Horses and wargs as a resource

Ya I have like 4000 horses and wargs in my current game. Totally useless as a resource, and indeed absolutely no reason not to design every single unit with a mount. They should be made much, much, rarer on the map, they should take up a normal accessory slot, and they should probably all have negative dodge rather than bonuses. Probably make horses +1 movement with increased weight capacity and -20 dodge, then make wargs +2 movement and -10 dodge, with no other bonuses. Then one of the civs (Capitar?) could have a trait that removes the mount dodge penalty and a national wonder that adds +2 horses per turn.

I saw similar stockpiles of mounts in my games and agree that horses and wargs  should be made much more rare.

The cost in ressource and time to produce mounted units could be increased, so only a bunch of your units would get them. They could reduce the amount of horses/wargs you get each seasons.

Horses should provide some sort of HP bonus as horses in theory should be stronger than wargs. Ideally it should be a trade off between mobility (wargs) and strength (horses). I've never understood why wargs got less moves.

But as for the actual resource I'm not sure how to make it work. It doesn't make sense to have a unit cost more than one horse since it will only need to use one horse. Using up horses to make your army move faster doesn't make a whole lot of sense either. You could trade horses to other empires but at a certain point they will become useless so perhaps there should be some sort of inter-empire trade. So you could sell your horses to people within your empire for a small amount of money. 

I don't think "using up horses for bonus movespeed" is a good idea.

First off its unrealistic that your horses are dead(?) after using them a bit

And second there are horsemen throughout the world and your suggestion would mean NO RIDERS at all.

Both break the immersion of the game.

I'd rather have less horses at all so you have to think about making the unit with horses or not.

So that means reducing the amount of wild horses and wargs and also reducing the production to about 1 Horse per year (4 seasons) per 2 stables or something along those lines.

Currently each Stable produces 1 Horse per season which is realistic since there are quite a few horses in it breeding and stuff, but since we don't train thousands of militias but instead only 7er stacks the relation is off curently.

Tl;dr: Reducing the amount of horses to match the amount of military in the game and increase their strategical value

Charge more horses per mounted unit upgrade troop size.

Oh, and caravans. Give players an ability to "upgrade" caravans with up to 2 mounts.

This means your 2 Wargs or Warhorses are "pulling" the wagon and will defend it if attacked. Each time a wagon departs, you may pay up to 2 or 4 mounts to "protect" it.

If the caravan is attacked, it would simulate an auto-battle, and the mounts would increase the strength of the caravan.

Lastly, Legacy of Serrane could give more defense for caravans.

When a caravan is defeated, it remains on the map and rolls for survival. If it fails, the caravan is destroyed, if it did then the caravan is assumed to have survived.

Caravan Escort would add a new dimension to the game, and would be more than fun for everyone.

Realistically you aren't going to have armies of under 100 people fighting for a kingdom or empire, so it would stand to reason each troop you train actually represents many soldiers, possibly hundreds. Multiplying the cost in horses/wargs by 10 would work and could make sense, though I'd rather the resources be more rare on the map to create situations where you might not have any near you.

Maybe we need buildings that use up horses.

eg Chariot races Unrest -10%, upkeep 1 horse/turn

Slaughterhouse +1 grain, upkeep 1 horse/turn (empire only?)

Ploughed fields +10 food per grain. Costs 4 horses to build.

Why complicated solutions? They work fine as they are. Just make them much more rare and thats it. 

It is notable that in LH, as a change from FE, we have to now research the technology to build on Wild Horses or on Wild Wargs, and the building intially provides 1/turn. In FE, we could build without the tech, and get 1/2 a horse or warg per turn.

I think I liked the FE version better, as one could upgrade or not, if necessary.

1. Butchers and tanners should provide Bonus A for horses and Bonus B for wargs. The horse/warg is likewise consumed by the butcher/tanner. Reminiscent of Colonization.

2. Mounted units should cost horse upkeep. There is no reason to believe every horses makes it out of battle unscathed.

3. I still think caravan escort with mounts would be great. It would help protect the wagon and give another use for mounts.

4. Maintenance makes armies harder to maintain. Requiring maintenance of Metal, Horses and Wargs would be a good thing, and add value to valueless resources.

Good ideas!

These are great ideas.

The idea of reducing the resource nodes on map is not, however. With less resource nodes you risk to never get even one. Would be more sensible to leave the nodes as they are, and reduce the amount of mount per turn they produce.

I would actually increase resource nodes like crystals and have tile features like forest or rivers help more.

I would also have 2 types of tiles" one with "normal" fertility and one with "high" fertility to increase the number of "spots". Each "settle zone" would have less spots in the range, however there would be more good spots tattered around and less big ranges of bad spots.

Also, the AI is bad at making choices, so giving it less but better choices is better.

IMHO the solution to this problem is introducing the storage concept, meaning that you need some place to store all those horses/wargs/crystals wathever. If you have storage for 100 horses you only can store 100 horses, not 4,000.

Let's say that each building in addition to produce resources each turn also has some storage space for those resources. One the storage space is full no more resource is produced until some resources are used and there is free room again, or until additional storage space is built. Also, having the storage building drestroyed results in a resource lose.

Hey, what if mounted units just required an extra wage - .25 horse per turn. This represents the stable having to send in new, fresh horses and/or support the horses that are out there. Thus you need the initial horses to get started, plus some of the stable's resources to maintain horses in the field. This way, a standing mounted army would require a LOT of extra stables. 

If making the resource rarer is easier in engineering hours for Stardock, however, then that is the way to go. 

I kinda like the wages idea.  .25 mounts\season per 3 Figures sounds about right.

The comment about horse / warg maintenance is great.  something like a .1 or .05 per turn.

The other thing I could see is that any mounted unit that takes 25% dmg in battle loses it mounts and they have to be replaced or the troops become unmounted.

Well, to begin with, one could just double the horse/warg requirement when building troops. Either that or half the number each outputs per turn. That would most certainly rein in their excessive amounts.

Maybe we can convert some to food. Horse meat is good.

"Maybe we can convert some to food. Horse meat is good.  "

If your French.....

Could we compensate the amount of one type of mount by adding more?

Like pegasi that boost initiative over health

Or unicorns that boost magical ability's over weight carrying ability......I just asked for unicorns...

While an interesting idea, that's not going to solve anything because 100 horses is still a lot compared to what you need, and you generate horses fast enough with just a single node that it wouldn't matter if it capped at 6 instead of 100. At most points in the game training a really good group of units takes longer or as long as it takes to reacquire the horses used, with just one map resource. Like 5 turns early on for a group of 3, like 5-10 turns later on for a group of 6, while you are getting 1 horse per turn.

Also horses already increase wages, and production time, but they are so beneficial that it doesn't matter. They are one of the single most beneficial items you can add to a character, there's pretty much never any reason not to do so.

Add /wargs to every "horses" in my post.

Sanati- horses/wargs add to wages? Are you sure? Could've sworn they had no wage cost, but I could be wrong. 

I agree with the 'upkep' cost in horses or wargs for equipped units, it's realistic, those delicate animals were expended in training as well as in battle.  

It's also not unrealistic to expend mounts to increase movement in an emergency; they're called 'remounts' and their availability has limited the strategic mobility of cavalry units since forever.  It's doubtless beyond the scope of the current game-system, but a hero ability in a commander-type tree to forced march an army, expending mounts in the process, would be strategically interesting, useful, and historically plausible. 

I'm Dutch.

... well, technically I'm Canadian. My heritage is Dutch.

Horsemeat is still good.

Would love to have more 'fantastic' mounts to choose from.

Pegasi can fly...

Unicorns can teleport...

Naturally, other magic types would require they're own fantastic creature types.