Is creature dwellings growth a little overkill?

I think that many players didn’t like the original concept of creature dwellings, which you have to go there every week if you want to hire the units and they don’t keep the number for the following week.

Some projects have added the feature of leaving the creatures for next week and keep the normal growing, as HoTA. However, I’ve seen that it works different in VCMI.

In HoTA you keep the creatures for the following weeks if someone has gone there before. In VCMI the number is always growing since the first week. The consequence is that if someone gets creatures late the number can be crazy. For instance, if someone discover an object to recruit water elementals the fifth week the amount of them is 30, and this is a number big enough to unbalance the game in the fifth week. IMHO, it makes sense if someone discovered the object the first week and it has had a flag since them.

In fact, it’s a lot of better for the gameplay if you change it. Imagine that you have some creatures in front of the object and you have to against them. It doesn’t matter if you fight against them early or not because the dwelling will keep the same number, so you can fight against them later with a bigger army, but the game should reward players who fought against them earlier with a less powerful army and having some casualties. The only reward would be an hypothetical +1 growing in their castles if they have the same dwelling.

However, I don’t like when someone gets a new dwelling in the sixth month and the creatures available to hire are the basic growth. I think that the best solution is use a different formula, which the number of creatures to hire is higher if you go there later, but not as a high as the normal growth.

In fact, I would like to add even a randomness factor. Something like the growth (if nobody has gone there before) is the normal rate of 1 week plus a randomness value between 20% and 50% for each of the previous weeks.

Following my example, if someone get a cloud temple in the eleventh week, he would be able to recruit an amount between 3 and 6 angels (the average would be 4.5) instead of 1 (normal HoMM3) or 11 (current VCMI).

What do you think about it?

Dwellings were initially accumulating creatures just because of a bug and we turned it into optional feature. You can simply turn it off if you don’t like.

As to “balance”, it’s hard to tell, depending on what you play and what you’re after. I for example play (or test AI) only on medium / rich random maps. On such maps players are supposed to rush and never stop, so getting few weeks of creatures from dwelling is just fine.
AI, on the other hand, plays too slowly and just needs these big dwellings to keep on going.