Italia
Lombards need a buff?
- Yes.
- No.
0 voters
Other: Comment
I donât know. It is assumed that they exchange an invested resource for 2 other different resources in an âequivalentâ way, so in theory it is already balanced XD.
Not sure who is voting no, people that havenât played italy I think. Currently it takes 5 minutes to even pay off the price of the lombard itself. Plus all that res could be units on the map.
5 Likes
I think one way to make this building more efficient is to make the investment not capped at â300â. It could be from 100 and up.
1 Like
I think it needs to give you like 5% extra wood and gold for investing food for example not the same amount.
yo he jugado con los italianos y vote no, aunque lo que si me gustarĂa es que el limite mĂĄximo no sea de 1500 recursos sino mas como 3000 (mientras mas lombardos haya mas rĂĄpido serĂĄ el intercambio) al que si creo que hay que buffear es al bersaglieri lo siento un poco flojo a comparaciĂłn a otros guerrilleros
1 Like
Iâve been playing Italy almost exclusively since it came out and have lost more games than I have won, but I still voted ânoâ. The thing is that it is a very slippery slope. As it is, lombards are profitable but not gamechanging. You need to pool effort into other aspects of the game to earn your win. I have always hated the Swedish approach of letting your houses do half the heavy lifting while you focus more on microing your attack units. Thatâs a cheap win, and one I hate to deal with. I donât want that for Italy.
Let the meta evolve a little, if two months down the line we start to see Italy helplessly at the bottom of the rankings, then by all means letâs revisit this topic, but for now, letâs just tinker with our meta a little more.
7 Likes
They are already a factory short though, presumably because of lombards so they need to be at least worth using.
3 Likes
A very slight gain on investments is probably justified.
Giving them a tech to research could also be a good buff as it would give a bonus villager. Something like this could make sense:
Double-Entry Bookkeeping - Improves investment work rate or causes Lombards to trickle coin while working
The main thing they need is for one of the late game cards to allow them to reinvest into themselves. That way theyâd stay topped up without a ton of micromanaging and offset the lack of a second factory. That function could be added to the effect of Usury.
Usury
One thing I donât like is that Advanced Lombards partially cancels out Uffizi since it reduces the duration that Lombards work for.
Advanced Lombards
Uffizi
Another thing to note is that the Financers cards seem to be bugged. If you try to top up when you are over the 1500 max, it gets reset to 1500. Monte di Pieta also seems to work strangely.
Genoese Financers
Florentine Financers
Monte di Pieta
7 Likes
I think this is done for balance purposes. Food exchanging 1 to 1 for gold and wood is pretty good. Gold and wood should have better exchanges.
I also think it should be possible to queue more than 1500 resources.
But you want to keep the lombard running anyway. A bigger trickle for compensation would be unfair i think, and giving a fixes trickle would be in contrast to the lombards mechanic, aswell as stackable through building 7 of them
I think there might be some misunderstanding of how Lombards work. From testing them in the scenario editor, I have seen that 300 Food is exchanged for 150 Wood and 150 Coin, but Wood or Coin are exchanged for 225 Food and 150 Coin/Wood, meaning that a 50% profit is made in terms of Food when Wood or Coin is invested. With Usury, investing Food or Wood also provides an additional, smaller (25%) profit in terms of Coin, so that investing 300 Food would then return 150 Wood and 187 Coin.
3 Likes
I do agree on one thing though, knowing exactly what you are getting back for your investment and how far into the exchange process you are into during the game is not an unreasonable request. I would wholeheartedly welcome that adjustment. Even in real life, an investor has a right to know what his return on investment is and how far into the transaction they are already.
Thatâs still only a 25% profit overall even if you donât account for gather rates. Food gathers much faster than wood (~174%) or coin (145%) so if thatâs the rate, youâre actually going to be losing resources by investing wood. If youâre hunting or gathering livestock and then investing the food, Lombards are probably a good option, but if youâre investing wood itâll actually be losing resources.
I think the biggest advantage of the Lombards is that they make poor resource floats easier to rebalance. If you have overgathered one resource, you can just drop it into the Lombard and it will be more useful than just sitting in your stockpile. For more experienced players, though, and especially in 1v1, this is probably not very useful. I donât think the Lombards can quite make up for the loss of the second Factory in the late game either.
3 Likes
the lombard could be changed by making it give a resource drip, e.g:
100f = 0.015f/s
100g = 0.020g/s
100w = 0.025w/s
but that these are not deposited directly, but in a lombard savings bank where, when withdrawing the resources, the trickle restarts at 0, having to deposit the resources again so that the trickle restarts.
The way the UI works doesnât suggest this. Instead, it suggests 1 to 1 exchange for all resources. This is basically how factories work. I might be wrong though.
Again, IIRC (I donât have the card list in front of me), Italy has a very good food gathering rate from mills. I think the point of lombards is to basically exchange the food you will be overgathering from mills into wood+gold.
The UI is a bit obscure in that regard, yes, but you can see the difference in the rates of return when different resources are deposited by looking at the work rates shown when the Lombard is selected. For example, after depositing Food into an empty Lombard, the work rates will be shown as 1 Wood/s and 1 Coin/s. However, when 300 Wood is deposited, the work rates shown are instead 1.5 Food/s and 1 Coin/s. Initially I thought that this would just mean that you would get more than 150 Food and less than 150 Coin back from a 300 Wood investment, but testing it in the scenario editor confirms that you actually do make a Food profit.
Iâm not sure if I am maybe misunderstanding you when you talk about this being how Factories work, but to be clear, Factories do not convert resources. They simply trickle them, at no expense to your other resources.