Poll: morale and routing

[Cainehill]

Boron said:

no tauren is true .
and you don't get his point here i think .

tauren says just that almost no national troop is worth being produced .

if you are honest you will admit that with most nations you replace the national troops as quick as you can by better summoned troops .

Duh. You do ... research in order to get better weapons, troops, spells.

Once the semi-automatic rifle was ... researched the nations that didn't have them tended to get chewed up and spit out. No intelligent leader said, "Hey! We can't replace our breech loaders! It wouldn't be right!"

As better units, weapons, spells, are researched, the earlier, less effective ones tend not to be produced or used as much any more. If the newly researched ones _weren't_ significantly improved and better, there wouldn't be much point in doing research.

"Hmm - I think I'll research conjured units - they may suck compare to my regular troops, but they're _so_ neat!"

if leaders alone woudn't rout once the first 1 dies would you build troops at all anymore ?

*smile* Considering that in general, leaders alone get killed, yes, I think I'd tend to still build and use troops. This remains true at least into the mid-game, and even after that, some troops tend to be used. They may not be the recruitable national troops - but again, there's a reason people did research into conjuration, construction, and enchantment - to get better things to use.

marignon , ulm , pangenea , vanheim and perhaps jotunheim are somehow exeptions here since they have special national troops which are worth being built over a longer timespan with the right bless effect .
or with flaming arrows + wind guide for marignon x-bows .

Let's see - you leave out Man, R'lyeh, Caelum, Pythium, and I expect there are other nations that I'm not thinking of. All these nations have national troops that remain useful into the late game, at least as part of a mixed army that includes conjured and constructed troops as well.

but i think you will admit that in general you only use as many troops as you think you need to avoid routing. the rest of your gold goes in commanders instead .
you basically said that in your post . at least i understanded it this way .

No, I use as many troops as I think I need in order to _win_. Leaders by themselves can rarely do it on their own, although there are some exceptions (Vanheim, Man, Caelum, etc) and even those function better with some troops - some disposable, some not.

And you need to reread my previous post - Tauren used 20 militia vice battlemages as the example in his post. I made a rebuttal using that same example. _Militia_ are disposable - they're used to keep your mages from getting killed, and also to keep your more valuable national troops from getting killed. Good cavalry, archers, even heavy infantry are all valuable and useful, and the screen of militia is used to try and keep the casualties of good troops low.

Frankly, it seems that you and Tauren (and let's not forget Cohen) want a game that has more emphasis on troops, and less on powerful combatants, summonings, spells, and magic items.

I'd suggest you find another game, because Dominions is designed around those things. We're talking beings that are trying to become God here - not beings that are trying to become King or Pope. If the powerful SCs and magic were removed or nerfed, as y'all want, the majority of the players would be upset.

Now, I have posted before that it would be nice if Illwinter would include a command line or game creation switch that would allow some things like magic research to be limitted. After all - it's already limitted to research level 4 in the demo, it shouldn't be hard to implement that as an option in the full game.

That way, people like you could have a game that played more like the game you want to play, without screwing everyone else's game over. For that matter, even some of us who _like_ the powerful magics and SCs and such might enjoy the odd low-research game as a refreshing change of pace.

But again - if you don't want a game that's geared and designed around powerful magics, supremely powerful beings and combatants, I'd suggest finding another game. There are _plenty_ of games that don't put such emphasis on mages, SCs, etc. It's hard to think of any that put the emphasis on them the way Dominions2 does though - not HoMM (which is a game for simpletons who like rote solutions in comparison), not the original MoM, not Disciples, Age of Wizards.

[Boron]

caine i say this because i extremely enjoy the lategame when i have ultrascs , vampirehordes etc. en masse and 500+ gem income from sites + clams etc. etc. etc.

i just think that a few things are too overprized ( national troops ) and a few special units are severely underprized . so it needs only a bit finetuning i think .
basically like it was with the vq pre 2.12 .

tartarians were nerfed because of this too a bit .
they are still extremely useful .


but dominions is a game not real life . and dominions is extremely well balanced and there are uses for lots of units .

but as it is it is the following :
most national troops are only good until you get summons .

but since national troops and national mages both need gold and mages result in a much higher RoI as soon as you have your first summons like e.g. vine ogres you start replacing your troops with them .
later you chose stronger summons .

but even on turn 10 it is already a hard decision if 1 mage is already worth more than 10 troops which have the same cost / upkeep .
and after earlygame this decision is so clear as nothing else .

so as it is almost EVERY leader / summonable leader is really useful .
lots of summoned units are really useful too .

but from the national troops 9/10th are already almost useless and only needed to prevent routing after turn 20-40 .

this is what cohen and tauren dislike . i just replace most of my national troops by summons but i feel too that this is just not right that there are about 500 national units which all have flair but only about 50 have still some value midgame and about 0! have value lategame .


if upkeep/resourcecosts of national units would be 1/2 after turn 30 and 1/4 after turn 60 until end of the game then the choice recruit 1 battlemage / priest or 5-10 national units would not be the nobrainer as it is atm anymore while it would not make SCs etc. useless .

[Kristoffer O]

Boron said:

but dominions is a game not real life . and dominions is extremely well balanced and there are uses for lots of units .

Unfortunately real life is not as balanced as Dominions. I suspect I was a useless unit, at least early in life. Hopefully I will be a late life winner, spending my days on Bahamas or whatever.