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Sounds fantastic, that would be ideal. I was going to chime in, but the topic sort of meandered a bit and I didn't feel like being the one to reel it in (at least that's the excuse I'm sticking to).

Qetesh thanks. I now have a thread I feel I can post in with out derailing the original thread. Well looks like it is time for me to "move on" from Goddus, with what was said in the first post of that thread the game is heading in a way I did not back the game for. I understand this is what the team was left with and they could not back track to make the game we though we were promised. I will not be leaving the boards for sure but for me Godus is just another game to lay on the wayside I will not touch again.

I think the conversation needs to drift (while focused on the original questions) to allow the discussion to be appropriately framed.

So you asked about war/military. This raises a series of fundamental questions:

• is godus a combat game?
• what is the role of economy in war after all "The sinews of war are infinite money"?
• do we even want counter civilisations?
• how is expansion to be managed?
• how does soldiering work as an occupation and does this change the settlement model?
• which leads to what is the role of professions and buildings in territory and conquest?
• if God powers are to be part of war then how are these sustained (belief, religion, priesthood and areas of influence)

These questions show that you cant narrowly focus the question on the means of combat.

I wanted to stay positive in the official thread but since this is the off topic version about the offical thread I want to say this. Peter and Jack have created an abosolute clusterfuck. If we are talking about dead ends let's consider the dead end they've led this game down. They created a bunch of useless elements such as the astari that were poorly considered and need to be ripped out. I know that is neither constructive nor achievable but this is the reality we face.

Moo you should consider creating a version of godus without military and without conquest. Kind of like banished. In terms of step, leap, fly or whatever it was that would be the most achieveable step, to work towards a game like banished where your goal is to improve and advance your civ like the game Banished. If you achieve this version of the game you could layer on combat and opposition later.

I think we need to start broad and narrow the discussion. The conversation probably needs community curation (rather than developer) to save moos time.

I'd just like to point out complaints about being a god does not mean placing buildings. Who says a god doesn't plant the blueprint and drive into a followers head to build something (Noah and the ark) why can't we as gods pick where to build things? Sorry I know it's off topic.

I believe these boards are more of a neutral zone, to put it in a ST reference type of way. 

I think that if you make finger of god a lot more expensive and thus you have to use it sparingly, it'd be more used as an indicator for your soldiers. FoG-ing an incoming raiding party would tell your soldiers to attack it. But if the power is too cheap, you could use it to just whipe out the raiding party. So make it cost more belief. The choice for the player then becomes 'do I want to spend all this belief on killing them myself, or do I just kill one or two and let my soldiers do the rest.
Belief represents a time investment, after all. Meteor would represent an even bigger time investment (higher belief cost), but would do more damage to more incoming Astari.

Letting your soldiers deal with incoming Astari instead of using god powers means your belief could be used elsewhere, and thus you don't have to spend your time on it.
Alternatively, casting a swamp in their path could hold the raiding party back for a while, representing the player's option of saying 'I want do deal with them, but later'. (thus requiring that swamps significantly slow Astari down. And swamp should be quite cheap, comparatively)

I think, if FoG and Meteor are expensive enough they will represent significant events. (the biblical flood only happened once, making it far more important than if it happened 100 times over) And it makes it less of a no-brainer to use them.

If letting soldiers deal with raiding parties is considered the 'baseline', and dealing with them through powers is a way to simply do it faster, but at a cost, then powers are a way of time management for the player.
A player who just wants to sculpt, would so generally want to leave raiding parties alone for their followers do deal with themselves so they can invest their belief into sculpting instead. A player who doesn't bother with sculpting too much wouldn't mind casting a meteor or 2 instead.

This may mean that every player should automatically have an army that deals with incoming raids. (at the cost of population growth) Otherwise there wouldn't be anything to stop the raid for players who don't have the belief to invest into expensive offensive powers.

In summary:
- Increase the cost of Meteor and Finger of God to the point where they can be cast sparingly.
- supply every player with a free defensive army to deal with incoming raids when the player can't or doesn't want to invest belief into Meteors / Finger of God.
- Keep swamps cheap and increase it's slowing effect on raiding parties that pass through it.

An emergent problem here is that finger of god is also used to destroy your own building if you don't want it there, as a corrective mechanic. This would also become very expensive to do with these changes. Perhaps it is feasible to make Finger of God cost less when used on friendly units or structures. But this also means a visual aid needs to be made to show how much it costs for what you're currently doing with it.

My guess would be he is doing the best he can with what he has to work with. Will it be what we backed for? No, not IMHO. Will it be better than what the mobile is now? Probably but not as much as some had hoped for. I think your best bet of raising the bar at least some is to give input as requested by the design team and yes also do remember to keep your expectations in check. 

I blame PM but that horse is turning into a fossil now, so onward...

FOR ALL:
Please feel free to rant all you want in this thread but follow the requested format to the letter in his threads or your posts will be moved here and multiple posts will be merged 

IMHO Moo is trying to push shit up hill and it is very likely he will fail to do so. However, it is a noble crusade he is undertaking and for that reason I am happy to support him. Nothing would make me happier than to see Moo succeed where the great Peter Molyneux failed so spectacularly. So let's all see where we can get to together. As Qetesh says we will likely need to let go of many of our expectations but at the same time we can hope that new ideas that we haven't thought of yet will be included.

This hope may be in vein but I prefer to be a Pollyanna.