Ports in Minor Settlements

Dutchbannger

Troy and warhammer are insanely similar, so as such I use a lot of the same "tactics" you could say. One of which is making sure all minor settlements have walls- however the difference here is that instead of walls you only get a garrison building. With so few spots to build that means in every minor settlement I have the only 2 resource buildings that don't give you negatives and the garrison building. When I have a minor settlement with a port however I am forced into losing a slot for absolutely no gain. Unlike warhammer the port isn't a magical trade and money maker and unlike 3k the port doesn't get me food from fishing. I am forced into giving up one of my resources because of an arbitrary forced port.

I think two possible solutions to this would be 1 make ports not take up a building. Simply put if your settlement is coastal you can just leave if sieged allowing a useful slot. If that seems like too much of a freebie (it really isn't) then perhaps make the actual forced port have more worth. Ports were amazing commodities in WH and 3K so it's a real shame that in Troy I "ugh" every time I get a settlement.

That's the meat and potatoes of my post but as a sub post I would like to address the extremely bare bones options when building settlements. There's no thought that goes into this at all it's honestly extremely disappointing. Every minor settlement is a clone of the same buildings everywhere and in turn if I don't want to make somewhere a military outpost for recruitment then even the major settlements all become clones of influence and happiness boosts so i can add more watch towers. I would really like to see more be done with this building system because as of now the game is all battles and watching agent spam in between turns. I like having to think on the campaign map as well as in battle.

MrCanister

Well it isn't absolutely "no gain" with the bit of food, growth and resource percentage boost, I don't have that comparison what kind of a beast they are in Warhammer though (haven't played). But in terms of what they give you, they seem balanced ok compared to the other buildings.

I also feel like I'm not really making any substantial choices in terms of town development - besides the recruitment city, cities are indeed pretty much clones of each other, only with the occasional unique building to spice it up a tiny bit, but there's also not much a of a choice there. Minor settlements actually get a bit more varied for me depending on the local influence and how exposed they are, but it still comes down to a few template builds as well.

Dutchbannger

MrCanister said:

Well it isn't absolutely "no gain" with the bit of food, growth and resource percentage boost, I don't have that comparison what kind of a beast they are in Warhammer though (haven't played). But in terms of what they give you, they seem balanced ok compared to the other buildings.

I also feel like I'm not really making any substantial choices in terms of town development - besides the recruitment city, cities are indeed pretty much clones of each other, only with the occasional unique building to spice it up a tiny bit, but there's also not much a of a choice there. Minor settlements actually get a bit more varied for me depending on the local influence and how exposed they are, but it still comes down to a few template builds as well.

You're right I went into my hyperbole without saying what they do actually give you. A better way to phrase it would be that what the port is providing me isn't of equal value when compared to what I could be using that slot for (More growth is always nice but it's the one resource that also becomes obsolete funnily enough)

MrCanister

From a gameplay perspective, I don't think you should be forced to have a port if you don't want to.
From a technical perspective, maybe the port slot is too baked into those settlements (like when you take a razed settlement, the port ruin is already there, more like a main building rather than a regular building slot). But that's probably pointless for us to think about unless it's for some modding intentions.

Dutchbannger

Yeah just food for thought at this point- I wonder which would be easier to mod- making port cities as opposed to cities with built in ports (ie the main building has the anchor logo and provides the same bonuses but still allows 3 slots for the player to fill) or adding another resource called fish to replace the food income from ports and splitting "food" the resource into fish and grain. You know what I'm going to far maybe just double the food income or something to represent fishing ports haha.

MrCanister

Ackchyually, if ports are supposed to represent trade, maybe just a change in the modifiers could give it more of that flavor and give them some kind of a more interesting progression - if their effectiveness was somehow related to their total count factionwide (or even including allies? wow wow wee waa), it could turn them from just a combination of several other buildings in weaker form to a more unique system.
So if you only have a handful of port settlements, you're not sprawled out enough to "need" ports, and as you expand, maritime transport and trade gets a lot more valuable/profitable.

Now obviously it could become a real pain to balance what the actual bonuses should be and what kind of progression the stacking should have - something something exponential something OP...but just the idea of looking at ports as a faction-wide network instead of just another building that only affects the province in isolation might be a way of making them stand out more without having to revamp entire game systems.

chainsawdd#9659

First of all, you don't need to build garrison building for every minor settlement. If you do build the garrsion, of course it should have some penalty on your economy.

Pi2rEpsilon

TLDR of this long post:

Ports: Learn to love them.
Garrisons: Learn not to use them.

You'll play the better for learning these lessons.

---

Garrisons, and why you shouldn't use them:


Neither in Warhammer nor in Troy is it a good idea to build garrison buildings in all minor settlements. It is a bad strategy in Warhammer, though one that can be useful for newbies to strategy games and can cut down on the annoyance in the Vortex campaign of WH2 - neither of which makes it a good strategy, but at least makes it an understandable choice, but it is a truly awful one in Troy where the balance is all in favour of field armies.

The rational approach in both games is to build them only in the provinces where they are absolutely necessary, which they mostly aren't so long as the player keeps expanding aggressively, and then tearing them down the moment the front has pushed past them and they aren't necessary any longer.

In Troy they are next to useless on the mainland since a) garrisons are weak, b) the AI will easily overrun a garrisoned minor settlement in one turn with a full stack, and c) distances are short, so having stacks team up to attack settlements if necessary is something even the AI finds easy, so long as it has the stacks.

On the mainland, the primary use of a garrison is supporting a field army defending the settlement, and frankly, if you get bogged down in fortifying your own settlements and keeping one or more field armies back to defend them, you slow down your expansion enormously which is not good for your long-term prospects.

They do have a role on islands that are near the front line where you don't have roaming fleets nearby to defend, as in the island hopping race the enemy will often have fleets that aren't full stacks, often only 10-15 sized, sailing around due to casualties, and such AI stacks will often be discouraged from attacking by a garrison.

But in general, spend your resources on expanding instead of fortifying and you'll do much the better for it. Don't hunker down! ATTACK!

---


Ports, and why you should love them:


With respect to resource generation, ports are, for lack of a better word, awesome.

1. They provide decent food - early, mid, or late-game, food is always useful, and maxing out at 160 base means they have significant impact (in practice from the mid-game and onwards that is 260 base per T3 and 160 from T1, because you get another 100 base food production from Poseidon T2 (added as faction food unaffected by resource% bonuses) which you should always have active once you start using seers to keep gods happy since the combination of Poseidon's extra food and extra battle loot is extremely valuable from a strategic perspective - as soon as you send Poseidon to 650, you have 35 turns before you need to concern yourself about his favour again... so, yea, you'll always keep him T2 happy after the early game unless you choose to roleplay as an atheist or for other reason choose to handicap yourself by not engaging fully in the religious aspect of the game).
   
2. They provide a resource bonus to all resources produced in every region in the province, which is of significant magnitude
   
3. They provide growth, up to 35 at T3, helping you to be able to have resource provinces growing at a reasonable speed while using one or two of the "-70 growth/high resources/cheap building cost" buildings in the province

But 260 base food at T3, +35 growth, +7% provincial resources doesn't sound like much...

It doesn't? Look at the 5 different food buildings for food provinces when maximized:

790 Large Apokia at high influence only, 310 otherwise... costs thousands of wood and stone and hundreds of gold
310 Farmland at high influence only, 140 otherwise
300 Hunter's Lodge, dirt cheap, hurts growth, dirt cheap
200 Granary, low influence provinces only! but really nice growth to compensate
0 Marble Agora, 20% provincial resources and +1% faction food

Even when taking into consideration that 100 of the 260 food from the port is unaffected by resource% bonuses, this is a good deal.

A Port when paired with Poseidon T2 gives any region that isn't a food region already a food settlement that is competitive in production with every food building in the game except the very best (high production at high influence/high cost), and with a cost that is competitive with every food building in the game except the very cheapest (high production with negative growth/low cost).

And a port in a food region?

If it is a high influence region, it makes a good complement to Farmland + Hunter's Lodge in the early game, and Farmland+ Large Apoika in the late.

It if is a low influence region, it makes a good complement to Granary + Hunter's Lodge in the early game, and Hunter's Lodge + (Marble Agora or Granary), with the choice depending on whether 3 or 4 settlement region as well as the total base food production in the late game.



I don't like hurting growth, waah:

You only need a single high tier province in the early/mid game, your main army recruitment center where you gain access to high tier units. Any other province where you'd like to pick up quick reinforcements can do with T1-T3 buildings to give you some chaff to fill up armies and sacrifice - that works well regardless of whether you fight battles manually or autoresolve. All other provinces should be devoted to resource production, and in those, beyond reaching tier 2 to gain access to all building slots in each settlement, growth just isn't that important compared to making resource investments that pay off quickly.

Mid/late game you'll slowly transition out of the -70 growth buildings in some resource provinces - those with high influence - as you have resource surpluses and nothing better to spend them on, but don't hurry up to do so under any circumstance. They pay off very, very, quickly and smart use of them is essential to rapidly expanding your resource base in the early game where you want most of your resource provinces to be tier 2 with cheap resource buildings that pay off quickly while you keep conquering new provinces to build up as resource provinces, because upgrading resource provinces to tier 3 to build tier 3 resource buildings that pay off dozens of turns down the road is a mistake in the early game unless doing it in a single high-influence province with good resources where you stack 3 envoys skilled for resource production. Better to go T2, get great bang for the buck with T1 and T2 buildings, and only slowly grow to T3 for he main settlements resource/growth bonus while still ignoring T3 resource buildings until you really don't have anything better to spend resources on.

Together with the 5 different resource building types for each good (which each has a time to shine), ports are an essential part of a well run Troy economy.

The best provinces in the game for overall resource production are those with 4 settlements that all have ports. Nothing else comes close, though specialized provinces without ports can be better at individual types of production. Ports provide good value in the early game even though you won't be upgrading the ports to tiers 2 or 3 until you've got a substantial wood production, and awesome food production plus great production of other resources in the late game, where food production, and to a lesser degree bronze and gold production, are what matters most.

Granted, only Odysseus can do something like this:


with 12854 total resource production in a single province in turn 48 by not only stacking envoys like everybody can do, but also using his special capital-only buildings, but everybody gets great resources out of provinces with lots of ports too, envoys or no.

bli-nk#6314

I haven't understood why Ports are a secondary building anyway? Settlements with Ports should have their main building chain BE the port- dedicating a separate slot to Port seems really weird and unnecessary. There could be military building or trade buildings that can only be built in Port settlement but why reduce a building slot?

Ports were basically almost anywhere with a coast but this is especially true in Greece and Aegean in this era where ships were simply pulled up onto the beach. The Port settlements should reflect the really important harbors and trade hubs of the ancient world; Delos, Rhodes, Appolonia, Piraeus/Phaleron, Pylos, Erana, etc.

kelalatir

In my two playthroughs so far, I've found garrisons essential to counteract the deficiencies of the supply line mechanic. Since the game punishes recruiting more heroes, and every mobile army requires a hero, I cannot afford to have any defensive armies. To counteract AI bonuses, especially on harder difficulties, every hero I deploy must have a full stack of troops, and with that much investment, I need that hero on the front lines.

Because of the supply lines mechanic limits on heroes and my rapidly expanding territory, my settlements will be attacked without army reinforcement. There is no way to prevent it. Some players refer to this as the "whack-a-mole" mechanic. If the enemy has a full stack, a garrison in a minor settlement won't do any good. However, I've noticed the AI often sends out armies between 6 and 15 units. If I have a garrison, and if I fight the battle manually, I have about a 90% success rate of repelling non-full stack enemies from minor settlements. The secret here is the new checkpoint maps, and understanding flanking and rear attack advantages. As long as a really high level enemy hero doesn't make an appearance, most of these battles are satisfying victories where the enemies are sent packing.

I find that repelling the attacks and keeping the settlements far preferable to building more resource buildings and watching the settlements be sacked, razed, or captured. Eventually, if a province moves far enough from the front lines, I'll convert the garrison building back to resources. However, the nature of island hopping and the open map makes "far from the front lines" mostly not relevant. Especially if your antagonist targets your weaker settlements. Garrison buildings mean I get fewer resources, but I can count on keeping those resources. Not having garrisons means more resources, but higher risk of losing them to enemy action.

Dutchbannger

MrCanister said:

Ackchyually, if ports are supposed to represent trade, maybe just a change in the modifiers could give it more of that flavor and give them some kind of a more interesting progression - if their effectiveness was somehow related to their total count factionwide (or even including allies? wow wow wee waa), it could turn them from just a combination of several other buildings in weaker form to a more unique system.
So if you only have a handful of port settlements, you're not sprawled out enough to "need" ports, and as you expand, maritime transport and trade gets a lot more valuable/profitable.

Now obviously it could become a real pain to balance what the actual bonuses should be and what kind of progression the stacking should have - something something exponential something OP...but just the idea of looking at ports as a faction-wide network instead of just another building that only affects the province in isolation might be a way of making them stand out more without having to revamp entire game systems.

Huh very interesting I really like this concept of exponential growth. Great post dude.

Dutchbannger

Pi2rEpsilon said:

TLDR of this long post:

Ports: Learn to love them.
Garrisons: Learn not to use them.

You'll play the better for learning these lessons.

---

Garrisons, and why you shouldn't use them:


Neither in Warhammer nor in Troy is it a good idea to build garrison buildings in all minor settlements. It is a bad strategy in Warhammer, though one that can be useful for newbies to strategy games and can cut down on the annoyance in the Vortex campaign of WH2 - neither of which makes it a good strategy, but at least makes it an understandable choice, but it is a truly awful one in Troy where the balance is all in favour of field armies.

The rational approach in both games is to build them only in the provinces where they are absolutely necessary, which they mostly aren't so long as the player keeps expanding aggressively, and then tearing them down the moment the front has pushed past them and they aren't necessary any longer.

In Troy they are next to useless on the mainland since a) garrisons are weak, b) the AI will easily overrun a garrisoned minor settlement in one turn with a full stack, and c) distances are short, so having stacks team up to attack settlements if necessary is something even the AI finds easy, so long as it has the stacks.

On the mainland, the primary use of a garrison is supporting a field army defending the settlement, and frankly, if you get bogged down in fortifying your own settlements and keeping one or more field armies back to defend them, you slow down your expansion enormously which is not good for your long-term prospects.

They do have a role on islands that are near the front line where you don't have roaming fleets nearby to defend, as in the island hopping race the enemy will often have fleets that aren't full stacks, often only 10-15 sized, sailing around due to casualties, and such AI stacks will often be discouraged from attacking by a garrison.

But in general, spend your resources on expanding instead of fortifying and you'll do much the better for it. Don't hunker down! ATTACK!

---


Ports, and why you should love them:


With respect to resource generation, ports are, for lack of a better word, awesome.

1. They provide decent food - early, mid, or late-game, food is always useful, and maxing out at 160 base means they have significant impact (in practice from the mid-game and onwards that is 260 base per T3 and 160 from T1, because you get another 100 base food production from Poseidon T2 (added as faction food unaffected by resource% bonuses) which you should always have active once you start using seers to keep gods happy since the combination of Poseidon's extra food and extra battle loot is extremely valuable from a strategic perspective - as soon as you send Poseidon to 650, you have 35 turns before you need to concern yourself about his favour again... so, yea, you'll always keep him T2 happy after the early game unless you choose to roleplay as an atheist or for other reason choose to handicap yourself by not engaging fully in the religious aspect of the game).
   
2. They provide a resource bonus to all resources produced in every region in the province, which is of significant magnitude
   
3. They provide growth, up to 35 at T3, helping you to be able to have resource provinces growing at a reasonable speed while using one or two of the "-70 growth/high resources/cheap building cost" buildings in the province

But 260 base food at T3, +35 growth, +7% provincial resources doesn't sound like much...

It doesn't? Look at the 5 different food buildings for food provinces when maximized:

790 Large Apokia at high influence only, 310 otherwise... costs thousands of wood and stone and hundreds of gold
310 Farmland at high influence only, 140 otherwise
300 Hunter's Lodge, dirt cheap, hurts growth, dirt cheap
200 Granary, low influence provinces only! but really nice growth to compensate
0 Marble Agora, 20% provincial resources and +1% faction food

Even when taking into consideration that 100 of the 260 food from the port is unaffected by resource% bonuses, this is a good deal.

A Port when paired with Poseidon T2 gives any region that isn't a food region already a food settlement that is competitive in production with every food building in the game except the very best (high production at high influence/high cost), and with a cost that is competitive with every food building in the game except the very cheapest (high production with negative growth/low cost).

And a port in a food region?

If it is a high influence region, it makes a good complement to Farmland + Hunter's Lodge in the early game, and Farmland+ Large Apoika in the late.

It if is a low influence region, it makes a good complement to Granary + Hunter's Lodge in the early game, and Hunter's Lodge + (Marble Agora or Granary), with the choice depending on whether 3 or 4 settlement region as well as the total base food production in the late game.



I don't like hurting growth, waah:

You only need a single high tier province in the early/mid game, your main army recruitment center where you gain access to high tier units. Any other province where you'd like to pick up quick reinforcements can do with T1-T3 buildings to give you some chaff to fill up armies and sacrifice - that works well regardless of whether you fight battles manually or autoresolve. All other provinces should be devoted to resource production, and in those, beyond reaching tier 2 to gain access to all building slots in each settlement, growth just isn't that important compared to making resource investments that pay off quickly.

Mid/late game you'll slowly transition out of the -70 growth buildings in some resource provinces - those with high influence - as you have resource surpluses and nothing better to spend them on, but don't hurry up to do so under any circumstance. They pay off very, very, quickly and smart use of them is essential to rapidly expanding your resource base in the early game where you want most of your resource provinces to be tier 2 with cheap resource buildings that pay off quickly while you keep conquering new provinces to build up as resource provinces, because upgrading resource provinces to tier 3 to build tier 3 resource buildings that pay off dozens of turns down the road is a mistake in the early game unless doing it in a single high-influence province with good resources where you stack 3 envoys skilled for resource production. Better to go T2, get great bang for the buck with T1 and T2 buildings, and only slowly grow to T3 for he main settlements resource/growth bonus while still ignoring T3 resource buildings until you really don't have anything better to spend resources on.

Together with the 5 different resource building types for each good (which each has a time to shine), ports are an essential part of a well run Troy economy.

The best provinces in the game for overall resource production are those with 4 settlements that all have ports. Nothing else comes close, though specialized provinces without ports can be better at individual types of production. Ports provide good value in the early game even though you won't be upgrading the ports to tiers 2 or 3 until you've got a substantial wood production, and awesome food production plus great production of other resources in the late game, where food production, and to a lesser degree bronze and gold production, are what matters most.

Granted, only Odysseus can do something like this:


with 12854 total resource production in a single province in turn 48 by not only stacking envoys like everybody can do, but also using his special capital-only buildings, but everybody gets great resources out of provinces with lots of ports too, envoys or no.

I certainly appreciate the effort you put into this post and I feel like this could be good advice for some but it isn't really that relevant to what is being discussed here. I am having absolutely 0 problems expanding nor gathering resources. I'm fielding three armies and could field 4, have so much land that I trade it to get allies to join wars or give me quick resources for a settlement. The pillars of Archeans own the entirey of the west and are assaulting the eastern front en mass with me. My post is just about would port settlements be better as tied into the primary building slot or should they at least add something else to make them feel more substantial. I must say good work on pulling numbers but as someone who makes influence a priority and only builds the top two producers with said influence bonus the port which doesn't recieve said bonus most certainly feels lack luster.

I love growth and maximize it until all buildings are top teir and then blow up any growth type building after that so one of the main bonuses of this port being perma growth that becomes obsolete is another knock on it to me.

To reiterate, I'm not struggling and blaming ports nor am I a noob who is making mistakes. I agree that once you have no more enemies or friends that would betray you it becomes less needed but say we're all over on the eastern flank taking paris and hectors land post amazons being wiped out and hector/ paris are sending troops over the sea to our home lands. This is very common in my campaign and I have no problems defending my minor settlements from 20 stacks only if I have the garrison building maxed out (depending on enemy composition of course).

What I've put up for discussing here is what I find to be poor implementation of ports because they are certainly not essential to a troy economy in my experience and instead make me wish that what they do currently offer was tied into said settlement instead of taking a building slot under it or just making more useful late game. Ports are great at the start of a campaign.

Then going into my secondary point, simply having more buildings to choose from like adding the purple line would do a lot for making minor settlements feel less shallow by making us have to pick and chose what we want settlements to be. The ports, imo, are hurting an already very weak city management in troy.

>"Together with the 5 different resource building types for each good (which each has a time to shine), ports are an essential part of a well run Troy economy.

The best provinces in the game for overall resource production are those with 4 settlements that all have ports. Nothing else comes close"<
I mean that is such a niche of getting and even then I can't see how that's really relevant to the idea of their implementation. I like that you're finding them useful but from that screen grab you're playing as odyssues who obviously will value ports more but would value them even more if they were the main building as he too suffers from the same issues of what is essentially non influence buffable food that is a measly amount, growth that becomes obsolete, and one less slot that could go to something else - with our current options the three best would probably be either garrison building, watch tower building, or the negative growth building.

It certainly isn't an issue that changes how I'm playing the game or an issue that well it's really not an "issue" at all, I just feel like it could be better than it's current implementation. Even in your screen shot you could most certainly put better buildings in those port spaces if given more options or if the ports were tied into the main building.

Dutchbannger

kelalatir said:

In my two playthroughs so far, I've found garrisons essential to counteract the deficiencies of the supply line mechanic. Since the game punishes recruiting more heroes, and every mobile army requires a hero, I cannot afford to have any defensive armies. To counteract AI bonuses, especially on harder difficulties, every hero I deploy must have a full stack of troops, and with that much investment, I need that hero on the front lines.

Because of the supply lines mechanic limits on heroes and my rapidly expanding territory, my settlements will be attacked without army reinforcement. There is no way to prevent it. Some players refer to this as the "whack-a-mole" mechanic. If the enemy has a full stack, a garrison in a minor settlement won't do any good. However, I've noticed the AI often sends out armies between 6 and 15 units. If I have a garrison, and if I fight the battle manually, I have about a 90% success rate of repelling non-full stack enemies from minor settlements. The secret here is the new checkpoint maps, and understanding flanking and rear attack advantages. As long as a really high level enemy hero doesn't make an appearance, most of these battles are satisfying victories where the enemies are sent packing.

I find that repelling the attacks and keeping the settlements far preferable to building more resource buildings and watching the settlements be sacked, razed, or captured. Eventually, if a province moves far enough from the front lines, I'll convert the garrison building back to resources. However, the nature of island hopping and the open map makes "far from the front lines" mostly not relevant. Especially if your antagonist targets your weaker settlements. Garrison buildings mean I get fewer resources, but I can count on keeping those resources. Not having garrisons means more resources, but higher risk of losing them to enemy action.

Very well said, this has been identical to my experience as well. Even when pushing through an enemy will build a stack and cross the sea to hit my home province. If they were to take that whilst we all remain on the attack, I would have to pull a high value army away from the under developed cities im taking in enemy terriory leaving them undefended to fly back home whilst that enemy army casually melts through all my non garrisoned settlements. Only the safest of places do I not add the building or if its something I'm gonna trade.

Dutchbannger

chainsawdd said:

First of all, you don't need to build garrison building for every minor settlement. If you do build the garrsion, of course it should have some penalty on your economy.

Yes that is a true statement but look at the other comments here and full OP to see that this is a really rudimentary answer and not really what is being discussed. Your statement simply says the garrison should have up keep. Which while true isn't contributing very much to this discussion.

xomitsious#2247

Dutchbannger said:

chainsawdd said:

First of all, you don't need to build garrison building for every minor settlement. If you do build the garrsion, of course it should have some penalty on your economy.

That doesn't have anything to do with this post...

Maybe I'm misunderstanding your post, but it seems to read as a complain because ports take up a slot, and don't let you build your 2 (high influence) resource buildings plus a garrisson.

Pi2rEpsilon goes to extreme lengths to show you that ports in Troy are actually valuable. That has to do with your following statement in the op "Unlike warhammer the port isn't a magical trade and money maker and unlike 3k the port doesn't get me food from fishing. I am forced into giving up one of my resources because of an arbitrary forced port.", yet you dismiss his post as irrellevant to the topic.

Are you looking to have a discussion, or do you just want people to agree with you? Many people (including me) think that ports are more important than garrissons. But I guess that's irrelevant too.

The comment above that you also dismiss, simply points out that improving defense, sacrifices improving economy. Gives player a choice and more choices = more interesting game.

What discussion exactly are you looking for? How to include ports in the game without them taking up a building slot?

Dutchbannger

@xomitsious I'm actually really glad you posted this, I must be loosing it because when I responded to chainawdd I could have sworn it said PO and not economy - I agree that these things should indeed affect economy as you have to pay for those troops as you would an army however logistically it's easier so they shouldn't be equivalent cost of a marching army

And I liked the in depth post of Epsilon but what I didn't like was the notion that I'm playing the game worse than him because of my use of garrisons and dislike of port implementation. I have found garrisons invaluable in terms of the benefit they provide me for being able to actually defend my land. Without the garrison building even a 12 card army just takes a settlement, it's like there isn't a garrison at all until you get the building.

You're right in saying my issue stems from grabbing ports and then having to decide what I give up and seeing as I love these garrisons I give up one of my resource buildings and feel like the port doesn't do too much for me vs what the other option would have done.

But ultimately the issue I think could be alleviated if we were allowed more building options over all as I feel most settlements are mostly clones of eachother unless there is a special building and so when the port stumbling block comes up it feels like the campaign equivalent of boosting the AI stats at harder difficulties. Im already so limited in what I build that no thought goes into it and then instead of the port being the main building of the settlement it takes a slot and limits me even further.

So it's not so much I'm unwilling to hear from those who like ports and to me epsilons post using words like noob, you'd be better off, imitating a cry with waaah. These were all things that turned me off from what he had to say however if you look I did respond back to him citing things to respond to as I did.

My statement back to him was basically that great you're playing as Odysseus who is locked into ports and you need them for your economy which in that regard the statement they're needed for a good economy in troy is true. As any other faction it simply isn't true that they are needed. On top of that Odysseus too would benefit from having the port as the main building in the settlement and not in a slot just as much if not more than everyone else.

My responses to him are exactly a discussion so I'm confused why you're saying I'm just rejecting what he said. I'm responding to it with my view point of the issues.

Again it's not like I'm suffering with things the way they are but I think the way this is set up in the game could be better and that's the reason i posted this, not because I'm crying about not being able to overcome the challenge of ports.

xomitsious#2247

Thanks for you reply.

In regard to chainsawdd's comment, I think he meant you are sacrificing an economy building (such as a port or resource building) to get the garrisson, not that garrissons should cost upkeep.

I think it's a matter of playstyle, like you said. Some people prefer feeling more secure, some want a stronger economy. There is no right or wrong way to play this game as long as you have fun.

Me, I rarely build garrissons. If I conquer a settlement near the front lines and it has a garrisson already built, I'll keep it for a while and demolish it later after I push further.

This also means, I occasionally get a settlement, sacked, razed or taken over by the AI, but it happens late into the game and it's just a minor annoyance to go get it back.

Pi2rEpsilon

Dutchbannger said:

And I liked the in depth post of Epsilon but what I didn't like was the notion that I'm playing the game worse than him because of my use of garrisons and dislike of port implementation. I have found garrisons invaluable in terms of the benefit they provide me for being able to actually defend my land. Without the garrison building even a 12 card army just takes a settlement, it's like there isn't a garrison at all until you get the building.

If you want to be fair to me here, consider this: If you actually played the game the game you wrote in the OP, building garrisons in all minor settlements (i.e. no matter how exposed to enemy attacks they are), and not knowing or choosing to ignore that you got food from ports (your complaint that you neither got money like in Warhammer nor food like in 3K, and that as a consequence you had to give up one of your resources for a port), then almost per definition you are playing the game worse than somebody who a) uses garrisons where it actually helps him (and only there ) and b) doesn't ignore the advantages of ports such as them providing food (and growth and bonus resource%, getting all four slots unlocked already at tier 2 rather than tier 3, sea access, and, for completeness sake, increased line of sight) in addition to their sole disadvantage (fixed building in slot reducing your choice of building options)

My post advising you to limit garrisons and love ports addressed these shortcomings by providing clarity about the effects of ports and deficiencies of garrisons.

And that is important. At least I consider it so.

If you want to have any sort of rational discussion of alternative way of implementing ports and/or whether such would be beneficial to the game in the first place, understanding how they currently work and what the pros and cons of it are is necessary; It is certainly possible that you do, but your opening post showed no such knowledge and that is what I responded to.

Dutchbannger said:

So it's not so much I'm unwilling to hear from those who like ports and to me epsilons post using words like noob, you'd be better off, imitating a cry with waaah. These were all things that turned me off from what he had to say however if you look I did respond back to him citing things to respond to as I did.

I did not use the word noob. I did imitate a cry with "waaa" in the section about hurting growth and regret it.

I chose at the time not to respond, because you managed - as I saw it - to extract the non-essential parts of my post and focus on those in your reply (e.g. your focusing on my one screenshot being with Odysseus to ignore my general points that have nothing to do with the Ithaca faction, your replying to my statement about 4 province settlements with ports being best resource provinces to point out how that specific case is a niche irrelevant to the discussion rather than seeing it as what I intended the statement to be, namely the application of my general argument that "ports are great for the resource production that matters" to showcase that based on all the previously said, this is what I would consider an ideal.

Since you further made clear our differences in playing by talking about how you were fielding three armies and could field four while you were attacking the east with your allies after uniting the west, rather than the 5 or 6 armies I would expect from my own way of playing, and as you communicated that you focus on maximizing settlement growth and building tier growth to tier 3 to get high tier resource provinces with high tier buildings quickly rather than focusing on your economic growth by maximizing ROI as I do, this strongly suggested to me that we were talking past each other based on our greatly different playing experiences, and that the outcome of further discussion would likely annoy both of us and be ultimately fruitless.


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With regards to garrisons, I quite agree that small armies will overrun unfortified settlements. The AI only attacks them in the first place if it is pretty certain it will win, and mostly it will.

It is a perfectly valid playing style to use lots of garrisons to feel safe, or if one hates losing the occasional settlement, or because one likes to turtle, or for any other number of reasons. But that does not mean they should not be evaluated rationally based on their benefits and the significant opportunity cost of using them rather than other buildings, if one wants to use them as an argument for how other game mechanics should change.

Given that you can see every turn the movement range of enemy armies you know of, and given that no army can move far on land and attack in the same turn, deep strikes inside your perimeter by AI armies should be rare and whether your settlements get attacked by enemy armies in the first place are to a large degree a matter of your choice of strategy.

No strategy will prevent your settlements from occasionally being attacked, but playing it defensively is close to being a self-fulfilling prophecy in that respect.

Spending resources on garrisons rather than economic growth leads to fewer armies and slower expansion, which leads to being attacked and having settlements threatened more often because you aren't advancing and eliminating the enemy armies before they become a threat to your established settlements.

That's just how it is. It doesn't mean that an offensive playing style such as I advocate is objectively better or more enjoyable. The only thing it is pretty much guaranteed to be is faster.


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But I'll stick by garrisons everywhere being a bad strategy in both Warhammer and in Troy for anybody but turtle fetishists.

Likewise I'll keep insisting that focusing on *economic* growth over *settlement and building tier growth* for resource provinces is the stronger play strategically, and that that means investing in settlement and building upgrades based on their ROI and slowing (but not eliminating) growth at T2 by using one or two cheap -growth buildings in a province (2 in larger provinces with more ports or more farm settlements) unless one is expanding so slowly that one does not have a steady influx of new provinces to develop or are building a single extremely high production province by stacking envoys. High tier settlement and resource buildings take dozens of turn to pay off, so rushing them is an inefficient use of resources if one has other options with higher ROI.