Province capture mechanic
I don't really know what the perfect solution to this would be, but it sure gets expensive and also kind of boring to capture a capital city. Just last night, in my British campaign, I was polishing off India with the capture of Bengal. I had a full stack, and the Calcutta defenders only had 1 or 2 units of regulars plus maybe 5 or 6 stacks of armed citizens.
Such battles can be boringly repetitive, but I used to get at least some maniacal pleasure in being able to destroy the various building that the militia would take cover in---thus eliminating them when the building fell. Now, with the last patch, said troops tend to vacate the building when it goes over 50% damage--sometimes even moving to another structure, which in turn makes these battles a lot more tedious This means that now the only real benefit of actually fighting such battles on the map is the elimination of troop losses one incurs when using auto-resolve because you are going to have repair costs regardless. It still irks me a bit when the adviser pops up in fort assaults warning one that what that buildings damaged on the battlefield will be reflected on the strategical map. This was obviously transported from M2TW, but at least it made sense in that game.
Anyhow, it was late, and I was getting ready to end my playing session, so I auto resolved. Afterward, it struck me as to just how expensive it is to capture a city in Empire in this manner.
First of all I had to repair all four of the major buildings to the tune of $3,900, and since I had lost men in every unit by auto-resolving, I had to spend another $2,200 on troop replenishment.
Considering that the city only had $395 in tax income, which I could not get for several turns due to unrest, and the fact that in Empire there is no city treasury or funds to acquire, my break even point was pretty far out in the future.
One of the things I liked about Medieval 2 was that with proper planning one could actually fight a city or castle assault with minimal troop losses and little or no damage to the city's facilities. To me this was an additional challenge that the game presented--not to mention the fact that along with the fall of the city, even if there were troop losses and repair costs, most of the time the attacker could still actually get a pretty decent financial shot in the arm by sacking the city.
With Empire, the ability to efficiently capture a region is gone---since regardless of what you do you are going to incur expenses to rebuild the city plus the expense of automatic troop losses if you auto-resolve. Add to that the fact that there seems to be no city treasury or goods to loot, region acquisition by combat is not nearly as interesting as it used to be.
One thing to remedy this would be to add some immediate funds to be gained by a city capture and some choices like M2TW had of how to deal with the populace of the city or any possible loot to be had. I realize that extermination and sacking were not as likely in the 18th Century, but I bet there are other choices that could be added that would be appropriate for the period.
Thoughts?
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