A suggestion for Pioneers, Troops, Cities and Outposts

This.   I would also suggest that the troops that spawn with a new city remain as intrinsic, strategically stationary militia troops, so you can't just take them out and bash the opposition.  Also, the capital city the Sovereign founds would automatically get the three types of starting troops as intrinsic protection of the starting capital (initial recruits from the founding of the brand new kingdom or empire), which will help with defense and help prevent steamrolling.  The intrinsic units of a capital or city would have the basic stats of the founding race with no traits, and the group size of the highest currently researched group size.  If you manage to take over an enemy city, the militia troops should take a while to appear, so you can't just capture a city and have instant protection, and must leave troops to prevent the enemy retaking the city.

What do other people think about these ideas?

i like the idea, or at least most of it, but i doubt anything like this would be implemented for a while considering such late in beta, and these sound like theyll add a lot of reprogramming of ai and gaming systems

There shouldn't be restrictions on what you do with your 3 spawned troops because the idea there was to be able to use then to balance stacks and to give opportunity to split stacks.

As far as it being difficult to code, there is one portion that would require extra calculation but the rest should be able to be done within the XML (not that I've looked in there much this time around).

1. All factions start the game with tech to produce Spearmen, Swordsmen and Archers.

This just relies on tech being available for these units from the start of the game which is in the XML, and from what I understand this is something Derek is looking at for the next version.

2. Pioneers cost as much as 3 other troops - including materials and time.

The Pioneer kit is just an XML item. Make it expensive. This could be used as an exploit if the base troop designs are upgraded but it is do-able.

3. The more cities you control the more gildar Pioneers cost on a compounding scale, eg 15% per city.

This requires an addition of base code I think because I don't know if the XML can be changed to apply these sort of modifiers where it knows the number of cities.

4. Pioneers can only found cities - not outposts.

I would imagine there would be flags in the XML that allow the Pioneer pack to found cities and hopefully another flag to found outposts. Just remove the XML flag for outposts and you are left with a city builder.

5. When a Pioneer founds a city, the Pioneer is used up but 3 troops spawn in the city (hence the 3 unit cost above)

I guess this is a little more complex but still should be able to be done in XML. Founding a city triggers an action already. Tie the spawn of the three troops to this action and job done. This would work much like the Sand Gollum summoner.

6. The spawned units will be one each of the initial types, Spearman, Swordsman, and Archer.

Just a pointer in the XML for the Pioneer pack.

7. Any recruitable troop unit can found an outpost but that unit becomes the garrison and can't leave.

As I said above, I'm guessing that the Pioneer pack has two flags that allow the building of either cities or outposts. If this flag is moved from the item across to units then that would be that part of it done. The next bit is more difficult where it then has to garrison the outpost. But even if outposts worked as level 1 cities that just spawned a defender unit when attacked, that would work fine too.

I don't see how you can get city spam early. There are 'always' big time monsters near the precious few good city sites - which I can't hope to deal with until well into the game. In most of my starts, I am really hardpressed to safely found even the second city in a good spot. Heck, I can only keep even mid level monsters from stolling around my capital area destroying improvement by keeping my lvl 8 soverign and best hero there. My best troops get single shotted by these guys.

There has clearly been a game design decision that archers come pretty late (hundreds of turns in unless you do military research only). This must be for balancing reasons so just don't see them implementing the three auto troops idea. Mind you, that is probably for the best since my cities can barely afford a single militia until the cash generating improvements start becoming available. New cities with a triple garrison is guaranteed bankruptcy - unless you get a lot more gold mines than I seem to.

City spam can be controlled by more aggressive monsters. You don't need to change the pioneer dynamic to get that effect. Right now, monsters in lairs rarely wander and even wandering monsters don't attack an undefended city or outpost. Once you kick up the agressiveness of the monsters city spam will be reduced AND players will build units to garrison any new cities. 

However, I *do* think that all civs should start with a ranged weapon of some sort. Whether it's thrown spears, slings or crude bows, we should be able to build archers from the start.

JMO.