Topic: My impression after few games (former settlers player)

I want to comment only to one thing, because I can't say much for the other points:

Auto-upgrading mines will work against you. And they don't run out that fast, even if they are at 0%, they only mine veeeeeeery slow.

Why does auto-upgrading work against you? You need the ressources (for the upgrade), you need experienced miners (biggest problem here, if you haven't experienced it) and you need to upgrade other buildings in order to run an upgraded building (for example the tavern for the empire).

Also: This game's focus is on economy. There shouldn't be an auto-upgrade, if part of your "skill" is to keep an eye for it. If the mine runs dry, you can see it really fast (hotkey 'c' or 's') and you should get a message.

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Welcome to the Forums! A lot of issues you raise, it is hard to comment properly on all of them in one thread alone.

First off the game is awesome. All the new things like blacksmith exp and upgrading buildings are great. I've only played as the barbarians so I will talk about them. At first I had major grout problems. You should not make the charcoal maker need grout to be built and the grout maker need coal to make grout. That led to me losing some very long games that I wish I could get my time back from.

Deadlocks are designed to make the game more difficult. It is a bit frustrating, I agree.

Also all the new resources and dependencies are great however I don't think they are balanced. Has anyone calculated how much you need to make top level soldiers coming out of just one training building and one battle building? I was playing on a huge map and I needed like 12 farms along with like 7 of everything else to make all the resources needing to half regularly make a top level soldier every once and awhile. When I looked at the training building I couldn't believe the whole mini map was used just for that one building and it still was slow.

The idea is that you will never be saturated (as it was the case with S2). You will constantly need to build more and more buildings and the economy is quite more fragile so the game does not become boring on bigger maps. The balance is something we address carefully and while it is surely not perfect (too many free variables), it is reasonable looking at the data we currently haven.

The economy in this game over the settlers has more elements and those elements compound fast. I found myself always running around to individual buildings seeing if they had what they needed. What might be good is a toggle so that over the buildings without putting your mouse there you can see a useful status report like a green 100% output, or a 80% output and a message saying "missing wheat", or "out of resources".

This already existst. Press 'c' and 's' to toggle census and statitics.

Also another thing would be a toggle to have mines auto upgrade when they run out.

I agree with !ChemBro. Mines will keep working and deliver resources even if there are no resources left though, but the cost/value ratio is very low.

And another would be to set the levels in which the training and battle buildings swap out their units (ie: swap at 2/5 unless everyone is already at 2/5, that or have the options "breadth" or "depth" training where so long as a unit out there in the empire is untrained he will be trained before someone else becomes stronger... at least for the forts you set as high priority for trained soldiers), and to also have them swap out with units already in forts etc (especially taking priority in forts closest to enemies).

that is planed, but not implemented.

That and consider rechecking all the requirements for things. Does training really require food? The miners needed food which in this game needed a tavern / inn etc which required wheat for the bakery and the micro brewery. The main goal is a strong army in the game so why do you need food for multiple parts of this process? That just compounds the need for resource gathering to incredible amounts way too fast. If you want to be realistic and make food needed for everything that you should make it easier to get with less land space needed. It's hard to play the game fully without a massive territory in which most maps want to try and make you work in a small space which just isn't balanced right.

No one here wants to be realistic, we just want to have a nice game. Yes, having a massive territory is a need if you want to run all your production at max, but be assured: I already played network games where I had 2 battle arenas fully working.

Cheers, !SirVer

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As for the balance I guess making it really hard to reach saturation is not the issue. However you still need quite a lot just to build the most basic war economy. And the second you try to expand past that your resource demands double and your basic soldier output halves. I guess after you play awhile you begin to learn exactly how many of each building you should build. However what I'm saying is the consequence of going off the perfect economy and land usage is very harsh and it hurts new players the most.

All you need for new soldiers are a smelting works and an axe factory for the barbarians. You can then produce a lot of low level soldiers quickly which is quite a viable strategy for the beginning of the game. The rest of the game is designed to take very long to reach a good equilibrium. I think we kinda disagree in this point of balance in the game, but I think our approach is quite good, but maybe not perfectly balanced.

I didn't know that mines produce forever, that's cool. Even stone mines?

yep, all of them.

Well battle arenas are pretty easy,

Thats the idea. Go ahead, build infrastructure to make level 0 soldiers, later add a battle arena and if you get serious add a trainingscamp. Sometimes I build the battle arena before building level 0 soldiers because evade level 2 makes the difference between your soldier barely winning + going home to heal and dying.

I'm talking about the empire needed to get a training camp producing top soldiers at 100% is phenomenally large. I understand it's not like your opponent has it any easier so it's still fair but having one training camp at 100% is not saturation because you can always build 2... This really is mostly an issue because the soldier wont leave until they are fully upgraded...

You can click on any soldier to make them leave earlier.

Also if you did the calculation, the amount of resources to make a top soldier probably doesn't even end up being the optimal route. It would probably be better to make two mid level soldiers then one top level. This makes me want to actually do all these calculations to prove balancing flaws (if they exist).

I highly doubt that. There is more to balance than just the numbers. E.g. if you have a castle full of level 5 soldiers and I have a castle of level 12 soldiers you can attack me and all your men will perish. My guys will go home and be fully healed when you attack again. If you have 24 soldiers you will likely win because you can keep my men from retreating. I suggest you do not crunch numbers, instead set up a scenario where you precisely set up the two different fractions left and right and the soldiers you want to fight each other and do some testing like that. Setting up such a scenario is easy to do using Lua. I do not doubt that you find some balance flaws, but theorycrafting will not convince me :).

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