With all due respect, I can’t tell you how useless palisade walls, fortified are not, are by the time you can build a university. There is actually still a tech in the DE scenario editor called Revetments, which allows palisade walls to be upgraded, but this should be available no later than Feudal to get any use.
B…b…bu…but…it is one building.
Unpopular opinion: I actually like where the Feitoria is at, and think it has a useful niche. Nothing will ever compare favorably to the utility of trade when it’s available, but the Feitoria obviously has uses when you can’t trade. As far as balance, the Feitoria has already been tweaked a lot, and there’s really no way to make it universally useful without making it crazy OP in some situations, as was discovered when it was first introduced. It’s obviously not worth making in most team games, but it can be extremely useful in the following situations:
-FFAs. Portuguese are one of the best FFA civs for this reason. I’ve won a fair few games on Black Forest, Arena, and Islands this way. The longer you last, the more inevitable your victory becomes, as long as you periodically make sure that none of the other players are trading. The fact that you can literally escape into the forest or wherever with one villager, and go from nothing to generating an infinity of all 4 resources is pretty great. And the Portuguese lategame combo of Organs/Bombards/Halbs is no joke.
-As others have mentioned, it’s even decent on black forest 1v1s, or arena at the mid-low level as long as you don’t let your enemy get all the relics.
-Island maps. Most of the time, the ability to generate wood is not that impressive. However, island games (even team games) often become a late-game stalemate until somebody runs out of resources (usually wood for ships). Here the Feitoria becomes invaluable.
-Anytime you want lots of stone. Obviously, stone is the scarcest of resources, and the only way to get it once it’s been mined is to buy it for increasingly higher prices at the market. Even in team games, I’ll sometimes drop a Feitoria or two if I expect the game to go late, and use the proceeds for defensive or offensive bombard towers.
So yeah, it’s hard to see the Feitoria becoming more viable in ordinary play without becoming too strong in the above situations. I think the resource generation should stay unaffected, however, here is an interesting buff I just thought of for the Feitoria:
-Give it all the attributes of a Town Center, i.e. you can train villagers from it, garrison up to 20, which can shoot arrows, and it can be a dropoff point for all resources. IMO this would be a fun little buff for Portuguese that makes the Feitoria more interesting without making its resource gen OP. I mean, the thing looks like a cross between a freaking castle and a town center, it would be nice if it had some defensive and dropoff capabilities.
Edit: Another idea I just thought of, but could live if it was never implemented:
What if the Feitoria by itself generated nothing, but could be garrisoned with up to 20 villagers who would “work” on producing whichever resource you specified? The rates of course, would be balanced in a comparable way to how they are now (i.e. they would gather much slower than villagers farming/mining/chopping), but you would be able to choose which resource you wanted.
. How about other archer civil. Special Vietnamese. Upgrade UU with high price