I have another tale of woe regarding my new favorite unit Master Builder.
For those who don’t know who he is:
See the part where it says “A settlement may have only one Barricade.”
Well… An ally sent me some extra mana this morning, so I decided to put the card to the test.
I tried to build a Barricade at a settlement where I already had a Barricade built. (Sneaky me!)
I clicked to use his ability, the selection appeared, and sure enough, the settlement the Master Builder was at was eligible! I clicked the Settlement, the Mana was spent… and… just like the card says… Only one can be built. So the fortification Bonus remained at +4… and I’m out of 8 Mana. 
Boooo! hiss Boooo!
Suggestion: There should be a Quality of Life User Experience: when I select a settlement that already has a Barricade built, a popup should inform me that I cannot actually build an additional barricade there and that only one per settlement is allowed. Also, it should not charge me the 8 Mana. (Because technically nothing was built.)
Bonus Suggestion: The word used to describe this ability should be unified. In some places it’s called “Barricade” in other places (Specifically looking at the town’s stats) It’s called “Fortification”. One word should be chosen and used universally to avoid further confusion.
Much Love! This game is great!
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In hindsight, perhaps the naming Barricade + Fortification is actually correct. Barricade being the “Special Structure Built” And “+ Fortification” being the actual bonus.
That’s probably acceptable if there are future plans to add other “Types” of “Structures” to add “+ Fortification” bonuses.
Yeah the naming is fine I think. If you use a Barricade on a village that has a Fortification already, the 2 different pieces of information would be separate so you can easily see the bonuses.
Apart from that, I agree that a warning should come up about overwritting or re-doing the same buff that you already have applied.
Edit: Here’s an image of what it will look like if you have both a Barricade and Fortification.
Yes, this is a general case bug that we need to address. No buffs in the game stack, so this could occur in a number of situations. It’s a broad system change that we need to make, so it might not get done for a while, but I’ll log it as a bug.
Normally, when you cast a duplicate buff on a unit or place, the old is replaced with the new so the restoration time is reset.
A few months ago Palisades and Barricades only lasts a few days so recasting the ability actually refreshed them so they would last longer. When I was trying to make them better I added code to make them never expire.
There are a few cases in the game were you can cast a spell, even if it’s a bit dumb to do so. I’m a little wary of trying to catch these and prevent the player from doing it because as the game progresses and we add new heroes to the game, there might be some interesting interactions that we would close the door to unintentionally.
More simply, I’m wary about trying to guess what is dumb and prevent the player from doing it incase they know something I don’t.
So for example, what if there was a hero where a player was paid 50 gold for every spell cast and they really needed it, but the only spell they could do was to fortify a town that already had one!
You could always allow them to cast it, but display a warning. “This settlement already has a barricade bonus. Are you sure you want to build it again? (You don’t get any new extra strength bonus.)”
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