Jump Monkeys wrote...
Cannons are too expensive for them to be destructable, besides any player who buys a cannon first would have an overwhelming advantage. If any other player builds a cannon or armory within range of an existing cannon and does not instantly protect them they've effectively wasted money.
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One thing to note is that a cannon costs 25 to build and 20 per shell. That is a total cost of 45 to fire a single time and would only require the opposing player an armory and a single walker to protect it costing 12 total. I do not see how allowing a cannon to destroy an unprotected armory/cannon would be overpowered as that initial/sustained cost has to come from somewhere.
Keep in mind that it would only require a 2 resource investment to protect the armory/cannon versus a 20 resource investment by the opposing player to destroy it. If the player fires multiple shells at the same armory/cannon, the defensive costs will increase by 10 per each additional shell fired. Given that each player can stack up to 16 walkers and a cannon shell can only destroy 5 walkers per shot, it would require 4 shells to destroy all of the walkers and a 5th shell to destroy the armory/cannon. That is an investment of 25 for the cannon and 20*5 for the shells (125 total) versus a minimum of 10 for the armory and 2*16 for the walkers (42 total).
I think that the resource investments are perfectly fine if a player is willing to invest so much to destroy an armory. Also note that the occupied tile will not change possession so the player can always rebuild the armory/cannon so long as it is not occupied by another player. This suggestion would not change much about the game but would allow for the bombardment of unprotected or weakly covered armories and cannons. Also note that the cannon shell would still sink the tile by one so sustained fire would destroy the tile regardless. This would simply allow a player with a properly positioned cannon to do more than drop a tile by one and would make certain battles more than just carrier/harvester encounters.
On a side note is that I agree that the controlled tiles bonus might not be the correct approach but there should be some type of cost reduction for certain actions. So if a player has the largest army (minimum of 16 walkers) then they get a 50% discount on building armories (costs 5 instead of 10). If a player has the most cannons in play (not loaded; minimum of 3) then they get a 25% discount on shells (costs 15 instead of 20). Carriers should never be discounted however.
EDIT: I had more time to think about the unsinkable tile idea and the term cornerstone or keystone seems appropriate. I do not have time to explain my idea currently but needless to say it would be a zero resource tile that cannot be harvested or sunk unless certain conditions are met. I will explain the idea in detail later today.