Learning to love Resources

[DrPraetorious]

The question has arisen - who wants Productivity?

Well, for productivity to be worth it, you want:
* An outstanding combat unit with a gold:resource ratio of ~1 or lower.
* When I say outstanding, it's not enough for the unit to beat the [censored] out of independents. The unit has to do that, and it has be tough, mobile etc. enough to continue to be relevant into the era where combat magic becomes relevant.
* The nation also needs (relatively) cheap mages, or you won't have enough money to use all these resources anyway.

Once combat magic becomes dominant, the only relevant stats are size and mapmove, because everything is chaff. However, you can have a lot more gems, income and money going into the late midgame if you dominate the early game.

Sinews and steel, the best stuff to spend a lot of resources on:
- Barbarian Heavy Horsemen (LA T'ien Ch'i). These guys are better than Knights and they cost *25 Gold*. Their bows help to overcome the drawbacks of being size 3, and being size 3 provides some resistance against the area of effect magic that first threatens to make them obsolete; more to the point, they're extremely swift.
- Various Jotun and Fomorians (LA Jotunheim, EA Fomoria). Have a little trouble eliminating chaff themselves, but are tough enough to remain relevant against magical enemies. The heavily armored ones cost a lot of resources. In the MA, unfortunately, your mages are too expensive to make this viable, and EA Niefelheim laughs at you.

[Humakty]

I do also think resource is important for many factions, as it allows you to make a bigger recruitment in a specific area of your empire/kingdom.

Not only will it reduce the micromanagement of putting your small armies together, you'll also save some months by recruiting directly in the fort who's the closer to the battlefront, being able to support a progresion in ennemy territory with rapidly set up armies, or to stop an invasion dead.

You also recover more rapidly of a crushing defeat, being able to transform your sudden increase in income into shiny new troops.

Even late game, it allows you to have a better equipped spell fodder, which can be usefull (apart against charm/domination spells).

After all, if your plans to crush your evil foes in a majestuous blitz fail (but it won't...), you can still expect to win an attrition war.(by recruiting more troops than he is)

[KissBlade]

Production would be way better if resources saved up in a province.

[Jazzepi]

KissBlade said:
Production would be way better if resources saved up in a province.

Someone mentioned the idea of upgrading troop's weapons and armor. I really liked this notion myself.

The problem is that gold accumulates and can be spent on many different things, so more gold income is always a benefit. Production is lost when not used, so a high production becomes a waste towards the end game. Would be nice if it did something. I was thinking also that production could provide a small amount of "free units" that would be produced without cost every turn, not automatically, just as a couple in the front of the production que worth X amount of resources.

Jazzepi

[Ironhawk]

What if unspent production slowly added to province defense? Up to a level of half the max resources, say? With a cap of something like 30.

[Zeldor]

You mean 50% of resources would be treated as gold investment into PD? So 30 unspent resources would be like 15 gold put into PD?

[DrPraetorious]

And the conscription bonus of T'ien Ch'i increases the unspent resources by order * dominion strength for this purpose ?

This is actually a good proposal that would work well, I think. It would help to reduce the prevalence of small forces raiding, which I found annoying on a micromanagement basis.

[Zeldor]

But how would Productivity work here? What base values and what bonuses? Just giving that with productivity 0 could really change game balance. And if it worked only with prod scale then what about sloth?

[DrPraetorious]

How's this for a proposal:

Sloth -3 =
-45% resources,
unspent resources do not accumulate towards province defense, province defense has a 15% chance of degrading 1 pt each turn,
building costs increased by 30%,
forts take an additional turn to construct,

Sloth -2 =
-30% resources,
unspent resources do not accumulate towards province defense, province defense has a 10% chance of degrading 1 pt each turn,
building costs increased by 20%,
forts take an extra turn to construct.

Sloth -1 =
-15% resources,
unspent resources do not accumulate towards province defense, province defense has a 5% chance of degrading 1 pt each turn,
building costs increased by 10%.

Prod +1 =
+15% resources,
10% of unspent available resources accumulate towards province defense,
building costs reduced by 10%.

Prod +2 =
+30% resources,
20% of unspent available resources accumulate towards province defense,
building costs reduced by 20%,
fort construction time reduced by 1 turn.

Prod +3 =
+45% resources,
30% of unspent available resources accumulate towards province defense,
building costs reduced by 30%,
fort construction time reduced by 1 turn.

Available resources exclude hidden resources and include resources brought into the province by forts.

[Loren]

I definitely like the idea of unspent resources aiding the province.

I'm not sure it should only be PD, though--I would like to see them randomly improve anything that can be improved.