In early game, the costs to expand and properly fill out towns can be rather crushing to a small economy that needs to be buying buildings and units instead of population, and by late game, one can theoretically purchase dozens of points of population in a single turn. Once the BL pass a certain point, they snowball and can become rather unstoppable. Imbalance aside, it's also something of a pain as the population costs tend to increase dependent on the amount of cities that you have. This discourages large, sprawling empires, even if you can fix the issue of expansion disapproval, and in the game of strategic resources, Broken Lords would tend to lose that fight.



What I propose is, instead of buying population, which can be broken and unbalanced both for and against, depending on the situation, as well as being annoying micro-management intensive, make dust act like food. A city's intake of dust should impact a city's population growth without breaking lore, and make BL players think about balancing production against dust intake instead of practicing the "buy everything" dust strategy.

Hm... I don't know about that... How would the dust income be divided between city growth and treasury accumulation? With the current system, you can choose what to do with dust: grow, repair your units, buy stuff, or whatever... And another very powerful concept is that you can counterbalance dust poor regions with dust rich regions, since you can buy stuff with dust... and this from the game start...



So, I kind of like the Broken Lords as they are: they are a good challenge, make you think very differently than the other factions.



And late game steamroll happens with all factions, to my knowledge... There is even a thread discussing that...



Another point: if a faction doesn't sprawl well, so what? The cultists can have only one city ... If you want to sprawl, go wild walkers... Or make a custom faction

Maybe have a slider on the town management screen to divvy dust between population growth and treasury accumulation? Maybe do it on an empire wide scale ala Harmony? I mean, don't get me wrong. I love the Dust Lords. The way they look is just the bees knees, they have this tragic Dark Souls Vibe going on, and everything from their voices to the way they die is just cool. I'm just thinking of ways to further improve and streamline them. As an amateur modder, that's just the kind of thing I do.



As for the lack of sprawling, yes, you are correct that the cultists cannot do so. However, it has been a discussion point that they are underpowered. Amplitide has even made a statement saying they are under review. I may be horribly bad at this game, but I have the understanding that success relies upon how far and well you expand. It is the first X in 4X afterall.

The second X ^^ explore, expand, exploit and exterminate.



I think that if a faction´s mechanics are very useful in certain scenarios and very limited in other ones, there´s a trade-off balance there somewhere. I personally don´t like the fact that you can start not having gold, like Necrophages can start without food; but the scale for population growth is fine because Dust, especially under the broken lords, can multiply exponentially. There´s not a dust upkeep from population like it happens with food.



I like the slider idea, then you´d set your own rate of growing and a dust upkeep for population; however, it may be hard to implement and actually have less of a "taste" for most BL players, because I can see how they would enjoy the level of micromanagement. I pick BL when I want the micromanagement to be part of my strategy.