Game balance issues, again...

[Arryn]

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:
I gave up on the game because it had become an indefinite stalemate. There's no way that he could make a force that could take out 100 mystics protected by all four domes and with the ability to make multiple juggernauts per turn and cast wish for gold to support the upkeep. My astral income from clams was considerably better than his.

Hardly a stalemate when he has twice the clams, an Arcane Nexus feeding him free income from *your* spells, and the ability to outproduce you in Tartarians and other units that can eat juggernauts for snacks. You might be safe, for a while, hiding in your capital, but even that wouldn't Last long after he'd conquered the rest of your realm. At which point you run the risk of losing via dominion ...

You have vastly underestimated what he had. I'm not trying to argue, just stating a fact, based upon what I've been shown of the score graphs and portions of his realm I don't think you were privy to.

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Arryn:
Hardly a stalemate when he has twice the clams, an Arcane Nexus feeding him free income from *your* spells, and the ability to outproduce you in Tartarians and other units that can eat juggernauts for snacks.

He gets absolutely no gems from any of my astral and blood spells, and there's no way he can outproduce wish produced blood slaves poured into the globals.

You might be safe, for a while, hiding in your capital, but even that wouldn't Last long after he'd conquered the rest of your realm. At which point you run the risk of losing via dominion ...

To do that he'd have to be able to produce juggernauts by the dozen.

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:
He gets absolutely no gems from any of my astral and blood spells, and there's no way he can outproduce wish produced blood slaves poured into the globals.

You have no idea. No idea at all. Wish-produced blood slaves? Not a problem. And SOMEBODY was feeding me 700 gems a turn....unless that was kickbacks from own spells. Either way, you seemed barely able to muster a paltry 3 angelic hosts a turn.

To do that he'd have to be able to produce juggernauts by the dozen.

I think that's doable.

[ March 20, 2004, 02:30: Message edited by: Norfleet ]

[Peter Ebbesen]

Originally posted by Norfleet:
You have no idea. No idea at all. Wish-produced blood slaves? Not a problem. And SOMEBODY was feeding me 700 gems a turn....unless that was kickbacks from own spells. Either way, you seemed barely able to muster a paltry 3 angelic hosts a turn.

Well, you get a 25% kickback on all non-blood, non-astral rituals and forging you or any other players do when Arcane Nexus is in effect.

In effect, if you forge 4 Clams of Pearl for 40 water gems, you receive 10 astral gems in kickback next turn - which can be turned into 5 water gems, if you so desire. In effect, the Arcane Nexus can be considered to cut 1/8th off the price of any of your monthly non-blood non-astral forging and rituals (well, actually better than that, but that is its least possible effect )

To receive 700 astral gems from the Arcane Nexus would require all the nations in the world to use 2800 non-astral non-blood gems per round, which is an awful lot, but certainly possible in the end-game on a large map, particularly if gem production has been significantly boosted with fire fetishes and clams of pearl (with astral gems alchemised to other types of gems for ritual/forging purposes)

[Norfleet]

Arcane Nexus also harvests an unknown amount of gems as "ambient energy", and I have no idea how much this is. All I know is that I was getting reports saying the arcane nexus was absorbing anything from 500 to 700+ worth of gems per turn.

I have no idea who was spending all that. I can only assume that the mystery extras come from this "ambient energy" amount. Although one time I got an 1800 gem kickback when I threw up a max GoH. I'm pretty sure that had to be the largest gem expenditure I made, and that caused the absorption to go from a normal 500-odd to 1800 odd, and it never went back to 500, and stayed at around 700, for the rest of the game.

Perhaps "ambient magic energy" is a kickback on global enchantments in the world as well? I was ramming up maxed out 999 point enchants, so that could be it. Ramming up a 1K-gem GoH certainly seemed to increase the output by about 200 gems....

[Peter Ebbesen]

Originally posted by Norfleet:
Arcane Nexus also harvests an unknown amount of gems as "ambient energy"

The baseline seems to be less than 10 astral power (approximately, probably an openended 2d6 really, or something like that)

I ran some controlled tests (I controlled all gem use in the game) putting up 200 gem globals and did not notice a significant increase in the baseline astral power I still saw the usual 2,3,5,8,4,13,3,5,4,5 kickbacks from the ambient energy the next ten rounds.

As such I doubt that there is any significant impact on the ambient energy from global enchantments, unless it is something that would only kick in at extremely high energy levels, which I have not tested. That would not make all that much sense from a game-balance perspective, but it would certainly be a neat synergy.

More likely, the players are just using gems like mad in your game - but you would know that better than I. If you make a copy of the savegame in the current situation, you can run controlled tests when the game is finished and tell us whether the extremely high gem cost globals increase the ambient energy.

Remember, when the monthly message text says "The Arcane Nexus has absorbed magic power equal to X astral gems.", that means that X non-astral non-blood gems generated the power for the nexus. It does not mean you get X astral gems. You only get x/4 astral gems in your lab, not X. (Sorry if I am belabouring the obvious here)

[ March 20, 2004, 09:21: Message edited by: Peter Ebbesen ]

[Norfleet]

Ah. So it was closer to +175 astrals/turn in income, which seems to be about right, then, and then there would be 700 gems expended in the world....that seems more like a reasonable figure.

Unfortunately, that would mean most of those expenditures are mine.