If a monument is destroyed, do they lose favor? What if they run out of room in their town for monuments? Can they delete monuments to build others in their place? What if they just keep building the same monument in the same place and deleting it over and over again? It seems there is some kind of problem here. I guess I might solve it by making many different monuments available, the amount of favor being proportional to the cost, HP, and build time, but not size. That way if you ran out of room in your town you could destory your cheap monuments to build expensive ones. But then how would they take away favor for losing monuments if you didn't have any? I guess I don't have an answer after all. It seems it would be difficult to rush with MU's for the Greeks. (Assumed MU's are available in the first age.) In my opinion, their method of gaining favor is the best. All they really have to do is assign villagers to a temple the same way you assign them to wood or gold. And if you have idle villagers at the end of the game when all the resources are gone, you can always put them to work. At first glance it looks like the Norse are the ideal rushing culture because they need to attack to gain favor. But then I realized that the first strike cannot be with MU's because they don't have any favor yet (I am assuming all MU's cost favor.) Because of this, the Norse will never really be able to be a defense culture (making them a bane to newbies Here's a potential problem with the Norse system of favor. It comes from playing those "blood" scenarios. In the scenarios, you get upgrades or resources or some other kind of bonus with kills or razings. It then became good strategy to manually delete your units and building that were low on HP's so the enemy can't benefit from taking them down. Although this practice was generally frowned upon, it still greatly helped those who employed it. This problem could also manifest itself in Age of Mythology. I know most people do not find it feasible to delete units low on HP when fighting the Norse, but it could become widespread. And again there is a problem with multi-team games: Team 1 takes most of Team 2's army down to half or quarter HP and then Team 3 finishes it off and gets all the favor. Here's how this could be remedied. You could have the Norse get favor for the number of actual HP taken from enemy. This would be harder to calculate than kills, but would definitely be fairer. One final thought on Norse favor: It seems they will end up in some kind of spiral. If they start to lose they cannot get favor and will lose more. If they start to win they get more and more favor and will win more. So the start of the game will be really crucial for them. The Greeks seem to the easiest time gaining favor. Maybe there should have to be a special prayer temple that costs a lot more. Or perhaps that favor gaining rate would be really slow, like, say, 1 favor units per 10 vill*sec. The Norse gain favor through kills, so their rate should go at a more medium pace. Maybe 1 favor unit per kill? The Egyptians have the worst deal, IMO, and should get lots of favor for their structures. Maybe they can make a 5 F monument, a 10 F monument, a 20 F monument, and so on up to maybe a 35 or 40. All of this, of course, is little more than speculation. All we know is that the favor cap is 100. So I would estimate that the really destructive god powers cost 50 or 60 F, the powerful MU's 10-15 F, and the weaker MU's as little as 5 F or even 2 F.
Another problem with the "blood" games usually occured in a free-for-all. The red player would take 1980 HP off blue's gate, and then green would come along and finish it off. Green got all the benefits. Blue got none.
Well, that's I can think of for now. What do you think about these problems, speculations, and suggestions?