In any case, it's a problem that needs to be fixed. I've taken advantage of this but always had a piece or two of the bonuses missing.



Thanks for documenting, nice catch!

Right now the Drakkens are overpowered too Try to go for diplomatic victory and just compliment other factions. It is THAT easy.

Hooray, we have 2 OP factions !

i just tried this Technic. it is indeed overpowered xD

this does need to change before the official game comes out.

Just chiming in to make sure that this thread doesn't disappear into the depths of the forum.



I completely agree that the way buyout costs are calculated now is rather broken. Anything that allows you to buy a unit with one resources and then gain more of said resource should be impossible.

A similar example: Industry boosters on Fast game speed. Their costs are adjusted for the game speed, but their benefit is not. Thus, the boosters cost 125/600 Industry to produce, but provide 150/700 industry. That's a gain of 100 industry on the level 2 boost, which is a considerable gain, especially with all costs being cut in half for fast game speed.

Given that last time I sold any, industry stockpiles fetched a considerable sum, this could easily snowball as well. Infinite Dust for everybody.

As far as I know Setseke Ho does not cost any dust/production... and 50 % plus massive amount of happiness for 10 turns at a nominal cost of 5 units per luxury is a massive boost...



But I will go crunch the numbers regardless.

Assuming you lose all production from uprooted cities (or even just from exploitations) on the turn you uproot, and Setseke Ho! costs /. Is the booster discount worth it?



I imagine since the boost lasts longer than it would take to reset your cities it would be a net benefit...

Propbuddha wrote:
It's been a while since I tried to move cities around but don't you lose FIDSI production while they are uprooted? Doesn't it take a few turns to re-deploy districts?

It takes the turn you queue up Setseke Ho! to build (and anything which will finish in the same turn does not get built... don't know if this is intended). The next turn you can settle, and then it takes another turn to deploy your districts. I guess you don't lose any FIDSI from the town centre, but I haven't tested this properly. The only problem with this feature/exploit is to get the timing right - all your cities needs to finish all of their current production or else you lose it. Regardless, you can use this to gain +50 % food, industry, science, gold, + some happiness and all the other benefits from luxuries for 5 luxuries each, regardless of the number of cities you own.



I assume it will work for empire plans as well, but not sure.

EzekielMoerdyk wrote:
While we are talking about the Roving Clans, I also want to point out (perhaps again? I didn't do a search but do keep an eye on the forums, so I think I would've noticed it) that the Roving Clans can uproot all of their cities in one turn in order to activate luxury boosters at a cost of 5 units each.

It's been a while since I tried to move cities around but don't you lose FIDSI production while they are uprooted? Doesn't it take a few turns to re-deploy districts?

While we are talking about the Roving Clans, I also want to point out (perhaps again? I didn't do a search but do keep an eye on the forums, so I think I would've noticed it) that the Roving Clans can uproot all of their cities in one turn in order to activate luxury boosters at a cost of 5 units each. Although this obviously costs a turn of FIDSI output, the net effect is ridiculously strong as you only have to buy 5 of each luxury to gain a massive 10 turn benefit to FIDSI all round. In addition, it means the few luxuries which you mine is mostly all directly profit.



Whether this is a foreseen implication of the Roving Clans (in other words a 'balanced' game feature) or an exploit I do not know, but it does feel quite overpowered.

Devs, what's your call on this?

Now, I know that I am making a big claim, but please hear out what I have to say.



To get to how they are overpowered you have to know that it is a combination of factors that add up to an undesirable effect that i believe was overlooked on selling mercenaries to the marketplace. The first is the combination of the empire plan unit production reduction cost of 25%, with the Roving Clan Hero trait that 2/2 reduces unit production cost by 25%. That will cause the unit to be half the production cost, still nothing wrong here until you factor in the slavery tech that gives you the 25% buyout on unit. This total reduction cost on a unit allows a roving clan player to use dust to buyout (4,6,8) units depending on his garrison size for (I use the example of what i experienced/saw in my own game) at 200ish dust per unit, and then sell them on the marketplace the next turn for about 600-700 dust a unit. The amount of dust only increases with each next era of equipment on units.



To be able to do that EVERY turn adds to a ridiculous amount of dust and in on my game, at turn 100 I had already achieved 35-40% (roughly 220,000 dust) economic victory with only 5 states.



WHY ITS OVERPOWERED: I was not only able to buy every city improvement on all my cities in the matter of a few turns, but was able to keep first military score because i could now max-out the amount of units i produce each turn on my other cities.

I was also able to fund another players war by feeding him thousands of dust a turn to buyout his own men. Not to mention an essentially limitless supply of dust.



I think this issue can be resolved by having unit being sold on the marketplace being sold as the adjusted (lowered) production cost of the unit, or anything the creative and resourceful solution the amplitude team comes up with!



IN SHORT: Roving clans can buyout units for cheap, then sell them for 75% of what they bought them for on marketplace making a huge income of dust.



NOTE: I do not know if there was any other factor involved aside from what i mentioned that causes so a huge gap in dust gain, and one has to remember the sheer amount of dust a roving clans already make from trade ontop of this mercenary selling business.

I am also making this post because this was not from just something i noticed that ONE time i played roving clans... I have played them multiple times competitively on public multiplayer games and among friends as well.



I hope this was not tl:dr but i think it has some valid points.

Propbuddha wrote:
Nice, never tried to do this, honest ...



To be fair, this isn't an exclusive Roving Clans thing (except that they can do it sooner). Any faction that has researched Mercenary Market can do this.



The flaw is the way buyouts are calculated (based on remaining production after discounts) and the Marketplace not changing payouts when units are being dumped on the market....

I agree that everyone can do it, but it was only because of roving clans that I discovered that this was really abusable.

Nice, never tried to do this, honest ...



To be fair, this isn't an exclusive Roving Clans thing (except that they can do it sooner). Any faction that has researched Mercenary Market can do this.



The flaw is the way buyouts are calculated (based on remaining production after discounts) and the Marketplace not changing payouts when units are being dumped on the market....

o0ber wrote:
@hashinshin You have a good point, but I think they should increase the dust cost of a buyout, to make any reductions meaningful as well as more balanced. As far as the Industry not affecting the buyout, I thought the cost of the buyout was based off the industry required to produce a unit but i may be wrong.



@Teslaflux That is an interesting concept but I think a buyout per turn limit would further hinder brokenlords who already rely on dust for many aspects of their gameplay, not to mention you can only build so many units a turn because of garrison limit. I feel the root of the problem is the cheap cost to buyout units. Perhaps unit buyout alone should be increased in order to prevent this because if the profit from buying out and selling is much less, there would not be a problem. As it stands, you can essentially just do this strategy and win because of the insane amount of dust you are gaining each turn.

Maybe an increase per unit in one turn. So the first has normal cost and then the cost get higher per additional unit boughtout(is this the right word?)

But I don´t know if this is a feasible idea. Especially if there is a overhaul of the economy like SirValeryn said.

@SirValeryn I know I know!! I just couldn't wait for the update and to see the changelog to make this post as I did think very well of what you said, but I had no idea if anyone else knew about this problem. I had some guilt build up inside me because of using this tactic seems like an abuse of a game mechanic.

@hashinshin You have a good point, but I think they should increase the dust cost of a buyout, to make any reductions meaningful as well as more balanced. As far as the Industry not affecting the buyout, I thought the cost of the buyout was based off the industry required to produce a unit but i may be wrong.



@Teslaflux That is an interesting concept but I think a buyout per turn limit would further hinder brokenlords who already rely on dust for many aspects of their gameplay, not to mention you can only build so many units a turn because of garrison limit. I feel the root of the problem is the cheap cost to buyout units. Perhaps unit buyout alone should be increased in order to prevent this because if the profit from buying out and selling is much less, there would not be a problem. As it stands, you can essentially just do this strategy and win because of the insane amount of dust you are gaining each turn.

Commenting now on this is fruitless as the Dev team has stated (on other larger threads) multiple times that there's a huge overhaul of resources, buildings and units coming in next build. We'll have to wait and see ^_^

One solution could be that there is a limit for the "buyout" per turn.

But I don´t know how a limit like that would affect the game balance.

I've long thought that dust buyout should be reduced across the board, but reductions to the industry of the unit shouldn't impact the dust buyout