Poll: morale and routing

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The Panther said:
The sloth 3 thing is normal for many pretenders. That is because you can overcome it with high admin castle or use low resource troops like mages and some of the sacreds.

Sloth is unique in that it becomes less important over time. It's the only scale that works this way. Order and Luck remain constant, Growth/Death becomes more important later on (especially Death), and Magic remains important as long as there is research to do. But the effect of sloth is not very significant in the late game. It matters at the start - only if you need to build high resource units to do initial expansion.

The thing is, by taking negative scales (sloth+misfortune) you can make your pretender strong enough to overcome the economic disadvantage. By the time your pretender is ready to retire from indy-busting, you're ready to convert your nation over to summoned units.

This doesn't have anything to do with how strong/weak national units are or how they are priced. It's fundamental to the game design: All national troops are available from the start of the game. For summons to be relevant at all, eventually the summons have to become more powerful than the national troops.

Part of the "problem," if such exists, is that resources are fairly abundant, relative to gold. Gold is needed for castles, temples, mages, troops, and upkeep. Resources are only needed for troops, and there are few troops that require more resources than gold (both in absolute terms, or in terms of relative abundance).

My suggestions for improvements would be address this Last issue. Instead of castles and temples taking fixed time to build, they require resources, and live in the build queue just like units. Sloth doesn't seem quite so appealing with this change - and this would also make the long build time castles more tolerable.

I should also point out that many people play in games with more spacious maps than the developers intended, and higher site frequency than the default. This amplifies the conditions that make sloth-3 so tolerable.

Turmoil 3, on the other hand, is a killer. Even with luck 3, you still get those horrible bad luck events far too often.

I don't really have a problem with Turmoil-3 being viable only for Ermor, or maybe Carrion Woods. Drain-3 is viable only for Ulm, Heat-3 is viable only for Abysia and Machaka. But Sloth-3 is viable for almost everyone.

Turmoil+Luck has bad events significantly less often than Order+Misfortune. The problem isn't the random events, it's the income loss. Turmoil-1 has about 75% as much money as Order-3. Turmoil-3 would have about 65% as much money as order-3. That's a big, big, big difference. Part of the difference is upkeep. Upkeep accumulates over time, resulting in a constrained growth situation; if you've studied differential equations (or ecology), you know that a 35% loss of income translates into much more than a 35% loss of population. Where the population, in this case, is mages. And mages are critically important. It's fair to say that order scale is almost important to research as magic scale is.