Houses, make the mini fortresses into guarded treasures

[fales]

Idea: Make houses more vulnerable to destruction and increase the loot gained by the attacker.

Goal: Increase the importance of both houses and walls (by which I mean both stone walls and palisades).

Explanation: 

1. Right now, not only are walls rarely used to protect houses, the houses themselves are used as walls. Players use the defense area around their CC to protect farms instead of houses. In reality, this was mostly the other way round.
2. The importance of women and family for the continuation and prosperity of the settlements is IMHO underrepresented in the game. The houses are the best candidate to represent this. And as such should be of high value. But not of high value to construct but rather when already constructed.
3. In reality, the houses would hold huge part of the wealth of the settlement, this corresponds to the suggested increased loot.
4. Right now, if you compare a house, barracks, a sentry tower and even a fortress you get almost equal ratio of health*defense/resource. This surely isn't realistic as the house is not a mini fortress and the resources for a house would normally be spend elsewhere than defenses. This corresponds to the suggested higher vulnerability of the houses.  Unlike a sentry tower, the house can usually be easily put to the torch. Hence, the houses should be vulnerable to all soldiers (with any type of attack).

Result: In the end, players should be more motivated to protect their houses as they best represent their civilization. The houses should be valuable enough to be put in the defensive area of CC together with/instead of farms at the beginning and protected by some kind of fortification or ready to defend army in the late game. Some tweaks to the stats of walls could be needed.

Moreover, as far as I know, there is no penalty for not having enough housing for your current population (your opponent destroys your houses but does not kill your people) in the sense that you can keep such a population indefinitely. If you can't create such a houseless population in the first place, you should not be able to keep it for a long time.

[alre]

I like the idea of making houses give more loot, including maybe food and metal, in account of family possessions. It would help turning raiding in a more enjoyable and profitable activity.

However, I mostly like how houses are used currently, and it's not really unproper, from an historical point of view, to use houses to wall your settlement, so I would keep their defensive stats in line with the ones of other civilian buildings.

[alre]

Also, I think the game punishes enough those players that lose houses and, more often than not, whole cities, so I don't think there is any need of additional mechanics to punish them further in the case they are left with more population than they could train.

Edited May 10, 2021 by alre

[fales]

16 minutes ago, alre said:

Also, I think the game punishes enough those players that lose houses and, more often than not, whole cities, so I don't think there is any need of additional mechanics to punish them further in the case they are left with more population than they could train.

Sure, it was mainly an additional thought on the topic.

20 minutes ago, alre said:

I like the idea of making houses give more loot, including maybe food and metal, in account of family possessions. It would help turning raiding in a more enjoyable and profitable activity.

However, I mostly like how houses are used currently, and it's not really unproper, from an historical point of view, to use houses to wall your settlement, so I would keep their defensive stats in line with the ones of other civilian buildings.

Some of the houses back then surely had some defensive function and I may be wrong but I would expect an average house was not nearly as resistant to an attack as an average sentry tower, which seems to be roughly the case here.

However, I did not mention the idea to make the game 100 % historically correct, it will (and should) never be. But I believe it could add an interesting new level to the game.

Also, it seems to me that the walls deserve to be used (more).

[alre]

If houses were completely useless defensively, it would be a total bore to build them though.

Walls have that same problem: they need focus and time to build, but they are quite sparing in fun.

[Lopess]

 Honestly as far as I know none of the civilizations represented in the current game used houses as defensive walls. If I'm wrong please correct me.

[Lopess]

17 minutes ago, alre said:

If houses were completely useless defensively, it would be a total bore to build them though.

Walls have that same problem: they need focus and time to build, but they are quite sparing in fun.

House already has a lot of importance being houses ... Try to win a game without them, something really impossible even if using only houses : D

[fales]

After reading Gameplay issue: Booming = Turtling, I think that the increased loot could help also with this issue. Moreover, it seems to me that it would be nice to somehow punish the defenders economy for even a partially successful raid. The reason for this is that the attacker needs to take his citizen soldiers and march them to the opponent (loosing resources gather by them), while the defender only needs to take the citizen soldiers of the resources during the fight itself (while also having defensive structures). Sure the attacker is rewarded by destroying your economy but it is very risky and the motivation to do so could be better.

Hence, the loot gained by destruction of houses could have two parts. First part is the one which is already present, which would remain unchanged. The second part would not only give resources to the attacker but also take them from the defender. Let say that houses would represent half of the wealth of your civilization and you have 10 houses, then if your opponent destroys one of your houses, 1/2 * 1/10 = 1/20 of your resources would be transferred to the attacker.