Razing cities

[Seravy]

As you are probably aware, the amount of gold gained when razing cities is improved, and there is no fame penalty.
This change was necessary as razing would be a really bad option otherwise, not only are you not gaining a city, but you aren't gaining much else either, why would anyone do that?

However, I'm not entirely sure the above reasoning was correct.
There is a a very huge "hidden" gain in razing cities, and that is momentum. If you raze a city, it's no longer there. You don't need to defend it. Your army that destroyed it can move on and destroy another. Assuming the army contains some sort of a transport, wind walking or otherwise, you can get rid of a city every turn using the same army. Meanwhile, the gold from razing can fund your defense : you can buy troops or convert it to mana and cast spells.
In other words, building one hard to stop army is enough to win a war or entire game, and in a pretty low amount of turns, too. Considering the AI being sluggish at their overland strategy (and by that I mean stackbuilding and moving those stacks to attack targets, since they will rarely end up containing only fast units), even if the AI is way stronger, they'll lose anyway as they can't keep up with one doomstack razing a city each and every turn. Ofc this requires said doom stack to either regenerate or be powerful enough to not take damage, but as my experience shows, that's quite possible to achieve, not to mention the two Nature spells that can heal a stack back to full health.

Since one of the ways the mod intends to balance heroes and strong units in general is the concept "they can't be everywhere at the same time", so while you do advance using those stacks, you have to worry about losing at other locations, razing (paired with transport and self-healing stacks) breaks this concept, as it allows advancing at a speed where long term self-defense becomes unnecessary, on top of razing funding the defense on short term by itself : you can re-buy lost units from the gold gained or refill your mana reserve you spent in combat.

Hopefully, AI wizards using Dispelling Wave on said doomstack can slow things down (which is an addition to 2.6 AI), but non-Sorcery wizards still have no outs against a razing strategy.

And then, there is Time Stop which can be paid and maintained by razing cities as well...on the other hand if there wasn't enough gold coming from razing, then the Inquisitor retort which I already think might be underpowered becomes even worse.

Unfortunately if razing wasn't possible, then games would take even longer to complete which is not an option.

I have no good idea how to deal with this problem - or if this is even a problem? -, if you have any, please let me know.
Wait, I might have one. Would making the AI always raze if they have a certain amount of global advantage (like at least twice the overall power on the historian graph) work? This could let the AI use the raze-rush tactic back against the player? This behavior would ofc be limited against the human player only (we don't want AI to excessively KO each other).

[spottedshroom]

Razing is a very strong strategy for exactly the reason you describe - no need to defend, just move on to the next target. I don't think that removing the fame penalty and/or increasing the gold gained is necessary. I frequently raze in the vanilla game.

Of course, it's also frequently possible to reduce cities to 1 population and few buildings by parking a flying or invisible unit inside the city during combat and waiting for time to run out.

[namad]

there's really no reason you should lose fame for razing a city, logically, if anything you should gain it.

however in MoM the main feature of fame is how often merchants and heroes and mercenaries will come visit you, and if you're burning civilians alive well maybe it makes sense for them to visit you less often?

I think I vote though for no-fame-loss because fame loss is just not fun. Tweak gold downwards if you have to, I only raze for strategic reasons not gold reasons anyways. The gold boost sometimes seems a bit large though, yeah sure. I don't have wind walking in most of my games though because only blue and I guess white get it? if you don't have wind walking it's usually a few turns for each doom stack to reach a city and you end up having 3or4 mid-doom-stacks each taking a city once every 3-4 turns.

[Tiltowait]

Well, murdering every man, woman, and child in a city after invading it is pretty much universally regarded as evil. It's no wonder you get a penalty for it. Why wouldn't you get a fame penalty for it? Having less fame does make it less likely that merchants and heroes and mercenaries will come visit you.

I often find myself wanting to raze but won't due to the fame penalty. I want to maximize my score, and fame goes directly into points at the end of the game. I think losing fame is an appropriate in-game penalty for mass murder.

Another reason you don't want another city, besides the onerous garrison requirements, is that you don't want to manage another crappy computer city. Whee, a pop 5 gnolls city that will require me to continually micromanage the production, just what I want. Ooo, look, a pop 8 klackon town that just had everything but the builders hall destroyed in combat, that's what I want to spend my time doing. Ugh.

The problem is that the game requires you to capture or raze every last city in the game to win. It should have been more like Warlords, where if you captured 2/3 of the cities in the world the enemies would give up. The "raze it and keep going" strategy is a good one that works. No muss, no fuss. Otherwise your doom stack gets slowed down or split up, or you have to have garrison stacks following closely after.

That's what I usually end up doing when conducting a large-scale invasion: 3 kinds of stacks. The spearhead(s) which take enemy cities, garrison stacks that occupy the new cities, and the replacement stacks that follow along and provide replacements for dead doom stack units so I can keep going without reloading a million times. The difference between garrison and replacement stacks is that garrison units are like halberdiers, javelineers, and berserkers, while replacement stacks have the same units as doom stacks, like wizards and priests. Of course a replacement stack can function as a garrison stack in a pinch, but again it blunts your momentum. All this so you can avoid the fame loss from razing.

[zitro1987]

I'd like razing to provide fame (as if it were infamy) at the same level as conquering a town. The gold bonus of razing can stay at the minuscule 10%.

[namad]

I agree. Fame and Infamy are the same thing basically. If you want there to be a penalty to fame for razing cities.... just rename it to popularity or something that makes sense for it to attract heroes and merchants and mercenaries and for it to go down when razing cities.

Because notoriety and fame go up from powerful actions be they positive or negative, imo.

[rgp151]

I mentioned elsewhere that I think you should add Infamy as separate from fame (if this is possible, might not be).

I think Infamy should : 1) Unlock certain heroes (Mortu, Morgana, Warrax, Mallus, for example) and 2) have a negative effect on your overall rebellion rate. So razing a town wouldn't cause you to lose Fame, but it would cause you to gain Infamy, which has both good and bad effects (unlocking certain heroes, but also causing unrest to increase). Also, increased Infamy should reduce your overall relations with all other Wizards.

I think using Bioweapons to kill a planet on Master of Orion also cased decreased diplomatic relations as well.

In regular MoM I typically don't raze towns until toward the end of the game.

Oh, also, if you can implement Infamy, then you should make it so that KLACKONS don't have the Infamy unrest penalty. That way, for Klackon Wizards they actually benefit from razing all towns and can raze town to replace them with Klackon towns! Would really fit well into the definition of the race!

If you can't implement Infamy, then at least put the Fame penalty back for razing but make it so that only KLACKON wizards don't get the Fame penalty.

[namad]

You're very wrong about master of orion.
In master of orion glassing a planet to barren and lifeless with your guns incurred no penalty. Only using bioweapons caused the penalty. (or other planet destroyer weapons).

This would be analogous to various curses in death and chaos realms, not analogous to razing a city.

[Tiltowait]

Yeah but in MoO you couldn't take over enemy planets and run them. The only type of population that produced was YOUR population. Being able to take over and operate enemy cities was one of the 'advancements' of MoM. Thus the raze option appeared in v1.01, to allow players to get rid of unwanted cities.