Castles cost 500 stone instead of 650 (-23%). Castle HP reduced to 3600 (-25%). Problem solved!
Notice no changes to Krepost, but maybe they can receive -50 stone cost and -200 HP, if they were to be changed.
This might actually change the meta too much making UUs and Castle Age UT more viable in general. What are your thoughts?
Notes: Frank Castles cost -25%, so basically 375 stone.
Incan castles cost -15%, so basically 425 stone. Sicilian construction modifier maybe changed slightly. Stone and Fortified walls HP should also be changed as such. All other buildings comparable in HP to a castle may be left unchanged. Basically they are wonders and Feitorias only.
Interesting idea, but… this introduces a whole host of problems. Do you also reduce the size of stone piles? How do you balance the cost and strength of towers?
Would Arena castle drops need to be rebalanced?
Castles are also easier to take down because of the reduced HP. And keeps still provide a worse value per stone spent (post imperial arrowslits + keeps). This is because in the present scenario, they have less than half the HP (2100 vs 4800) and same attack (I assumed arrowslits + keeps, so 8+3 attack), they have so much less number of arrows that they are quite weak.
1/5 the attack strength and 1/2 HP (assuming 2400 HP keeps which is not a reality), they are just 1/10 of a castle. So they should be costing 65 stone and no wood.
1 step at a time.
I am quite a patient of that. I don’t know what to say. It is a strong strategy but I don’t see Krepost drops too much too.
The problem is also the cost of towers. Sorry, I wasn’t clear. If you make towers cheaper, it’ll make tower rushes probably too strong. If you make towers weaker, then they might just be too weak to be viable at all. It feels like a LOT of the game would need to be rebalanced.
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Absolutely no change to towers. Change only to castles.
Or maybe Kreposts and stone walls too if they get out of hand.
I support the idea of the availability of UU’s, but I don’t like this idea because it would make games so annoying with castles’ drop everywhere. The cost of the castles is ok. Castles should take crucial positions, not spammed everywhere. I already think Franks discount for castles is super annoying…
I have proposed several ideas to UU’s viability, I will not spam here, but to don’t go further from your idea, what if a new building is introduced, the Palace, cost 500W 200S where you can train your UU and research UT’s, levy and Spy/treason. This building has no attack.
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I dont think changing the price by that much would help much. Part of the problem is how long it takes to make a castle in comparison to other buildings. You are also either attacking or defending with it which means they are no where near each other to help produce more units. Second if you lose your castle what would you go into or do you just quiet as you can’t make more of the building easily.
I think this would shift dynamics of the game too much in unpredictable ways.
I kind of like the Palace idea as a new building but I think lots of people would be quite opposed to adding a new building.
I propose instead a technology, that similar to supplies is available to most, but not all civilizations and further reduces training time of unique units. Making this a technology allows a good balance to what civs to give it to, so those that already have very strong unique units dont get too powerful.
Surely an easier solution would me to have a common tech for all civs in imperial to train uu from standard buildings and then give Goths a new ut ?
Might again be very hard to balance. Do you really want to see Britons longbow spam from Archery Range? Or even worse: Mangudai spam from Archery range? 
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Just balancing the cost and TT could be a solution
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A change to the cost of castles is a change to towers.
Making castles better inherently makes towers worse since towers are of the same type of building, defensive structure which threatens an area.
Towers are already underused in later phases of the game because castles are so much better at defending crucial areas against larger threats.
Maybe we can shift Arrowslits to Castle age and Fortified walls to Imperial Age.
Another thing about Castle drops I got.
Castles in dark age fire 2 arrows (one main, one 2ndary). With each age they get +1 arrow (like the Donjon). So basically unchanged in Imperial Age.
Making a Castle is actually a big investment. You need either 2 of Monastery, SW and University or 1 Castle
Even if you make all 3 of these, the combined cost is 575 wood which is much easier to get 650 stone.
hmmmm… what if… u can create your UU at universities?
You want your soldiers to be educated? 11
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exactly
11
In aoe there was this building military academy in which you trained heavy infantry. Could be something like this. I think that castles are perfect. Expensive, limited, long time to build. Nothing of that must change at all. So the only solution could be training them in a different building. An expensive one in order to keep relevant technologies like perfusion or marauders. But don’t touch castles.
We have got a lot of problems with UU because lots of them are too weak, or has only special useful situation and also training time are mostly too high. That has nothing to do with the castle cost itself.
eg lots of UU infantry are even weaker than Longswords, but doing well in certain situation or their elite version are really powerful.
This is incredibly poorly thought out; there’s way too many side effects. If your goal is the change an aspect of the game the goal is to induce as few effects as possible. You should narrow down the changes to only affect the one thing you want changed.
Reducing the cost of castles changes so many things it’s hard to list them all: Makes towers not as competitive, more castles = seige needed in more places, makes raiding harder, makes castle drops easier (magnifying castle age time differences), changes civ balance for civs like Teutons who have 13 range on castles, in general makes high pierce armor civs better, requires changing map generation to balance out, etc.
Or you could just reduce the TT of the selected units or increase the benefit of conscription on castles.
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UUs are some of the most unfun units to play against because many of them have almost no counters and they don’t get nerfed
the game does not have good enough matchmaking settings and map pools to let people win early before the game becomes about UU spam. the aggressive options are nowhere near powerful enough for that.
it’s bad enough that they put fake maps like arena and arena-clones and land nomads in the map pool all the time. all of those are already UU-fests. UUs need to be less viable, not more viable