Hi Guys,
I would like to share my thoughts and ask for your opinions on the usefulness of the bonuses that the temples provide. Obviously, I’ve checked only a handful of factions so I might be wrong in some aspects.
Overview
- Temples don’t change culture of the province, unlike what one may expect after having played vanilla M2TW or certain other mods. The main benefit of the temples is, as usual, better public order complemented by other side-benefits.
- Public order bonuses are the same for all types of temples at all levels. They don’t increase at each level but only three times: 5% for village, 10% for town and large town, 15% for city and large city.
- These bonuses concern Happiness, with the exception is the Governors type temples where it's replaced by Law (clearly superior bonus, combating also corruption).
- Only one temple can be build in a settlement so the player cannot have all the benefits in one settlement.
- Temples incur maintenance costs so it’s better not to build a (higher level) of a temple if the public order is good (what may happen eg. in a home province). All city-level temples (lvl 4 and 5) give also -1 trade malus.
- The benefits and availability of the temples may vary from faction to faction. Eg. for Pritanoi all the benefits of the Fertility and Farm temples are identical (what may stem from the fact that they don't have access to lvl 5 level), Pritanoi don’t have Fun and Governors types; Hayasdan doesn’t have Farm type but does the other five.
Bonuses and their usefulness
- Governors: the Construction Time bonus – this bonus doesn’t matter in practice as most of the buildings have comparatively short building times (eg. the higher level of mines in EBII it's 12 turns, while in the EBI it was 40 turns). However, the law bonus is a great one, much superior to the happiness provided by the other temples.
- Battle: the unit Experience bonus is quite useful even if – due to the low battle losses – the player recruits new units rather rarely. An option is to have city with this temple so that the new units recruited elsewhere come and re-retrain to get that additional chevron. This might be costly though.
- Forge: the unit Retraining Cost bonus: if the player does re-train, this is an attractive option. If the player follows a limited-retraining rule (as I do, see here) then it’s rather useless.
- Fertility: the Population growth bonus is very useful given vera scarce pop growth bonuses from other sources (what is different from the mods like SSHIP, see here). This might be the optimal choice for the players with the “builder spirit”, ie those trying to get the cities as big as possible.
- Farm: is very similar to the Fertility temple as it gives same population growth bonuses up to lvl4. At lvl5 it offers an agricultural income instead of the additional +0.5 population growth. Given that it’s a flat sum of money (what translates in the lower percentage of income as the settlemet gets bigger), and that the pop growth bonuses are very scarce and provide for higher population, this type of temple is inferior to the Fertility one. (mind that this conclusion doesn’t hold for factions with only 4 levels of temples – in this case Farm and Fertility temples seem to provide similar bonuses).
- Fun: half the (own) maintenance cost for each level, but there’s a swap between happiness and law bonuses (eg. the highest level is +25% happiness but -10% law). I think the costs are unlikely to make up for the downsides of having less law, therefore this is a kind of useless temple, imo.
Overall assessment
- The similar happiness bonus for all types of temples might be a good choice for the gameplay. However, the bonuses seem rather small to me. The temples were essential for public cohesion in the antiquity and I think they should be more important. Furthermore, more variety gives more choice for the player - and the game is about making choices. So I'd also be in favour of diversification of happiness bonuses, mixing them with law etc. More choice is better.
- At first glance, for the reasons of historicity, I was very positive on the idea of the temples not providing for the cultural change. However, after the second thought I think that they should provide for a small change over time (even though it cannot be compared to the impact of hegemonic religions in Late Antiquity).
- The situation when not building a temple is a better choice than building it (when it incurs maintaining cost while providing no practical benefits ) is very bad for the historical feeling. Given that it occurs in the home provinces, this is very unhistorical. I think the temples should always be a pre-requiste for some governments or other building. They should be the first building a player builds in the province – life in those times concentrated on cult and people needed places of worship.
- The law bonuses of Governors temple make it vastly more useful than the others unless in the home provinces close to the capital.
- The other good types of temple are Fertility and Battle, while Forge may be useful for certain gamestyles.
- The bonuses of Fun and Farm (lvl5) look good on paper but are irrelevant in practice (ie: player optimizing his game would never chose building them – even if he wouldn’t destroy them if the city is conquered).
Questions to the EBII team:
- What do you think about this dis-incentive to build temples in own provinces? (they incur costs without providing benefits)
- In this context: have you considered making the temples conditions for other buildings more frequent? This would make the player building temples in a historical manner - as a basic amenity of a settlement.
- Would you consider differentiation of the Farm and Fertility temples in another way so that the barbarian factions would effectively have 4 types of temples (for now, they have 3 as Farm and Fertility are identical). Or in general: what do you think about introducing more variety into the benefits of the temples?
- Have you considered allowing for many temples in one settlement? If yes, what were pros and cons for the decision? (well, me personally, I'm not very much interested in having many temples, but it's just a thought)
- Why have you chosen that the temples don’t provide for any culture change (I want to repeat: I think only a very minor change would be historical but still temples were transmitters of a culture)?
- In general: what kind of change of the bonuses could you consider in the future?