Celtic Gold Mine rework

As you mentioned it, the problem is that the goldmines are not placed properly. I only use the mine in candy kourion thought, all other maps caravans are usually most effective.

Changing the goldmines so the goldminer camp can be placed over it is for me the solution.

Having a +50% goldmine drop off bonus is a bit too high for pvp, would be ok in pve since caravans are anyway so much faster then mining.

 

there is one at Idalion.
the goldmine south to our forum.
Looks like it is too close to the "cliff"

 

By the way,

I don't catch the advantage of Celtic gold mine,

it's available at silver.

at that time,

the caravans or transport ship should already be running, no ?

 

I only use it rarely eg. On candy kourion

 

I play a lot of celts, but because i switch between greeks and romans too i often forget to use gold mines (when i can) since they don't ever feel like they do very much. Maybe it does need a slight tweak, a small rework, so that it offers something unique?

Celts never seem to feel short on gold anyway, since they're infantry focussed you should have barracks, and if you've got barracks, you can make swarms of celtic spearmen, which only cost food. 10 barracks and 20-30 farms puts an unbreakable wall of meatshields soldiers between you and your enemy.

I haven't got any particular ideas, but i'm sure that they could be something other than storehouses that need rebuilding each time the gold runs out, and can't be used for other resources. I don't play babylonians much, and i don't know what high end players do, but i always make sure i'm maxed out on gardens as i age up. I'd love to see this unique celt feature be closer to that level of usefulness, even if it means changing something from the base game.

 

So the Celtic Mines are basically supposed to be the A3 gold mining tech for Celts - Celts are the only civ with only 1 gold mining tech (Compared to Babylon, who only have 1 tier stone and 1 tier farm, but have gardens, ox carts, and special A4 tech to make up for that). Celts gather gold in a gold mine at a speed equivalent to having 2 techs of gold mining, but also gain 50% gold conservation on top of that.

Of course, the main thing is that you shouldn't be mining gold with Villagers but instead using Caravans, as your gold generation per caravan is easily 2-3x that of Villagers, and it's infinite rather then limited.

Of course, we have a number of maps in which you can't use caravans (Kourion and Cold Cata for this winter event), and while Merchant Tranports have even higher gold generation per second then Caravans, they also have hefty collision issues - With Cold Cata, you can make 2 seperate merchant transport lines, 1 on the bottom and 1 on the top, but with Kourion you can only make a single merchant transport line, and if you get over 15 or so combined Merchant Transporrts with both players you start to get significant collision (Collision is a significantly lesser issue with Caravans outside of early game extreme boom, or bad building placement)

With these maps, gold generation becomes much more important, and Celtic Mines even more so. And tbh Celtic Spearman Spam is the 3rd worst spam possible for Celts, only behind Slinger and Ram spam. Even spamming Druids gets you farther compared to spamming Spearmen.

 

Those gold mines could use some tweaking to make them more reliable for sure, but when you get used to it it's not so bad.

On top of not be buildable or buildable even if red, another small problem is the villagers not entering inside automatically after building it all the time. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.

 

Yes! That's an issue in PvP as well, where gold mines play a much more critical role.

Is there a way around that? I think I've shift-clicked the mine after ordering vills to build the foundation, but I haven't paid close enough attention to know if that consistently fixes it. Or if shift-clicking the foundation again works.

One thing I sometimes do when I assign a villager to a storehouse, but they already have a different resource partially-collected:

• order build storehouse
• shift-right-click next to storehouse
• shift-right-click storehouse foundation
• shift-right-click adjacent resource

It's a lot of click-spam, but that allows the vill to drop of their resources at the storehouse before they get wasted when the vill collects something different. I try to avoid it when I can by having the vill drop off at an existing storehouse first, but that's not always feasible.

Would be nice if a simple shift-right-click on storehouse would do the trick (that does not seem to work), or even if they would auto-drop when finishing the storehouse. I wonder if the gold mine build&idle behavior is related to this.

 

@CrimsonCantab I tried shift clicking the foundation and shift clicking the gold under the foundation, but it doesn't seem reliable. I should try shift clicking away and back to the foundation like you do with storehouses.