Spartans Highlight the Problem with Culture Being Used for Too Many Things

[Bankipriel]

Local Reforms are just too good---especially for gaining Research on one's capital.

Then, Culture is also the only way to create new towns or integrate pioneer outposts.

*Then*, toss in something like Spartans, which are an otherwise great defensive military National Spirit, except, the only way to get Spartan units is through Culture ability, meaning one has to sacrifice town development and research in order to get it. I can sort of see how that might fit historically with Spartans, but it makes the National Spirit functionally terrible, because 4 Spartans are not worth the production and money from setting up two Tier 2 logging towns, one at each of my first two Regions.

Suggestion 01: please move the create Spartan ability to Warfare; make the cost really, really high if the point is we're only supposed to have a few of them.

Suggestion 02: please just remove Local Reforms from the game. It's not necessary, but it's too good to not use, and it just contributes to one of the game's other main problems, which is tech pacing.

Suggestion 03: please increase tech costs significantly. I read from an official post on here that the devs were aiming for 50 turns per Age, and honestly that seems like it would be pretty great from my experience with the game so far. But the first 5 Ages take between 10 and 25 Turns each to progress through. It's just too fast to even engage with most of the goods and production buildings, because there are so few pops growing in that time span, there isn't even room to build much of anything beyond food, production, and housing before racing through the Age of Kings.

 

[Neil Wilkes]

Some good points very well made above.
There is a LOT of rebalancing required at this point.

 

[Knut Are Mykland]

There are a few things they have to do if they want each age to last 50 turns.
1. they need to remove local reforms.
2. they need to change vassals to only give wealth. ( you can increase the wealth they give if you remove the other benefits)
3. they need to change the inspiration that gives +1 diplomatic xp and knowledge to monasteries.
4. they need to make production to knowledge project even worse then it is now.
5. they need to increase the distance between regions, otherwise people would get really frustrated. well more then now anyway.
6. they should probably play test each patch change before letting it go live.
7. There are many more changes that they need to do, and they might not have the skill or desire to properly balance this game. Many balance flaws were really easy to spot.

The game does need better balance if they want the game to be playable and fun in multiplayer. Currently the game is a fun single player game. The multiplayer solution is quite lackluster and the balance is very bad.

 

[Mnoracle]

I actually think Spartans are great.

You are explicitly selecting between army and other things. And this goes straight to quality vs quantity issues. You won't have huge amount of Spartans like 5-7 max. But they are super effective in the bronze age

If you want almost infinite army choose raiders.