Hel Gast

Note: these ideas are based on the topic http://forums.revora...showtopic=70697, I am only reposting the basic ideas I had in that topic for clarity.

These ideas focused on two things:

• Reworking the resource system
  
• Reworking the damage system

The resource is in my opinion generally flawed: after initial setup I don't really care about it anymore, resources are always abundant. And if resource structures are destroyed, then my income is reestablished pretty soon. This can be changed in several ways (I am taking the farm as an example right now):

• Reduce health or increase damage taken by fire (farms look like cottages with hay all over them: so they should be generally easy to destroy with fire, see also the raiding of the farms in the second movie).
  
• Sharply reduce initial resources of a farm: A new farm isn't ready for full production, the ground isn't prepared, the farmer isn't prepared: so the first crops (level 1 crops) will not pay back that much.
  
• Leveling a farm means improving the ground of the farm (and technique of the farmer). So leveling can be considered as a way to increase resources (as it is now).

Thus idea is to make farms more fragile and low producing in the beginning, and only make them valuable after leveling (which takes some time): Now it is really worthwhile to defend every farm.

The resource system can be refined further more by providing faction specific spells (bad factions: devastation and the likes) or special upgrades to economy (good factions: better mines for dwarves, marketplaces, ...).

The damage system is pretty good actually. Although fire should be more effective on certain buildings (farms for example, or the rhûn tents). But I think that most buildings have to much health initially, I can't imagine that every building is build war-ready (thus fully fortified), and this is also seen in the quality of fortification of buildings (it becomes more fortified when leveling buildings up).

• Level 1: drastically reduce health: building isn't intended for war purposes.
  
• Leveling up would fortify the buildings more and more: thus harder to take down.

By making only siege (and in certain cases fire) attacks effective on buildings will make sure that strange rushes with farmers will not bring down a city in any way. Thus these reductions in health don't have to mean that rushing is back as it is.

So general ideas of this improvement:
We start with level 1 'cities': these are ordinary cities, for ordinary live and cannot truly support a war. They have some defensive structures (fortress, walls) to protect the city against outlaws but nothing more.

When a city goes to war, then the city will need to change its internals, its infrastructure. This is done by gradually improving resource gathering (leveling of farms) and by improving training facilities (fortifying them against raids, and increasing productivity).

When some army then throws down (parts of) such war infrastructure, then it will take a lot of time to recover (especially economy wise). So targeted attacks really do real damage, making quick hit and runs on buildings more effective.

Second Note: I hope this topic isn't to big, but these ideas are strongly related to each other and strongly intended for making you care about (resource) buildings: Else just say so and I will make two separate topics (one for resource, one for structures).