Had a stray thought and figured I’d post a poll. Here it is: What if Traders did not eat up primary population space, but instead had their own trader specific population limits instead? Traders themselves are just reskinned workers, that come from a nonTC building, and by the dynamics of trade, are extremely difficult to keep under static defenses short a mid-map wall off. Would this be enough of an incentive to push trade into mainstream games? To create more reactionary play/room for raiding.
- I don’t think having trader specific population limits would add anything good or interesting to the game.
- I think it’s a cool suggestion but let’s take it even farther!
- Yeah, I can dig it. Let’s try it out.
Having population efficiency added to the traders would make them strong late game unit, which in turn would mean that their early game power would have to be reduced in order to keep them balanced.
All in all it would decrease the possible early game use cases for the traders making them more monotone than they already are.
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I’m curious what you’re reasoning here is. Your original reply is conclusive in nature, it doesn’t really argue why you believe these things or what has created these beliefs. Care to expand?
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With your suggested change the traders become a must have unit in the late Imperial Age.
If traders have no population cost you can then over boom with them.
Think of it like going into late Imperial Age with 150 villagers, but instead of having to delete your villagers to gain more population space you can keep all of those villagers.
The player who uses these traders can keep booming into the late Imperial Age with no interruptions to their economy.
On the other side the player who doesn’t use traders has to either:
- Overproduce villagers and then eventually switch to Traders (and kill their villagers).
- Stop producing villagers while transitioning into Traders.
In both cases the traders give a bonus at the mid Imperial Age when the players not using traders have to transition into traders.
This means that traders will have an inherent bonus giving the player using them a economy bonus that can be cashed in at the mid Imperial Age.
And the reason why I don’t think this a good, which I highlighted in my firs post is that by giving the traders a late game bonus would then force a nerf to the traders pushing them away from early game, which would limit the available strategies regarding traders. Even though this change would make the traders more commonly used it would not increase the use cases for traders.