Will Vanheim Ever Become Spayed?

[Sombre]

I think the AI does quite a lot of research - it's just that it does research on seemingly random paths and never really uses battlemages as part of a true army.

[Sir_Dr_D]

So many things bug me about the heims. On the top of the list is their stealth. To me Pangaea should be the great stealth nation. Vanheim just steals their thunder.

Personally I think that the heims should have glamour only within their dominion. After all they are gods. Wander too far away, and you start to lose your power.

Other wise I would like to see weaknesses that could be exploited in the Heims, without taking away their strengths. One of these could be to increase their encumbrance (after all this glmaour could take a lot of mental effort to maintain.) That way, they would be strong at the beginning of the battle, but if they can't take out their opponant quickly, they start to lose their effectivness.

[HoneyBadger]

It's not that I'm dismissing it, MaxWilson. Not at all. It's the weight of the MP players that is the deciding factor. The nation is unbalanced in SP and carries through to MP. That's where their opinions become relevant, because you can analyze the nation in the laboratory of SP and then the imbalance plays itself out in the environment of MP.
It's definitely important. I'm just saying it's too great a variable in this kind of situation to be trusted by itself as to the degree the balance is off and should be corrected.

The game itself is so huge that it's hard to identify what's balanced and what isn't. Adding in the human factor makes it a degree more difficult. But if you can look at the SP game and say "yes, this nation is definitely, obviously better than every other one, whether I'm playing it or I'm playing against it" you're making things a lot easier on yourself.

You can come up with ways to fix the balance in SP, and test it, and then you can introduce it back into the environment of MP and see how it plays, but all the specifications should be decided in SP and then you can start talking ramifications in MP.

Do you see what I mean?

[Foodstamp]

When this thread originally started some time back, I was one of the first people to respond by saying yes the heims are overpowered.

I was told that if you were new to multiplayer, you just think the heims are overpowered because you are inexperienced.

Well its been several months, I have played in several larger MP games now and several blitzes. I am far from being a multiplayer expert, or even good for that matter, but in every game that has included a heim, I have watched them gobble up their neighbors, gobble up their neighbors neighbors and so on. The only counter I have seen against the heims is massed alliances made to wipe them out.

I may not be the best player out there, but I feel like I have been playing in games with some really great players. And I have watched those good players become eradicated by heims.

In one of my current games, I was placed next to a very experienced player that was behind the wheel of Marverni. I was pretty nervous being in such a position, then Helheim came along. Helheim utterly slaughtered Marverni and became my new neighbor.

Several months later, I still stand behind my original comments. The heims are overpowered to a point that in multiplayer games, the only solutions include hoping the player is brand new to the game and does not notice the powerful units in his recruit screen. The other alternative is to form dogpile alliances to knock out the heim player early.

That being said, I also hang on to my original proposal for a solution. Rather than nerf the heims, create a couple of new game mechanics that counter glamour, and give those new counters to nations that underperform.

[HoneyBadger]

I agree about counters to glamour, but I'd hate to see the "anti-Helheim" spell. I hope people will come up with enough partial solutions that they'll add up to one whole solution, rather than shoe-horning a deus ex machina.

[Edi]

HoneyBadger, your base assumptions about what makes for an objective laboratory environment for testing Dom3 balance seem very strange. Your assertion that single player games provide for an accurate lab environment is, to me, nothing but a baseless claim with no evidence to back it up other than your say-so.

It is my contention that the multiplayer games provide a far more accurate environment because in that environment ALL the strengths of a nation can be utilized to their full effect. It has been, since the beginning of the thread, pointed out by very experienced players that Vanheim and Helheim are not only powerful but that the power balance with them vs other nations is ridiculously lopsided. I have yet to see any evidence to the contrary.

It just so happens that in MP, without mass alliances, you need to do everyything exactly right AND the heim player must also go along and work to YOUR script if you are to defeat him, while he has much more options. All this talk about defeating AI vanheim/Helheim means precisely nothing due to handicaps of the AI. It's much like a highly trained athlete crowing about being able to beat a person bound to a wheelchair on the 100 meter dash.

[Foodstamp]

It just so happens that in MP, without mass alliances, you need to do everything exactly right AND the heim player must also go along and work to YOUR script if you are to defeat him, while he has much more options.

QFT

[vfb]

I think one solution might be to use the CB mod when playing MP. I'm not sure, because I haven't tried CB in MP yet, but this is why I think it should solve the heim problem:

Those who play MP based from the shrapnel forums can get help loading the CB mod (not that it's difficult). SP players (who might not even visit here) might need variety in the strengths of the AI nations, so that once you kill the 2 or 3 AIs on your doorstep, you aren't faced with either a wasteland or a bunch of 15-province fortified AI nations ready to be invaded by a now 45-province human. Considering the nationality of the developers, and the nature of IW as an independent studio, it is not surprising that they chose to make the heims powerful. Without hiems to fight in SP, at the end you would be faced with the drudgery of wading through 500 bare chested warriors etc.

And if the CB 1.00 mod doesn't work because EA Helheim still, in one turn, flies into each province of a nation with 6 or 8 W9F9s and rapes all your horses and rides off on your women, then all we need to do is make CB 1.01 where we adjust the costs so it takes 3 turns to build a Dis and 2 turns to build a single Valk. Resources and gold. And if Helheim still pwns the world, then mod the defense of heim units down too.

Of course, this does not mean anyone is forced to do this (use CB in MP). Do what's fun for you (I think that's why some experienced players still join MP games as heim, when it's an option). Next game I host will be CB, though.

[MaxWilson]

HoneyBadger said:
You can come up with ways to fix the balance in SP, and test it, and then you can introduce it back into the environment of MP and see how it plays, but all the specifications should be decided in SP and then you can start talking ramifications in MP.

I see that having to factor diplomacy into the game makes analysis harder. I see that test games and games played against yourself let you analyze tactics more easily, and if by SP you include these types of games I agree they're quite useful. And yes, if a nation is both easy to play and hard to play against in SP that's evidence of potential imbalance and I see your point. Still, a nation which is "clearly better" may simply have weaknesses that neither the AI nor the player know how to exploit. Increasing the number of players increases my confidence that no weakness exists, provided that the greater number of players don't find a weakness either.

It looks like you're pointing out that diplomacy in MP complicates analyses.

-Max

[Reverend Zombie]

Darrel said:
<snip>

Other wise I would like to see weaknesses that could be exploited in the Heims, without taking away their strengths. One of these could be to increase their encumbrance (after all this glmaour could take a lot of mental effort to maintain.) That way, they would be strong at the beginning of the battle, but if they can't take out their opponant quickly, they start to lose their effectivness.

How about making them magical beings? They seem quite "magical", after all.