Devotion and Meat

[Panfilo]

Devotion and Meat are two campaign resources available for Kislev and Ogres respectively. They are interesting concepts but feel rather under done.

Devotion is indirectly used to help you win the Follower race with your rival. It can be spent on lowering followers for your rival, initiating 'rituals' which can also gain followers under particular circumstances, and can be spent on specific buildings and upgrades. So what's the problem? Aside from rituals (which costs seem to scale up over time, not sure what the calculation is exactly) all the other uses are one-off. Once you confederate with your rival, there's only the use of rituals to be an ongoing sink to use them. Worse yet, at this point you're finally swimming in devotion, but probably won't be using it for very much. I don't like the idea of a campaign resource that becomes rather obsolete over time. Also, I don't think the rituals stack with one another; if you use one then another I think the first one gets overwritten (I could be wrong on this). There is a very nice event called Mother Earth that gives a 50% discount on devotion costs for rituals for 20 turns, but if they don't stack that just means you get 2 rituals half off.

Suggestion: Devotion could be used as a diplomatic resource in lieu of gold to entice alliances. Give them another button similar to the one that offers enough of a gold bribe to agree to your proposal. This could thus let you use devotion to help force peace treaties or get trade agreements from reluctant neighbors. I'd like to see it somewhat similar to how Influence works for the elves, a resource that currently has far more uses compared to devotion.

Meat is part of the upkeep for Ogre units. Due to the way camps work, meat upkeep costs encourage you to set up camps bordering hostile areas, so you can venture out and raid while still generating a positive supply of meat. It can also be used for offerings (similar to rituals I guess) and also a pre-battle buff. Both the latter two ongoing uses only cost 10 meat, so later on that cost becomes negligible as you build up a healthy surplus of grub. Ogres are a fun faction, but my main gripe is that similar to how Devotion is a mediocre version of Influence, Meat is a mediocre version of Food. Skaven have a greater risk and reward with their faction resource, but I find (with later tweaking of buildings/mechanics) that it was far, far more useful for them. Compared to Ogres, Skaven can instantly occupy ruins to X tier or get additional deployed clanrats. Having a high surplus of food also gave them decent strategic buffs. As the campaign progressed you had more and more applications of food that scaled up benefits.

Suggestion: While it doesn't need to be a direct ripoff of Food, Meat should at least be a little more comparable; a few examples of this is pre-battle feasting having a higher maximum threshold (how much of a difference does +10% speed/charge/mass really make? It didn't feel like a huge improvement to me). Meat should be able to be exchanged for instant population letting you build up settlements and camps faster (but you still need to spend money/time for the structures themselves). It should play into contracts more allowing you to chase down and intercept caravans and negotiate with them (let them go in exchange for eating a unit for meat or try to fight them for gold).

[Desponark]

I agree on the meaty part. Good ideas.

[Torrens]

Meat should have more uses for things in my opinion. Totally agree on the pre-battle feast. 10% doesn't really feel a whole lot. Perhaps give players the option to use 10 Meat for 20% bonus. I like the meat rituals mechanic but its so cheap that it tends to just become something you do every 10 turns without thinking the cost. Perhaps expand this where you could choose between small-medium-large benefits for the ritual consuming either lots or little meat.

[Zeek]

I'm all for doing literally anything else with devotion. I don't even use the invocations most of the time.

[Aleera]

What about followers for Kislev. Once you confederate the other, or have given support once or twice as Boris, they're used for nothing at all.
Atleast Devotion is used for some buildings, specially landmarks and keeping that high stops random chaos armies.
But followers, do absolutely nothing after some time.

I'd also like to see being able to use Grimoires and skulls. Both tend to overflow at certain points as well. I know Skarrbrand loves skulls. But I'm lugging 45k Skulls, surely they have more use then settling once per province?

[Zeek]

Originally posted by Rianne:

What about followers for Kislev. Once you confederate the other, or have given support once or twice as Boris, they're used for nothing at all.
Atleast Devotion is used for some buildings, specially landmarks and keeping that high stops random chaos armies.
But followers, do absolutely nothing after some time.

I'd also like to see being able to use Grimoires and skulls. Both tend to overflow at certain points as well. I know Skarrbrand loves skulls. But I'm lugging 45k Skulls, surely they have more use then settling once per province?

I'm actually ok with the followers. I view it as a time-limited currency. I mean I wouldn't be opposed if it got some uses after the confederation, I just don't know how they would do it.

Skulls, yeah. They are a bit like devotion. Basically only used to keep the Skull Throne active. I think I only ever used them to settle like once or twice. I think there's a lot of potential to do more things with skulls than followers.

I'm also currently ok with grimoires as I typically can find a use for them pretty much all the time. Maybe if skulls and followers did more things like grimories do they could be better?

[Golanth]

Contrary to popular belief Ogres are pretty half baked. We'll see if they get actual fixes because they had the privilege of being the preorder race.

[Aluminum Elite Master]

I feel like Meat is almost just fine. The +10 melee attack bonus for the low price of 10 meat is good... there just needs to be maybe one or two more things to spend meat on.

Devotion is where things get *really* messy. In the early going, you don't have enough of it to do much, and later on, you have plenty of it but no longer need it. The original post is pretty accurate on that. The invocations are powerful enough, but there's not a lot to do with devotion beyond that.

Overall, I feel like Meat is more of a basic fuel... it depletes over time unless you do certain things as a player, so it's basically fuel and already has a somewhat constant impact on Ogre Kingdoms strategy. But Devotion is balanced pretty badly right now, and like another poster said, Devotion is a problem but so, too, is the Followers mechanic which solely exists for the unique confed option.

[Alan]

There is a mod that lets you use devotion for unit upgrades, the same as scrap for orcs. It's fantastic. Needs some balance, but shows how the game SHOULD be designed.

[DarkFenix]

I remember thinking devotion was incredibly useless. Anything you buy with it is extremely expensive, and the costs scale up with your number of settlements just to make sure things remain unreachable even as your income improves. Oh and it's used as part of your main campaign mechanic, just to make 100% sure you'll never save up enough for it to be useful.

I don't recall interacting much with the meat mechanic either to be honest, though it's certainly better than devotion.

The Chaos Dwarf DLC has finally gotten multi-resource management right. I hope they take lessons from it and apply those to other faction overhauls in future.