Are devils worth 7 blood each?

[Huzurdaddi]

I think that they are worth 7 blood gems a pop. I think that they are fantastic units. I actually think that 7 blood gems a pop just about the correct cost, not too high not too low, just right.

The problem is if that's the correct cost then why do soul contracts cost so little?

For the paltry price of 60 blood ( you *really* should be able to forge a hammer if you are going blood ) you get 1 per turn. That pays for itself in 9 turns. This is much faster than other income generating types of investments.

Clams take ( assuming alchemy from astral -> water ) 14 turns to pay themselves off.

Fever Fetishes take ( assuming closed loop via alchemy again ) take 20 turns ( but really people probably do not close loop these ).

Vampires pay off in ~ 14 turns.

It just seems like the price of contracts is a little too low. If the requirement was 6 Blood to make them the cost 125 slaves which means it would pay off in 14 turns almost exactly the same as other income streams.

I just don't see why these things are so inexpensive. I just won a game based on them and really they are quite powerful.

[Thufir]

Huzurdaddi said:

I just don't see why these things are so inexpensive. I just won a game based on them and really they are quite powerful.



As a guy that's getting smacked around by devils pretty badly, I find that easy to believe. Although I don't know if the key to my opponents devil hordes is soul contracts (though I've been wondering about that).

[Graeme Dice]

Huzurdaddi said:
The problem is if that's the correct cost then why do soul contracts cost so little?



60 slaves takes 10 turns to pay for itself. 10 turns is enough time to have your entire empire wiped out.

[Huzurdaddi]

As a guy that's getting smacked around by devils pretty badly




I've been that guy a couple of times, LOL. So this time I wanted to be the guy on the other side. And yup it's not horribly hard. There is a small window, however, in which you can get stomped.



Although I don't know if the key to my opponents devil hordes is soul contracts (though I've been wondering about that).




I doubt he is summoning them. They are quite difficult to summon in quanity, the casting requirements are quite high.



60 slaves takes 10 turns to pay for itself.




Uhm, I think it's 9, like I posted.

Of course there is a window in which you can get busted. Like all investment stratgies. My question is why does this one take less time than all the others to pay off?

[Kel]

It's really not fair to assume a hammer on one side (and not even count its cost or design points on a pretender to get one) and alchemy conVersion loss on the other. Imo, the comparison is flawed at it's very base.

- Kel

[Cohen]

I believe it depends on your need.
If you're at peace and plan for a long term game, Soul Contract is better.

But the chance to get 10 devils in 2-3 rounds instead could be useful if you're in immediate need for them in battle.

Not to count the Soul Contract guy get horror marked, and is victim of horrors, that find him even if he's hiding.

[The_Tauren13]

Kel said:
Imo, the comparison is flawed at it's very base.



I couldnt agree more. I see no reason to take into account hammers, as that is a different story all together. I would say 11 turns payback for the soul contract. I also think that astral pearls are worth more than water gems, so taking into account alchemy for payback time is somewhat lame. If anything, the clams have 8 or 9 turn payback because of relative gem worth. Also, your vampire comparison is flawed in that you not only get the 1 vampire/turn, you get a powerful vampire lord.

[baruk]

If the comparison is "how long do they take to pay for themselves", soul contract loses as you cannot alchemise devils into blood slaves for a new soul contract. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif
Vampire lords may be more expensive than hammer forged soul contracts, though you may be lucky and find a summoning bonus site. Besides which, vampires are immortal, which is quite handy.

[Thufir]

The_Tauren13 said:
...
I also think that astral pearls are worth more than water gems, so taking into account alchemy for payback time is somewhat lame. If anything, the clams have 8 or 9 turn payback because of relative gem worth.



The relative worth of astral vs. water is quite dependent on the nation, but IMO it's clear that for any clamhoarding nation (which is what we're talking about in this case), the water is worth more than the astral.

I expect that anybody that's doing clamhoarding (or at least doing it well) should be running a substantial surplus in astral, and doing a lot of alchemizing from astral to other types, never from non-astral to astral.

[Huzurdaddi]

It's really not fair to assume a hammer on one side (and not even count its cost or design points on a pretender to get one) and alchemy conVersion loss on the other. Imo, the comparison is flawed at it's very base.




Uhm ... the hammers are assumed on both sides. Removing them does not change the ratios which is what this is all about. Soul contracts yeild an effective gem supply which is 150% greater ( given the input ) than the other sources.



Not to count the Soul Contract guy get horror marked, and is victim of horrors, that find him even if he's hiding.




Do they? Not in any game I have played. In games I have played I somewhat commonly get the message "a horror attacked so and so" however I can not watch the battle ( "bad VCR" ) and when I check he is still alive. Perhaps someone has seen a Horror kill a scout with a soul contract before, but I have not.

[Cainehill]

Thufir said:
The relative worth of astral vs. water is quite dependent on the nation, but IMO it's clear that for any clamhoarding nation (which is what we're talking about in this case), the water is worth more than the astral.




I don't think so. They're making clams _because_ astral gems are more valuable to them. After all - compare to fever fetishes. If you run a surplus of fire gems, but need ... air, you have to convert 4 fire for each air gem. The astral gems are more valuable because they're essentially worth twice as much as any other gem when alchemizing from one to another.

I say this as someone who has clammed, and who has fevered, and who has had at least something like 40 fetishes and 40 clams going in the same game, with a non-fire, non-water, non-astral nation, without ever alchemizing to build the fetishes or clams.

[Kel]

Uhm ... the hammers are assumed on both sides. Removing them does not change the ratios which is what this is all about. Soul contracts yield an effective gem supply which is 150% greater ( given the input ) than the other sources.




You are adding extra factors to the equation. Barring extraneous factors, clams take 10 turns to pay themselves and soul contracts take ~ 11.5 .

Even that isn't really a great comparison because since there are so many different factors that differ between the two but assuming alchemical losses, the cost of speeding up clams beyond your natural water income, and not taking into account reduced gold, pop and research loss from speeding up blood income makes for a flawed basis of comparison.

Admittedly, it would be difficult to come up with the losses from speeding up blood production so the obvious thing to do is to not take into account rushed production on either side, in which case, clams pay for themselves faster than soul contracts.

- Kel

[Huzurdaddi]

You are adding extra factors to the equation. Barring extraneous factors, clams take 10 turns to pay themselves and soul contracts take ~ 11.5 .




Uhm if you are alchemizing ( note: soul contracts give essentially blood that makes this a totally valid comparison ) and you have no hammers then it takes *20* turns for a clam to pay for itself.

[Graeme Dice]

Huzurdaddi said:
Uhm if you are alchemizing ( note: soul contracts give essentially blood that makes this a totally valid comparison ) and you have no hammers then it takes *20* turns for a clam to pay for itself.



Clams actually take only 5 turns to pay for themselves with no hammer if you'd rather have astral pearls, or 10 turns if you want something other than than astral or water. It's only 20 turns if you want to convert them back into water gems to make more clams.

[nakomus]

Soul contracts don’t give gems; they don’t even give blood slaves. They give devils. They are only worth anything at all if devils are what you need. Its also not possible to set up a exponential growth situation with soul contracts, since you cant turn devils into soul contracts.

The soul contract can never pay for another soul contract for free (as is the case for the 20-turn clam with alchemy. This is a very important difference.

Clams give you astral gems, which through alchemy can be used to do almost anything, including get more clams.

Soul contracts get you devils, which are only good for flying around and smashing things. Granted this a pretty generally useful ability, but not nearly as flexible as a high astral income.

I like devils a lot, but I haven’t found soul contracts are a good investment in a close run game. I’d rather have my devils right now, keeping me alive, or killing off the other guy.

[Huzurdaddi]

The soul contract can never pay for another soul contract for free (as is the case for the 20-turn clam with alchemy. This is a very important difference.




I agree with that. 100% correct.



Soul contracts get you devils, which are only good for flying around and smashing things. Granted this a pretty generally useful ability, but not nearly as flexible as a high astral income.




Not as flexible true. However the soul contract produces the end product. You need not spend the caster time ( which is important ) to convert your gems into something that can smash things.



I like devils a lot, but I haven’t found soul contracts are a good investment in a close run game. I’d rather have my devils right now, keeping me alive, or killing off the other guy.




I would imagine that in close game you are spending your blood slaves on SC devils not on devils. It's very hard to actually summon devils in any quanity ( except once you reach blood 9 ).

[Tuidjy]

Once you commit to devils, you are stuck with them. Your opponent will
learn about what you are doing, and will have about ten turns to prepare
for them. As someone who was utterly destroyed the first time he faced
devils, and who has utterly destroyed any devil hoarding opponent since,
I will stick with clams and fetishes, thank you very much.

Thank you for bringing back the memory of decimating and routing more than
a hundred devils and abysyan intantries with two indy sorceresses and a
jade amazonne! And then doing it again, because the guy was stuck with the
soul contract strategy.

[Huzurdaddi]

Thank you for bringing back the memory of decimating and routing more than a hundred devils




You are special yes indeed. No one else has ever obliterated tons of devils.

The assertion is: *if* you think devils are worth 7 blood a pop then it seems that Soul Contracts return more than other investment types of strategies.

[Yossar]

Huzurdaddi said:You are special yes indeed. No one else has ever obliterated tons of devils.




Never?

[Cohen]

Devils are easily killed under storm, with massive spellfire or wrathful skies.

Devils aren't so strong ...
Stormies are, but they're limited to lightning attack, that could be avoided by Lightn Immunity.

[PDF]

Even if there are ways to deal with Demons, the fact is that they are bloodily (!) cheap when you got them through Contracts. I do think- and other experienced players too- that Contracts are somewhat overpowered. The contract takes some time to pay off for sure, but with a Blood nation you can churn a very high supply of slaves and transform them into Devil-factories without even having to research Blood. Best of all you have to use 1 mage-turn to make the contract but no time is lost summoning the devils, that come automatically after that.
It's not a rush strategy, but an income of 60 slaves/turn is possible relatively early, allowing mass-production of though devils. Tell me about one other good summon for such a low cost ...

[Boron]

Cohen said:
Devils are easily killed under storm, with massive spellfire or wrathful skies.

Devils aren't so strong ...
Stormies are, but they're limited to lightning attack, that could be avoided by Lightn Immunity.



Interesting discussion http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Cohen is right that especially against Airnations devils are not that useful .

A comparison Soul contracts vs. Clams is not good imo because both need different sources .
So you can compare them with Bloodstones somewhat and mainly with Vampirelords .

After you summoned your unique blood SCs there is not so much left to spend blood on :
- Bloodstones
- Good items like Hellsword / Blood Thorn
- Vampire lords
- The lvl 9 summoning spells for Devils/Storm demons etc.

If you are a 2nd tier bloodnation like pangenea you can bloodhunt a bit and use it only for soul contracts and don't need to research blood at all .
As a 1st tier bloodnation you don't need to research higher than blood 5/6/7 then too urgently if you want e.g. only the Ice devils or the Arch devils .

In the offensive Devils are better , in the defensive Vampire lords with vampires are better .
If e.g. Ulm finds independent bloodmages and brings up the FotA this would be horrible for Soul Contract forging too .

[Boron]

PDF said:
Tell me about one other good summon for such a low cost ...



I agree fully with you http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif
3 other "good" summons of relative low cost come to my mind :
- Vampires from vampire lords
- Ghosts from wraithlords
- Demon knights / storm demons via the infernal xxx spell .

Soul contract is the easiest to get . Mictlan needs anyways construction 4 for SDR . Normally to get the second cheap +1 blood item , the bloodthorn you need to go construction 6 though to get 5B mages to forge the soul contracts .
Only vampires + storm demons are almost as useful as demons but given that you need blood 9 to get storm demons in half reasonable quantities and that you need B3D4 on your pretender to summon the first Vampire lord devils are a bit too cheap aquireable via soul contract .

Most important is also the time . In theory you could take e.g. a FoB pretender and start forging soul contracts with it once you reach 80 blood already . As you said you have your SoulContract devil economy probably running 10-30 turns before your enemies get something which is almost as strong summonwise .

You force your enemies almost to get staff(s) of storms .
Later by summoning some storm demons you can use them against the staff of storms battlemage anti-devil armies and the devils for the rest .
Basically the only thing you have to worry are enemy UBERSCs then , especially Airqueens .

[Cohen]

In fact IMO Staff of Storms should be reviewed.
Const-6 and A4 needed, because a mage that cast Storm should be A4, so to channel the storm power into a staff he need to be A4.

[Kel]

Vampires are a great comparison. Same source, same type of product, same rate of production. Still have things to account for (like cursed items and research levels) but it's a lot closer than clams or bloodstones.

- Kel

[Boron]

Kel said:
Vampires are a great comparison. Same source, same type of product, same rate of production. Still have things to account for (like cursed items and research levels) but it's a lot closer than clams or bloodstones.

- Kel



Yep . Vampires + devils serve 2 different purposes imo :
Vampires are mainly defensive weapons , devils allaround weapons . So devils are a bit more useful and as others have said already the scout wastes no magetime while the Vampire lord needs to allysummon and each turn he does something else like forging / casting you lose a vampire .
So the RoI of the soul contract is really a lot better .

With forgeboni like dwarfenhammers , sites and the forge of ancients the soul contracts become really horrible .
You could really try to bring forge up as abysia . Your demonbreds could forge then earth bloodstones , fiever fetishes + your warlocks with only 1 +1blooditem or a lucky bloodrandom without that soul contracts .
So if you save your blood even if the forge gets dispelled after a few turns your gain is huge .

[Kel]

Boron said:
With forgeboni like dwarfenhammers , sites and the forge of ancients the soul contracts become really horrible



I am sure. Of course, I would never assume that I would have 100+ earth gems and site bonuses to boot in any reasonable amount of time and if we start assuming ideal and unlikely things, than a lot of things become possible. We might just as well assume that someone has a 999 reinforced Arcane Nexus up, , has site bonuses and multiple S9 mages available. Maybe throw in a const bonus for clamming, who knows since it's all unlikely and hypothetical.

I don't even remember the Last MP game I played where I found a const site bonus.

- Kel

[Soapyfrog]

Soul Contracted Devils are effectively free troops.

They provide you with a mass of highly mobile ratehr strong troops: of course they can be beaten, but so what? More are on the way...

And you are not "stuck" with the strategy... clearly you can be simultaneously clamming, and fetishing, and doing whatever other ridiculously overpowered strategies you might have going for you... except you also have loads of free devils!

So there is no downside... there really isnt any other worthwhile activity for expending your blood except for making some blood thorns, blood stones, summoning up the unique devils, and given the quantity of blood a skilled blood nation can rake in this is quite trivial activity happening alongside your soul contracting operations.

[Cohen]

You're forgetting Vampire Lords and Fallen Angels, both good summons.

And Blood could be used to paradrop Hordes from Hell early and cause problems to your enemy (I underline early, later there will be many castles and stronger units), especially cutting out withdraw options to enemy armies that you're going to engage.

Not to count some good battle spells ... sadly you've to bring a lot of slaves with you to cast blood battle magic, and this is a shame IMO.

[Soapyfrog]

I'd rather be getting 30 devils a turn and paradropping THEM onto my opponents.

I think you could reasonably have 30 contracts by turn 50 AND have summoned most or even all of the unique devils if you play a blood nation like Abysia BoH or Mictlan.

That translates to 4-500 devils generated at a cost of less than 4 blood per (and dropping), at turn 50. You want your devils NOW? I want them now... and later... and later on... etc etc.

[Boron]

Kel said:

Boron said:
With forgeboni like dwarfenhammers , sites and the forge of ancients the soul contracts become really horrible



I am sure. Of course, I would never assume that I would have 100+ earth gems and site bonuses to boot in any reasonable amount of time and if we start assuming ideal and unlikely things, than a lot of things become possible. We might just as well assume that someone has a 999 reinforced Arcane Nexus up, , has site bonuses and multiple S9 mages available. Maybe throw in a const bonus for clamming, who knows since it's all unlikely and hypothetical.

I don't even remember the Last MP game I played where I found a const site bonus.

- Kel



Yeah you are right most likely you will have 25% bonus from dwarfen hammer but not more since ulm or somebody else will get the 50% unique hammer and probably if anyone casts the forge it is ulm .


Soapyfrog said:
I'd rather be getting 30 devils a turn and paradropping THEM onto my opponents.

I think you could reasonably have 30 contracts by turn 50 AND have summoned most or even all of the unique devils if you play a blood nation like Abysia BoH or Mictlan.

That translates to 4-500 devils generated at a cost of less than 4 blood per (and dropping), at turn 50. You want your devils NOW? I want them now... and later... and later on... etc etc.



Yeah the devils are strong . I have thought more about it today but it is not really imbalanced i think . If you bloodhunt you have to sacrifice significant amounts of goldincome and you have to use some of your mages for bloodhunting . So you have a significantly smaller number of mages than e.g. a pythiumopponent who has about the same number of provinces with comparable income .

So he has inferior troops on battlefield but he normally can field more battlemages and compensate this way .

If you go to lategame your population maybe quite damaged by perhaps taking deathscale since abysia has this as a special bonus or by raiding + random events .
On a smaller map like aran where you don't have more than 20-30 provinces for a long time a clamhoarder may find it worthy to limit your natural further bloodhunt abilities by killing your pop like by plague etc. + suicide pillage .


Astral income by clams increases exponential over time while bloodincome by bloodhunt is hard to increase .
If you aren't able to kill a clamhoarding ryleh/caelum/pythium in time you get 1-2 new soul contracts or similiar / turn while he gets 5 or more new clams each turn which he can either use for e.g. summoning tartarians , wishing or whatever else he wants .

As abysia if you want to try that too it needs a lot of effort by e.g. summoning spectres + recruiting sages/warlocks in hope to get some with W .
As mictlan you can in theory clamhoard very well but mictlan is earlygame highly vulnerable so probably you don't get that powerful than abysia early-midgame .
With blood you mainly get strong summons , strong Scs and good items but you lack battlemagic .
Abysia has good battlemages with their fireskill . Mictlan has imo not that possiblities though they are magically more flexible but their only truly useful battlemage , the F2B3 priests cost 390 gold + are capitol only .


Perhaps these reasons make abysia so loved by lots of ppl because they are with mictlan the best bloodhunter .
Additionally they have heat 3 + the deathbonus +5 firegem starting income which is like +75 income and most important with firemagic good battlemages .
They don't need to waste blood on dominionpush as mictlan has too .

This almost perfect synergy is perhaps the reason because ppl complain almost as much about abysia as about caelum .

[CUnknown]

I think we should take another look at the numbers real quick.

Clam/fetish hoarding: Costs 10 gems, gives 1 a turn. This will repay itself in 10 turns.

Soul contracts: Costs 80 slaves, gives 7 slaves a turn. This will repay itself in.. what was it? 11.5 turns?

So, in reality (not including any additional bonuses), clams are actually a better investment, but the problem is they don't give you the finished product. You have to spend a character action to actually use what you get, as opposed to Soul contracts, which don't require this.

Yet, as others have pointed out, Soul contracts have the downside of inflexibility. Once the appropriate counters are in place, you might wish you had spent those blood slaves in another way.

So, Soul contracts have advantages and disadvantages when compared to clamming/fetishing. Seems balanced to me.

Whether devils are actually worth 7 slaves though, is a different question. They may be worth more...so possibly Soul contracts are unbalanced after all, even compared to clamming (a strategy many think is unbalanced). We'd have to compare stats of similar summoned units of the same research level for that.

[nakomus]

I don’t think Soul Contracts are all that great if you have easy access to the summing spell as well.

If you assume that devils are what you need, Soul Contract is only desirable if you either a) cannot easily summon devils directly or
b) Do not need your devils right away.

If you need an Army right now it matters not at all how good a return on investment a Soul Contract has. And who can really be sure what the game situation will be like in 5 or 10 turns?

If you are playing Abysia (the only nation I’ve seriously used Devils with), its quite easy to just summon them. You need level three blood and one demonbred per devil per turn. The Demonbreds can cast the spell without items or empowerment. At 260 gold and sacred the cost of the mages to support the summoning is not too severe.

Soul Contract requires 5(!) Blood. No Abysian mages can cast this without a boost. Your closest bet is a Warlock with 3 blood and a random pick. If you don’t have a warlock with a random pick in blood you need con4 and two boosters in order to forge the item at all. 11 turns after that, your first soul contract will make its return on investment. If you count the cost of the boosters (60 additional blood, I think), that first contract actually takes 20 turns to payback. Of course you could amortize that over later contracts.

Still, the cost of that first contract is 140 slaves and some time. By the time that you get your first devil out of the soul contract, someone summoning devils directly could have an army of 20 Devils out in the field. My money is on the guy with the army

As to Huzurdaddi’s point that I would be spending the Blood on SCs instead anyway, this is probably true a bit later, but Abysia can get Devils out with less research and boosting.

I’m assuming the game is played on a small enough map that you cannot reasonably expect to just be left alone. Certainly if you have 20 or 30 turns without major conflict, Soul Contract is a better deal.

This doesn’t address whether Devils are themselves balanced of course.

[Arryn]

nakomus said:
I don’t think Soul Contracts are all that great if you have easy access to the summing spell as well.

Very well-reasoned. Good work!

[Soapyfrog]

I dont like the fact that if someone is lucky enough to get left alone for a bit they can grow their gem income exponentially and/or produce a devil factory of scary proportions.

I think exponential/quadratic growth is not a good thing in a fantasy game that doesn't scale well past turn 60 or so. Who wants to see Doom Horrors getting summoned 1 or even 2 per turn? Who wants to see an army of 120 devils wiped out at great cost to return completely regenerated a turn later? Even worse, who wants to fight their way through an mile-wide mass of vampires which respawns every turn no matter how often you kill it and keeps growing to boot?

The worst part is there are essentially only 3 or 4 ROI quadratic/exponential growth strategies that really pay off: clamming, fetishing, soul contracts, and vampire lords. That doesnt exactly give the game a lot of depth, or a much of an nteresting end game... in a 17 player game SOMEONE is going to carry off one or more of these strategies more that likely and, assuming some level competetance, dominate because of it.

Those empires that had to fight tooth and nail to survive and could not put the neccessary resources into clamming or whatever, get steamrolled.

Eliminating these strategies would surely result in a more balanced game.

[Kel]

If one nation gets left alone until turn 60 while everyone expends resources fighting, they will be way ahead anyway. Whether it is that they have the prime artifacts, the unique summons (since theirs aren't dying off), they have castled (having nothing else to do with gold), they have set up the hard to get to spells (wishing, tartarians, etc.), they have taken all the indies and the CC'd player territories, searched their sites more thoroughly, have more mages because they didn't die off, have more gems because they weren't lost in battle, have better provinces because they weren't raided/pillaged, you name it.

As far as eliminating strategies, this might lead to a more balanced game because it is much easier to balance simplicity and the more strategies you eliminate, the simpler the game is. And a fine, balanced, simple game is quite fine and enjoyable at times...I just don't think that's why most people like Dom2. No offense but getting rid of strategies entirely is, imo, not a good idea.

- Kel

[Arryn]

Kel said:
No offense but getting rid of strategies entirely is, imo, not a good idea.

Right. There's a word for what it'd make the game: BORING.

[Yossar]

Kel said:
If one nation gets left alone until turn 60 while everyone expends resources fighting, they will be way ahead anyway.



No way. If you've gone 60 turns without attacking anyone, you're most likely irrelevant. You're going to lose to the two or three other nations that have been taking all the land and are three times as large as you are. Unless you're playing with newbies or on a HUGE map, or some other strange setting.

[Cainehill]

Boron said:
Yeah you are right most likely you will have 25% bonus from dwarfen hammer but not more since ulm or somebody else will get the 50% unique hammer and probably if anyone casts the forge it is ulm .




I'm not sure what you base this on. Theory? I have maybe 12 MP games going right now, in none of which do I play (ewww!) Ulm. In at least 3, I forged the unique hammer. In 4 or 5, I casted Forge of the Ancients - as Man, as Pangaea, as Vanheim, as Jotuns, at a minimum. A number of those games included Ulm - in one, my impoverished (but Forged) Man was just betrayed, backstabbed, ambushed, by a very rich powerful Ulm. Ulm often tends to use their earth gems for : forging, and for conjuring Earth Kings etc.

It all really depends on the player's research strategy, and just as much upon luck in finding magic sites. When I have a nature nation with 1/3 the income in nature as my next lowest income - I'm not casting the big nature spells. (And yes, I'm in that situation in several games. No nature for Pangeaa and Man, no air for either Vanheim or Caelum, etc.)

[Cainehill]

Yossar said:

Kel said:
If one nation gets left alone until turn 60 while everyone expends resources fighting, they will be way ahead anyway.



No way. If you've gone 60 turns without attacking anyone, you're most likely irrelevant. You're going to lose to the two or three other nations that have been taking all the land and are three times as large as you are. Unless you're playing with newbies or on a HUGE map, or some other strange setting.



Not necessarily. Posit a small map - 80 provinces, 6 nations. If one nation acquires 10 provinces - less than average - but isn't fighting until turn 60, it's quite possibly ahead of the game. Another nation might have 20 provinces - but has spent most of its gold, and gems, on troops and magic items which are dead and gone.

Others have 5-15, say. The nation that has built its strength undisturbed is almost certainly better than those others, even the ones with 15.

I'm half in agreement with you - the way the game is, land is power. If you have 20 provinces to my 10, all other things being equal, you're likely going to win.

Clams, fetishes, etc, are simply a mechanism whereby a nation with less territory can attempt to balance the scales. The conqueror is using her gems to forge weapons and summon monsters; the lurker is saving those gems to use in major spells, major forgings, and also possibly using the gems as an investment instead of spending them right away.

Both strategies (in a hundred flavors, including Spam) can work. And as Arryn and Kel both said - getting rid of strategies is a bad thing, makes the game boring. If this wasn't the case, we could all play Chinese Checkers, with the understanding that the winner was Dog. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

[Boron]

Soapyfrog said:
I think exponential/quadratic growth is not a good thing in a fantasy game that doesn't scale well past turn 60 or so. Who wants to see Doom Horrors getting summoned 1 or even 2 per turn? Who wants to see an army of 120 devils wiped out at great cost to return completely regenerated a turn later? Even worse, who wants to fight their way through an mile-wide mass of vampires which respawns every turn no matter how often you kill it and keeps growing to boot?

The worst part is there are essentially only 3 or 4 ROI quadratic/exponential growth strategies that really pay off: clamming, fetishing, soul contracts, and vampire lords. That doesnt exactly give the game a lot of depth, or a much of an nteresting end game... in a 17 player game SOMEONE is going to carry off one or more of these strategies more that likely and, assuming some level competetance, dominate because of it.

Those empires that had to fight tooth and nail to survive and could not put the neccessary resources into clamming or whatever, get steamrolled.

Eliminating these strategies would surely result in a more balanced game.



Yeah . The worst thing is that clamming together with wishing gives you access to everything then . You can wish for a bit blood to get then the blood autosummons started , can wish the unique SCs you want in endless amounts etc. etc.
So once it comes to real lategame the nations who can't wish because they have no good astral mages + couldn't clamhoard well are severely disadvantaged .

And before especially the devilhoarding is evil .

After about turn 50-60 normally the ability to use one or more of these hoard strategies with exponential growth is the most important thing .
Furthermore normally nations don't get too big that quick and if they do they fight for lots of turns against their neighbors so they are actually weakened .

Especially Caelum + Abysia are here probably a problem because they are so strong in early game already too .

[johan osterman]

There are easy and simple solutions to your problems. Fiddle with the game settings and victory conditions, use smaller maps, attack players before strategies with 10 turn investement returns pay off.

If you continously play on huge maps while letting other players grow at their own pace do not be shocked if strategies with delayed investment return pays off. If you do not like it, play on smaller maps and use victory settings that encourage more agressive play etc.


Boron: I am pleased to see that you have been convinced to use punctuation, trying to decipher your post earlier was a hassle.

[Kel]

Yossar said:
No way. If you've gone 60 turns without attacking anyone, you're most likely irrelevant. You're going to lose to the two or three other nations that have been taking all the land and are three times as large as you are. Unless you're playing with newbies or on a HUGE map, or some other strange setting.



Well, most MP games...well, let me rephrase, most MP games that start here, *are* huge maps so maybe my experience is tainted by that. However, even without a huge map, you still have a lot of situations where you pick up land without being 'disturbed' by other players. Aside from the fact that you can clean up every indie province, you can also clean up territories from players who get thrashed and go computer control next to you. Heck, even if they don't go CC, you can still take a bunch of territory from them. On top of that, your territory will be substantially better than theirs, pound for pound, as yours will be more thoroughly site searched, castled and unpillaged.

Start a game with 3 people. Let the first two go to war while the third just takes indies and builds power. It's not a sure bet but my money is on the third guy.

- Kel

[Soapyfrog]

johan osterman said:
There are easy and simple solutions to your problems. Fiddle with the game settings and victory conditions, use smaller maps, attack players before strategies with 10 turn investement returns pay off.


This is not good game mechanics, period. If the solution to a Mictlan devil factory is "gang up on Mictlan early" then that's broken. If the solution to runaway economies is to play on small maps, then that's broken. The game doesnt scale!

What if I want to play a game on a huge map that doesnt become a clamming competition after turn 30-40? Short of a house rule I can't: there is NO POSSIBLE ALTERNATE STRATEGY.


johan osterman said:If you continously play on huge maps while letting other players grow at their own pace do not be shocked if strategies with delayed investment return pays off. If you do not like it, play on smaller maps and use victory settings that encourage more agressive play etc.



Its not a question "letting" them grow at their own pace. in a 17 player game, SOMEONE will manage it, and that player will win regardless of who won all the hard-fought wars in the middle game.

So there is no incentive to fight except to shoot cripples and snatch territory. You certainly don't want to risk an evenly matched conflict becuase that will simply cripple you.

It would be more interesting to me if magic sites and powerful summons etc. did not devalue so quickly as the game progresses. It would be interesting to see armies of national troops still relevant in the late game.

[Alneyan]

In the case of Soul Contracts, a mod could also be used to alter the effect of the item, if you think such a change is needed. As I do not think we can currently mod magic items (I haven't checked under 2.13 though), the solution would imply a weakening of the Devils themselves, and a change of the cost of the "Bind Devil" spell.

The Soul Contract will still be a long term investment, but it would then take longer to pay back, while making direct summons cheaper as well. The actual changes are left to you, depending on your mileage. Sure, a mod will unlikely be widely used, but it should do just as well as a house rule in this case. And if magic items can currently be modded, it would be much easier to do something along these lines (the same reasoning would go with clams and the like, but it would be harder to do it with an indirect change).

[Gandalf Parker]

Soapyfrog said:

johan osterman said:
There are easy and simple solutions to your problems. Fiddle with the game settings and victory conditions, use smaller maps, attack players before strategies with 10 turn investement returns pay off.


This is not good game mechanics, period. If the solution to a Mictlan devil factory is "gang up on Mictlan early" then that's broken. If the solution to runaway economies is to play on small maps, then that's broken. The game doesnt scale!



I havent really been following the conversation but it sounds like another "if its not head-to-head fair then its broke" discussion. ou are saying that if a strategy is offered in response to a strategy that its not an answer?

And arent nations like Marignon and TienChi also solutions to devils? (any nations with high priests)


What if I want to play a game on a huge map that doesnt become a clamming competition after turn 30-40? Short of a house rule I can't: there is NO POSSIBLE ALTERNATE STRATEGY.



You are talking about Atlantis using clams, correct? On a large map, what about the other large-map strategies. The ones that dont get a "fair play" on small maps. Pangaea sneak, Man air-drops, Caelum checkerboard, Arcos stand-and-think? Surely those offer some challenge to the clammers.



johan osterman said:If you continously play on huge maps while letting other players grow at their own pace do not be shocked if strategies with delayed investment return pays off. If you do not like it, play on smaller maps and use victory settings that encourage more agressive play etc.



Its not a question "letting" them grow at their own pace. in a 17 player game, SOMEONE will manage it, and that player will win regardless of who won all the hard-fought wars in the middle game.



Your games have 17 people using the same strategy? No wonder you have a problem with balance issues.

[johan osterman]

Soapyfrog said:

This is not good game mechanics, period. If the solution to a Mictlan devil factory is "gang up on Mictlan early" then that's broken. If the solution to runaway economies is to play on small maps, then that's broken. The game doesnt scale!




Broken? Just because the way doesn't play the way you want on larger maps do not mean that it is broken. The game setup parameters are intended to have gameplay effects, obviously all strategies will not be equally effective with all setups. This doesn't mean the game is broken. It just means that all strategies are not optimal in all setups, which is both desirable and very hard to avoid.




What if I want to play a game on a huge map that doesnt become a clamming competition after turn 30-40? Short of a house rule I can't: there is NO POSSIBLE ALTERNATE STRATEGY.




What if I wan't to keep the cake and eat it? Short of regurgitating it up again I can't: THERE IS NO POSSIBLE STRATEGY.

Also I believe you are overstating the clam potency.



...

So there is no incentive to fight except to shoot cripples and snatch territory. You certainly don't want to risk an evenly matched conflict becuase that will simply cripple you.



I fail to see why this is particular to large game and what it has to do with soul contracts and their balancee and why it is a bad thing, it seems like entirely reasonable and indeed desirable state of affairs.



It would be more interesting to me if magic sites and powerful summons etc. did not devalue so quickly as the game progresses. It would be interesting to see armies of national troops still relevant in the late game.



While you might object to the speed at which this happens I do not see how anyone can argue with that delayed investment payoffs should payoff. Research etc need to yield significant results, or no one would bother with it. Also, as has been pointed out by various other posters, some players enjoy the presence and dominance of the high end troops and spells.

[The_Tauren13]

And the people who don't, like me, play small maps ( like Karan with 17 players! ), and we all go home happy. Quit whining. So maybe the game isn't perfectly balanced, but it is one of the best games I have ever played, simply because there are so many strategies. Eliminating long-term strategies would do nothing but take away from why this game is fun.

[Soapyfrog]

Gandalf Parker said:
Surely those offer some challenge to the clammers.



Do they? I dont know!! I cant understand how they would. Massive gem income gives you freedom of action without significant constraints... seems like a no-brainer to me!

Well if there are counter-strategies then I'd love to hear them in detail, since I would prefer not to have to clam like a madman just to keep up.


Gandalf Parker said:Your games have 17 people using the same strategy? No wonder you have a problem with balance issues.



I dunno... can you really NOT clam and survive in a game that is certainly going to Last more that 50-60 turns? I mean out of 17 maybe not all of them will use that strategy but the winner at the end of the game WILL be a someone who has implemented one or more of these investment strategies.


johan osterman said:
Also, as has been pointed out by various other posters, some players enjoy the presence and dominance of the high end troops and spells.



I enjoy that too, but I think a GOOD game is one where players are forced to make DIFFICULT decisions with regards to the use of their limited resources. If you have ivnestment strategies that allow for exponential growth, but a) there is not equal opportunity to use them and b) the game doesnt continue to scale as your economy grows, then all the high end magic and summons etc become massively devalued.

[Soapyfrog]

The_Tauren13 said:
So maybe the game isn't perfectly balanced, but it is one of the best games I have ever played, simply because there are so many strategies. Eliminating long-term strategies would do nothing but take away from why this game is fun.


Does not compute. If you play on a large map you must pursue a long term strategy of clamming/fetishing/blood stoning/soul contracting. Doesnt sound like "so many strategies" to me. Sounds like, effectively, only 4, which are all slight variants on the same strategy... and really you should be implementing all four.

I guess there is some strategy in what you DO with all your gem/devil income, but not much (mostly empower to cast wish). When you have no hard decisions to make, there is not much strategy involved.

If you play on a SMALL map you should STILL pursue a clamming strategy as it will ensure your final victory if you come out of the dogfight alive, although I TOTALLY AGREE that in this case it is much harder to do because you SHOULD be in conflict much earlier and more continuously.

[Cohen]

Clam is effectively strong, but you can handle a loner clamming if you're stronger.

But investing in clams requires a good amount of water gems, especially at starting. Sadly none can see you're clamming til lyou reveal your strenght, and this IMO is the bad thing.
If people could see you're raising your gem income every turn far beyond your province ownage chance by finding sites, probably will gang up unless they want to find themselves against dozens of horrors that run in a totally unpredictable way in your land, to have to face some wish empowered SCs or such. In a long term game you'll find yourself without any chance of global spell during more than 1 turn too.
The other bad stuff is that a scout can keep the clam and so is immune to most ranged spells and raiding (but usually they're inside a castle)
IMO Clams should work only on mages (they know how to take care of those trinkets and such) and the mage should be set to research (unless we want to change the clam working system, as the mage is required to do an action to "alchemize" the free pearls out from the clams he's bringing).

[johan osterman]

Sopyfrog:

I would say that players have to make difficult decisions. And more importantly adopt and modify their strategies to the circumstances they find themselves in. I am not sure what you mean by devalued here, are you saying high end summons are not effective thus lack value or that they cost to little in the long run? I guess the second reading is the only one that makes sense taken with your other opinions, but then I do not quite see what you mean by that the game does not scale as your economy grows. Would you care to elaborate.

[johan osterman]

Soapyfrog said:
...

If you play on a SMALL map you should STILL pursue a clamming strategy as it will ensure your final victory if you come out of the dogfight alive, although I TOTALLY AGREE that in this case it is much harder to do because you SHOULD be in conflict much earlier and more continuously.



I disagree completely with this, in small agressive games resources are better spent in more direct ways then clam hoarding, especially if you are in a war.

[Thufir]

Cohen said:
IMO Clams should work only on mages (they know how to take care of those trinkets and such) and the mage should be set to research (unless we want to change the clam working system, as the mage is required to do an action to "alchemize" the free pearls out from the clams he's bringing).



I like this idea! This sounds (to my novice mind) like a change that wouldn't be too dangerous to make, and is worth consideration of including in a patch. Although perhaps there's some difficulty in coding this, I think this is a very appropriate change to the way clams are handled.

[Soapyfrog]

What I mean by devalued is that you wont care so much if you lost that doom horror you summoned because you are summoning two more PER TURN.

Thats devalued. When high end is no longer high end!

If you want "high end" to really MEAN something throughout the game, then you have to make sure that resources are constrained so that the upper limit of you game is always tough to reach.

I think dom2 has a plethora of strategies that can be pursued that can kleep the game interesting for very very long games as long as you disallow the investment strategies that create wealth out thin air. In the real world investing works of course (not at 14% mind you, generally speaking!!) but resources are always being consumed. If wealth is created out of thin air you have inflation.

So here would be my suggestions to make these investment strategies a little more interesting in dom2:

Added Restrictions:
Only mages can equip clams/fetishes/blood stones (I see cohen agrees with me on this one!)
Only blood mages can equip soul contracts
Random horror attacks on soul contract bearers should actually work

Gem producing items:
Clams allow the bearer to convert (via an action) 1 water gem into 2 astral gems.
Fetishes allow the bearer to convert (via an action) 1 nature gem to 2 fire gems.
Blood Stones allow the bearer to convert (via an action) any 1 gem of any type to an earth gem.

The action could be like "summon allies" you can just switch it on and forget about it, so no crazy micro-management neccessary.

Vampire Lords and Fallen Angels:
Ideally imho only uniques should be able to summon allies (outside of combat summons). There are tons of mass summoning spells if you want to summon batches of stuff, no need to have unit "factories". For example, vampire lors can cast blood rite instead of having the cummon allies ability...

[Soapyfrog]

johan osterman said:
I disagree completely with this, in small agressive games resources are better spent in more direct ways then clam hoarding, especially if you are in a war.


Oh hey I said it would be harder to clamhoard for the reasons you mention, but if you can make it out of the dogfight intact it will win you the game, so it seems like a good plan to me!

[Boron]

I like dominions and i like the lategame . I am a little clamhoarder myself http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/biggrin.gif

But i think it is a bit too good . I list a few things which i think are problematic :

- Clams require exactly water gems . Water is one of the weakest schools . If you are not an underwaternation you basically only spend a few watergems on boots of quickness / jade armours . You could summon sea trolls but since they require upkeep and are rather expensive they are not a top choice . In the water queens you don't invest normally too because the underwater nation will have them already probably .

So normally almost all your watergemincome goes into clams . If you are not in danger you can always convert your astral gems back to water and get clams quite quick .

- Clams and the other items are absolutely save from everything when stocked on stealth units . So you never lose this income unless you are dead .

- There could be no better output for clams than astral gems . This makes them for every nation worthy since every nation can convert the astral gems quite cheap in exactly the magic they need .

- The soul contracts give you one of the strongest troops of all , devils . Devils and Storm demons are probably the strongest troops of all costwise . If you don't look at costs then torrasquen and abominations would be good too .
The time you get the soul contracts is very interesting too : if you have a blood 5 pretender once you have 80 slaves and even without you only need Construction 6 .
Construction 6 is anyways a very important research goal for most nations and as blood nation since you have blood for summoned troops you can invest all your earthincome on dwarfen hammers making Soul contracts even more profitable .

- False horror spell : Stormbinder started a long thread about this 1 month ago . False horrors make almost all national troops worthless . 2-3 false horror casters are normally already enough to scare away even 50-100 national troops .


Finally Johan you are right that Mictlan can be defeated earlygame by rushing them . But with Caelum / Abysia this requires lots of effort .
These 2 nations are earlygame horrible strong already .
Every player is glad being at peace with Caelum in the first 20-30 turns , probably a lot longer because he knows that Caelum normally always wins the economic warfare earlygame .

I think most ppl will agree here with me :
Earlygame wars are normally not very profitable because they tend to Last very long and hurt both participants because of movement guessing / enemy dominion / castle siege . Only if the enemy is extremely weak earlygame because of special things like he chose a crappy pretender / got hurt too bad with lots of bad events like early lab/temple blow , indy attacks etc .

Last but not least most games are played with scoregraphs on . People tend to gangbang the "leader" . Because clamincome is hidden the main criterias to estimate who the leader is are provinces/income/gem income/army size .
So the early warmonger is normally very often attacked and this way kept busy while the "boomer" grows secretly and when you recognize it finally it is too late .

[Ygorl]

Or you could play in a game with difficult research; low site frequency might help slow down clamhoarding and its end results as well.

[Soapyfrog]

Boron: Well said!

[Cohen]

Random attack on Soul Contract bearers works!
I can assure, at least in 2.12 ... where I didn't known that Soul Contracts attracted horrors and assigned them to Warlocks and such ...
I'd agree in fact that only Blood Mages could get the Soul Contract.

Warlock:"Hey Scout, come there, I've sold your soul to Hell Lord"
Scout: "A well, what I've gained? Eternal Life? Neverending youth? All the women I want? To become the richest of the world?"
Warlock:"Oh yes everything of this ... put a sign on those contract"
Scout: "Wow" ... and signs
Here the first Devil appears but the Scout can't issue him any order and the Devil start rampaging for all the countryside in a frenzy killakilla.
Scout: "Mmmm there should be something wrong in that ... unless that red stuff is my first female"



About Fallen Angels, nothing to say to they Summon Allied Imps ... since Imps are good only as sieging and defending force (don't eat, and fly). Even Fallen Angel itself is far weaker than an ID for his Blood Slave cost (I know he's more magic, but why it is far less used? Probably because it's too weak even if it is not unique).

About Vamps, I'd agree to remove them the Summon Allies skill. They can easily cast the vampire summoning spell.
Otherwise may I suggest a rule that a Vampire in a province feeds himself with X population at turn (1 to 10), I mean Vampire, Lords, Count, Queen or whatever.
If the Vampire in question doesn't find any suitable pop victim, he'll dissanguate 1 troop non lifeless non undead non magical of your army (note: Commanders won't get touched by Vampires). If there're no living soldiers the Vampires that aren't fed should become an indipendant force proclaming a vampire a vampire commander (perhaps upgrading to count) and revolting against the army they're in, or they simply migrates in the next friendly owned province to seek new feeding.
This could prevent you to keep vampires in your land, going to attack forcefully unless you want to see your lands get depopulated as an Ermorian province. And usually to go in enemy land you'll need a strong dominion at least ... well not so difficult to reach with Aby or Mic that can sacrifice however, but however they eat pop of provinces that are going to become yours.
If Vamps goes hiding and eat in enemy provinces, a message like the unrest caused by spies should appear.
Solar Brillance spell should be mostly effective too against Vamps, killing them asap it is cast in battle.
The Second Sun global could burn them out too. (beware all ppl will be interested in dispelling it or attaking you because their provinces will get warmer)

If you have to issue an order to produce gems, even for a better alchemize, you probably have too many mages spending time creating gems, making this strategy totally wothless considering you strip resources to your research and combat firepower.

[PvK]

Not putting your income into staying alive during a war is of course a disadvantage and a risk. Winning a war is better than camping and investing, unless the camper attacks soon after you win, when you are still weak.

In general, that seems to all work fine to me.

On huge maps and long-term, peaceful games, hoarding strategies will naturally be more effective than on small ones.

Clearly, it is possible to get huge results from some of these, eventually. In some cases, perhaps some tweaks could help.

Clams - would be good to limit to mages, and/or have a world clam income per turn that caps the total clam astral income (1/water province in the world was my old suggestion).

Soul Contracts - are supposed to be risky, but it seems like the risk is quite low. Might be good to tweak this risk up a bit, and to disallow use on units that don't have souls, or that already have a soul contract (for logical, thematic reasons, mostly).

Fever Fetishes - are supposed to have some additional cost via disease. It'd be good if they didn't work on undead (was that patched yet?), and perhaps if they occasionally diseased a random unit in the same province through contagion (this would have a natural and logical negative effect of hoarding), and perhaps of occasional health crisis for the wearer (take some open-ended damage - possibly fatal, possibly causing affliction).

PvK

[Soapyfrog]

Heh yeah there should be SOME kind of cost for spreading rampant vampirism through your lands... heheh I was just thinking pop death and unrest!

As for soul contract horrors in 2.12 its not working. When I get a "lesser horror attacks" message, I get the "bad vcr" crashbug when I try to watch the battle and the scout with the contract is still alive when I check. Maybe this is only hapening with hidden units?

[Kel]

Soapyfrog said:If wealth is created out of thin air you have inflation.




I don't know about it being created out of thin air but yes, there is inflation. That's a *good* thing, though. Every game has a natural life cycle and evolves through stages, otherwise research would not be a meaningful element.

There seems to have been a recent push of people who want the game to *not* evolve by discouraging the use of SC's and other mid/late game tactics, instead favoring the national troops that are more effective in the early game.

I like the way it is now. Each instance of a game evolves into different stages and you have to employ different tactics at different stages. You can talk about how powerful soul contracts are but what if someone attacks you on turn 10 by summoning troops while you are still making brazen skulls to work towards contracts ? Soul contracts are effective during certain phases of the game, in certain situations, just as pure summoning and national troops are at other parts of the game.

If you want the option to have research caps or turn limits in your game or in the program, that's fine by me, but I don't want my games turning into limited Versions of what they are now.

Summary:
Minor balance tweaking (ala the VQ changes) = yes
Major strategic element rebalancing = no

- Kel

[PvK]

Yes, I like that idea (Vampire's Summon Allies order could require and consume population, just like the Unholy-1 raising of Ghouls. Seems appropritate, thematic and limiting).

PvK

[Cohen]

I'd agree with Boron ... he's a good analyzer.

Abysya is very rushable. And is totally defenceless except a good pretender. Aby infantry costs a lot of gold and resources and you can't pour out many of them.
You probably start recruiting Warlock type mages that are good at research but are useless in combat at early stage (and mostly in late unless you use blood magic ... please make sure in the next patch slaves don't take fire by heat aura).
I add the consideration that Aby infantry, for how much it could be strong, has a very bad morale for his cost, and thus is too weak at capturing indeps or defending. Unless you want to afford a 360 gold mage that is a pretty useless battery (due to poor aim) and that could cast fanaticism, depriving you of many gold AND a mage that can research (this is very bad for Abysya due to bloodhunters and researchers capitol only).

I've already made my proposals in previous Posts.

EDIT: About Vampires the cost isn't for Summoning Allies, but for the presence itself of vampires, so you're losing X pop for every single vampire you've, and every turn.

[Thufir]

johan osterman said:
Sopyfrog:

I would say that players have to make difficult decisions. And more importantly adopt and modify their strategies to the circumstances they find themselves in. I am not sure what you mean by devalued here, are you saying high end summons are not effective thus lack value or that they cost to little in the long run? I guess the second reading is the only one that makes sense taken with your other opinions, but then I do not quite see what you mean by that the game does not scale as your economy grows. Would you care to elaborate.



Although I'm sure that soapyfrog will respond to this differently than I am about to, I'd like to respond to this question. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

First off I'd like to say that one of the best things about Dom2 is how well balanced it is. Dom2 is not the best balanced game of all time, but complexity and game balance are in direct opposition. After all, Go is nearly perfectly balanced, and if balance is all that you want, you should look for a game with very simple rules. However, if you were to devise two measures one of game complexity and the other of game balance, and call game quality the product of the two, I would say that Dom2 has the highest game quality of any game I have ever played http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

Secondly, soapyfrog is clearly correct in saying the value of magic sites is devalued in the endgame, if players use clams (and the like) a lot in the game. For example, if the total gem income at turn 100 is 75% due to clams, then clearly losing a few magic sites is not much of a problem any longer.

Thirdly (and what this post is mostly about), I believe soapyfrog is misguided in objecting to exponential growth. I mean every kind of bootstrapping game since the beginning of time (with recent, relevant examples being Civ, MoM, MOO2, et al) has featured exponential growth prominently.

Perhaps the real objection is to unconstrained exponential growth (maybe soapyfrog is already saying this, and I've misread). There are various ways to impose constraints, but one common method is to include maintenance costs (which Dom2 does, but only for recruited units).
Most turn based strategy games, especially those that try to give a sense of reaching epic proportions, include maintenance much more broadly than Dom2 does. In games where maintenance is not included, I think it is commonly (but not always the case, Dom2 being a notable exception), that optimal strategies devolve into races to produce the best monster/weapon of all time before anyone else does.

Now I know that maintenance for magic has been brought up before (where Boron did an excellent job of discrediting the argument for all time http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif - apologies in advance, Boron http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif), but either way, it's clear that introducing maintenance is a gigantic change and IMO would require a ground up rewrite, and is not in the cards for a patch, and probably not even in the cards for Dom3. Also it is abundantly clear to me (and quite obviously to the large number of people actively playing the game, and actively debating in this forum), that maintenance is not required for Dom2 to be fun, and well balanced.

But I do believe that the lack of maintenance is what gives me the sense of the Dom2 magic economy not scaling. I know that Dom2 is a fantasy game, but there are certain basic elements of the real world, that when carried into a fantasy game help give the game depth, and a sense of realism that aids in the suspension of disbelief. One of those elements is a sort of "Conservation of Energy", or "There's no free lunch", kind of principle. And, clams, soul contracts, fever fetishes, and the like violate this princple and at least for me, break the suspension of disbelief.

I think for many of us newbies, coming into the Dom2 world after having played the more commercial games, the lack of maintenance cost in Dom2 does contribute to a sense of unrealism. And I think soapyfrog is right in some sense that the economy does not scale. However, I just don't see that it is all that critical for the economy to scale. After all, who really wants to play to turn 300? As things stand, based on empirical evidence, it is 100% clear that many people play Dom2, many people get to end games that are interesting and exciting, nobody has solved this game. Therefore, the game is balanced. Therefore the game is fun.

All that said, if it should ever happen that the Dominions devs are ever in a position to undertake a rewrite, I would love to see maintenance costs incorporated, from the ground up, for all continuing magic and physical effects. If done in the context of a rewrite, I think this could be very clean, and would ultimately support a system that is more easily balanced, not less. Such a system would feel more natural, and more real, and would as soapyfrog says, scale better. Also, for those that fear the game becoming mundane, there's no reason whatsoever that this would have to be done at the expense of lategame magic being dominant, and omnipresent - you just have to know that that's your target at design time.

Short of a rewrite, I am in agreement with those conservatives that don't want to see the system dramatically changed. The game is clearly working, and has an extraordinarily large following, given it's non-commercial nature. To argue that the game is broken, or dramatically unbalanced is ludicrous. It flies in the face of the fact that so many smart people are playing this game, and so few can agree on what constitutes an optimal strategy.

- Thufir

PS

Apologies for the long post - it's a result of a character flaw and can't be helped. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[Boron]

Thufir said:
I think for many of us newbies, coming into the Dom2 world after having played the more commercial games, the lack of maintenance cost in Dom2 does contribute to a sense of unrealism. And I think soapyfrog is right in some sense that the economy does not scale. However, I just don't see that it is all that critical for the economy to scale. After all, who really wants to play to turn 300? As things stand, based on empirical evidence, it is 100% clear that many people play Dom2, many people get to end games that are interesting and exciting, nobody has solved this game. Therefore, the game is balanced. Therefore the game is fun.




Yeah that's the good thing that each school has something what is nice http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif . Against everything there is at least 1 countermeasure .
Perhaps i am too critical with clams/soul contracts etc. because i am a typical lategamer . But until you get lategame you can of course be wiped out already .

The only nation where i tend to say it maybe a bit imbalanced is Caelum because of the false horror spell .

[Huzurdaddi]

What if I want to play a game on a huge map that doesnt become a clamming competition after turn 30-40?




Unless someone is playing Atlantis or is astonishingly competent clams don't really come into the picture until turn 60 or so.



And arent nations like Marignon and TienChi also solutions to devils? (any nations with high priests)




No. Preists are essentially useless against devils devils have very high MR. The solution to devils is usually either ( 1 ) wrathful or ( 2 ) a SC that can tank them. Best to combine ( 1 ) and ( 2 ).



While you might object to the speed at which this happens I do not see how anyone can argue with that delayed investment payoffs should payoff.




I have to say I totally agree with this point. My only objection is ROI on some investments ( IMO soul contracts ROI is a little too high).

In general it is all about ROI vs. the speed at which the game progresses. If you are in a game in which you can be over run in 5 turns then even a 10% ROI may not be sufficient to entice you to invest. However in a game where you would not be badly hurt after 20 turns of war even a 5% ROI would seem godly.



Eliminating long-term strategies would do nothing but take away from why this game is fun.




Totally correct.



I disagree completely with this, in small agressive games resources are better spent in more direct ways then clam hoarding, especially if you are in a war.




I agree. However water gems are not amazingly useful they have some uses boots of quickness, perhaps swords of quick, but in general they are not going to swing the war. Any extras might as well go to clams. I have to say I would love clams going to 2W1N.



About Vamps, I'd agree to remove them the Summon Allies skill. They can easily cast the vampire summoning spell.




That actually makes sense.



I don't know about it being created out of thin air but yes, there is inflation. That's a *good* thing, though. Every game has a natural life cycle and evolves through stages, otherwise research would not be a meaningful element.




That's just an EXCELLENT post KEI. I could quote the whole thing and I pretty much agree with it.

I still think that the ROI on all investment type strategies should be carefully monitored though.



There seems to have been a recent push of people who want the game to *not* evolve by discouraging the use of SC's and other mid/late game tactics, instead favoring the national troops that are more effective in the early game.




Again, excellent. I love the natural progression of the game. I do think that SC's are a *little* too powerful pretty early in the game. And I think that almost all of this "power" comes from life draining weapons. Without them SC's would have a hard time soloing huge armies but yet would still be awesome forces. But I don't think I totally want to get rid of life draining weapons since that is removing a choice from players. Probably a small tweak to the damage of all life draining weapons would be sufficient ( at least in my eyes ).



Abysya is very rushable. And is totally defenceless except a good pretender.




BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAH! They have 1st rate troops. Please. This is not Miclain we are talking about here.



and that could cast fanaticism




Sermon of courage works dandy.



Short of a rewrite, I am in agreement with those conservatives that don't want to see the system dramatically changed. The game is clearly working, and has an extraordinarily large following, given it's non-commercial nature. To argue that the game is broken, or dramatically unbalanced is ludicrous. It flies in the face of the fact that so many smart people are playing this game, and so few can agree on what constitutes an optimal strategy.




Pretty much dead on. You can still argue though, that tweaks can be made on prices of certian units. Nothing major, just small changes.

[Soapyfrog]

Thufir said:
Thirdly (and what this post is mostly about), I believe soapyfrog is misguided in objecting to exponential growth. I mean every kind of bootstrapping game since the beginning of time (with recent, relevant examples being Civ, MoM, MOO2, et al) has featured exponential growth prominently.


Well I do not object to exponential economic growth, of course, if you take Moo2 or Civ as examples these games integrate such growth very well into the game itself: You MUST grow to survive and economic growth is ubiquitous. Further, the games scale very well... you dont start producing the best unit in the game on turn 60, thats for sure.

Secondly growth in these games is tied to and constrained to various factors such as population, resources, geographical areas, whichs caps your maximum growth, and as the game continues you will constantly find youself resource constrained, so if you want to REALLY grow exponentially, you must physically expand and thus conflict with your neighbours.

In Dominions2 you have this exponential growth strategy in clamming etc. as well. However it is not tied to expansion, it is self-sustaining (i.e. you will never really be resource constrained once your clamming etc oeprations get going)... so you do NOT need to attack your neighbours, in fact you shouldn't since its counter-productive. That's not a very good game mechanic IMHO.

The clam/fetish/stone hoarding strategy needs to have a continual external cost to constrain that growth. My "conVersion instead of creation" suggestion would accomplish this, i.e. a fever fetish would let you produce 2 fire gems a turn, but you need 1 nature gem to feed it. At some point you will need more nature gems, and have to look beyond your borders to get them.

In the end it is not the exponential growth specifically whcih is bad, it is the self-sustaining nature of that growth which is highly unnatural for most games.

I hope the suggestions this thread have generated have been constructive. I would love to see some of them implemented. Hopefully with item/unit modding some of it can even be done without the need for an official patch...

[Cainehill]

Soapyfrog said:

johan osterman said:
I disagree completely with this, in small agressive games resources are better spent in more direct ways then clam hoarding, especially if you are in a war.


Oh hey I said it would be harder to clamhoard for the reasons you mention, but if you can make it out of the dogfight intact it will win you the game, so it seems like a good plan to me!



And if I save _all_ my gold by not buying troops, thus not having to pay upkeep on them, it will win me the game if I can make it out of the dogfight alive.

And when boxing, if a fighter can Last through the first 8 rounds without ever swinging at his opponent, he'll be able to win the fight in the 9th round because his opponent will be tired while he's fresh.

You go ahead and invest as much as you can in clams while in wars on small maps; as you say, if you survive you'll be in good position, but I expect your opponents will be eating your lunch.

[Soapyfrog]

Actually my suggestion doesnt work sicne you'd just alchemize the nature gems from your astral/fire production. Doh!

Well I dont know. For sure forcing Mages to use them would be a huge step in the right direction.

[Soapyfrog]

Cainehill said:
You go ahead and invest as much as you can in clams while in wars on small maps; as you say, if you survive you'll be in good position, but I expect your opponents will be eating your lunch.


Because I spent some water gems on clams? I really doubt that would lose me the game.

I have lost games becuase I spent those gems on things OTHER than clamming though. So I know that happens http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

[johan osterman]

Soapyfrog said:

Well I do not object to exponential economic growth, of course, if you take Moo2 or Civ as examples these games integrate such growth very well into the game itself: You MUST grow to survive and economic growth is ubiquitous. Further, the games scale very well... you dont start producing the best unit in the game on turn 60, thats for sure.



You seem to labour under the absurd notion that 1 turn in one game is directly translates to 1 turn in another. By turn 60 in MOO2 you would have researched less than half a dozen technologies and would just be getting started with the game, in dom2 you could very well have, for all intents and purposes, won a midsize game by turn 60.



Secondly growth in these games is tied to and constrained to various factors such as population, resources, geographical areas, whichs caps your maximum growth, and as the game continues you will constantly find youself resource constrained, so if you want to REALLY grow exponentially, you must physically expand and thus conflict with your neighbours.

In Dominions2 you have this exponential growth strategy in clamming etc. as well. However it is not tied to expansion, it is self-sustaining (i.e. you will never really be resource constrained once your clamming etc oeprations get going)... so you do NOT need to attack your neighbours, in fact you shouldn't since its counter-productive. That's not a very good game mechanic IMHO.

....



If you do not expand and use your resources in other ways than trying to get clams and hoard them you will get stomped, even if you play just 2 players on a enormous map. If you are to acquire any significant number clams you will have to expand etc in order to get the reources you need to produce the clams and the money to get the mages you need in order to use them.

[Soapyfrog]

johan osterman said:
If you do not expand and use your resources in other ways than trying to get clams and hoard them you will get stomped, even if you play just 2 players on a enormous map. If you are to acquire any significant number clams you will have to expand etc in order to get the reources you need to produce the clams and the money to get the mages you need in order to use them.


You will use resources in other ways, and you will expand in the early game, clean up the indeps around, maybe shoot a cripple or two if its convenient, but once your clamhoarding operations get under way, the actual NEED to expand to continue your growth will disappear.

[Arryn]

Huzurdaddi said:
Unless someone is playing Atlantis or is astonishingly competent clams don't really come into the picture until turn 60 or so.

I guess I must be "astonishingly" competent because, in my Caelum SP game (Orania, 15 nations) at turn 42 my astral site income is 1/turn and 21/turn from clams. I'd say that a 21:1 clam income ratio is by most anyone's definition "in the picture". The clams (and astral gems) do not change my strategy at all (I could live without any whatsoever), but they are sure handy to have for alchemy, which speeds some of my summonings or forgings by several turns. Oh, and I haven't been diligent in site searching, either. I'd have more clams (from more water gem income) had I been deliberately seeking to maximize my output of clams. As it is, I've just been using the water income I've come across through conquest.

[Boron]

Soapyfrog said:

johan osterman said:
If you do not expand and use your resources in other ways than trying to get clams and hoard them you will get stomped, even if you play just 2 players on a enormous map. If you are to acquire any significant number clams you will have to expand etc in order to get the reources you need to produce the clams and the money to get the mages you need in order to use them.


You will use resources in other ways, and you will expand in the early game, clean up the indeps around, maybe shoot a cripple or two if its convenient, but once your clamhoarding operations get under way, the actual NEED to expand to continue your growth will disappear.



Expansion is always not bad . Gives you more income .
On 50% magic site frequency ,the most common setting in mp games i guess in average a fully searched province nets you about 3-5 gems , you get gold and you find perhaps even very special sites like special mages / boni for summoning . And not to forget you can perhaps bloodhunt the new province .

Those investment strategies are good but only if you are in a relative good position like 3rd or 4th . If your enemy has 10 provinces more which are searched this is like if he has +30-50 clams , perhaps more if you include blood etc. in the calculation .


But clamhoarding is of course very powerful . A problem is that those nations who can sitesearch bad and are bad hoarders of one of the good hoard items like marignon/man etc. are disadvantaged after earlygame .

If you see clamhoarding from another side it is perhaps more a bless then a curse because it is a possibility to do inner growth .
In master of orion 2 the bigger nation had normally always an advantage because 20% more planets meant 20% more supplies/income/researchpower .
In civilization it is better handled because of the corruption mechanism and the map is rather small .

[Thufir]

Soapyfrog said:

Thufir said:
Thirdly (and what this post is mostly about), I believe soapyfrog is misguided in objecting to exponential growth. I mean every kind of bootstrapping game since the beginning of time (with recent, relevant examples being Civ, MoM, MOO2, et al) has featured exponential growth prominently.


Well I do not object to exponential economic growth, of course, if you take Moo2 or Civ as examples these games integrate such growth very well into the game itself: You MUST grow to survive and economic growth is ubiquitous. Further, the games scale very well... you dont start producing the best unit in the game on turn 60, thats for sure.

Secondly growth in these games is tied to and constrained to various factors such as population, resources, geographical areas, whichs caps your maximum growth, and as the game continues you will constantly find youself resource constrained, so if you want to REALLY grow exponentially, you must physically expand and thus conflict with your neighbours.

In Dominions2 you have this exponential growth strategy in clamming etc. as well. However it is not tied to expansion, it is self-sustaining (i.e. you will never really be resource constrained once your clamming etc oeprations get going)... so you do NOT need to attack your neighbours, in fact you shouldn't since its counter-productive. That's not a very good game mechanic IMHO.

The clam/fetish/stone hoarding strategy needs to have a continual external cost to constrain that growth. My "conVersion instead of creation" suggestion would accomplish this, i.e. a fever fetish would let you produce 2 fire gems a turn, but you need 1 nature gem to feed it. At some point you will need more nature gems, and have to look beyond your borders to get them.

In the end it is not the exponential growth specifically whcih is bad, it is the self-sustaining nature of that growth which is highly unnatural for most games.

I hope the suggestions this thread have generated have been constructive. I would love to see some of them implemented. Hopefully with item/unit modding some of it can even be done without the need for an official patch...



You misquote me. In the sentence right after you chop my quote I said:


Perhaps the real objection is to unconstrained exponential growth (maybe soapyfrog is already saying this, and I've misread).




So, we are in agreement, at least at a theoretical level. The problem is that in practice, building in constraints in growth needs to be done at design time. It's not just clams (or even clams +ff's +soul contracts +summoners +...) it's really the way the whole magic system works. In a real sense, anything that has an ongoing effect, without an ongoing cost constitutes a "free lunch" or a perpetual motion machine, of a kind.

And the fact is, that the game as it stands is not broken, so I'm pretty happy with the current state of affairs, myself. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif I like some of the changes that you list, namely that clams could only be used by mages (as Cohen had earlier suggested), and soul contracts could only be used by Blood Mages.

However, undoing the unconstrained growth of clams and other items will unbalance the game, as it stands. For example, Tien Chi S&A (one of my favorite themes, but already weak to begin with) is truly hosed. So, I would guess are Atlantis and R'lyeh.

[Huzurdaddi]

guess I must be "astonishingly" competent because, in my Caelum SP game (Orania, 15 nations) at turn 42 my astral site income is 1/turn and 21/turn from clams




Right and 21 per turn does not have the same kind of impact that the frog is talking about. He's talking about the 50-100 astral per turn income which feeds wishing. 21 / turn is nice and you are on the way. In maybe in 10 or 15 turns you will be GTG.

[Pickles]

I think I agree with everyone here!
Late game your gem income can be far higher if you spam gem items than if not but you have to survive. Diplomacy can sometimes replace armies for this MP. These strategies give exponential growth while any other growth in the game is not exponential. In general late game admin means I am not interested in playing game with more than about 10 provinces each or 120 ish in total. PLus I prefer the early wars & using the whole of the tech tree. So while I do think the game is a bit flawed in way I think it is soluble without any code changes by choosing maps that suit me. Admittedly if I liked teching all the way before I attacked anyone I might have issues.

So to slightly drag this in another direction has anyone considered ULM spamming. I played one MP game and was able to get a Forge of the Ancients. This with a smith (or hammer) reduces the cost of a fever fetish to one fire & one nature gem & allows any mage to make them. It reduces clams to 3S if you can get a water (1) mage.
This is a 2 turn payback or worst case - alchemising fire into nature - 5 turn.

Now that is insane growth - too much to be bothered with for me after only 30 ish but it does not take long for that to be a ludicrous number of fetishes or clams. The fire gems can be alchemised to pay for scouts to carry them.

Around turn 30 when the forge is likely to be researched Ulm will have at least 30 smiths so even one turns use of the forge would allow 30 fetishes - adding 90 earth gems to the cost makes them 5 gems each. Or if you get 2 turns use 3.5 gems each. I think the forge saved me its cost almost every turn I had it up, it is grotesque but especially for spamming.

I also got contracts for 20 slaves (from an empowered smith) which makes the ROI very good, (& I did lose at least one to a horror attack). You can make this 10 for one smith if you use the unique hammer but it may need a second empowering.

Anyway there you have a truly horrible exponential micro hell of forging

Hmm lost the plot now

dum dum

Pickles

[Arryn]

Huzurdaddi said:
Right and 21 per turn does not have the same kind of impact that the frog is talking about. He's talking about the 50-100 astral per turn income which feeds wishing.

By the time I can have a 50-100 astral/turn income (turn 60-80) I've already effectively won the game (ie: I cannot be stopped), even on a map the size of Orania, and the whole issue of clamhoarding for wishing is thus moot. All wishing does is hasten what will happen anyway. For me that is; YMMV.

The boys at IW have more or less said the same thing re: clams. If you're aggressively expanding and building units, you'll be overrunning the map long before a massive clam-bake will matter. Clam-hoarding only matters if you have a laid-back play style. IMO (which I have said before, as have others), the whole issue of clams is way overblown. Also IMO, those who appear to have the most trouble coping with other's usage of clams have fundamental play style issues and they'll get crushed by opponents regardless, even if clams didn't exist at all. The clams are just adding insult to injury. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/eek.gif

[Boron]

That game was a bad example though pickles http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/biggrin.gif

You were in a very special , extremely good position diplomacywise . I as arco was at peace with you so i had no interest in dispelling your forge . The only other good astralnation in the game , Ryleh was very peaceful too .


But normally dispelling is not so easy http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif . If you can avoid it you always avoid it normally because you never know how many gems your opponent put into it and so unless verylategame or because you are at war with the one with Forge up it is not so likely to get dispelled .

[Soapyfrog]

Thufir said:
So, we are in agreement, at least at a theoretical level. The problem is that in practice, building in constraints in growth needs to be done at design time. It's not just clams (or even clams +ff's +soul contracts +summoners +...) it's really the way the whole magic system works. In a real sense, anything that has an ongoing effect, without an ongoing cost constitutes a "free lunch" or a perpetual motion machine, of a kind.


Yep we agree on this... and the game is just not really designed with this stuff in mind, it was kind of tacked on as an afterthought.

I disagree that removing it would unbalance the game in the other direction unduly, though... Tien Chi has excellent sacred summons and a dynamic capital only mage, Atlantis and Ryleh are effectively unassailable for the first part of the game, these things are very good even in the absence of clamming.

I would however agree that the BEST thing to do (as upposed to simply excising the items in question) would be to add some additional constraints to these strategies as has been suggested by plenty of very smart people in this thread. Simple things like making them mage-only items and eliminating vampire lord summon allies ability would be welcome changes that might result in a common ground being found between those who think clamming is too strong and those who think its just fine.

[Boron]

Arryn said:

Huzurdaddi said:
Right and 21 per turn does not have the same kind of impact that the frog is talking about. He's talking about the 50-100 astral per turn income which feeds wishing.

By the time I can have a 50-100 astral/turn income (turn 60-80) I've already effectively won the game (ie: I cannot be stopped), even on a map the size of Orania, and the whole issue of clamhoarding for wishing is thus moot. All wishing does is hasten what will happen anyway. For me that is; YMMV.




You are too optimistic here i think . On a 17 player orania you haven't won already by turn 60-80 . You may have 100 provinces but the map has about 280 provinces .

I think you can't win that quick against 10+ players which are skilled too .
Did you really win once a Mp game on a full house orania on turn 60-80 ? Then congrats .

[Arryn]

Boron, please note the perhaps-too-subtle distinction I made: "won" as defined as "cannot be stopped". There are still many turns to go after such a point before all other players have either been crushed or they've given up. In SP games on Orania I reach that point in the 40s (as the AI is a much weaker adversary), and sometimes as early as the 30s. Just because the map has almost 300 provinces doesn't mean I have to conquer even half of them before I'm certain of a victory. Sometimes all it takes is 10-15% of them. The rest is inevitable.

[Boron]

Soapyfrog said:
I would however agree that the BEST thing to do (as upposed to simply excising the items in question) would be to add some additional constraints to these strategies as has been suggested by plenty of very smart people in this thread. Simple things like making them mage-only items and eliminating vampire lord summon allies ability would be welcome changes that might result in a common ground being found between those who think clamming is too strong and those who think its just fine.



Yeah some imo nice modifications would be :
- Leave clams as they are . But make them stockable only on mages or at least not on scouts which can't be targeted by flames / seeking arrows etc. .
- Remove a few allysummons and give them instead the ability to summon one special unit with a small bonus if that is possible .
A soul contract would give the possessor e.g. 20% discount on summoned devils and a vampire lord would get 40% discount on bloodrite or get +x vampires as a bonus when doing this special ritual .

Vampires and devils are both top 5 troops . Because of the get 1 / turn per allysummoning vampire lord / soul contract they become a bit too cheap and so they are really first choice for all nations who can afford them .
There is really nothing else which is similiar powerful which you can get out so quick and with little effort .

Only a wraithlord is similiar because he has too autosummon . The only other troop you can get in quite big quantities quite cheap is the vine ogre . But a vine ogre is only a living wall while a devil beats almost every other troop and can be dangerous to thugs too .

[Boron]

Arryn said:
Boron, please note the perhaps-too-subtle distinction I made: "won" as defined as "cannot be stopped". There are still many turns to go after such a point before all other players have either been crushed or they've given up. In SP games on Orania I reach that point in the 40s (as the AI is a much weaker adversary), and sometimes as early as the 30s. Just because the map has almost 300 provinces doesn't mean I have to conquer even half of them before I'm certain of a victory. Sometimes all it takes is 10-15% of them. The rest is inevitable.



Sorry but that sounds arrogant . How can you declare you victor in a mp game when you control only 10-15% of orania ? This should quickly lead to an alliance against you and 2-4 allied neighbors should at least weaken you extremely .

You are perhaps the major power in your edge of the world but in the other edge there is probably one who is as strong . So how can you see that you are unstoppable that quick ?
Once you control 40-50% of the map and the other players , especially the 2nd and 3rd biggest have given up you have won but not with only 10-20% of the map .

[Soapyfrog]

I think she was saying thats the case in SP...

[Cohen]

Clams should be given to a mage that has to research!!!
Otherwise someone could have less costy mages that could hide (see Man Bards, or Ryleh Starchild).

[Graeme Dice]

Soapyfrog said:
This is not good game mechanics, period. If the solution to a Mictlan devil factory is "gang up on Mictlan early" then that's broken. If the solution to runaway economies is to play on small maps, then that's broken. The game doesnt scale!



Another solution is Lamias, storm, and iron dragons. You shouldn't take too many, if any losses that way.

[Graeme Dice]

PvK said:
It'd be good if they didn't work on undead (was that patched yet?),



This wouldn't be good. This would have no more effect than making people right-click through 50 scouts a turn to check their hitpoints. As it is now, they cost more resources when you can spend 3 death gems to put them on a mound king.

[Graeme Dice]

Boron said:
- Leave clams as they are . But make them stockable only on mages or at least not on scouts which can't be targeted by flames / seeking arrows etc. .



This wouldn't make any difference, because I'm going to have 50 mages researching in my capital underneaeh several domes by the time I have 100 clams anyways.

[Boron]

Graeme Dice said:

Boron said:
- Leave clams as they are . But make them stockable only on mages or at least not on scouts which can't be targeted by flames / seeking arrows etc. .



This wouldn't make any difference, because I'm going to have 50 mages researching in my capital underneaeh several domes by the time I have 100 clams anyways.



Hm but this would perhaps make dome wars a bit more interesting . If you bombard the domes with dozens of cheap spells like seeking arrow and at the end of the spellcastchain include a few fires i think this would be funny http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[Graeme Dice]

Boron said:
Hm but this would perhaps make dome wars a bit more interesting . If you bombard the domes with dozens of cheap spells like seeking arrow and at the end of the spellcastchain include a few fires i think this would be funny http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif



Spells are cast in random order. You have no way to make your spells go in any particular order, and a proper set of domes only gives a 7% chance that any one spell will make it through.

[odd_enuf]

for the soul contracts, making them give an extra 1-3 devils, when casting the summon devil spell, similer to the ivy crown, would help balance them. Giving 2 extra devils would make them pay off twice as fast, but you would still need a blood income to use them, along with mage time.

odd_enuf

[Huzurdaddi]

for the soul contracts, making them give an extra 1-3 devils, when casting the summon devil spell, similer to the ivy crown, would help balance them. Giving 2 extra devils would make them pay off twice as fast, but you would still need a blood income to use them, along with mage time.




I have to say that is a solid suggestion. But it makes devils an abysia only type of thing.

[Soapyfrog]

Graeme Dice said:
, because I'm going to have 50 mages researching in my capital underneaeh several domes by the time I have 100 clams anyways.


Yes but: they take up a slot you could otherwise be using for a research item, or something else.

Also I think USING a clam or fetish to generate a pearl should be an action: i.e. you cant research while you are generating them. That would make it an interesting tradeoff!!!

[Graeme Dice]

Soapyfrog said:
Yes but: they take up a slot you could otherwise be using for a research item, or something else.



Well, since I'll have another 20-50 sages in some other province, they can hold the research boosting items.


Also I think USING a clam or fetish to generate a pearl should be an action: i.e. you cant research while you are generating them. That would make it an interesting tradeoff!!!



It's not yet even been established that there is any imbalance inherent to the clams.

[Boron]

Graeme Dice said:

Boron said:
Hm but this would perhaps make dome wars a bit more interesting . If you bombard the domes with dozens of cheap spells like seeking arrow and at the end of the spellcastchain include a few fires i think this would be funny http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif



Spells are cast in random order. You have no way to make your spells go in any particular order, and a proper set of domes only gives a 7% chance that any one spell will make it through.



Oh i thought you can influence the order http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif
At least bringing them to fall by seeking arrows or similiar is cost effective http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[Wendigo]

Graeme Dice said:
Spells are cast in random order. You have no way to make your spells go in any particular order, and a proper set of domes only gives a 7% chance that any one spell will make it through.



Graeme has a supberb knowledge of the game mechanics, but I believe he is wrong on this one:

Casting order is actually fully deterministic.

Every single trooper & commander in a Dominions game is tracked with an ID number (ranging from 1 to aprox 30,000) that is used to track experience, afflictions....
Spell casting orders (rituals+forging+battlefield spells) are resolved according to this number.

Back in Dom PPP you could use the debug screen to gather this data regarding your mages (& get the exact order in which spells would be cast), tho I believe this is no longer possible in Dom II. You can get some clues however if you pay atention.


This issue can & does decide games:
will you claim that Last unique commmander that just died or will you get a "Nobody answered the spell" because somebody else did?
will you forge that disputed artifact or will your opponent pull it instead?
Are you capable of getting your slaves to cast communion slave before their master runs through his script?
Will you burst the air dome with arrows & other cheapo spells before your MW/FFS have to roll vs it?
will you nail that teleporting SC with an assasination spell before he jumps away?

[Cohen]

This are damn good to know if we could know the number of the guy ...

So you can dispel too and cast a global in the same game-turn, if the dispel is cast by someone with a previous number that the guy that casts the global.

[deccan]

JK established in this thread (http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/threads/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=UBB74&Number=289008&Forum= f74) that the casting order of ritual spells is explicitly random.

[Kel]

Humm, nice information, even if it seems a bit cheesy to use.

The easy way, I suppose, is just knowing that if mage a casts before mage b, he will always cast before him in the future.

- Kel

[Cohen]

I'd really put some clue into remote spellcasting ...

If you want to Ghost Ride a province and then teleport in a guy, you should be able to do that, your mages should coordinate the military action ... probably Dom2 counts of SNAFU too.

[johan osterman]

Cohen said:
I'd really put some clue into remote spellcasting ...

If you want to Ghost Ride a province and then teleport in a guy, you should be able to do that, your mages should coordinate the military action ... probably Dom2 counts of SNAFU too.



This is wholly unrelated to the order in which magicUsers cast their spells and is utterly unfeasible as anything except hardwired sequences for certain categories of spells, and would require additional battlechecks in the turn sequence, which would result in other now available options dissappearing.

[Cohen]

Seen you've answered to this, about the proposals about clams, contracts and such ...

It seems many ppl would like to see something changed ... and there're a lot of ideas to take from or have your own.
Should we expect something in the next patch?

[Thufir]

Graeme Dice said:

Boron said:
- Leave clams as they are . But make them stockable only on mages or at least not on scouts which can't be targeted by flames / seeking arrows etc. .



This wouldn't make any difference, because I'm going to have 50 mages researching in my capital underneaeh several domes by the time I have 100 clams anyways.



I've read all the following debate on domes and whatnot, but I still believe it would be an improvement to require mages to have the clams. It may not make a big difference, but it will make a difference. For one thing, even if the mages are as invulnerable as scouts, it is more thematically appropriate, and just looks better. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

But I don't think it's the case that the mages will be as safe for clam holding as scouts are. After all, you will go through some portion of the game without a dome up. And dome or no, the mages will still be vulnerable to assassins, correct?

[Kel]

Cohen said:
It seems many ppl would like to see something changed ... and there're a lot of ideas to take from or have your own.
Should we expect something in the next patch?



I don't think you have sufficiently proved a problem with vamps, clams, contracts or castling.

I think they are fine as they are.

- Kel

[archaeolept]

the thing is, there are some things in my experience that would tend to support Wendigo's claim of determinism in casting order. But Johan did say that casting order for explicitly random, so I'm a bit confused. i would love a confirmation that two mages each vying for a unique summons would each have an equal chance of getting it...

two salted herring for the dev who first confirms it

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

[Mark the Merciful]

Returning to the main topic of the thread, I thought I'd do another ROI calculation for purposes of comparison.

A typical Arco early expansion army might consist of 1 commander, 1 priestess, 16 Hypaspists and 4 Elephants. Total cost approx 800 Gold. Assume this army conquers 5 provinces with an average value of 40 Gold each, before attrition or bad luck ends its progress.

So, total income from the conquered provinces is effectively 146 gold (we lose about 54 per turn to pay maintenance on the army), which means our investment in elephants pays back in a little under six turns. That's pretty damn good; an awful lot better than you could expect in real life.

I wonder if it's unbalanced?

Mark

[atul]

Wendigo said:
Casting order is actually fully deterministic.

Every single trooper & commander in a Dominions game is tracked with an ID number (ranging from 1 to aprox 30,000) that is used to track experience, afflictions....
Spell casting orders (rituals+forging+battlefield spells) are resolved according to this number.



Not willing to bet my neck on this, but I believe Dom2 has added a small random variable here. Random turns resolve spells/forging in backward order, going from the largest ID to the smallest. I tested this with setting 6 casters on cast monthly ritual, and scrolling turns forward - there was only two different cast resolving ques, and they mirrored each other perfectly.

So, the order wouldn't be in a real sense random, but one can't have any foreknowledge what is the order of two castings.

Of course this can be abused if you have enough resources, putting the same casting on both ends of que, nearly ensuring a positive outcome.

[Huzurdaddi]

Returning to the main topic of the thread, I thought I'd do another ROI calculation for purposes of comparison.




Well I guess it depends upon indep settings doesn't it?

Further such rates do not hold for up long either, since one will quickly meet up with other empires.

[Soapyfrog]

Huzurdaddi said:


Returning to the main topic of the thread, I thought I'd do another ROI calculation for purposes of comparison.




Further such rates do not hold for up long either, since one will quickly meet up with other empires.


Precisely, your growth is limited to what you can conquer. You cant spend 800 gold and create a new province once you have conquered all within your reach.

[Pickles]

Mark the Merciful said:
....Your investment in elephants pays back in a little under six turns. That's pretty damn good; an awful lot better than you could expect in real life.

I wonder if it's unbalanced?

Mark



The difference is that after 5 or 10 provinces or whatever you can expand no more - it is bounded.

Pickles

[Boron]

Pickles said:

Mark the Merciful said:
....Your investment in elephants pays back in a little under six turns. That's pretty damn good; an awful lot better than you could expect in real life.

I wonder if it's unbalanced?

Mark



The difference is that after 5 or 10 provinces or whatever you can expand no more - it is bounded.

Pickles



Yeah and gold income tends to decrease in the long run because a lot of nations have death scales + random events / spells .
4 elephants + 16 Hypaspists are not bad but normally with each province you conquer you will lose at least 1-2 Hypaspists or sometimes one elephant . So if you can conquer 5 provinces with this force is already good but on indeps 7-9 at least i doubt that .

And a SC can conquer those provinces without upkeep or if it is a recruitable SC ( Jotunheim ) goldwise significantly cheaper . And he doesn't lose his value mid-lategame as your hypaspists + elephants do .

[Mark the Merciful]

Pickles said:
The difference is that after 5 or 10 provinces or whatever you can expand no more - it is bounded.



It's only bounded by the size of the map. I can apply my Elephant Investment Strategy to other players' provinces as well as independents (in fact, my ROI might increase because the defenses in such province will - on average - be weaker than, say, size 6 Indeps).

Or are we taking enemy action into account now? We certainly weren't in the previous calculations.

Mark

[Soapyfrog]

Mark the Merciful said:
Or are we taking enemy action into account now? We certainly weren't in the previous calculations.



Naturally not. Your clam/fetish/stone/contract-holding scouts are quite safe from enemy action unless your empire has been completely overrun.

It's already been stated that fighting is detrimental to a clam-hoarding strat.

Military expansion, on the other, requires you to fight, and fighting reqires a continual investment or resources, AND your ROI is much less sure and much harder to calculate (if it goes badly your ROI could be quite negative! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif) In short military expansion is a much riskier "investment".

[CUnknown]

I think there isn't a major problem with the way things are now, but a small tweak like clams are only equippable on mages sounds reasonable. Who could object to that? All it does is limit the extreme clamming strategy (abuse?) where you have hundreds and are making more each turn. It does nothing to discourage a moderate to heavy investment in clams.

Also, I'd like to see the life given from lifedrain capped at the user's normal hitpoint maximum and/or another magic item added that gives protection from lifedrain (soul protection pendant or the like).

[The Panther]

Actually, the single best solution to clam hoarding would be to make water magic useful.

For a start, they ought to eliminate the inability of casting water magic on both land and water. Make water spells unique in that they all could be cast either land or water. Excepting the auqatic or land summons, of course.

But really, why on earth can niefel flames not be cast underwater? You spend all that mage time as Atlantis getting to level 9 and can't even use it in your most powerful dominion of your home territory.

As it stands, water gems are most useful for turning into astral via clams.

[Boron]

Soapyfrog said:

Mark the Merciful said:
Or are we taking enemy action into account now? We certainly weren't in the previous calculations.



Naturally not. Your clam/fetish/stone/contract-holding scouts are quite safe from enemy action unless your empire has been completely overrun.

It's already been stated that fighting is detrimental to a clam-hoarding strat.

Military expansion, on the other, requires you to fight, and fighting reqires a continual investment or resources, AND your ROI is much less sure and much harder to calculate (if it goes badly your ROI could be quite negative! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif) In short military expansion is a much riskier "investment".



It is more like e.g. Civilization . Normally earlygame expansion is always bloody and Lasts long . Midgame it already gets better ( Roads everywhere , e.g. knights in civ http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/biggrin.gif ) and lategame it is much easier against weaker opponents ( Railroads everywhere , the best weapons in civ ) .
In earlygame fighting in enemy dominion is quite risky , especially if your opponent has an immortal pretender .
It is hard to get a huge enough superority earlygame over your opponent to win fast enough with most nations .

If you played well and made the right preparations then a lategame war can be won in about 5 turns while an earlygame war Lasts often much longer . Lategame you just have more possibilities like SCs teleported in / Huge summoned armies / lots of battlemages / Ghost riders etc. .

Sure your opponent can do this too .

So imo the "art" of clamhoarding is to always not let the gap between you and the biggest nation not become too big , try staying in the upper middle in most graphs and hoard . Then you can be quite sure that when you are ready you are probably deadly enough because you have about the same income than the largest player or only slightly less but you didn't lose much because of wars .

Rushing is always good in small games with few players but with lots of players it is too risky because there will be always one who techs . If you would e.g. play empire earth with 8 players in a true FFA and rush you will probably get 1-2 of your neighbors but one who teched will be 1-2 ages more developed than you and beat e.g. your middle age troops with musketiers .

Empire earth is a game with "hard counters" like FM_Surrignon called them but the interesting thing there is that it often doesn't work because of different tech levels http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/biggrin.gif .
Tanks e.g. improve to a new model every age there while Paks improve only every 2 ages and iirc the Last tank improvement is in era 14 , the Last one while the Last Pak improvement is in era 13 .

You got your first tank and your first pak in world war 1 era . There the pak won . In world war 2 era there was only a new tank model . This won then against the paks , narrow but it won . In modern age there was a new tank and a new pak but in the Last era again only a new tank .

I think dominions is in many ways similiar there , like Banes -> Bane lords -> Wraith lords -> Tartarians .
That makes it so entertaining i think . That every nation has an era at which it is especially strong but every nation has weaknesses too .
If you remember my long postings where i compared dominions with starcraft i had that balance in mind but starcraft lacks a real techtree . Starcraft is perhaps a bit more balanced but it is not as complex .
Dominions has another kind of balance .
I think now that the balance of dominions is even better than e.g. starcraft because it is more chesslike there . So it gets soon boring while the number of possibilities in dominions is just great .

The "negative" side is because dominions is so complex and because most ppl when they are asked about balance think first imo in a chess/starcraft system of balance tend to say when they are new dominions is imbalanced ( I have proven this often enough myself http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/biggrin.gif ) .

I agreed here too that clams are too good etc. but the longer i think about it i think i were wrong with that .
It is a good strategy but not overpowered because other strats can lead to victory as well or perhaps even better .


The only thing which i would like to see finetuning is the false horror spell . Against all troops with morale this is too long toooo powerful . I think about 10-12 of the included nations have severe difficulties defending against the common caelum false horror strat and a few have still difficulties but can defend because they can do the same or similiar ( vanheim / pythium especially ) and the 2 undead nations are here advantaged because they have enough troops + they don't rout .

[Cainehill]

The Panther said:
Actually, the single best solution to clam hoarding would be to make water magic useful.

For a start, they ought to eliminate the inability of casting water magic on both land and water.



Yep. It always strikes me as wrong that air spells are more useful for underwater combat than water spells are. Lightning, orb lightning, etc, can be used on land or underwater, while many of water's direct damage spells ... can't be cast underwater. That's just so wrong...

Same thing with rituals. If Voice of Apsu can be cast on a land province, from another land province, why can't it be cast on the land province from an underwater lab?

And artifacts and magic items - with the exception of the Orb of Atlantis, there are none that require more than Water-3, and 20 water gems.

[PvK]

Graeme Dice said:

PvK said:
It'd be good if they didn't work on undead (was that patched yet?),



This wouldn't be good. This would have no more effect than making people right-click through 50 scouts a turn to check their hitpoints. As it is now, they cost more resources when you can spend 3 death gems to put them on a mound king.



You didn't quote my entire suggestion. The idea, already begun by the devs, was to attach a drawback and additional cost to the fettishes, and not just a free infinite fire income with almost no limit or cost. My suggestion was not just to require it be on something that can actually be diseased, which is logical given the description, but to also add a chance of damage which might kill the bearer. So it would be akin to the Soul Contract, in that it doesn't Last forever, because eventually the bearer will get a heart attack or seizure and die before the fettish can be applied to someone else.

PvK

[Kel]

Whether it is effective or not, I assume that's why contracts are cursed and horror mark you.

- Kel

[The_Tauren13]

I think the best suggestion to change clams is to make it a command that has to be given to whoever is wearing it: a "use item" command that would simply make 1 asral gem/turn. That way, your little scouts sitting around wont be able to hide and use them at the same time. Yes yes, i know what some people might say: "but it wont make any difference; i can just use domes!". Well, maybe it wouldnt make a BIG difference, but i dont think anyone is asking for a big change, just a change. It would definitely make some difference in that clam hoarding wouldnt be totally indestructable like it is now, and at least an opponent would be able to do something to kill off your clam income.

Now don't get me wrong; i don't support a change, i was just expressing my opinion about which suggestion was best. Personally, i think clams are fine as they are. The main reason people use them is not that they are overpowered, but because there is little else useful to do with water gems, like Panther and Cainehill were saying.

[Cohen]

Domes aren't totally protective as hiding is (nor Hiding is totally protective from some spells like Mind Hunt, but to cast it usually you should know that there's someone in that province, and a lone S1 mage will feeblemind your S4+ mage, even if it's S10 he'll get feebleminded).

[The_Tauren13]

I've been wondering about mind hunt... How exactly does it work?

[Thufir]

The_Tauren13 said:
I've been wondering about mind hunt... How exactly does it work?



Badly, in my SP experience.

You get the chance to kill one enemy commander (via Mind Burn or Soul Slay, whichever you've got, or Soul Slay if you've got both), but my experience is consistent with what Cohen is saying, in that the risk of being feebleminded is very high, even if you do it with a very high level astral mage. Also, I'm beginning to think Astral Projection carries with it the same kind of bogus risk.

Just had a thought - is it possible this is the same kind of bug that had been affecting magic duel? And then, is there any chance it's fixed in 2.14?

[Cohen]

You need too some research in Thaumathurgy.
It casts a Soul Slay or Mind Burn (the better you've researched beetween those 2), and cast it remotely (those spells are combat spells) on an enemy commander in that province.
It checks on MR and if fails to pass the check the enemy die if you've Soul Slay.
I know this strikes too hiding unit and glamouring ones. (I had a Man Thuatha besieging one of my castles ... the map shows that Man was besieging me but no units were shown ... I went for Mind Hunt, the spell found the target but sadly failed to kill him).
But it has a very high double edge... if there's an astral mage in the target province this will feeblemind all your guys casting the spell in that province (it's not very realistic imo that a single guy 1S could feeblemind 6 S3 or S4 mages casting that spell in the same turn). In fact this spell is usually used by Arco, that has healing priestess and cheap astrologers.

[The_Tauren13]

Hmmm.. so ANY astral mage in the target province will ALWAYS feeblemind ALL casting mages??? That does make it sound somewhat useless...

[Soapyfrog]

Well perhaps not useless but it sure does require good scouting reports.

I have seen it have a tremendous imapct on the unprepared... the suden death of an army commander just before a battle can have rather severe consequences!

[Cohen]

If the enemy hasn't Astral Mages in the province this is the best spell to kill SCs without engaging them.
I killed Wraithlords and Air Queens too with that spell.

If you'ven't Astral as default and your random pick is capitol only probably you'll have problems in covering your troops.

[Alneyan]

If you are found by an Astral mage, can you still attempt to kill one of the commanders, or is the attempt aborted?

Even if you have to avoid Astral mages to ensure a kill, this spell should be useful if you have cheap Astral mages and/or ways of curing the likely feeblemindedness. Even an Astral mage 1 should be able to cast this spell with the Astral boosting equipment, although it would be fairly expensive to forge all of them. But since the mage isn't killed, even after a failure, I guess it may pay out after some successful castings.

[Cohen]

Usually are Pythium and Arco that use that spells.
Sometimes the nations that have 2S mages + a random pick, like Abysyan warlocks.

Usually you need a +1 S item however.

If an Astral Mage is in the targetted provinces, you'll get all your mages feebleminded AND the spellcasting will be aborted, so you can't kill anyone.

Personally I believe it's pretty weak that 1 single 1 S mage could feeblemind mages far better than him and more numberous. (according to description 1 lvl in a path means normal user, 2 lvls mean good mage in that path, 3 or more a very powerful mage of that path).

[Boron]

You should post it e.g. in patch 2.14 .
Perhaps it is a "bug" like with magic duel the open ended D6 was .
I don't think too that 1 S mage always stops all mindhunters as you described was intended .

[atul]

Boron said:
I don't think too that 1 S mage always stops all mindhunters as you described was intended .


Well, according to the spell description, it's currently working as intended.

Mind Hunt is a very useful spell, the drawback with enemy astral mages just ensures it's not one-for-all solution. Handle with care, use with caution.

And as to who can use it, I've used it playing TC while been on the receiving end by mind hunting Jots and Marignon, so I'd hardly call it "Arco only". You can ensure you aren't getting feebleminded, it's just all about intel. Using it on an army that just attacked should be quite safe since you can check the battle replay for astral mages.

[Cohen]

Not Arco only, but they can do that massively with Astrologers, having access to both Spell Focus and Rune Smasher forging with national mages (and a +1 F ow W item)