Glen Tomkins
Chieftain
- Joined
- Apr 10, 2019
- Messages
- 5
As it stands, encampments and their buildings aren't useful enough, and there is the overall defect in the game balance that war is too attractive a strategy. Having unit experience decrease very slowly over time, with encampments and their buildings able to decrease or even halt that deterioration, would tend to help out both problems.
This mechanic would not penalize armies if the decrease could be compensated, but that compensation had a limit on number of units. Every civ would be given a base rate of protection against the decrease, a number of units in its army below which there would be no decrease. Exceed that number in your army, and you start to bleed experience every turn based on how much you exceed the limit. Encampments and their buildings would increase a civ's limit. The larger the army you want to maintain, the more encampments you need to maintain to avoid having their experience level decrease.
As XP are taken away, promotions would be revoked if the XPs get below the level needed for that promotion. There could be a bottom limit, whereby, say, a unit only loses promotions down to, but not including, its first promotion.
To compensate for the overall dwindling of XP over time, it could be made easier to get XP, or promotions could be set to come at lower XP levels. More promotion levels could be introduced to cover this greater ease of obtaining promotions. Highly promoted units would have further to fall, even if the army was too large and encampments too few to prevent deterioration.
This idea would profit from being introduced alongside my other proposal to create a production cost for healing, because by itself it might actually make war-mongering too attractive. A player would be motivated to stay at war more consistently, pausing only to offload war weariness, to keep up XPs.
Having both ideas in play creates another possible way to make high-casualty wars unattractive, at least if a civ has not also invested in encampments. Once the amount of healing over a given number of turns exceeds a certain percentage of the unit's total health points, there could be a "dilution" effect, whereby the unit's XP go down. A high-XP unit that loses 90% of its health and has to heal it all over less than, say, 10 turns, loses XP as it heals because of the influx of so many raw recruits. If, though, your civ has plenty of encampments and their buildings, there is no dilution, because these replacements have been adequately trained in all of those encampments to take their place beside the veterans.
This mechanic would not penalize armies if the decrease could be compensated, but that compensation had a limit on number of units. Every civ would be given a base rate of protection against the decrease, a number of units in its army below which there would be no decrease. Exceed that number in your army, and you start to bleed experience every turn based on how much you exceed the limit. Encampments and their buildings would increase a civ's limit. The larger the army you want to maintain, the more encampments you need to maintain to avoid having their experience level decrease.
As XP are taken away, promotions would be revoked if the XPs get below the level needed for that promotion. There could be a bottom limit, whereby, say, a unit only loses promotions down to, but not including, its first promotion.
To compensate for the overall dwindling of XP over time, it could be made easier to get XP, or promotions could be set to come at lower XP levels. More promotion levels could be introduced to cover this greater ease of obtaining promotions. Highly promoted units would have further to fall, even if the army was too large and encampments too few to prevent deterioration.
This idea would profit from being introduced alongside my other proposal to create a production cost for healing, because by itself it might actually make war-mongering too attractive. A player would be motivated to stay at war more consistently, pausing only to offload war weariness, to keep up XPs.
Having both ideas in play creates another possible way to make high-casualty wars unattractive, at least if a civ has not also invested in encampments. Once the amount of healing over a given number of turns exceeds a certain percentage of the unit's total health points, there could be a "dilution" effect, whereby the unit's XP go down. A high-XP unit that loses 90% of its health and has to heal it all over less than, say, 10 turns, loses XP as it heals because of the influx of so many raw recruits. If, though, your civ has plenty of encampments and their buildings, there is no dilution, because these replacements have been adequately trained in all of those encampments to take their place beside the veterans.
