I know the reason the manor is designed to be undeletable is to prevent players from creating boom by repeatedly deleting and rebuilding.
However, from time to time, I still get stuck on the path and location of the units in the manor because I didn’t anticipate it in advance, and have to delete or detour the units. The undeletable manor also made it difficult to design a satisfying colonial city because it can’t be changed to elsewhere if it doesn’t look good at there.
I’m wondering if there is a way to make the manor deleteable without breaking the balance. The current thinking is that the manor can only spawn a maximum of 20 settlers if there is a TC before hitting the imperial age. This means that the 21st manor and beyond will not be able to spawn settlers when built unless all TCs are destroyed or hitting the imperial age. Players will not sacrifice population stability, wood costs, and operational attention for an unobtainable 21st free settler.
The only exception that may be possible is when a manor is destroyed by opponents, releasing a free settler spawn opportunity. For example, if the player has built 20 manors and one of them is destroyed by opponents and an other one is deleted by the player himself, rebuilding these 2 manors will only spawn One free settler, the 21st free settler.
Agreed, undeletable manor is annoying. Mostly because we often build houses quickly, and then want to move them away to get place for other stuff. And even though the age1 card to let manors heal nearby units is not worth it in most decks, it would be a nice improvement to it if you could delete and rebuild manors.
I like your idea but find it a little complicated, especially due to the difference between the enemy destroying a manor and you deleting it. I would rather give up on the concept of “daring the enemy to destroy your manors as it strenghtens your economy”.
An alternative adjustment of the manor would be to create a “british settler” unit spawning from manors that is different from the regular settler only by its name and appearance. The maximum british settler count would be 20 (current and maximum count visible on each manor), and a newly constructed manor only spawn a settler if you are below this limit. Which implies:
deleting & rebuilding a manor after max manor count does not spawn new settler
Enemy destroying a manor does not enable you to get a new villager by rebuilding the manor
When losing a british villager, you can get one back by destroying and rebuilding a manor if you like (only worth it if you are far below 99 settlers, as the manor cost of 90w or 135w is greater than the 100f cost from TC).
Compared to your suggestion, we cannot “manor rebuild boom” if we have no TC.
The reason why I separate the manor destroyed by the enemy from the manor the player deleted is because I think the settlers spawned by the manor have an indelible effect on sustaining the British economy when the player falls behind. It’s a bonus the British have even now, and it’s reasonable and technically possible to keep it that way. My intention is not to buff or nerf the British, so the existing advantage like this should be maintained.
Also we do not need “British Villager” since the normal settlers are enough technically.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but I think a TC is still far more important to the economy than manors.
I think players will still actively try to rebuild a TC when the TCs are destroyed by enemies, rather than taking advantage of the manor after deliberately deleting all TCs. This will only allow the manor to help revive the British economy in the absence of TC, and not disrupt the balance.
Anyway, These are just details. I think basically we are on the same side on this issue.
Yeah we both agree on allowing manors to be deleted and rebuilt somewhere else while adding an “anti-abuse” mechanism to prevent rebuilding one manor over and over
Yeah, I got it. I just thought that the feature to get a villager back after the enemy destroys a manor was not importantbto the civ and convenient for the devs, so they dont need to implement an anti-abuse system.
Yeah, we dont “need” them. I only suggested this alternative because I thought it would be clearer to the player how the anti-abuse system works. I thought maybe your solution is a little complicated and it would not be clear to the “player not reading patch notes” when a settler spawns and one doesnt.
I triedbto replicate the USA settler wagon system on mills, as it already exists.
I don’t know. I mean it is not necessarily a bad thing to have the “manor rebuilding booming” when you have no TC, I just removed it from my suggestion to make it more simple, especially for “players not reading patch notes”. Otherwise it ends up being a “hidden trick”.
For TC vs manor rebuilding boom: a manor with Virgina Company costs 90w while a TC costs 500w and a settler 100f which feels like 70w in villager/second.
So 1 TC + 25 setters has the cost of 25 manors.
The difference being that 1 TC + 25 settlers are built in 685s while 25 manors potentially in 40s, as your bank of wood is the main limiting factor of your rebooming speed.
Add to that the card “team houses build time -90%” so your manor takes 2s to be built. if you build all manors at the same time, you save at the very least 20w per manor, due to 2 settlers gathering wood 18s earlier and wood gather rate being 0.5w/s without market upgrades (10%, 20%, 30%). And a manor becomes virtually cheaper than a settler from TC and with virtually 0 training time. And this excludes the potential snowball effects of having the next manors being started even earlier hence saving more than these 20w for the manor.
Of course this is just theory that uses up 2 cards and forget that you do not have 2000w on your bank when rebooming, but this shows some potential. And TC is surely still better if you have to gather point (outpost, fort) or want to age up.
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But as you said, we both want to be able to delete manors and have no possible abuse of this feature.
Well! that sounds like a great idea. it can have a slow load time after which one will be able to delete that particular manor ONLY.
Basically you’ll pay a certain amount,
Wait for some time for the permit to be released ,
And then the delete button will be enabled.
And then you can delete that particular manor whenever.
it all depends on the cost of permit and the time for permit to be approved ,
I think both should be very high i.e. 100w or 50W50G and 45-60 seconds.
So that the current builds,rushes,1v1 etc don’t get affected. And the player have to still be cautious on building a manor, but the brits will still have an option to rebuild in late game or in an urgency.
additional limits can imposed for late game where after a certain number of rebuild/deletion the manors will not spawn a settler. that limit can be a higher number as its the speciality of brits. limiting to a smaller number wont be a justice to the civ IMO.
And give the manor a distinct look. It is the only unique building that looks exactly the same as its counterpart
If it’s a true “manor” instead of a small house, the “slow costly delete” button would make more sense.
It should have been a matter of course that buildings can be deleted without additional formalities and costs. This design is unreasonable and more like a punishment. Do not use another unreasonable way to deal with the unreasonable status quo please.
The problem of units getting stuck could be solved by giving Manors a courtyard where units could walk through like how it is in AoE4. That would be a little bit of a nerf because it would prevent them from being used as walls and cause them to take up a little more space.
Well, building your houses in a way it doesn’t hinder your future development is part of the British macro. Also forcing the British into being pigeon hold into a small area is an effective way to counter them.
This is a good point I didn’t consider. The british house-boom feels like the best early-game boom of the game by a significant margin. It somehow makes sense to “annoy” the british player by preventing him to “move” manors around, and make his life inconvenient if it opponents manage to confine him in his base.
Yeah, but the idea was to add some gimmics to prevent the abuse of British manor delete & rebuild.
Does this work in general ? So if you delete any finished building, your opponents get XP as if they it themselves ?
His units are also relatively short ranged in the early game (longbows require wood which is expensive early on), so if you mess up his sim city, he will be unable to defend properly against long range attackers.
Similarly, manors (as with any houses) can be used to help defend if properly placed.
Normal houses, even TCs and forts can be deleted, and they will also give the opponent XP when they are deleted. I think being deletable is very basic for buildings.
The manor cannot be deletable entirely because of the settler it spawns. As long as this bonus can be controlled, it is not a problem for the manor to be deleted.
Yeah on some level not being able to destroy them feels just wrong and unnatural and like an easy way out, instead of a more thought-out solution - more elegant and one that is not colliding with such basic functionality as the ability to destroy/kill owned unit.
