Topic: "Northmen" Tribe Page

• The bee-keeper can let his bees swarm over any medium field or bush. These are barley/wheat/corn/blackroot fields, berry bushes, reed patches and grapevines (I usually build 1 bee-keeper next to each berry farm). I´ll add this to the helptexts in the next upload.

• I agree that the number of medium-size building is somewhat too high. Perhaps the reed farm could be made a small building (again), but it wouldn´t make sense for most medium buildings if they are made small (they all store wares, the equivalents in other tribes are medium or big…).

• All right, bricks are quite expensive. Letting 1 brick cost 1 clay + ½ granite + ½ coal should be expensive enough. I don´t think reducing building costs is necessary then. I´ll add this in the next revision.

• In all games I played with the frisians, the amount of soldiers I could recruit was always limited by the availability of iron and coal. I always had at least as many fur clothes as basic swords, so I don´t consider them that expensive. Making the rookies stronger is a good idea, though. Increasing basic attack by 300 makes them too strong, but 150 seems to be have pretty good results. The chance in % of frisian rookies to win when…

(I am confident I interpreted the tables from einstein´s program correctly )

The changes of soldier stats in the next revision: Health increase +250, attack base +150, attack increase –25

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the seamstress and weaving mill would also fit enough as small buildings, since they don't store that much stuff.

You also asked about tools, which so far are all made with iron and log. So what could be changed

fire tongs: iron

fishing net: fur (many ancient people made ropes from animal tendons, and neither iron nor wood makes sense for this)

needles: get 2 for one iron (they are small, they don't require a full iron)

as tools are made rarely, they don't affect much the balance, and so we can go mostly for flavor with them

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and most building costs have to be strongly reduced. they are just too slow. Even when I made a goood start and didn't run out of anything, half an hour into the game all my land still fits into the screen at normal zoom.

In particular wooden towers are absolutely horrible as expansion buildings. they are expensive (need more time to build) and they conquer little terrain - and you feel the difference between 5 and 6, especially when you go south and you lose another step because of the flag. An awful building for expansion doesn't couple well with a tribe that needs lot of space. In fact, while we could leave the wooden tower as scouting building, I'd say frisians definitely need something like barbarian imperial sentries: fast, inexpensive buildings good to conquer land.

Farms cost 15 resources, against 8 resources for most other tribes. Ok, they may be inexpensive resources - but not really, because bricks cost coal and stones - but they add on building time. it takes some 10-15 minutes to complete one farm. Reindeer farms are even worse, requiring 27 wares. The most expensive buildings (ports, training camps, atlantean castles) require 20, and they need some 15-20 minutes to build. The acqua farm has 20 water, which is fine, as it is a late game building, but it also has 18 other resources.

Now I understand why soldiers were originally so strong: to compensate for all this awful inefficience. But if we made it that way, frisians would be screwed on any small map where they get killed before they have the time to do anything, and they would be invincible in any large map where they have time to make an economy.

So, I suggest keeping the high cost of bricks, but strongly reducing the need for them. New costs I propose, for keeping in line with costs of similar buildings for other tribes

I also propose, still for the purpose of reducing the consumption of large spaces, that acqua farms could be small buildings. The farmer then would proceed to dig vats in the terrain nearby, and those vats would be sort of like reed fields, but permanent until the building is destroied. thhey would be filled with water and used to breed fish. So the fish farm would still require space, but it could be made in rough terrain.

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Yet again another way to reduce the need for medium plots and simplify the economy would be to let the advanced buildings produce the stuff of the basic ones. mead brewery does not produce beer, honey bakery does not produce bread, and large armor smith does not produce low level weapons. one such things can be acceptable, but three are a nuisance, and too crippling on small maps. I'd say, pick one out of three, and for the other two remove the need for the simple building.

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As well as the number of bricks needed to build anytjing there are some problems with ciclular dependancies. My quarry was getting low on stone so I had started builing a mine and had found a new quarry site, both of these need brick to build them but my granite supply ran out before I had enough stone to create bricks. This was made worse as I was at the begining of mine upgrading which meant upgrading a tavern and brewery, both of which needed mor bricks,. I had to turn off the brick storage at all building sites except the quarry and mine then dismantle two wells to reclaim bricks. Once the quarry and mine were working I ran out of coal as there were no rations or meals being made. It took a lot of micro management to get things back on track.

It was made more difficult as I made first contact with an Imperial tribe at the same time. I had a working barracks but no training sites were working, so I had a supply of untrained soldiers. With the current trunk AI soldiers are a bit trigger happy and they were attacking immediatley. While defending against their untrained soldiers I lost about 2 for every 10 of theirs, not what I would call weak. Once they stopped attacking it implied they were not recruiting soldirs and the line of sentries had only one soldier, the blockhouses can only hold one anyway. I advanced my troops, two to every sentry and blockhose, my losses were more like 5 of mine to 10 of theirs, acceptable for the level I think.

Wodeen towers were one of the most useful buildings, they used no brick, and I could leapfrog across their supply lines easily, dismantling as I advanced. By the time I got close to their HQ my training sites were online and I was getting soldiers with one health or one defence at the front line and my loses were dropping to 1 to 20, and the odd loses by me were due to attacking with wounded soldiers.

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