Surprised I don’t see a thread about this yet? It’s somewhat sweeping the ladder…
The (seemingly unintended) interaction results from sending Freemasons (let’s architects build defensive structures) card and sending the Fort card. This will unlock the ability for architects to build a Fort and increases fort limit by +1. Five architects build a fort in ~16 seconds. In villager seconds those five architects are worth about ~50-75 villagers during that time, depending on how upgraded your villagers are.
That’s already problematic but it gets worse. Italy can revolt into USA, which provides +2 gatling guns for each existing and new fort, ships a fort wagon and increases build limit, and allows for infinite fort + build limit card. Architects are transformed into revolutionaries but can be re-trained ASAP without sending any home city shipment.
So five architects build a fort in 15 seconds which spawns two gatling guns. That’s 1200 res + 800 res = 2000 res. Which means in value those five architects are ~100-130 vills. It’s actually meta to build a fort, have it spawn 2 gatlings, immediately delete the fort, and rebuild it again, over and over, as much as desired. The architects will rebuild forts faster than the enemy can kill them even with mortars.
This is funny but bad. I’m ngl I abused it myself and expect to meet Judas in the 9th circle, but this should probably be hotfixed relatively soon imho. Even sans revolt it’s way too busted for supremacy, the ability to keep rebuilding free forts in age 3/4 for almost no time investment.
clip for those interested, nsfw music lyrics: Twitch
There’s another topic about it already,Can we have urgent balance patch? it’s an oversight that the architects can build a fort in the same time they build an outpost, as you said this is even more broken with the usa revolt causing each fort built to spawn 2 gatlings. I imagine it will be fixed quite soon.
I think it could be fine if architects build time is in relation to the buildings cost, so if outpost takes 20 seconds then it should cost like 90 seconds ish to build a fort. You cannot even build the fort until you’ve sent the fort card and freemasons and you need to train the architects so it’s quite a big investment just to be able to do it. There would be no fort spam either if it took 90 secs to build one and that time is with 5 architects and freemasons.
Seconded!
Architects should not be able to build defensive structures for free. Either pay the full price or disallow them from building them all together.
This is only really exploitable with three cards and a Revolution–but if you’re revolting as Italy, that late, you’ve probably sent Assassins and Uffizi and are popping batches of Knowlton Rangers to annihilate enemy mercs and heroes at range. You’re not gonna queue three Fort Wagons.
The Fort issue is that you’re entirely bottlenecked by Italy’s shipment curve and however many Forts you’re allowed to have at any one time–and remember, anything building one is a priority target for enemy soldiers.
If Pierce Brosnan wasn’t able to build Forts (at any price), he wouldn’t be relevant late game at all.
It’s exploitable as hell with two cards and no revolution, lol. But if you want to revolt, nothing late about it, you could queue it after a factory and be revolted at 11 mins.
Achieving a high fort limit isn’t the issue (but you’d be surprised how viable shipping fort 3x first really is) it’s the architects building them for free and so fast, and the 2 gatling you get for free. Hard to target architects while receiving fort fire and they can just garrison in a nearby fort. Your XP curve is pretty good deleting and rebuilding four forts/minute btw.
A fort takes like 60-90 seconds or something to build from a wagon which is a one-time, 1k-res value shipment, that’s what balances it. When heroes build them it costs 1200 res and takes 2+ minutes. The architects can rebuild and rebuild and rebuild for free at 10x the rate.
Nothing wrong with not knowing anything about how the game plays but not when you’re trying to dismiss an unintended and very abusable exploit.
Just increasing the building time is enough, honestly is not that bad issue. When doing that revolt you sacrifice all your eco so you basically only fight with forts so, is not a broken thing.
