Kind of an obscure one, but i find myself noticing this one thing alot in realms.
That being the spawn rate of goblins is really fast compared to other villages. This tends to make them overly helpful when you recruit them.

I assume that it has to do with the amount of time correlating with the value of the unit, but i wonder what would happen if you slowed down the spawn rate of villages. I feel like they should almost be seen as types of mercs that you pay for in time rather than gold (i know kudos is technically the cost, but since your not spending your kudos on anything else, it tends to just boil down to whether you recruit them or not)

A meta spell to speed up this process could totally be a thing, for realms that give you earlier mana fluxes. This could add a bit of nuance to the mana management.

But it would be interesting, especially if have realm scenarios were your leading your villagers vs 2 different lords. It would make the managing your creatures more important as each one killed would mean that you lost days (currently villages spawn so fast that this is generally inconsequential, making them more of cannon fodder)

This alongside the upgrade to AI in the coming update could be a great combo.

The speed of goblin spawns from villages is a counter-balance to the usefulness of slower spawn villages. The slower a goblin village the more I'll want to recruit a giant village. Giants are a major advantage vs. goblins at fighting marauders.

I'd rather have the ability for Allied players to help with villager fights. I'd also rather see villager units survive in place when their village is destroyed. That would help a great deal in realm-building. Currently, the rules favor choke-points to mitigate marauders.

Glas Masv wrote:I'd also rather see villager units survive in place when their village is destroyed. That would help a great deal in realm-building. Currently, the rules favor choke-points to mitigate marauders.

Wow I was going to make almost this exact same point to (I tried to post a reply the other day but the forum went down).

I think there are a few systems in realms which still feel like a work in progress. Tweaking how villages, totem fights etc work could improve how the realm 'geo-scape' stuff works as a whole.

Regarding villages, players aren't really able to react to marauder spawns or their movement speed, as such marauders tend to raze 'empty' recruited villages uncontested..

..I think it would be better if recruited villages were never considered 'empty' but merely weakened/under-protected when the recruits are out on a mission.

There could perhaps be a default number of recruits who stay on-site (separate from the fighting recruits who go out on missions). This way the player will always be involved in the village invasion/base defence battles (by either being present at them, or auto-resolving them).

Changing this would aid realm designers because currently they have to place villages in cul-de-sacs just so the player is able to get some functionality out of them without marauders instantly spawning near them and taking them out.

I guess another way of tweaking this would be to make it similar to what Glas suggested. Just have marauders reset the spawn rate when they wipe out the village (without totally destroying it). The player has to go reclaim it.

..OR, keep it how it is with marauders able to raze villages beyond repair but any village recruits that are already outside of the village remain in play (they just become homeless, a non replenishable army). Maybe the act of returning the recruits back to their village could auto-repair the village (and restart the spawn rate).

Regarding the speed of goblins being ideal in comparison to giants....I'm not sure I can change my mind on it...Maybe i'm blowing it out of proportion, but i feel that whenever i recruit a goblin village, they just get pooped out at such a fast rate that i can generally be guaranteed a full roster of them fellas when i go to attack a lord with them, which usually results in me being able to just engulf them with goblins. With the other villages, it isn't quite the same...

For example: when i recruit a giant village, the wait time can be agonizing (relatively speaking lol) when your looking for 1 unit to creep up towards that heavily fortified lord with. I do actually really like this because it makes me take care of the villagers in battle, instead of just making them lemming their way over there to soak the 1st hits. Were I first got an appreciation for this was when i was testing cathal (there's a portion were 2 wizard lords were back to back, and i was a little pressed for time, so i couldn't afford to wait for reinforcements from the giant village) I've been since trying to recreate this dynamic in various ways.

The dwarves, being another low tier village, are balanced out simply on the basis that dwarves can be so useless. One realm battle that illustrated this was when i attacked a mr. lord of the west (who was fully reinforced) and then got invaded by a player. It was a pretty close match, and felt about right. The goblins, on the other hand, are really useful..they got 2 movement, pack a pretty nice punch, i'm generally pretty cautious about putting my better units in the range of goblins. Having 8 of them totally blows a giant and a lion out of the water i find. As a result, I feel i can never use them in my realms.

Just some context for why i'm targetting goblin villages in specific xD.

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Regarding the at home vs war party villagers idea, I feel that it might not work so well in practice. For example, if you've got a tier 1 village, which is usually weak enough as is, even taking 1 or 2 villagers would wind up being a tough fight vs a marauder wizard. I think if you were to go this route, that you'd have to consider adding other mechanics or tweaks to existing ones to facilitate this better.

I was thinking that one mechanic that might work is some kind of system were you can feed kudos into villages you've already recruited to build respect among them. This would dictate how many villagers you could order to move around the map. This way, you could leave the number of villagers who stay home as a default amount (which you could perhaps choose to upgrade via meta spell), this way you could always have villagers at home, which could then be possibly improved simply on the basis of whether you decide to move a group of villagers away from home or not. I'd balance this standard, stay at home amount as a level that is at least reasonable enough to fend off a marauder (with 0 reinforcements), perhaps having a villages full potential (i.e max village defense upgrade + not using villagers allotted to you/leaving them at home) could be strong enough to fend off marauders w/ full mercs (though the lower tier of villages would be expected to fend off lords w/ weak mercs, while stronger ones could be expected to deal with a better merc composition)

The kudos/respect system would playout like this:
1)You pay for village with kudos as normal
2)You have a respect bar (simply 0-100), you'll start at 50 or something.

These kudos would determine:
-How many creatures you can use from the village.
-How fast they generate.

You Gain kudos by:
-Deciding to spend additional kudos on them (making you choose between whether you want to strengthen this one or seek other villages to help)
You Lose kudos by:
-Letting villagers die in combat
-Letting the village get ransacked

Perhaps if you lost enough respect, the village would defect, receiving 'hostile' status.

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All said, I'm glad that you both are chiming in. I feel that some discussion about this might be important for giving good feedback on what could possibly be looked at, possibly resulting in having realms mode hit its potential.

Giving villages the garrisons they get when players attack villages would be simple and fair. The recruited units are additional forces from drafting units.

If your allied villager units were part of the garrison it wouldn't take so long for them to appear for service. The rate of spawning is then tied to how numerous the units are in lore.

The only things I'd add to consider with that is that:
-The villager amounts that defend a village is based on the realm level (lvl 12, has max villagers defending it, while a level 4 will only have 3-4 units), which would be an oddity, as you'd have a harder time defending villages in a lvl 4 realm, then a lvl 12. (in realm testing, attack a village when it's set to lvl 4 and compare it to lvl 12)
-Any villagers on top of that amount would be way too much in most cases (you might as well have auto-resolve 100%)

You got to try to find a balance, which makes the game fun. (not being too easy/trivial or being too difficult/trivial

Though if you look at how many villagers are garrisoned in neutral/lvl 12 villages (as shown when you attack one) that might be a good frame of reference for a maxed out village garrison in which a player can eventually achieve (In terms of an improved AI or invader player, a force this size would probably be enough to fight off a marauder)

From here, you could simply make the contingencies like a marauder with 8 marauders running around simply be that point where the player has to decide if it is worth running back to that village to help them, or whether they should just proceed on and take that loss, preparing to deal with that marauder later. Although...If you were to allow the player to increase the number of spells in which they can upgrade a village with, the extra spell limit would be a good mitigator to help a village defend itself in these extreme cases.

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Kind of off topic: I do like the idea of spending kudos to determine how many creatures you can take from the village as kudos is a currency associated with diplomacy and is less prone to being thrown out of wack like meta mana is. I find meta-mana problematic because the ways in which the AI can mitigate your mana generation is almost non-existent. By the time you've gotten the flux, your most likely guaranteed enough mana to upgrade everything to max, reveal the whole map, and banish the palace spell. As a result, i'm usually forced to treat mana fluxes like a requirement that a player finds near the end of the realm to banish the palace force field, as opposed to integrating it into the village upgrading and what have you.

Otherwise, kudos is generally really abundant in a way that it becomes hard to manage as well. for example: you kill an undead lord and get a whopping 100 chaos kudos, this gives you the ability to easily recruit most villages in the game, and with the right placement, can easily ensure your going be able to poop out a large amount of cannon fodder to throw at any lord in range. If you were forced to spend further kudos to influence how many creatures you could take out of a village to help you, it might make the choice of kudos spending more interesting in the strategy layer of the realm.

*Important thing to note: that you'd always have a minimal amount of villagers who stayed behind to defend, and you'd always have a fairly decent limit of villagers you could take out to help you. The balance would be deciding what amount of forces would be reasonable to send away vs the minimal amount that should always be in village (Splitting the amounts of the full number of villagers as depicted in a neutral lvl 12 village that you attack)

I suppose regarding the meta-mana, it might be interesting if the marauders had some means to make you lose meta mana, but that could throw alot of realms already designed around the game mechanic limitations out of wack...Although, it might actually enhance them if you had a clever idea. Maybe the act of them retaking a flux could cause an automatic loss of meta-mana? maybe citadels could give a boost in lord reinforcement pts? might make these more significant...thematically it could be explained as the maruader catching up on the work of the lord who died their before them....

It seems like Mana Fluxes would be more flexible in terms of realm design if they had finite mana to extract that could be set by the realm designer.