10-06-2025, 06:53 AM
(This post was last modified: 10-06-2025, 07:01 AM by CrystikRage.)
I don't have the time to play an active character these days, so take my words with that caveat in mind, but I really vibed with what Rozen mentioned about history.
E4 very specifically has this strange quirk where change comes far too suddenly without any granularity. Now, making comparisons to the real world is a bit useless in a world where your important figures can throw fireballs, run faster than a modern car, and get thrown through twenty feet of stone with boneshattering force and come out the other side swinging...
But the fact that conquest is no longer a real thing is kind of... Strange, if you think about it. Cities were rarely, truly, /burned/, they were important. Decades went into their construction, the labor of thousands and thousands of people, ridiculous amounts of resources and money. Why in gods name would you /destroy/ that? No, you took it over, because the average person living there had their own problems to deal with and rarely gave the slightest fuck about who was actually in charge of them. King X or Queen Y, it didn't matter, they still had to drag their ass out of bed every morning before the sun rose to bake bread. And in older iterations, or at least E1 and E3, this was a thing. You took over a static city if you wanted power, you didn't get together a handful of friends and suddenly shit out a settlement with hundreds if not thousands of people on some random patch of land with no real strategic importance or viability.
And besides that, there is no real system for granularity in conquest/destruction. Yes, you need to have multiple raids of 'build-up' before you can go for the knockout blow, but it never really... Feels that way. You don't see or feel any kind of change to a settlement because it's been getting hammered in battle after battle. Buildings aren't gradually damaged and destroyed, people don't become less prevalent (NPCs can't be less common if they don't exist), farmland doesn't get turned to ash... You fight out in the middle of the woods on a separate map, return and then if you lose, congrats, the city is just poof, gone, Thanos snapped to dust.
I'm not entirely sure how to go about this. Maybe you can reduce settlement sizes, turn buildings outside the reduced radius into ruins? I don't know, while I fully agree that change and death are both healthy and necessary for the game, it's too sudden without any kind of granularity, and change means quite literally 'burn it down to the foundation and then piss on the ashes because I have my own cool city over here, why would I want to control that one too'.
E4 very specifically has this strange quirk where change comes far too suddenly without any granularity. Now, making comparisons to the real world is a bit useless in a world where your important figures can throw fireballs, run faster than a modern car, and get thrown through twenty feet of stone with boneshattering force and come out the other side swinging...
But the fact that conquest is no longer a real thing is kind of... Strange, if you think about it. Cities were rarely, truly, /burned/, they were important. Decades went into their construction, the labor of thousands and thousands of people, ridiculous amounts of resources and money. Why in gods name would you /destroy/ that? No, you took it over, because the average person living there had their own problems to deal with and rarely gave the slightest fuck about who was actually in charge of them. King X or Queen Y, it didn't matter, they still had to drag their ass out of bed every morning before the sun rose to bake bread. And in older iterations, or at least E1 and E3, this was a thing. You took over a static city if you wanted power, you didn't get together a handful of friends and suddenly shit out a settlement with hundreds if not thousands of people on some random patch of land with no real strategic importance or viability.
And besides that, there is no real system for granularity in conquest/destruction. Yes, you need to have multiple raids of 'build-up' before you can go for the knockout blow, but it never really... Feels that way. You don't see or feel any kind of change to a settlement because it's been getting hammered in battle after battle. Buildings aren't gradually damaged and destroyed, people don't become less prevalent (NPCs can't be less common if they don't exist), farmland doesn't get turned to ash... You fight out in the middle of the woods on a separate map, return and then if you lose, congrats, the city is just poof, gone, Thanos snapped to dust.
I'm not entirely sure how to go about this. Maybe you can reduce settlement sizes, turn buildings outside the reduced radius into ruins? I don't know, while I fully agree that change and death are both healthy and necessary for the game, it's too sudden without any kind of granularity, and change means quite literally 'burn it down to the foundation and then piss on the ashes because I have my own cool city over here, why would I want to control that one too'.