I very much agree with what Jojo_fr said with the balancing.

I mostly agree with you on most of the Mykara city stuff, I think they are very weak early game, which is the idea, but they might be a bit too weak early. I do think that the eclipse effect is strong, but they are underpowered, so I think that taking away one of their few strengths would be unfair. During eclipses they are very strong at taking undefended cities, but you need to leave a city undefended for it to matter, so thats more player error than being overpowered. The rest of the stuff you said seems mostly fair.

I think your Urkan bribery bit is completly off the mark though. Urkan are significantly stronger than titans,with more utility, and one of the toughest neutral fights in the game. I think that the cost to bribe them if anything is too low. These have the power of late game units, asking a lot doesn't seem unfair at all. I don't see titans utilized every game and I would be fine if a game ends before Urkans are viable.

I also feel that your suggestions are mostly good, and while the Mykara could certainly use a bit of an easier start I think they have the potential to be extremely strong late game, and don't want to see that nerfed out. I think that the x2 are working as intended and should remain so. if the Mykara live to late game and get these late era techs and then are able to start out producing you, I belive thats a failure of the other player, not the Mykara. There are many ways to address the growth of Mykara as another player, but if you leave them long enough to develop a strong foothold then you will be at a disadvantage. They are a lategame snowball race.

Overall, good suggestions that I hope get considered. If I didn't directly address it in my post it's because I mostly agree with it. I think with a small amount of tweaking the Mykara can be very interesting defensive Cultists that attack with blitzkriegs, especially during the eclipse, and thats a gameplay style I think would be very interesting

I agree that the Mykara are underpowered and I think the suggestions for buffing them are sound. The Topography tech might be a lore thing; the person who melded with the Mykara was a scientist or a scholar. But yeah, it is pretty useless.

I agree that the Mykara need something to help them with their influence woes, but I'm fine with them starting with topography. The Center for Minerology is very good for the amount of population Mykara can (eventually) get, though Geomic Labs is basically useless and CfM is not handy for the early game. What I would rather see is replacing Search Party with Cultivation. Starting with food tech makes far more sense to me than starting with ruins tech.

I agree with ynotgriff on the Urkans - they're so incredibly powerful, I was thinking the bribery costs were rather low for them. It was a simple thing for me to just go to the market and buy the luxuries (though I wouldn't be surprised if this is much more difficult on higher difficulties/against humans). Urkans are incredibly powerful military units in addition to eco boosters - I'm fine with it being hard to get them. Side note: the lore paints them to be these creatures of random destruction; could we have them going on rampages? Probably unfair but they feel too peaceful pre-capture.

I would not oppose Mykara having a discount for taming Urkans; I haven't tried fighting Urkans with the Urkan Slayer skill, mostly because if I want to use a hero as a general it feels very hard to go down that skill path. It would be nice to have an advantage to claim them and make a lot of sense, lore-wise.

Regarding the quest, I'm not sure I have an issue with the city debuff because I found I was able to finish the quest so incredibly quickly, I think it balances it out a little. +1 to the comments about making sure all the roaming armies and such are nearby, though... Too many times I was saying to myself, "[Region]? Where on Auriga is [Region]???"

Something I would like to see is Urkan upgrade costs being limited to luxury resources present on the map. I played a small 4 player match and was unable to purchase some upgrades because they cost spices, the map had no spices, and the market ran out of spices.

Thank you for your feedback guys.

It's very interesting. I agree with most things you said. I hope others players will join and say what they think.

This afternoon I played two games with some serious players. The power gap between a strong player as Forgottens and me, was huge. Turn 25 he got twice score me. And he got a low start.

They are actually the weakst faction of all. Even the Broken Lords are stronger economiquely than them...

I know now that Mykara are even more underpowered than I thought before.

That's why now, in addition to the suggestions of buff made in this topic, I support the 3 following propositions:

- 50% influence cost and booster cost added by fungal bloom owned. It's super hard to have influence early game. But you need some fungal to grow. You don't have cultist governor to farm influence. And you have more important things to do that farming influence (you have to farm food, science or industry).

+2 science gained for any fungalised ruins (because you have to give scientific boost, it's logical and you need more science!).

+1 influence gained per village fungalised. Logical, and a nice little buff for the eraly game especially.

landed here from your steam thread.  great ideas.  i would like to add the following to compliment the one city mechanic:

3 levels for districts with scaling of fidsi.

rework hero to be a stronger governor.

1. agreed but only partially. it takes strategy to not overreach in the early game with your fungal spore to keep your empire running efficiently. I agree they need some love but some of what you say is based on player choice and strategy.  The problem becomes, however, that are they so finicky that you have to play them in a super specific way every time or they don't work in the early game, or not. 

2.agreed, it leads them to be more aggressive to expand quickly and would bolster their early game enough.

3. I kinda wish to assault the Mykara city there were more hazards, like militia that can patrol in the base region and such.

4.bugs are creepy crawly

5. Knowing beforehand what the resource is needed to bribe the urkan would be a nice unique feature to add to the game.  Like a technology of some sort.

6. I kind of agree, however, nerfs are never nice to see or experience. require balancing

7. agreed

8. having factions be weak to each other in certain ways is not necessarily a bad thing.

9. If there was an endgame tech/quest that allowed other factions to backtrack through the tunnels this might still be ok. (it will also keep you from enacting such things if such tech exists)

10. sure this is a good idea I agree.

11. keeping them for the endgame is not a bad thing, but by the time you get them, the enemy has an easier time dealing with them.

12. Agreed, the penalty seems not worth the cost  

13. I found this odd as well, but its something new. I'm not knocking it until I get more games in 

14. It kinda fits because of the story quest..... 

HappyShepherd wrote:

landed here from your steam thread.  great ideas.  i would like to add the following to compliment the one city mechanic:

3 levels for districts with scaling of fidsi.

rework hero to be a stronger governor.

there is the market filled with heroes that are strong governors

I think I'm pretty much in agreement with the list.

I think Point 12 (the empire-plan and booster costs of assimilated cities) is probably the most important point here. 

I liked your list, Jojo. And I strongly second the +1 for blossom'd village. 

The first time i read the fungal bloom description and saw  the starting techs i thought that the geolabs (or similar buildings) would also work on exploited fungal blooms. Was disappointed that this wasnt so, but this could be op in late game. 

I do agree wis this post anyways, in particular that the conquered cities should not coint as regular cities for happines, empire plan and booster penalities....

I won't comment much on the suggestions but wanted to chime in to say I agree the Mykara are definitely underpowered right now. I'm really struggling even after lowering the difficulty and making a second attempt, though it's probable I'm also playing them poorly. I haven't managed to tame an Urkan yet with them and I feel like that's probably a crux of their strategy. To be honest I've found them pretty frustrating to play, they seem to have quite a big learning curve as far as when/where to place your blooms, looking at what others have posted.

Regarding Urkans, my problem is that they quickly become unavailable to tame with resources if you're out-teched. Not only do new Urkans require the Tier 3 luxury if anyone has gotten that far (and above normal difficulty, early game you're going to be out-teched most of the time) but the old Urkans retroactively require a Tier 3 luxury (at least they did in my game, which I didn't discover until I'd sailed through the ocean in winter to tame it), so you're locked out. Though at least I'm not the only one, as in my current game it's turn 90 and nobody has tamed either urkan yet. In my first Mykara game, the first Urkan was snagged up before I had a chance to tame it.

Hello devs,

While I do agree the Mykara could use a little love, I think the situation isn't nearly as dramatic as some would like to paint it - the launch really reminded me of the Forgotten, who needed a small sprinkle of Dust and Influence to help them out. In fact, I think the race is already less fragile than the shadow folks.  Still, it's not without its warts, even if I think a lot of the early struggles are due to bloom/overgrowth being more of a much more fine balance thing than people intuitively assume.

Anyway, here's some of my humble suggestions:

1. The unique technologies need the Caudata Sanctuary treatment.

Caudata Sanctuary was a nice tech: one that was convenient and pleasant to use, but not really necessary in the grand scheme of things and thus skippable if one's really pressed by a challenge in the game. Adding a rider of influence discount to it gave it some much needed extra use. Mykara technologies are in a similar need: not only are they very conditional (depending on Urkan ownership), but also... not good at all. Diplomatic action cost is peanuts, particularly for a faction incentivized for warfare and garrison, while fun in principle, trips over Urkan's small garrison size and the slots being taken by the lice anyway. Moreover, the techs come early enough in the tree they should be a fine vector for whatever little buffs one intends to do. Some of the ideas I had for such boni are:

• Urkan politics discounting all influence costs - by a lesser amount, if (likely) necessary. In that case, even if the percentage would be halved, the broad application would offer a decent influence trickle for an Empire Plan-reliant faction, while encouraging espionage play, nudging players to keep assimilating all the diverse minors in their zone of influence and help juggle overgrown cities and empire plans.
• Urkan Encampment extends owned Urkan's garrison size by 2 - it would allow the Urkanportation (really cool, but not that crucial given the ruins network) to work with Era II Meritocratic Promotion 6-unit strong armies. It would also mean two extra slots for lice spawning, which would amount to nice little passive buff for all of the time one's not doing surgical strikes at a given moment.
• Incorporate an Urkan-bribing help into one of them. The resource discount vanished since beta (I think there was one in beta) for a reason, but it either could make a return or the shrooms could get some other enabler - like being offered two random resources as a bribery option. It'd be really nice for them to have a leg up in the Urkan race, given all their techs and a step in factional questline rely on it!

2. Overgrown city scaling

As it stands right now, it seems pretty clear the overgrown cities are meant to be kept temporarily, to be discarded a turn before the empire plan - otherwise, the cost of empire plans, luxury boosters and happiness maluses grow prohibitive. If that's intended, it's fine - though it would be really nice if devs stated this out loud, since there's a lot of counterintuitive things going on with them. For example, the expansion penalty while limited to happiness buildings in capital is either very much intended to keep happiness investment a resource sink like it is for other empires, or an unintended omission. Some clarity here would really go a long way, guys.

Still, assuming they are meant to be kept - or at least the nicely developed ones - I would suggest having their empire size penalty scale with the amount of districts - basically treat them very similar to the blooms. With some tweaking of the exact costs, it could provide a much more fluid, intuitive and workable trade-off between expanding for capital-boosted FIDSI space and Empire Plan considerations - similar to how other empires deal with expansion. This I feel is rather crucial, given Mykara has only one city's worth of influence boosters and cannot force the new acquisitions to "pay for themselves" by throwing production and dust at them.

3. Hero talent tweak

Okay, this is a minor one, but the -food consumption talent really sucks. It sounds wild, but it really amounts to granting 1 food/pop per level. Even for the trickier considerations (winter penalties! rushing out a volcanic city) the maths don't really work out compared to any other food generation option. The idea was nice, but it needs a tweak, such as:

• The simplest way: make it a single level talent granting -100% food consumption. Still worse that the level 1 food talent, but fine enough for a diminishing returns kind of thing.
• Turn it into a +% food production bonus (much in line with how most resource-oriented heroes have their talent trees built).
• Cook up a food-scaling bonus not unlike Organic Industry.

I really like the overgrown city mechanic, would be a waste if you had to aband it as a core game play mechanic. As of right now, due to penalities, its better option. As a side note, i'd also propose a slight increase in the defensive capabilities of home/overgrowth cities, for example one could buff the mykara garisson uinits and add some to overgrowth cities as well. 

One could roam more freely with hero army, using the ruin network and grabbing a good asortment of luxury extractors, thus buffing the urkan gameplay for the mykara. Also striking undefended enemy cites. 

Btw would it be op if home/overgrown cities also count as teleportation points automatically?

Hello everbody,

thank you very much for this thread, and the very neatly structured way you presented your concerns. We have been discussing the balance of the Mykara based on your feedback, and we are considering some changes. I would also like to mention that some of the balance issues you have been discussing were connected to bugs, like the Overgrown Cities lowering your Empire Approval far more than intended.

Unfortunately, I have no information yet on when the next patch is inbound, but I hope it will address many of your concerns.