Imaginary Unique Tech: Salvage

Either for a new defensive civ, or possible existing civ candidates: Byzantines, Koreans, or Teutons.

Cost: 450f, 600g

Effect: Defensive buildings (eg. Towers and Castles) that are destroyed by enemies return 60% of the resource cost. (Deleting them by yourself doesn’t count and won’t yield the refund).

Uses:

Take a Castle for example. One that was destroyed means precious resources lost, so this means having to find another stone pile or buying stone from the market when the price will increase after each purchase. However, this tech will remedy this by refunding 60% stone after the Castle is destroyed.

Do you think we should have a team bonus, civ bonus, or unique tech like above where we get a 60% refund for any unit, or building lost?

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How would this interact with repairs? It’s probably best to never repair and always just build a new castle next to it right? Because repair costs are not refunded. So the tech would result in kind of weird and counter intuitive optimal play.

I also feel like 60% would be a lot. Particularly since the tech only costs 600 gold and can apply starting with your very first castle, as you can buy the tech before It’s destroyed.

Sure, the Slavs Detinets tech also only costs resources, but it only gives a 40% reduction, those costs don’t disappear but turn into wood costs (which means it can be benificial to not get it while you still have a lot of stone, as paying for the tech and a post-tech castle actually takes you longer than just buying a castle straight up) and the discount is not applied retroactively to castles you already have.

The Franks bonus is a straight up discount, with no cost, but it’s only -25%.

A final note: both Slav castles and Frank castles don’t get a lot of upgrades. I would not give something like this to a civ with good castles.

I don’t think it’s as strong as you make out. Similar to madrash. It only pays back when you lose. So in order to benefit you need to take bad fights. Except it’s even worse than madrash because you need to temporarily lose ground

Take that castle for example. You don’t automatically have the 400stone for the 2nd castle. You need to lose the first one before you get the stone

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It sounds fun, though I’m not sure about the percentage.

Also, deleting the building yourself should absolutely refund the resources too. AOE has enough exceptions already, don’t introduce new exceptions without a very good reason.

I wonder why devs limited stone in the first place…

Because stone access is a rubber band mechanic.

Castles, towers and TC’s are stronger overall than the same ammount of resources in units. For the same total resources as a castle for instance you can buy less than 5 knights, much less of a force than a single castle, and I’m not even counting the cost of the stable. (Although to be fair I’m not counting the villager time invested in the castle either, so those two at least partially balance each other out.) The downside of having a castle instead of 5 knights is that the castle is immobile and therefore more suited for defense than offense. This is how defensive buildings help keep the game balanced and how they help losing player’s get back in the fight. They give the party getting pushed back more bang for their buck. Stone is limited because the game at some point has to end, eventually you want a winner. This means the late game should have more snowball mechanics, that reward the person who’s winning, and less rubber band mechanics, that help the person who’s losing. Stone is a rubber band mechanic, hence limited stone.

(Now neutral stone, that dips into both categories. After all, the person who’s winning is more likely to get access to neutral resources, so the concept of neutral resources as a whole is a snowball mechanic.)

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Very good explaination. It also explain why Castle is so good in caslte age and why Imperial Age Siege has to be so good.

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Feitoria says hi.

Overall you make a decent case for why snowball mechanics should be (and are) more common than rubber-band mechanics, as you call them. But while I’m not wild about this particular salvage mechanic (IMO: should be civ bonus, smaller percentage), it’s hard to think of it as being too gamebreaking when you consider the other things that already exist. Furthermore, in addition to having to lose ground in order to benefit from this sort of mechanic, it’s sort of like a Russian-nesting doll: Yes, it allows you to recoup a decent amount of resources, but with each use, you have ever diminishing pools of those resources from which you can draw, and if you lose more than a couple castles you’re probably going to lose anyway. It’s hard not to see the Feitoria as having similar advantages (gaining otherwise limited resources without map control, in perpetuity), but with a lower barrier to entry, and without the need to suffer significant losses in order to take advantage of it.

Personally I think there’s room for a couple more “rubber-band” type mechanics that make a player a little hard to push, and give them more chances to recover when on the back foot. As it is, most bonuses that were originally meant to be used defensively are best used for aggression (cheaper Castles, stronger TCs, any kind of tower bonus). One of these I suggested in another thread was to have destroyed buildings spawn a military unit, which I think is interesting because defensiveness is built into it and it’s hard to use aggressively. Overall these types of mechanics should be used sparingly relative to snowball-types though.

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Well there could be the option of making a tech in imp that reduces stone cost for castles or even in general. This could reward players who “saved” their Stone earlier on.
Ofc this similar would also be possible with Gold. But I think it’s hard to come to a position like this for many civs without using a lot of Gold already.

Both techs would then lead to a very hard snowball in the lategame. And idk if I like it cause real trash wars are already quite uncommon and these techs would make them even less.

I personally would prefer if there were more “positional” fights in trash wars. As I already proposed in other threads, I would like to have an infinite Gold Pile in the middle of the map (probably with 1/2 the collection rate or other restrictions to the effective income). Then we had a more “gradual” snowball for the very lategame and (hopefully) a lot of opportunities to fight over that position before.
And I think Gold is better suitable for this kind of mechanic cause unlike stone it’s basically only usable for offensive purposes. If you can hold that position you don’t need stone anyways, you want gold to finish and if you get stone you would first invest it in m´just making sure not to lose the position. Which would drag the game unnecessarily. And then probably make a very slow castle/tower rush… Nah. I think it would be way more interesting with Gold, for either player.

@PanCalvus my post was meant kinda ironic but I like your answer regardless :wink:

We have towers and castles. The main reasons why games end early or in the midgame is because of raids. So if you want to have more rubber bands you would need something that stops raids from killing the eco… which is… idk… probably kinda hard to achieve? Not that I would be against it, but probably not as easy.
Ofc we can talk at some point about techs like loom in feudal and castle age, that make vills a bit more resilient (for a price ofc). That would be the “easiest” way. Then the damage of early agression wouldn’t be as much in killing vills but forcing the opponent into these techs and having a lot of idle time.

I guess aftermath gaia market workshop (forget the exact name) is doing similar thing? I think aftermath is good because there are many market workshop in team game and do not force people to control a single point. Because If there is only one position like King of the Hill, the game will goes for defensive style and maybe less interesting to watch

First I think these trade workshops have too high output already.
Second the design that they are important early on disturbs the game. Especially as we have some civs that have so much higher early agression potential that they can so easily snowball from there.

Gaia Markets in the corner also have a potentially too high output imo.

I think adjusting the res amount by the time is fine. But it still different from the gold since it do not need villagers to mine so that it will occupy some pop space

And imo these kind of workshops / positional res income tools should only provide ONE type of res. Cause that opens a win condition for the other player: Push the controller of them out of other res like wood. I also talked about that with regards to Feitoria. Imo feitoria shouldn’t provide wood or stone for that reason, especially with water maps in mind.

If we talk about a rubber-band mechanic in the midgame against raids… what about monks being able (with a tech possibly) to “revive” killed vills at the spot they died? Or other said the vills aren’t really dead but just heavily injured and can be brought back to being able to work by the monks?
It would still be highly macro-demanding, but it would reduce the impact of early raids in the continuation of the game. Still, if the raids do enough damage it can’t bring it back. It’s just a rubber band for raids that currently give a low chance for a comeback.

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