.80 Observations

I never used to raze conquered cities, but now I raze them all.  I can live with the current system but if the developers can come up with a more fun system I'd like to see it.

0.80 is the version I like the most from LH so far.

A lot have been done to fix bugs, improve the AI, help heroes out ...

It's almost possible to have "normal" diplomatic relations with your neighbours, to benefit from trades, wage wars and make peace. It still needs a lot of improvment for the AI to be less schizophrenic and warmongering-happy when your faction power is too low.

I have seen pioneers and AI armies getting attacked by monsters both in ridiculous and expert! At a rate similar to what I witnessed in FE. Way to go.

AI is upgrading its troops when it reaches a new tech! This is great but leads to two problems:

- AI (consistently) cheats and is able to upgrade without enough Iron or Mana (often finishing turns at -13, 10 iron)

- AI will upgrade scouts in full plate armor and pike, it will upgrade or create troops with full plate armor but no weapon, or no armor but mauls.

I suggest that the AI only produces or upgrades its troops when it has the iron/mana available and entirely.

Moving the unrest penalty by city from 2 to 3 makes Large and Huge map impossible (a pain) to win by domination. With 16 cities for exemple (10 are not occupied), I get cities with such a high unrest that I have to stop capturing cities or else I would paralyze most of my cities and have only a few very high production cities still capable of producing something (2-4). And yes I know "Raze" exists and uses it.

Also The unrest penalty from the occupation should decrease over time (does it? if it does, it should be faster, especially with an army inside the city).

Removing the encumbrance system without redoing the traits for units was silly (+1 attack, +1 attack, +1 attack -1hp), but is good and makes interesting choices for your heroes.

Speaking of heroes I really like what the trees are becoming, although I don't understand why changing endurance from 1hp/lvl to +10hp gave to the defender for exemple. You pick 1hp/lvl to get some significant boost, after you harvest levels with potentials, always finishing above level 10, meaning this was a nerf more than anything else. I think the trees still need some work, i.e: Summoners could use more summons from the start (ice and air to start and eart/fire further down the tree).

More spells would be great (Wall of Fire, Magic Missile, Meteors, Ice blast, Mass slow, Mass haste, Chain Lightning, Dispel Magic/enchantments for exemple).

Giving more exp from kills for AI units is needed, killing 3 corpse spiders gives more exp than taking on some deadly garrisoned cities.

Dividing exp when 2 heroes should be removed, but take place when you have 3 or more (henchmen should count from 4+ onward). Having a duo of heroes in a group is really fun, like a mage and a defender or an assassin and a commander. It makes for great little stories in game.

Thank you and Good Gaming.

My observation has been that the occupied city unrest penalty declines over time.

9 cities and your empire was collapsing under unrest??? Major flaw imo. 9-12 cities equates to an EXCELLANT game well played. My best 4x experiances have all included empires that were around 9-12 cities.

Players should not be penalized for playing well.

The unreast for 9 - 12 cities (attributed to city unrest penalty) is only 27-36. Easily subverted by having a fortress or two, which yields an overall reduction to unrest throughout the empire. The trait there is to force the player to build a balanced empire (in a sense). If one ignores towns, then food and gold are hard to come by. If one ignores conclaves research and mana will be hard to come by... if one ignores fortresses, then unrest and decent troops will be hard to come by.  Each has their own purpose and to balance the numbers of each is part of the gameplay.

Yes, it does.  I'm razing enemy cities because I'm playing on huge maps and already have 10 to 12 cities of my own at the time.

Allright! I think I must be keeping too many cities around then, although I focus on having at least one commander with administrator III and lots of unrest reduction buildings in every cities.

Getting a fortress high enough level to get the global -30% unrest is pretty long and usually the game is over before I can reach it.

I'll go with Publius advice and raze more then... but I like having dem cities  :'(

There is also prison that is -10% unrest (level 4 fortress though), there are also loads of other buildings that reduce unrest. (find more bees or ancient temples) those help.

you don't even need fortresses to counter the unrest - any level 4 city will do. towns give extra production per material, conclaves give global research boost at level 4. you can basically counter the unrest (to some extent) by increasing the production/research globally. of course that only really works with medium sized empires - once the unrest percentage is really high, the global loss is too big to counter it with more production. 9-12 cities are easily manageable if you grow them to decent sizes. sure, you may lose 1/3 of the total research, but 3 conclaves at level 4 will also boost your research by ~30% and 3 level 4 towns will increase your production per material by 1 each (which is probably something like 5-10% each  depending on your current material>production tech ratio). 

another alternative is to pick the level 4 upgrades that make the individual cities unaffected by the city count penalty. chances are that the cities that hit level 4 first are your core cities anyway - if your main fortress' production is independent of unrest and your main conclaves' research is unaffected by it, you don't really lose anything substantial by having high unrest. new or conquered cities will be fairly worthless, but at the stage of the game where you start conquering large sections of the map that's really a non issue - you only keep those cities to deny the AI the space those cities occupy (so they can't just send in pioneers and resettle after you razed the cities)

Let us not forget the adminstrator 3 ability that can be given to commanders. With 3 of them (level 4 min) having this ability you can get -30% faction unrest. (just 1 will give -10% faction unrest). This is not a difficulty when managing an empire, you just need the correct tools.

Well said.

I am really pleased that unrest reduction abilities were tied in with the Fortress. It's made that particular avenue of construction more important than....well...ever.

I believe this to be true, as well, but it would be wonderful to know how this works. 1% per season? What's the game mechanic that drives this?

Its in the elementaldef.xml and it reduces the unrest after 5 turns. I'm not sure by how much, but there you go.

Thanks, parrottmath. You're amazing.

Does the tooltip provide info on when that changes as determined in elementaldef.xml? If not, having it do so would help.

Thank you for the info Parrottmath, this is extremly valuable.

The level 4 fortress improvement does exactly what I was thinking of, so my unrest comment can be ignored :-/

I do have a new observation: 

It looks like enemy sovereigns have traits from all of the trees when they surrender.  Can they freely navigate between assassin defender and mage, etc?