I'm not sure the "negative recruits" thing was fully understood. I can honestly say I didn't fully understand the response (from Grinsevent).

Perceived problem with Larian's suggestion:

I think it will be genuinely difficult or even impossible to correctly determine automatically when the player cannot acquire enough recruits to spawn the dragon, and as a player I wouldn't want to inadvertently trigger this effect if you cannot subsequently use recruits to create the dragon again. (Conquering sites gives you recruits, selling buildings gives you recruits; presently there is no final limit. You're only stuck when you are also defeated/immobilized.)

Proposed solution:

Make sure the dragon can be spawned at least once in a situation like the one Larian described. I would accomplish this with a "buy now, pay later" mechanism that kicks in automatically if you don't have enough recruits at the moment. Until the debt is settled, this mechanism cannot be used again, and all new recruits go towards settling this debt. During most of the battle, that debt would be quickly settled if it occurs at all. It has the same impact on unit production and base construction, but incidentally lets you whip out the dragon instead of waiting. I expect this dragon-advantage to be tolerable. (It would probably be more significant the greater the enemy's advantage was at the beginning of the battle, which makes it a slight equalizer for battles that would otherwise be hopeless.)

Maybe that does also make no sense in RP, but to determine that you'd have to explain exactly what happens to those 20 recruits in the first place. I think the RP element is muted at best in the RTS part anyway. (The various phases give you different abstractions of the world. The RTS battle lets you construct bundles of factories that build highly advanced non-permanent military forces. That's probably not how I'd envision it in RP.)

If its effect on the game balance is good, and Larian's intention can be achieved by this, I don't think the RP aspect will really suffer.

Last edited by Sinister; 23/07/13 11:05 AM.