We have problems with the early game.
As is, the player (or AI) has to make a choice. With only the starting capital and its limited production capacity, the player can either build settlers, or units but can't do both.
For the AI the choice is obviously the settlers - building troops achieves nothing for expansion if there are no nearby cities to conquer and the AI has no way of knowing that. Troops are also a losing strategy for the AI if they have a personality that won't declare war early - and even if they will, the "no war until turn 40" restriction is a hard counter to the AI rushing people with troops early. And they shouldn't do it for a very strong reason - a game where the human player loses on turn 10 is not fun.
For humans, they actually get to make the choice, but it's something of a lose-lose situation.
If they build settlers, they won't have the capacity to defend against an early invasion - unless they both go all summons and picked a wizard with a strong summoning strategy at the same time.
If they don't build the settlers, they will be able to conquer hamlets from the AI, but they won't get to play their own race!
So the only actually working strategy is to build troops, use them against lairs and nodes, find gold, and buy settlers from the money - but doing that delays those cities by several years which is against pretty bad, and it's even luck based. If you don't have Alchemy and get mana/items instead of gold, well, you have to take the 50% loss but that's still the good case because not finding any of these is also a possibility.
Now, we had this discussion to fix the problem but it didn't quite work out - the cons outweight the pros on raising the starting population to increase more production. Most of those cons come from the human being able to use that production for anything, not just the intended goal of having both units and settlers. They can instead have twice the units and crush everyone else with that.
Which brings us to the thread title : we can give the player the needed extra production in a way that cannot be spent freely. In other words, give them 2 free starting settlers, the "expected" amount people will likely want to produce without risking overextension.
This solution has none of the bad side effects - the settler won't turn into productive population immediately, and won't increase the relevant of mithril on the starting city. It also won't affect slow vs fast race balance much, while still making slow races a bit more playable, as they will be able to reach their units faster - no need to wait for the settlers to complete first.
The AI indeed loses from this - they don't get the production advantage on these produced settlers, but we can do the same thing we did for Sawmills - give the AI additional starting gold to compensate for missing out on the bonus production.
There is no threat of early races becoming stronger either - they went for troops first to begin with, so the ability to skip settler production is not speeding them up. If anything it might give them a small disadvantage because they'll now have 3 of their bad economy military race while they could otherwise get away with only their capital being of that race and other cities being better (not for lunatic obviously, but I'd expect 1 barbarian city to be enough for Advanced, maybe Expert).
This doesn't even impact the overextension decision - players can STILL decide to build a third or fourth settler and fail to defend their oversized territory. Especially as the AI will be capable of producing more troops early, as they also have 2 settler worth of production freed up, plus their hamlets turn productive earlier too.
I feel if we want any sort of relevance to swordsmen/bowmen/cavalry as troops in actual wars, we will need to do this. I used to be against it but I see no other way out.
Finally, as this makes the game progress a bit faster, we probably need to reduce the "no war until turn 40" limit to compensate for no longer needing time to produce settlers on the human's side. Turn 30 might be a good new limit.
As is, the player (or AI) has to make a choice. With only the starting capital and its limited production capacity, the player can either build settlers, or units but can't do both.
For the AI the choice is obviously the settlers - building troops achieves nothing for expansion if there are no nearby cities to conquer and the AI has no way of knowing that. Troops are also a losing strategy for the AI if they have a personality that won't declare war early - and even if they will, the "no war until turn 40" restriction is a hard counter to the AI rushing people with troops early. And they shouldn't do it for a very strong reason - a game where the human player loses on turn 10 is not fun.
For humans, they actually get to make the choice, but it's something of a lose-lose situation.
If they build settlers, they won't have the capacity to defend against an early invasion - unless they both go all summons and picked a wizard with a strong summoning strategy at the same time.
If they don't build the settlers, they will be able to conquer hamlets from the AI, but they won't get to play their own race!
So the only actually working strategy is to build troops, use them against lairs and nodes, find gold, and buy settlers from the money - but doing that delays those cities by several years which is against pretty bad, and it's even luck based. If you don't have Alchemy and get mana/items instead of gold, well, you have to take the 50% loss but that's still the good case because not finding any of these is also a possibility.
Now, we had this discussion to fix the problem but it didn't quite work out - the cons outweight the pros on raising the starting population to increase more production. Most of those cons come from the human being able to use that production for anything, not just the intended goal of having both units and settlers. They can instead have twice the units and crush everyone else with that.
Which brings us to the thread title : we can give the player the needed extra production in a way that cannot be spent freely. In other words, give them 2 free starting settlers, the "expected" amount people will likely want to produce without risking overextension.
This solution has none of the bad side effects - the settler won't turn into productive population immediately, and won't increase the relevant of mithril on the starting city. It also won't affect slow vs fast race balance much, while still making slow races a bit more playable, as they will be able to reach their units faster - no need to wait for the settlers to complete first.
The AI indeed loses from this - they don't get the production advantage on these produced settlers, but we can do the same thing we did for Sawmills - give the AI additional starting gold to compensate for missing out on the bonus production.
There is no threat of early races becoming stronger either - they went for troops first to begin with, so the ability to skip settler production is not speeding them up. If anything it might give them a small disadvantage because they'll now have 3 of their bad economy military race while they could otherwise get away with only their capital being of that race and other cities being better (not for lunatic obviously, but I'd expect 1 barbarian city to be enough for Advanced, maybe Expert).
This doesn't even impact the overextension decision - players can STILL decide to build a third or fourth settler and fail to defend their oversized territory. Especially as the AI will be capable of producing more troops early, as they also have 2 settler worth of production freed up, plus their hamlets turn productive earlier too.
I feel if we want any sort of relevance to swordsmen/bowmen/cavalry as troops in actual wars, we will need to do this. I used to be against it but I see no other way out.
Finally, as this makes the game progress a bit faster, we probably need to reduce the "no war until turn 40" limit to compensate for no longer needing time to produce settlers on the human's side. Turn 30 might be a good new limit.
