Please don't take my toys away!

[Jasper]

Originally posted by johan osterman:
First of all I still think that the bad luck events are not that much of a problem, not compared with the income loss. The 66% income of turmoil 3 to order 3 dominates the effect of the badluck events themselves. So if order -3 luck +3 is less viable than order +3 luck -3 it is in my mind much more to the constant income loss rather than the effects of negative events. It is highly unlikely that bad events will come remotely close to having as much of a negative impact as the turmoil will.

Definitely the income lost is just too much, and way more of a factor than the bad events.

I hope this doesn't come out as sounding condescending, but I believe many dominions players tend to overestimate risk compared to predictable loss, many strategy players seem to be very averse to random factors and I think this is reflected in the negative press the badluck events get. The sense I get from much of the discussion is that players worry more about the hurricanes and floods than they do about the income loss from turmoil.

However, I partially disagree with this. The bad events really are worse than the good events on average in my experience, over and above players being risk adverse.

Bad events are always bad, suffer from increasing decrements, and are more likely to destroy something critical permanently than good events are to give a permanent increase.

Good events are often not usefull, sometimes even harmfull, have decreasing increments, and are likely to be minor things like gems or worthless troops. There are occasionally _very_ usefull things -- but these are rare.

Good events I usually see: Random worthless troops, small amounts of possibly usefull gems, usually unusefull items, laughable increases in province defense, etc. Hero, Gold and mine events also crop up, but are relatively rare. Very often "good" events don't actually improve my position.

Bad events I usually see: Gold lost through unrest, event, or province loss. Temple and lab destruction. Permanent income reduction. Theft of stuff I was planning on using. Bad events typically hurt my position.

I'm not really sure why, and perhaps my tests are just skewed, but the balance of possible good vs. bad events seems substantially different from Dom 1.

[ywl]

Originally posted by Jasper:

quote:

---

Originally posted by johan osterman:
First of all I still think that the bad luck events are not that much of a problem, not compared with the income loss. The 66% income of turmoil 3 to order 3 dominates the effect of the badluck events themselves. So if order -3 luck +3 is less viable than order +3 luck -3 it is in my mind much more to the constant income loss rather than the effects of negative events. It is highly unlikely that bad events will come remotely close to having as much of a negative impact as the turmoil will.

Definitely the income lost is just too much, and way more of a factor than the bad events.

I hope this doesn't come out as sounding condescending, but I believe many dominions players tend to overestimate risk compared to predictable loss, many strategy players seem to be very averse to random factors and I think this is reflected in the negative press the badluck events get. The sense I get from much of the discussion is that players worry more about the hurricanes and floods than they do about the income loss from turmoil.

However, I partially disagree with this. The bad events really are worse than the good events on average in my experience, over and above players being risk adverse.

Bad events are always bad, suffer from increasing decrements, and are more likely to destroy something critical permanently than good events are to give a permanent increase.

Good events are often not usefull, sometimes even harmfull, have decreasing increments, and are likely to be minor things like gems or worthless troops. There are occasionally _very_ usefull things -- but these are rare.

Good events I usually see: Random worthless troops, small amounts of possibly usefull gems, usually unusefull items, laughable increases in province defense, etc. Hero, Gold and mine events also crop up, but are relatively rare. Very often "good" events don't actually improve my position.

Bad events I usually see: Gold lost through unrest, event, or province loss. Temple and lab destruction. Permanent income reduction. Theft of stuff I was planning on using. Bad events typically hurt my position.

I'm not really sure why, and perhaps my tests are just skewed, but the balance of possible good vs. bad events seems substantially different from Dom 1.

---

I don't really see the good events that minor. I'm not sure you've never seen it or just unintentionally missed it while writing.

There are equivalents or even mirror images of the bad events: there are permanent increase of province income and resource, increase of population from migration, random temples and laboratories - though usually not in the right places - or even castles...

In Dom 2, you can also get some very good commanders from a few new events - wind master, lore master and the stalker (that ethereal assasain).

I don't know. As Gandalf Parker said, the gambler in me always like luck. I've not battle-tested Dom 2 enough to form a solid judgement but of course, the income decrease from Chao scale is significant.

[Kristoffer O]

Originally posted by Zen:
Well; the Devil's Advocate question is?

Johan you've had and played the game longer than any of us; you've played with the different situation.

If you wanted to win a MP game; and didn't have any "Fantasy" notions, or "Roleplaying" notions not using Ermor or any other Point Rich race/theme.

What % of the time do you choose Order and what % of the time do you choose Turmoil? Then the same for luck and misfortune.

I suspect it would be difficult to beat the roleplaying notions out of him. It is more fun to win a MP game with a "rolplaying god", and diplomacy accounts for more balance issues than god design anyway (but he doesn't like diplomacy too much).

He would probably create a god with too high death or blood magic and turmoil. Probably combined with luck and death scales. What he wouldn't do is have a value of 0 or 1 in any of the scales (perhaps except heat).

[johan osterman]

Originally posted by Kristoffer O:

quote:

---

Originally posted by Zen:
Well; the Devil's Advocate question is?

Johan you've had and played the game longer than any of us; you've played with the different situation.

If you wanted to win a MP game; and didn't have any "Fantasy" notions, or "Roleplaying" notions not using Ermor or any other Point Rich race/theme.

What % of the time do you choose Order and what % of the time do you choose Turmoil? Then the same for luck and misfortune.

I suspect it would be difficult to beat the roleplaying notions out of him. It is more fun to win a MP game with a "rolplaying god", and diplomacy accounts for more balance issues than god design anyway (but he doesn't like diplomacy too much).

He would probably create a god with too high death or blood magic and turmoil. Probably combined with luck and death scales. What he wouldn't do is have a value of 0 or 1 in any of the scales (perhaps except heat).

---

If I where to make a maximised design I would most likely go for order 3 luck 3. But as Kristoffer indicated I think other factors such as alliances, starting location, luck (not the scale variety)will dominate the outcome of MP to a much greater degree then the difference between designs of players playing with reasonably competent race designs.

When I first started playtesting dom 1 perhaps 5 years ago I was into maximising race design much more than I am at present. But I think I conduct myself reasonably sucessfully against players that are more heavily into optimising than me anyway these days. So I guess what I am saying is that in the end I do not think it is terribly important to squeeze out every Last drop of advantage from your design points, as long as you do not mess up to badly and is adaptable, you should be able to get by anyway.

[Keir Maxwell]

Originally posted by johan osterman:
So I guess what I am saying is that in the end I do not think it is terribly important to squeeze out every Last drop of advantage from your design points, as long as you do not mess up to badly and is adaptable, you should be able to get by anyway.

My experiance is that generally a strong player with a tight design will win playing MP unless they get beaten by similar or better. This was my experiance in Stars! as well even though we couldn't establish fair starting positions for players - which I do when hosting Dom games.

I have to admit that its along time since I played in full diplomacy games and this can change things but in my experiance the skilled diplomicists also were skilled players with tight designs. Part of the reason I play no alliances is to avoid the way in which the top players run away with the game.

I may well have been somewhat lucky in my years of PBEM but fortune has not seemed decisive while focused race designs have done me proud even when I'm using "weak" races - I never MP the traditional power races although I have come up with some new ones. I think alot of what wins and loses any game of skill is *pressure* and loose designs put those running them under pressure while tight ones hold your hand. Probably the biggest thing in favour of tight designs is reliability and ease of play - once you have got them down pat. I have generally found that a tight but not very strong race has the advantage over a loosly designed power race.

Perhaps my usage of the word tight is a part of the difference here? Tight does not mean powerful to me so much as that the different elements combine together to make each more powerful - syncronicity/synergy.

But hey each to their own and the particular nature of my experiance of PBEM may have mislead me.

Cheers

Keir

[johan osterman]

Originally posted by Keir Maxwell:
My experiance is that generally a strong player with a tight design will win playing MP unless they get beaten by similar or better. This was my experiance in Stars! as well even though we couldn't establish fair starting positions for players - which I do when hosting Dom games.

...

I have to admit that its along time since I played in full diplomacy games and this can change things but in my experiance the skilled diplomicists also were skilled players with tight designs. Part of the reason I play no alliances is to avoid the way in which the top players run away with the game.

...

No wonder our experience differs, we seldom if ever use fixed starting positions, the dynamics sprung from the starting positions tend dominate the game more than tight race designs. This is fine by me, I do not want dominion to be chess. Although I can certainly see why other people do want to play with balanced starting positions to me it might detract from gameplay.

We usually play with some form of informal diplomacy, mainly because we like to blabber away about dominions over a beer or a cup of coffe. This has some effects on our diplomatic interactions since it often does not seem worth the bother to conspire with or against people you meet on a more or less daily basis. So most often our diplomacy is limited to players joining the fray on one side or the other when there allready is a war in progress, or occasionally banding together if one player appears to be getting to far ahead of the rest.

[ November 26, 2003, 21:54: Message edited by: johan osterman ]