Balance in HotA.

I'll add a bit regarding rebuilding — the need for it is partly due to the fact that in several scenarios, a player ends up with too few cities for building guilds in them to provide good chances of control.

Therefore, it is advisable to consider measures that increase the number of cities available to the player.

The most natural mechanism here seems to be the optimization of the road network, reducing the number of situations where one of the players takes a key road junction and traps the opponent in a corner with two or three cities.

If the road network is more balanced, if available junctions are accessible to every player, if there are cyclic routes, etc., then the chances of being trapped will be much lower.

Plus, imho, we should move away from roadless treasures and place villages everywhere. Besides a general acceleration of Gameplay, this would also add one-way roads for expansion.

And an ideological consideration — it doesn't seem normal to me when 1 city and a pile of resources are enough to build up all magic. The amount of developed territory and the number of captured castles is an indicator of game quality; it should be rewarded, among other things, by increasing the number of available spells.

Well, building up a guild in a castle that is under enemy fire is very debatable and more likely to be a disadvantage than an advantage. And capturing territory is already rewarded with a large number of objects.

And if you have 14 cons and 88 Dragon Utopia on your respawn, what's the point of capturing castles and building up control if there's a high probability you'll find it in the Dragon Utopia.