Playing as Massalia
Thoughts on buildings (and feedback on balance)
Agriculture
For the most part you don't want to build many Agriculture buildings. Only if your population is very tiny is it time to build them (start of the game and colonized lands). Build farms where possible, and try to have a Ranch in trade range of most regions (less Ranches the better). At the start of the game it can also be worth spreading out Shepherd House next to farms for the wool bonus. If your in the desert with only 1-2 pops its a good idea to build Shepherd House and Hemp Field because they are super cheap and can jump start the region.
If your in need of money Shepherd House, Cotton Field, and Master Hunter buildings can be helpful. (they can lead into good bonuses from commerce buildings)
Sparely spread out in your nation you will want to get to teir3 for Irrigation Canals which gives you Papyrus (needed for important culture/decadence buildings.
Worthy mention is the Mill, and its upgrade for the loyalty boost and a food gain. However seeing as most t1 buildings arnt worth it, getting to teir2/3 jsut for it is a good chunk of turns and micro management. (as you will probably want to tare down the other Agriculture buildings after you get to it)
Once you hit mid-end game its time to start tearing down these buildings
Health
Basically there is only 2 buildings worth building in the health line, Salthouse and Smokehouse. They give health, food, and coin from trading. These buildings serve as the regions base food income, and make the state a decent amount of money. (of course make sure you have a supply of cow/salt in range). They also import cows for your farm bonus, so you can keep ranches sparse.
Basically all the other buildings is a waste of a buildingslot. Health isnt important as most the game your trying to keep population down. Fresh water is free so its fine (and better then paying for a shuffle)
(There might be health wonders worth getting but i never get to t3)
Infrastructure
In any new region/province focus this first. Can't really go wrong with infrastructure, just try to pay attention to the bonuses. Try to get stone from hill regions and lumber from forests. Note you can get marble from all hill regions, which is good for culture bonuses, but Marble Vein is rare so it can take awhile.
Build as much Infrastructure as you want, cant really go wrong, if you make to much, once the province is fully build, simply start tearing it down. Every region should have t2 Infrastructure for roads and Land Reclamation.
Note you can get gold and silver mines at t2 (which if you have access to those resources is very good early game)
Military
Basically ignore these buildings, see the equipment resource section for more info. The buildings that decrease equipment/manpower/metal costs can be nice but a nations limits to their military capabilities is the upkeep cost, not the upfront cost. The xp boost from buildings can also be nice, but is more of a tie breaker then a determining factor in a battle. All these buildings become useless if you lose control of the prov for a turn, causing the provincial capital to move location. If the location has alot of military buildings its probably lacking culture production compared to other regions, so moving the capital back is rather hard.
Will want barracks so you can make heavy inf, merc building for mercs, also walls (if your hellen you can make 0 slot size walls)
Worth noting at t3 there is a building that increases the number of generals you can have
Commerce
The most complex building section, however due to how easy it is to make coin/metal most can be ignored (see resources section). Basically if you see a building pop up that will make decent money build it, otherwise don't worry much about it.
Notable buildings for coin (due to how easy they are to work everywhere) are t1 Weaver Shop, t1 Crafter District (its free), t2 Spinning Mills, and the amazing t2 Ceramics Works.
T1 Blacksmith is great if you have the metals nearby. Gives coin, infrastructure, and metal.
Also if your Hellen you need to build t2 Stoa everywhere! It give a 5% national coin boost... its basically overpowered... you will have endless coin....
Coastal Regions
If your a coastal region, T1 Coastal Market, and T2 (culture) Thalassan Temple with a nearby fish resource is a good goal to have (note if you make a normal temple you lose access to Thalassan Temple). Your desert provinces can survive off of these alone. aka very important for Africa
I normally only ever get an Anchorage. I don't consider the other ports worth the slot unless im building a fleet at that location.
Culture
Simply build everyone of these buildings, they are ALL good. (might want to wait till after your making 100+ culture before building loyalty buildings). In the end when a region is making 1000+ culture the minor decadence down side is nothing compared to the loyalty multiplier
Buildings and Population General Thoughts
After the first 50-100 turns it turns extremely simplistic for new provinces, as food, health, equipment, and coin don't matter. It becomes build infrastructure till roads t2, then make culture buildings only. (and probably tear down all the ai build buildings).
As for population, i normally drop them on Infrastructure and let new ones stack up on food. Then the pop growth takes care of itself. Once the province is done growing/building shift everyone to culture, if pop shrinks that's fine, less unrest. (if armies are traveling though, make sure food production is there to feed them)
There is a major issue with culture which i go into more detail here http://www.slitherine.com/forum/viewtop ... 34&t=92834 (some info is slightly wrong/dated, but the main point of your culture being the worst pop type stands)
Thoughts on Resources (and feedback on balance) coin/manpower/metal
Coin
Coin seems way to easy to make. It doesn't take much to be making thousands a turn in profit. The issue is once you start making larges amounts of money, alot of the interesting parts of the game fall off. If a nation is ever at peace for a good amount of turns, any decent coin income can turn into a massive stockpile. Trade and building planing stops to matter, as profits/costs stop impacting the nation. Once coin stops being a priority the only thing for regions to build is culture. Basically the whole building system falls apart, and id argue its the one of best parts of the game.
Its hard to say how much of that is due to Stoa(had a +205% income boost, which could of easily been drastically higher). However even early before i had Stoas, i was often fielding large merc armies with out the manpower to provide support (granted these armies couldn't do much). Ofcourse Massalia does have income boosts, and manpower nerfs so hard to say if non-hellan nations would still be swimming in coins. However due to how badly the game starts to fall apart when coin isnt an issue its worth keeping an eye on, and Stoa needs to be fixed/removed.
I was often spending 30k a turn on provincial troops and it didn't matter.
Manpower
A fairly automatic resource the player can't directly influence much. Depending on nation can have large penalties or boost to manpower, determining how much of the army may need to be mercs. Buildings that impact manpower, impact it by such a tiny amount that the opportunity cost make it seem not worth it.
Metal
Sadly its almost as if this resource doesn't exist. Build a blacksmith in ideal locations and iron mines where you can, and you will have a surplus of metal. In the current state of the game, metal only exists to give you a boost to manpower/coin by selling it via event. Id argue heavy inf should have their metal costs/upkeep drastically increased, so that metal actually becomes a useful resource making the metalworking buildings interesting
Equipment
Controls how fast you can produce armies. Any decently sized province can produce enough equipment for a full army in one turn. This makes military buildings that produce equipment pointless. Only edge case i can think of when equipment matters is in tiny provinces with 3 regions when you need that specific province troop. Better troops need to cost more equipment or population needs to supply less for military building to be useful.
Military
Cav is useless, but you can see all the other threads for info on why
Skirmishers are the worst unit in the game. They are worse then light cav (less range attack, lower skirmish bonus, lower movespeed), and yet they cost more upkeep... never build them
As you can see in many other threads troops auto deployment is busted, like how militia (worst support unit in the game) takes priority over all other support units. Not arguing for the ability to manually config armys, that sounds terrible, just would like it to work
Not a big fan of how limited general are. Now maybe if building military buildings was worth it, getting to t3 for more generals would solve this, but currently it isn't worth it
OPM Hell
OPM can have decent armies on suicide. This is a notable problem if they are in very defensible terrain. If there are armies around them, they tend to not move, unless you move your army away. Attacking them when they are in good terrain can become suicide, or even impossible to kill them. During my game, an army got into the middle of my land and took a fort in the alps. I tried attacking that region 15-20 turns in a row (when there wasnt a storm) until i noticed anything id kill the ai would rebuild. It was literally impossible for me to retake the region. I had to move all my armies away and wait for the army to leave.
The game needs some way to kill opms that have good defensive terrain, when its impossible to break the army in 1-2 non-draws a turn. One idea is a no retreat order, that gives your army a -1 or -2 combat modifier but they will never route from the region. This would eventually allow a large army to grind down a small army over time, but taking heavy losses as a cost.
Germanic Independence, aka worse then hell...
Did you think large ai armies in good terrain was hard to beat? Well what if i told you the ai keeps spawning free armies over and over again ontop of that? The Germanic armies that the ai has, has a 7 or 9 combat number when defending a forest(depending on the unit type). Any general army has basically no chance to beat it. Even if you manage to get your hands on forest inf, odds are still in the Germanic Independence favor. (note the only way to get these inf, is by conquering parts of Germany...) Every time you launch a failed attack on the region, the defending army gets stronger. Once it hits 300ish power, It going to go on a rampage in nearby claimed lands. If you dont have forest inf, good luck stopping it. If you try to retake the lands that are taken, it will spawn more armies Good luck trying to beat endless strong armies in terrain when they have the combat advantage.
Sieges
City garrisons are so weak, that there no reason to siege anything. Because Attacking right away rarely fails there is no reason to invest in city defenses. Also you can't even put small armies into cities because the militia messes up the formation. Basically higher tier walls should offer good garrisons to force sieges to actually happen
Roads and Invaders
Why do invaders gain the movement boost of roads? Trying to eliminate large armies in your boarders is a pain. They can move 5 spaces, and there is no good way to catch them. If you do manage to intercept them by luck, you only get 1 fight and then they continue on their way, If you don't have walls on every region, the damage they can do is massive
Trade Range
Trade range always seemed a bit odd to me. Having high trade range is a bad thing as it allows other nations to force you to import from them. Most regions doing the importing have low trade range, importing cows/salt/etc. However the big trade centers with high trade range tend to be the cities trying to export resources, as they have all the t2 and t3 Commerce buildings producing goods. The only reason to get high level ports is to import a good from across the world, but even then its only going to effect adjacent regions and won't help the nation much.
Decadence
Surprisingly wasn't as big as a problem as i expect it to be. When you have regions producing 1k+ culture and 150+ loyalty it becomes fairly easy to have a good ratio. I actually had a point in the game where i wasn't expanding fast enough and almost accidentally became glorious. Had to put off culture building production for a while. In the screenshot, id say only 1/3 of the regions are producing culture, either due to being under developed or recently conquered. The ratio could easily be raised if wanted/needed.
(note this is with a leader giving +10% decadence)
I do have one issue with Decadence. The first 20 or 50 turns Decadence is impossible to stop for alot of nations. This then becomes pure rng, if your nation will get hit into a death spiral. For this reason ill probably only player with slow ageing/progress option in future games
One thing i did find interesting, when killing rome, causing alot of tiny nations to break off of it, it can push you down the nation rankings fast. This is because all the new nations have very high ratios
AI Balance
On suicide after the initial expansion, the ai is never really a threat besides rome. In romes case, they had more powerful/numerous armies, but its army composition was horrible. Their armies where 5 legionaries and 80 auxiliaries, so if you could break the 5 legionaries they couldn't put up a fight. Not sure if Rome has extra bonuses compared to other ai, or if its just because Italy is well devolved, but other ai could use a boost to army size (add a higher difficulty if need be). Will say it was really fun invading Rome, when they had a larger military. It was also fun to watch it fall apart after i took a large amounts of it objectives, Just which it had a decent army composition to put up a better fight.
The ai has huge modifiers to legacy point gain on suicide. With the extreme rate they gain points, its basically impossible for the player to keep up, so they need to catch up in end game. This is fine, as long as the AI doesn't auto win for having 3x points, if they can its can be pure rng if the ai auto wins or not. The player has to pray there will be another powerhouse ai to keep up with the leading ai, as there is no way the player can police the world at the start of the game.
Not sure what is up with AI building management, but i often come across regions that are alot of health buildings, and a few food building, and nothing else. This is clearly an extremely weak building set up, and i often tear most of it down. Another thing i noticed is the nation that starts on the island north on Germany, 200 turns in game and it never built a building.
Originally when i found out about of field of glory empires, i was hoping to play on a difficulty so hard the only way to survive was field of glory 2 manual battles. Now i understand the game will never be balanced around fog2 battles, and i didn't use fog2 for this run(would take ages) just it would be nice if there was a mode like that. I also understand that because this game relays on choke points so much that most the map can be turned into a choke point (aka anything not a plain) that a mode like this may never work. As you can very effectively hold off a large army with 12-16 units, which you couldn't do in fog2.
Bugs
Carthage land navy... not much else to say
Now the bug that made me quit before finishing the world conquest. The auto builder system doesn't work.... I went though each province and set them to build culture/loyalty buildings. After a few turns went back to find a large amount of them where building 0 buildings (and there was many buildings the provinces could still build). When you control many regions, the micromanagement simply became to much and ruined what little fun was left. See image of province with auto build set, and 0 building set
Also found an exploit with the auto build system. If the region has 0 build slots left, and it can build a building that costs 0 building slots it will build it. For example got regions with t2 industry, didn't make the land clearance buildings, and not building slots. Set auto build type to infrastructure and the region with 0 building slots will start building it. Also this works quite while at building the super rare secret cult site. If you have a Cult Site, and Monument (or it may make the Monument since it also costs 0), once you hit 0 build slots set the auto build to culture and that extra rare, hard to get secret cult site is now yours in all the regions you want.
Mics Thoughts
The message system basically turns into spam, probably to no surprise i don't bother looking at any messages. Don't need to know about new buildings or pop growth, they block important notification (do like them on the map though). Some info on raiding would be nice, with out changing notification level.
Emporiums
Emporiums are just bad.... You need to invest a ton of gold, for a building that if your lucky gives you 100 coin in trade and it also causes decadence? Most of the Emporiums simply won't help your nation, alot of them are almost 100% useless. Sure you get access to a rare resource, but when they only have 1-2 rare uses your never making back the investment. There are some good ones, the best would be the Silk Emporium, simply because Amphitheater is great and with out access to silk either your culture production or coin bag is going to hurt
Hellenic
They have a huge advatage over nations with weaker or no custom buildings. As said before stoa is basically broken, and buildings that give score but not everyone has access to them is a bit odd(or access to the same # of non-wonder buildings that give score). I don't really have an issue with some cultures being weaker then other, just surprised by how extreme it can be.
Slaves
Eventually you get to the point where your getting more then 10 slaves a turn, far faster then you can sell them all. My solution, starving regions with slave buildings. Eventually i was going to destroy all slave buildings (so slaves auto go to the capital) and destroy most food income for the capital province. So the slave can go there on mass, and all starve to death, also no more decadence from slave buildings. At this point you probably want to reduce the population to as small as possible in the cap province any ways so lack of food isn't hurting the other regions. Because when each region is making 1000+ culture, the pop isn't worth the -80 culture caused by the 8 unrest
Please add a hot key for building buildings, if i have to build any more building with out one i might go insane
Well that's my general thought on balance/issues the game currently has. It got kinda long so i may of over simplified/summarized some points. If anyone wants me to expand on a specific point just say so. Hopefully there is something useful in here for devs/players. Look forwards to future updates, probably done until then (besides multiplayer, shhh im not a threat there ignore me
) Also hopefully no one rips into me to hard about it not being a complete WC
