Noriad2
Emperor
- Joined
- Oct 23, 2014
- Messages
- 1,153
I think that overpowered trade missions (from traders or criminals) are a serious game breaker.
Money acts as a limiter on expansion. If you effectively get unlimited money, you can just spam cities everywhere, build as many armies as you like, let cities grown as fast as possible without bothering about civic upkeep or (with revolutions off) without bothering about crime.
As larger empires cost disproportionately more money, lack of money is a solution to the snowballing effect that ruins many strategy games past the early stages. It is one of the core features of vanilla Beyond the Sword. If you overexpand, it forces you to set cities to "build wealth" instead of "build science" which accelerates your science progress even more.
The game was already fine without these trade missions. Adding them disturbs the financial challenge of the game, and making these missions so strong that you can basically choose your income destroys the challenge. It's like playing chess with your 6 year old nephew. Sure you hold back for a while to give him the illusion that he is also playing but once you are done with that you wipe him off the board without a sweat. Choosing your income allows you to skip building financial buildings, and go all out war instead, while the AI wastes his hammers on buildings that just provide money.
I used to play MMORPGs but don't anymore as they all tend to devolve from a challenging adventure to a "click for reward" children's theme park ride where winning is simply the result of being in the game for a set amount of time and clicking on stuff. If one simple strategy (spam trade missions) gives you more money than you'll ever need, then doing that simple strategy is the default, every other strategy is pointless, and C2C is back to "caveman2castles". Especially since taking a city and selling off all buildings has become another source of too much cash recently (but at least taking cities requires some actual playing).
Money acts as a limiter on expansion. If you effectively get unlimited money, you can just spam cities everywhere, build as many armies as you like, let cities grown as fast as possible without bothering about civic upkeep or (with revolutions off) without bothering about crime.
As larger empires cost disproportionately more money, lack of money is a solution to the snowballing effect that ruins many strategy games past the early stages. It is one of the core features of vanilla Beyond the Sword. If you overexpand, it forces you to set cities to "build wealth" instead of "build science" which accelerates your science progress even more.
The game was already fine without these trade missions. Adding them disturbs the financial challenge of the game, and making these missions so strong that you can basically choose your income destroys the challenge. It's like playing chess with your 6 year old nephew. Sure you hold back for a while to give him the illusion that he is also playing but once you are done with that you wipe him off the board without a sweat. Choosing your income allows you to skip building financial buildings, and go all out war instead, while the AI wastes his hammers on buildings that just provide money.
I used to play MMORPGs but don't anymore as they all tend to devolve from a challenging adventure to a "click for reward" children's theme park ride where winning is simply the result of being in the game for a set amount of time and clicking on stuff. If one simple strategy (spam trade missions) gives you more money than you'll ever need, then doing that simple strategy is the default, every other strategy is pointless, and C2C is back to "caveman2castles". Especially since taking a city and selling off all buildings has become another source of too much cash recently (but at least taking cities requires some actual playing).
Last edited:
for disease
