Building Leveling

[Sir_Stig]

Overall I have liked the new plot style, but there is one thing that bugs me. If you hit you command point limit and/or don't produce a ton of certain units your buildings can't level up any more. I think that there should either be an automatic gaining of experience over time, or some other way of levelling the building.
I know the idea was to increase unit diversity, but I found that the opposite happened: by the time I levelled up my PBs I had hit max command points and couldn't build elite unites.
Just spit-balling here, but could there be an upgrade to units beyond just armour and weapons? Maybe if you send them back to an upgraded PB you could pay the cost difference and have them turned into an elite version of the unite, for example normal spears being turned into tower guards?

[klantai]

Glad to see I'm not the only one who was a little bothered by buildings leveling ^^. Though I do not doubt that in a long-drawn hard game, your units will die in great enough numbers that training new troops will level your buildings to the max, for milder games, or situations where you switch from mostly using a type of unit to using another type, the leveling system can get a little frustrating. Most of all, I think it encourages players recruiting units just to send them to their deaths until they get the better units they wanted to make, which I find strategically/economically nonsensical, and above all very contradictory with how good factions should work and are depicted in both books and movies : people caring for the lost lives of their soldiers.
As such, and considering BfME II had this system to decommission unwanted troops, I too believe that it could be worthwhile to look for a better way to deal with extra troops and building leveling.
There are a few lacking ways I can envision to deal with that :

- Allow the player an option in the buildings to purchase his way to the next level, as in BfME II, which in my opinion isn't a good idea (and that's most likely why it was removed ^^).
- Give, to all factions, access to a spell that can instantly level one or several buildings. It seems a more satisfactory way of doing things, but would take up a spell slot, which is sad ^^.
- Give passive exp. earnings to buildings, so that when getting towards late-game, even mostly unused buildings could grant access to their better units ; it feels a little lackluster though ^^.

And the way I would like to suggest, if ever it isn't too hard to implement, as I believe it deals with both superfluous troops and buildings exp. and goes somewhat the same way as the op's suggestion :

Allow us to decommission unwanted troops for a small amount of exp. (rather than resources, like in BfME II). I can however see more than one way of doing it :
- The units could be decommissioned at any appropriate building (a unit recruitment building), granting it an instant small amount of exp. While it does sound very simple, I believe it may require to give that ability to each and every concerned building and wouldn't be a very efficient way of doing it. That way though, exp. granted could be proportional to exp. earned by that unit on the field of battle, and this ability could be restricted : footmen to footmen buildings etc.
- As in BfME II, the units could only be decommissioned at the citadel, and doing so would temporarily unlock a power of the citadel that grants some exp. to the chosen building (out of the citadel's building plots, not the outside ones). If at all feasible, that way seems more elegant, because it would allow to force a cooldown on that ability, preventing the player to instantly level a new building from scratch to max

At any rate, again if it's feasible, I believe such a method can kill many birds with one small stone :
- get rid of unwanted units
- allow for an additional way to level buildings
- incite player to care for their units, even when planning to replace them with more powerful variants
- give a feeling of continuity between weaker start-game units that still served you well, and stronger units you'll need later, without using an upgrade system that would, in my opinion, be unnecessarily heavy to implement and use
- make a nice impression that veterans who survived the battles are allowed to rest, while becoming instructors to train better units
- allow for faction specific mechanics :
    - Gondor, which heavily arms his soldiers, could get in addition to the exp. a small discount on the next unit produced in the building that was targeted (as if the equipment was passed over)
    - Rohan, which relies on conscript peasants, could see the production time of the next battalion reduced, due to old soldiers helping train the new ones ; or farm productivity slightly increase for a short period of time, due to the decommissioned men returning to the fields
    - The idea doesn't apply so well to evil factions, especially Mordor, as they rather rely on troops mostly thought of as expandable, but through the same mechanics, orcs could be fed to the Troll cage to speed Troll production or reduce cost or some other unique system.

[Sir_Stig]

I really like your citadel solution, it is very elegant and would work well with I think the least amount of work required to implement.

[Kadan Joelavich]

Similar to above suggestions, but what about giving all buildings a "Hire Veteran Recruiters" power that can be used to target a friendly troop that could be produced at that building, and remove it (they run to the building and disappear) to give experience to the building based on the level of the soldiers. For example, using the ability on level 5 units might grant as much as a whole level, whereas using it on a level 1 troop would only give about as much exp as training a troop would. This would reward players who did a good job managing and leveling their basic units by allowing them easier access to elite units.

Also, is it possible to have buildings level up to level 5 (with additional levels giving more heath and quicker training)?

[klantai]

To Sir_Stig : thanks : ). What I'm not sure of is whether a building power can be locked/unlocked based on something else than cooldown/resource availability (here it would have to be locked by both cooldown and whether a unit was decommissioned recently at the citadel).

To Kadan Joelavich : As I see it, the catch would be to have to give all training buildings an additional power, which seems heavier to implement, and might be a problem for buildings that already have their 5 slots taken (like the Gondor barracks ; I'm not sure 5 is an absolute limit since some heroes have more powers than that in Edain ; however it appears all regular buildings follow this rule, so I don't think that would change ^^).

As for leveling buildings past lvl 3, I'm actually curious about that as well ^^. Seeing as siege engines roam the land far and wide, a few extra hit-points for our most strategic buildings feel like they couldn't hurt. On the other hand, maybe modding buildings to give them extra levels is less trivial than it seems and as such not worth it (I honestly don't know) ?

[Sir_Stig]

I was just thinking, Would it be possible to add an xp multiplier on camp maps where it is more difficult to hold onto resource buildings and consequently harder to level units? This might help with most games not getting upgrades of one type or another. I usually can't get fire arrows with Gondor or Rohan until I'm pretty much mopping up bases, and this is versus hards and brutals where we have been trading units most of the game.

For the sake of visualization lets say on a castle map it takes 10 archers to reach level 3, whereas on a camp map it could maybe only take 5 or something like that.