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I should easily be able to afford to give my characters the same equipment my troops have, if I should have to pay at all. This is just silly.
I can't agree with this. Too easy to outfit champs.
Surely though, the sheer IDEA that the king of your faction has worse equipment than your troops is pretty weird, isn't it? If that amounts to an intolerable power boost, then shouldn't that tell you champions are too powerful in the first place. Arguing that champions should have less equipment than troops so they're not overpowered is like tying usain bolt's laces together so he isn't too fast for the kids in the fun run.
Magic users should be doing comparable damage to fighters at all stages of the game, if not more, given that they are expending mana to do so.
Disagree. Magic users need some weakness and they already have far more utility than melee users.
So for pure damage, no one should ever play a magic user? There should be no combination of spells items and perks that can flatten a unit like a guy swinging an axe, even though i'm expending a resource to do so? If you disagree with this principle, then why would anyone use tactical damage spells, when they could just save the mana for utility and strategic spells? That doesn't sound like the heir to master of magic to me.
A unit being felled by a single blow should be a very rare ocurrence (ie, demon vs militia). It makes first strike too important.
Disagree. What you're asking for would make tactical battles very long. This is not really that fun.
Come on though, there are bears in this game that can flatten whole units of spearmen in a single blow. Don't tell me that doesn't make the time and money I invested in them a joke.
I doubt it, given that the enemy factions move their units the same way. If the AI moved it's units straight from stronghold to enemy city when it knew it could win (like a player does) this game would be a hell of a lot harder.
I should be able to upgrade units by putting them back into the queue rather than paying with cash. 1000Gold is much more valuable than the 6 turns it would take me to simply build a new unit. It's been 4 games since the original release of galactic civilizations 2 and stardock still don't seem to “get” upgrading.
Too much coding effort for too little reward. Most games use the gold approach for this reason.
We must play different games. If I could turn off all my production buildings and claw back the gold maintenance and use this to pay for my upgrades, the current situation would be viable. As it stands, upgrading my old units instead of building new ones essentially means i am paying for them twice: once for the upgrade cost and again for the production capacity i am not making use of. No prudent player would ever do that.
A new city should be able to afford to maintain a unit of militia to defend itself and one or two buildings, without going into the red. Why give me the option to build stuff when there's no way I can afford it?
Options are there for you to make choices. Shooting yourself in the foot with maintenance is a choice. That said the maintenance cost on units is one of the things that makes them impractical in the early game.
New players generally view any infrastructure as a benefit, build everything they can, and only consider maintenance when it comes to troops. Stardock clearly believe that the game should allow players to overbuild, otherwise there would be no building maintenance. Personally I don't enjoy sitting down with a calculator and working out how many turns my production queue will be empty, in order to find out if a building that gives me +10% income when the queue is empty but costs one gold will be profitable (especially in a game where there is so much more to do). But I have given up trying to win that argument.
Fine, make it possible to crippe your economy, but should it really be that easy? Rightly or wrongly, building everything is an instinct many player have and it's important to recognise that. Shouldn't they have to wait a little longer than their third building before they can shoot themselves in the foot?