In the late game, towers become progressively more rare compared to castles. Which makes sense, castles provide a lot of value that towers don’t. On the flipside, it means that certain bonuses like the Keep upgrade end up neglected.
What if the Masonry and Architecture techs reduced the stone cost of Towers? Maybe Masonry could reduce it by 10, and Architecture by 15. That could help to increase the lategame relative value of towers for some civs.
This probably shouldn’t effect Bombard Towers, though. They’re quite strong as-is, especially for civs like the Byzantines and Turks.
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I’m not opposed to this. I think unless you’re in feudal or Japanese you’ll just save up and build a castle. Most time castles are just a better investment. Can produce units, research techs, and provide pop space. Usually better than the five towers you could have built with that stone.
If you want to think about in the most extreme way castles take up 16 tiles and towers only 1. So a tower on paper should only cost about 40 stone.
I think for game design reasons making towers 1/3 as expensive on stone as they are now would make every base next to impossible to raid and therefore less fun overall.
But I think there’s some justification for making towers a little cheaper.
But I think you could have towers start at 100 and masonry and architecture bring them down a little more to 75. Then you could build two towers in your base in feudal instead of one, and in late game you could build nearly nine towers for the same stone cost as a castle. Still no unit production, techs, or pop space but nine towers starts to look tempting.
Admittedly Slavs after detinets have the same stone savings but aren’t known for spamming towers but they also don’t have keep or bracer. Incas have -15% and while historically they were tower rush civ I don’t think that was really a late game strategy. If you want more towers in the late game IDK exactly how much cheaper towers need to be honestly.
Pros might not like that as it makes game less aggressive but I don’t think it’s a huge difference. One extra tower in feudal while a deterrent isn’t super scary w/o murder holes. Unless you palisade wall around it, etc,etc. and the pros are very conscious about keeping their vills gathering not building. The build time for that tower and walls will be a deterrent for the pros regardless of the stone cost IMO.
So I don’t think it’s a big change for pros but could help lower elo players feel a bit safer
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It wouldn’t affect the cost of castles tho? I think that’s good for balance but doesn’t make logical sense lol.