Mana Themed Mage Towers
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I very much like the idea of "generic bonus buildings". However, I feel like we have way too many types of Mana in FFH and WildMana; the fact alone that not every type of mana has a passive effect says enough. I know there's a new Spell System coming up (though I haven't had the heart to read all of it), but I feel that the mana/magic types should be more compact. A new possible ordening would be, e.g.: 8 types of mana, each with their own spell(s). Aside from each "pure" spell(tree), there are also hybrid spells, requiring several types of mana to unlock. The highest grades would require 4 (or more?) types of mana to use.
Anyway, that was slightly off topic, so lets get back: Rather than having "one tower per magic type", which would lead to 20 or so different towers in WildMana, I'd suggest having one Tower that starts with no effect, but can be upgraded by sacrificing units to it. The type of unit (melee, recon, ...) determines the effect of the tower. For example, sacrificing Melee units could give a boost to production, while sacrificing an Arcane unit could boost research, either by means of multiplier or absolute numbers.
Each city would have such a tower, but the type of effect would be limit to one or two, such as Production+Gold. The effect of a sacrifice would depend, as PhoenixMuse suggested, on the level of the unit sacrificed. The sacrifice bonuses are not cumulative, but a higher unit can be sacrificed to upgrade the tower beyond the level of the previous sacrifice. This way, low units can be sacrificed early on for a small boost while a bigger boost can be obtained later on when XP gets easier to acquire. I'd suggest putting a limit on the boost to prevent people from sacrificing a level 50 unit to receive a City that can finish every Wonder in a single turn.
The reasons for these towers would be to make it easier to specialize cities as well as giving the +XP Civics a bit more use, as I feel they are slightly underpowered these days (Apprenticeship will get you killed early one unless you also run Nationhood, because of the rounding mechanics in Civ4, and Theocracy severely limits your citysizes as stacking religions and temples is one of the easiest ways to consistently get your Happiness up.)
On a few of the other suggestions/remarks:
I don't think Cultural Victories are that easy in this game. They were by far the easiest Victory in BtS, but since most buildings here give multiplier bonuses, I find that the final amount of Culture/Turn isn't that great due to the lack of absolute +culture. However, I've never actively gone for Cultural Victory in FFH/WM, so I'm not sure how easy it gets once you run the +Culture Civis and get some Bards in. I've noticed that Balseraphs can rack up some serious +culture with their Freak Shows, Slave Cages and others, but in my first real FFH2 Victory (playing as Balseraphs!), I had practically every Victory condition only a few turns away (Tower of Mastery had been built but queued back for the last turn; both Domination and Conquest were easy to achieve and my Council of Esus had been spread to every corner of the map.) and eventhough my three earliest cities were sitting on many Wonders, none of them reached Legendary Culture by the time I won. When I checked the Victory page, I saw I was by far the most Cultured, so the other ones weren't really close either.
Having an Event every turn would get boring really quickly... and annoying! Taking your two suggested Events as an example, you can go every way with those two: Spend money for units, upgrade spot, upgrade city building, gain gold, improve city. This makes it so that at any stage of the game, this event will benefit you. Keeping that in mind, think of the following: Normally, when you receive an event, you know it's a rare thing and you can choose the thing that benefits you most. However, if the frequency of events increases, the benefits of the current event are only a small portion of the trade-off: maybe if you spend gold now, you won't be able to get the much better results from the next event! Is that 50gold for a mage worth potentially missing out on a Great Person next turn?
Events are meant to be small things with barely any impact. I already disagree with the FFH/WildMana change of making some random events really powerful (free Great People? That's insane! Even those free specialist events are already very, very powerful early on!), but if you're going to increase the frequency, you'll be forced to tune down their impact. Even in vanilla Civ I sometimes noticed that a random event can make or break your game. Lucking out on a goodie hut and receiving a Settler/Worker in the first few turns gave you a definite edge on your rivals.
[to_xp]Gekko;9502862 said:
I thought the Princess Rule was that any suggestion in a fantasy-themed environment made by a girl/woman must include Unicorns!
boobs should always come before tanks!
Definitely!