Fabius

I am certain Romans were not above hiring mercs, I believe in the parthian wars they had balearic slingers already to great effect. This was the Triumvirate era though, but I am certain they would have already been using them prior. And I would love to see a slinger in the Roman arsenal.

Offensive turtling is something i enjoyed a great deal in A23, i agree that basic passive turtling is boring, but i find great satisfcation in city building and defending said cities, so yeah That being said, celts are the worst possible turtle civs, they are the classical offensive oriented civs, Rome was the pinnacle of a defensive civ, their wooden walls which are now nerfed were the best and their siege was great, and you had consular guard for making sorties against strategic points, all in all was a solid civ. That being said, turtles in A25 are an absolutely pointless exercise. Rams are unbearably hard to counter and fixed defenses are far less useful than before. That being said, if someone does try to turtle, simply amass champion cavalry with rams and kill them, run all over their base destroying vital areas and detachments, and if a fortress gives you trouble simply hack it down, you can hack civic centers apart with enough swords so little reason to be worried if they get your rams. There is no counter to late game champions unless you have a lot of your own that counter them. Sparta I would say is the best Turtle civ available, Iberians similarly because of fire cav.

I would love to see these for Rome

Currently catapults have no point to existence and bolt shooters are meh.

An interesting idea, I like it

Interesting insight, honestly when I realized their skirmisher cav was a merc I dropped them, as ranged mercs to me are just metal wastage that could go on champions, the skirmisher cav plus melee cav meta is very potent, but not viable with ranged mercenaries. Also the lack of easy access swords for ram killing.

Seems very gimmicky, Macedonia seldom gets picked in my experience, but that is more underlying issues with their unit roster given current meta than anything else.

If someone wants to use ministers as sappers I am fine with it, its different and we have a lack of interesting random features. Monuments have no capture points therefore cannot be captured even by territory creep so no worries there, though it would be very funny if they did. If it doesn't have capture points it can't be captured period, I would assume this applies to the gates as well.

That sounds much more interesting and meaningful than a death aura which sounds straight out of a fantasy game.

Walls get ignored and by the time you capture an opponents fields you have usually already defeated him.

Ok, thanks for clarification

I would be enthusiastic to see a super heavy cavalry unit like the cataphract in game

So auto delete citizen troops and effectively counter champions of any category bar elephants, though you can kite them so GG to them too. My initial reaction to this is depression, its already hard to get citizens to function against champions, now we must fight a health draining champion block? Did I mention walking into someones Eco and watching their Eco die around you, because I would totally do that, and unless the guy is on foot you aren't stopping me either, even with an alarm attached to the health drain, five seconds and a probably decent chunk of your Eco is dead. Then I just march my own army in and you dead by defeat in detail. Granted I have not played with Han so I am simply going off my understanding of Yekaterina's above commentary, but to me this seems like a recipe for disaster.

I am in favour of altering the tower technologies to affect the fortress and increasing the garrison capacity to 40 as suggested elsewhere.

I agree with your point, chapions simply make a fortress obligatory, and that seems counter productive. I like the idea of second rank troops, but that does potentially remove the uniqueness of other civ bonuses that give that, skiritai and roman castrum infantry to give the two primary examples.

Very true. Also something I call building micro, which is were you micro garrisoned troops in and out of buildings to kill strategic objectives like rams.

Agreed, the cost of will to fight is to great to warrant it in most games, I can buy 15 champions with that or get most of the blacksmith upgrades for one type of troop. More often than not I am frustrated at not having a lot of options to defend a fortress or make it impede an enemy advance more than five seconds. I don't mind being forced to adapt, but I also want options to adapt with.

Some of the tower technologies could be tweaked to overlap

Depends on their composition and the competence of the turtler.

A further idea I just had is to utilize the tower upgrades as concepts for upgrades to the fortress, being a more valuable building theoretically there would be more incentive to actually spend the resources on it. Those tower upgrades get zero priority otherwise as I no longer build towers because to me they are now useless resource wasters.

The counter point to ram spam would be catapult spam if they have better accuracy, because then you can wall up and smash any rams that get near the walls, something not currently viable under present circumstances. But since main topic is fortresses and not the entirety of the game, I would suggest maybe technologies that put emphasis fortresses as strong points, maybe technologies granting them higher health, I like the idea of bigger garrison space, maybe some kind of upgrade that puts a catapult on top, stronger resistance to capture. One does not actually have to go the damage route, just make the building harder to knock down quickly

I was strongly oriented toward defense in A23 and have seen the decline in its viability since. you need catapults to properly turtle, which we don't have in a functional form.

Hi, is there a test version of A26 currently available or is it still under construction?

Hi, Romans had the longest range siege in A23 and also the strongest. Particularly their scorpions, great aesthetic and faster setup time, higher damage, and smaller unit template. For all intents and purposes the scorpion felt like a unique Roman unit even if it probably was not created as such.

As an avid bolt shooter user I can point out that the Ptolemies have a bolt shooter almost identical to A23. And its the most useful in the game in my opinion. Rate of fire is far more useful than more damage, they can already one shot most things with just 160 pierce damage. 240 is overkill unless used against elephants, the big elephants die in roughly four shots. An interesting idea, you could make a technology that improves rate of fire for bolt shooters.