Quote Originally Posted by vonsch
The Pope is not pleased if you destroy church-line buildings. I've gotten a message from him, and a drop in my Pope-o-meter when I did it. And there is a population happiness hit in that you do at least lose the positive happiness benefits. That aspect of "sacking," the deliberate destruction of churches by direct player action is, I think, reasonable.

I think it's too easy to repair sacked cities as it stands if the buildings are completely zeroed out on the repair meter. This isn't a new issue though. It's always been this way from STW.

I think having the building drop back a level is a sensible balance. Having to go through the whole line to rebuild is a lot of time, more so than the cost in gold. Have it so that if the building is at zero status and takes more damage, it drops a level down and applies the new damage to that level. This would also encourage repairing buildings immediately to avoid having them drop a level if you have enemy assassins acting, or a seige looming that might result in ownership swaps in the near future.

But it's probably programming, not modding, so it's a wishlist item, not practical.

Doing this would change assassin missions, but while it would decrease their power in a fashion, it would also make training them easier. You get more bites at the different buildings, thus more potential experience gain. It would slow things down, though. It would take more assassin missions to totally remove a troop-production line of buildings. Not that most would care to totally destroy such; we'd mostly want to remove the capability of producing one or two types of troops that give us special trouble.
Sadly there are only so many ways you can make the game harder in SP. Give the AI cheats (more money, better starting troops, better buildings) or increase the penalty for the players actions.

The later achieves a 2nd goal of requiring the player to make tougher choices, in my view its win win. The specifics of what penalty should be incurred for what action is a larger discussion, but essentially gaming Ai's need one or both of these conditions to present a challenge to a human.