ErestorX
Well-Known Member
I think it is fair to have a formula that assumes players use mostly a mix of fighting and catering and build the wonders that fit their playing style.
Currently you are probably right, most players use a mix of fighting and catering. The problem is that given that formula the current strategy is suboptimal. The formula encourages players to decide to either fight or cater because as I explained in my previous post improving your ability in either fighting or catering has a strong negative impact on the other.
From what I know most players mostly fight in the tournament. And therefore I think that the current penalty of 0,003 per wonder level is to high for most non-fighting wonders; possibly even for the abyss.
Even for some fighting wonders. Even with only one queue a troop production effect was less valuable than the lower troop size from wrecking the troop producing wonder in my live city. And with three production queues barrack troops from troop producing wonders will have less value than before.
I also think that gold from neighbourly help should usually scale well with expansions. It does scale with both discovered neighbours and with main hall upgrades. The main hall should scale exponentially with research and discovered neighbours scales faster than available expansions.
Available expansions are not part of the formula as far as I know, it's placed expansions. Therefore to maximise the number of tournament provinces you can play with your gold income you have to scout like crazy without placing the available expansions. Again, you seem to look at existing cities to judge the formula and forget that the cities will change because of the formula in the future.
I have to admit I haven't repeated the excercise after the catering costs were adjusted. But before I planned a chapter eight city with 42 expansions that produced enough goods and supplies to match the gold income. Maybe a few more expansions would have been fine because I didn't take the gold income from Instants into account.
Taking that as a starting point, there was no way to improve the tournament potential of the city except for reducing the relic bonus and switching to good producing event buildings or researching to chapter 15, getting a phoenix, building a few military wonders and switching to manual fighting. The reason was that the increased gold income from main hall upgrade in chapter 9 was way too low to compensate for the increased costs because of the research and the need to place a lot of additional expansions, mainly to produce orcs for catering.
But I still do not see anything inherently wrong with having such a constant on principal.
If the effect of that formula on troop size would be displayed in every wonder together with the positive effects and everybody would get the ability to teleport wonders in case he doesn't like the balance, I wouldn't disagree. But I would still ask if it wasn't much simpler and straightforward to reduce the positive effects of the stronger wonders.
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