Antistone wrote:
I've discovered that many of the mechanics used by converted villages (for Cultist faction) are less favorable for the owner than I would have expected.





- Vision is a major problem: converted villages only have a sight radius of 1, and garrisoned units do not provide vision. This makes it hard to see enemy armies or settlers approaching.



- If you keep 1 unit outside the village to act as a sentry and provide vision, that unit can be killed easily, because units garrisoning a village cannot join a battle as reinforcements.



- That might incline you to keep most of your units outside of the villages rather than inside them, but that leaves your villages vulnerable, because a village is destroyed if its garrison is killed, even if the attacker did not win the battle because you had reinforcements still fighting.



- And your villages will be attacked a lot, because AI players aggressively attack converted villages in NEUTRAL territory (attacking converted villages in their own territory makes sense, but in neutral territory they don't get any benefits for it, they're merely going out of their way to hurt you). This doesn't require a declaration of war, and if you counter-attack the army that just destroyed your village the AI will become upset due to your "aggression in cold war".



- Since armies can't stand directly on a village, clicking "new army" will automatically move garrisoned units to an adjacent tile (and charge them movement points). But you can't issue orders directly to units in a village like you can in a city, so "new army" is the only way to get them out, meaning you can't choose what direction they exit in. If you happen to want to move in the opposite direction from where the game chooses to pop them out, this can cost you almost an entire turn's worth of movement (because villages cost more than cities to move through, and cannot build road networks).



- Converted villages exploit the 6 adjacent tiles for your capital city...but only if those tiles are within the same region. Since villages seem to like to spawn in the corners of regions, this frequently means you get more like 2-4 adjacent tiles. (Cities have to stop at region boundaries because otherwise they could overlap, and this isn't much of a disadvantage because you can choose where to place the city; there's no obvious reason that villages have to stop at region boundaries, and you can't avoid the downside because you don't choose their placement.)



- Units in a converted village do not regenerate



- Units in a converted village sometimes mysteriously disappear





Some of those are clearly bugs. Others...I honestly can't tell.

Most of what you describe are trade offs you are supposed to deal with. Non issues honestly, it's intended game design. It's not supposed to be easy to succeed, you need to do an effort to maximize your gain you know, like for any other faction.



If you want to keep your villages, make sure you defend them.