[Balance Suggestion] Growing meta tower cost

[Darxo]

Problem:
From my experience meta castles all use mostly quadratic or round tower because they can field ballistas and mangonels. And it is rarely a mistake to overuse them and never build any of the smaller tower.

Suggestion:

• Introduce a special mechanic for both of those meta tower where the building cost of a new quadratic or round tower is always equal to their base cost + the amount of already placed towers (of both types combined) * 5 (or some other number)
• Reduce the base cost of both towers by 5 to account for this new mechanic

Example:
Your first quadratic tower costs 30 stones (down from 35) or your first round tower costs 35 stones (down from 40)
After you've already placed 3 quadratic towers and 2 round towers you now have to pay the following prices:

• Quadratic Tower: 55 stones
• Round Tower: 60 stones

Now every additional tower that you place or have to replace is more expensive than the one before. IF any of them die you have to pay the same very expensive price for them.
Killing any of those towers from an enemies base which overuses them will now requires more than twice as many materials to rebuild than before. But the AI which rarely builds more than 4 of them is barely affected by this

[gynt]

Is it also okay if AI ignores this rule?

[jsobeslav]

I welcome any suggestions that would make smaller towers more appealing to the player, beside their aesthetics. I agree that the vanila game doesn't require the player to use those instead of the largest ones and it hurts the gameplay a bit, as it gets repetitive.

Related suggestion: what if part of the small towers cost was paid in wood instead? That would make them more attractive on maps where the player doesn't have an access to the quarry.

Alternatively, are we able to increase their HPs in order to give them better cost / strength ratio?

And back to the original suggestion: wouldn't simple flat increase in cost of the larger towers be sufficient enough? E.g. 70 / 80 stone instead of 35 / 40. That seems much easier to acomplish. Also, what if they cost extra gold, or perhaps even metal?

There are many possibilities.

[gynt]

@jsobeslav Are you in the UCP discord and the Bootstrap Gameplay discord? There balance changes like these (but not this one I believe) are frequently discussed, you might like it!

I like the idea of a flat increase of big towers. Delaying their build.