Demeter is inherently weak right now, but Hestia’s tech that gives +10 population for every 2 farms built around a towcenter is the most powerful and toxic tech in the game (especially in long games), and it’s only a heroic-age technology, not even a mythic-age one.
This is just a minor nitpick because I like its concept and I can easily see this thing being fixed and nerfed in the long run.
For example, it could grant +1 population instead of +5 per farm, forcing players to spend five times the resources to reach the population cap with this tech. That would result in more farms being built around a Town Center, which is also much more thematic and balanced.
I agree, Demeter is quite binary right now, you survive the earlier part and some techs juts outright carry you the rest of the way. + 30 pop on a single tech is very strong.
Making it more of an investment to get the pop sounds nice imo.
Isis with +5 pop per TC and Citadel with +10 pop from the god power are the two main comparisons. 10-15 pop from 1 minor god can be strong to begin with but 30 in a normal long game is way too much even if you invest in extra farms.
Especially bad if Demeter gets to 4 tc and has 300 pop vs 210 in a long game, there’s just no coming back from that if you can get to popcap.
Suggestion: Reduce bonus to 4-5 extra population maximum per TC
I would rather keep the population bonus, but your TCs will cost +100w/g and lose 25% hp. Since this is an age3 tech, it should have obvious downsides.
The issue with farms is that while it looks like you could cancel the upgrade by killing farms, the enemy can basically have backup farms…