 - add another 4 fire elementals to that list, with combat 5 lunnotars to defend the stack - and they don't even have to be heroic.
Hope my thoughts are useful.
-Colin
The reason why I keep bringing up the kurotaes is that they are the most similar people to what you are trying to make. And most people agree that generally, the kurotaes are rather outclassed by most of the other races - which would you rather have, 4 cities that can crank out a unit a turn, or 12 cities that average 2 turns per unit?
The other big thing that I thought of that you will need to worry about is health. With your only health resources being the various sea ones, and needing to work lots of tiles, you will need lots of buildings that increase the health cap of your cities. Another thing - currently kelp only spreads along coast tiles, it doesn't spread across ocean. If you want them floating in vast kelp fields then you'll need to modify that. Though, to solve the health problem, you could make kelp give +1 health like forests do.
Lastly, unit limits. I know that they are difficult to attack. However, having so few cities, all easily disrupted through a few blockading privateer fleets, will probably gimp them more than enough. Most players would never reach the unit cap anyways. And the ones who do are usually in multiplayer, and that limitation would probably lead to them getting steamrolled. Edit: Mages. 12 adepts is a bit whimpy, but whatever. Even with twincast its not like they're that useful anyways. 8 mages however, is, rather weak. Especially, if you're playing a mage heavy game (amurites, svaltar, khadi, thessa, grigori - anyone with arcane). For most non-mage heavy games, I usually end up with 4-8 mages on a small map - more on larger maps. They are doing things like having fireball to bombard city defenses or sitting in my cities casting hope and whatnot. For mage heavy games though, i usually have 20 or so - and thats on a small map before I even have arcane lore. Big maps I may have 50+, especially if I'm playing multiplayer. 8 twincasting mages really doesn't compete at all. Lastly, I would like to point out the grigori. 8 adventurers isn't that tough to get before strength of will. If I was to play a mage grigori game, that would be 8 mages all with combat 5, twincast, my promotion line of choice (generally, death and fire), and possibly heroic defense 1-2 (maybe heroic attack 1-2 for the oldest). Then with strength of will I get 4 archmages and 4 liches. Then summoning 16 fire elementals or whatever and not much usually survives. To top it all, they can they upgrade any melee, archery, or recon unit to a lunnotar (again, available at strength of will), and lunnotar have channeling 1-3 - add another 4 fire elementals to that list, with combat 5 lunnotars to defend the stack - and they don't even have to be heroic.
Hope my thoughts are useful.
-Colin
More easily defendable for a builder civ, especially once I start purchasing all the master promotions.
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