[HoneyBadger]

Now to answer the questions about unit upgrades already in the game: Yes they are there and yes they do their job very well. But, it's a different type of strategy you're talking about, actively concentrating on upgrading your leader units with magic items, empowerments, what have you, or actively fighting with those units and gaining experience. In both case you are using those units directly. What I'm talking about is leaving those units alone so that they can do their own thing, or taking risks with them and potentially having those risks-which increase exponentially over time-pay off in the long term. Kind of like the state (you and your pretender) collecting taxes on a free-market economy (the units you're either risking and that are surviving the risk, or the units that you are protecting and paying the price of that protection). Conditions currently are something along the lines of a communist/socialist economy. No matter how long you stand in line, you're going to get the same scratchy toilet paper, it's just that if you stand in line long enough, you might get more and fresher than the other guy. If you're lucky.

Ofcourse, those units you're paying to protect can still be used for other things, but the longer the game goes on, the harder it is to keep any particular unit alive and undamaged/unafflicted enough to be very useful. Units which are good at passive things, such as research and preaching, often are not ones that are going to be good at combat anyway, nor should they be, and most of these would be afflicted with age, as happens now. Those units which would grow more powerful over time would be the ones that you'd want on the front lines anyway, and so holding them in reserve for years at a time would be a choice which would have real consequences, and if you put that type of unit at risk, and it survives anyway, and keeps surviving, you've gambled well and the Fates have smiled on it and it's good to be rewarded with increased viability as well as having the pleasure of increased individuality. These things help keep such a change to the game in balance, while at the same time, raising the stakes, instead of diminshing them-as happens now-in long epic games.

You start the game and maybe produce 10 Jotun skinshifters on the first turn, and it's exciting because you only have a few, and you put a lot of thought into how you're going to use those skinshifters, because they're all you've got, and if you don't use them carefully, you won't make it very far in the game. By turn 100 you've done well and you can churn out 250 Jotun skinshifters at a pop, knowing that they're going to be the same skinshifters on turn 5000.

Basically, you pay for better units with gold-which you get more of as the game goes on and you conquer more territory, and which, because of it's increased availability, diminishes in value until it's worth it's weight in dirty rainwater, and you pay for better units with resources, which you get a bit more of as you build your infrastructure, but the availability of resources stays much more stable throughout the game, and resources are valuable because of that. Time is always a very valuable resource. If you're paying for better units with time, it's always a rare commodity, and it becomes more and more valuable as a game progresses, because you always have less of it, and you always have the risk that, no matter how great a given game is, this might be your last turn. This means that the longer a game goes on, the better the game should become. This just doesn't happen naturally in a turn-based-strategy environment, or really with any kind of game. There have to be influencing factors such as: plenty of different things to see-which Dom3 does well, plenty of things to do-which Dom3 does VERY well, and good opponents, which the AI doesn't do a bad job of, but human players are generally better. As things are, there are only a finite amount of things to see and do in the game, and those are the same things that are programmed into the game. Thus the whole purpose of modding. If you can, however, add things to see and do, depending on how long you play a particular game (time as currency) then more people are going to want to play games for longer periods of time, which should mean that more people are going to want to buy Dom3, simply because the investment of their valuable time is going to pay off more here than it will playing another game that has a finite amount of things to see and do, regardless of how long you play it. My point is that turn-based-strategy games are exactly the sorts of games which SHOULD get better and more interesting the longer a game goes on, instead of the wave of going from everything-is-fresh-and-new to I-can-do-a-lot-of-things to I've-seen-it-all-and-I'm-bored/exhausted-what's-on-tv that most games currently ride. If Dom3 can break that cycle, then I think it's going to be a very good time for everyone concerned.