High Bless rush strategy :(

[Boron]

Gandalf Parker said:
This might be my fault. I pushed for big maps and large games. Balancing for that might have knocked the blitzes out

No need to apology Gandalf .
I myself e.g. love both, large maps in SP and occasional longterm MPs and small maps in blitzes.

Gandalf Parker said:
Someone will always be too good for blitzes. But others are "too good" for large maps, or many player games with alliances. Im not sure if it could be fixed for one game type without messing up the others. Maybe if a version of DOm was created just for small blitz maps.

Only time will tell, but at least some bless rush nations might do as well in longterm games too.

And if a blitz strat can kill another player immediately, unless the longterm mp map is very huge it can happen there too. And the advantage of getting a 2nd castle, extra gems, maybe some searched provinces etc. can be a nice boost. If you were lucky to have an ultrabless strat and neighbor someone who cannot counter it adequatly such a rush might boost your longterm potential a lot too in that game.

So maybe longterm games might not be that different .

There is more diplomacy of course, but at least those ppl who also play blitzes know then too well how scary an uberbless strat is in earlygame and thus are hesitant to gangbang the player who uses a blessrush in earlygame.

We have exactly this situation in the DDD-Pbem currently. Jurri took an uberbless, but all of his neighbors are scared and dare not to attack him. Will be definately interesting, i think Jurri has a very good chance of winning this game, especially because it is a VP game, so he doesn't have to continue till lategame where he might be more vulnerable.

[Foodstamp]

Wow, you guys are making multiplayer sound depressing at any level. I didn't know the blesses were so devistating on larger FFA maps as well.

I guess I can hope that the players in my current MP games chose to have fun and be original over using someone else's strategy to try to secure easy victories.

[DominionsFan]

Foodstamp said:
I didn't know the blesses were so devistating on larger FFA maps as well.

They are not. It helps a lot however.

[WraithLord]

I find this thread's discussion disturbing.
Bless strat. was already very powerful in dom-II and I would have hoped that in dom-III it would be toned down, not up.

Having ubber bless become a no-brainer is not fun.
But, I'm still not convinced it is indeed so.
For starters, its a good thing that few nations have a lot to gain from bless strat. Secondly, there are counters to ubber bless, though I digress that most are available through research which is now harder.

I think that adding some obvious counters and limitations to bless might bring more diversity to the game. I like the idea of "dispel" bless by priests and/or mages. Also it would be nice to have a single target spell that causes damage or fatigue or something negative to a blessed unit, and also larger scale versions of this spell.

EDIT,

I also like the idea of having the bless effect tied to Pretenders arrival, so each season closer to its coming will add this much to the bless effect, gaining full effect when the god arrives.

[okiN]

One simple way of severely limiting the feasibility of strategies relying solely on bless would be to make Divine Blessing a H4 spell.

That might be a bit too extreme, though...

[DominionsFan]

WraithLord said:
I like the idea of "dispel" bless by priests and/or mages.

Well than what would be the point to take a bless strategy at all? Everyone would script their priests and/or mages to dispell it anyways. That would just make the blessings almost useless. Or..yet another example: Player A is scripting his priest to dispell the blessing in all turns, Player B is scripting his priest to cast blessing in all turns.
Which player would win the bless/dispell battle? You would be forced to cast these things only with those priests. Definitely not good.


I don't see any problem with the blessings. On small map they are indeed very useful, however just blessings won't decide the game, only if an "uber bless nation" like helheim or vanheim is rushing the enemy early in the game. If the game is on 'till turn 20-25, the blessings won't be that important. They are very useful of course.
Anyways blessing is what making the sacred troops better than the normal troops, and it is totally ok. Don't forget that you use up lot of design points to take dual+ blessing. Often you have to use an imprisoned pretender and/or misfortune/drain etc.

[WraithLord]

Your point makes sense. So long is blessing don't become a no brainner for large maps as well.

[dirtywick]

If they decided to have dispelling of blesses, MR would even it out so the dispel doesn't work every time.

[Boron]

WraithLord said:
Your point makes sense. So long is blessing don't become a no brainner for large maps as well.

Only time will tell.

Drain 2 gives you only -1 rp.
Misfortune 3 is rather harmless too, usually it doesn't hurt you enough to make you lose the game. 1 out of 10-20 of your games you might die because of the misfortune 3 events.

Most sacreds are only useful for the earlygame, but there are clear exeptions, those nations with very useful sacreds, preferably not capitol only.

Mictlan, Vanheim and Helheim fall in this category. To a lesser extent Tien Chi S&A and some of the Ape Nations too.

If they manage to kill 1-2 players in the first 25 turns of a game their additional castles and extra terrain let them recruit enough mages to overcome their research disadvantage from drain 2. Some bless nations can also take magic 1.

And Mictlan blesshordes can get out of control, because they can spend their blood on jaguar fiends which are excellent if you have a high micromanagement pain tolerance (which i obviously lack though ).

Mictlan might very well manage to use their bless troops well till the lategame, Vanheim and Helheim too because they are sacred and thus still perfect raiders.

And finally there is Niefelheim. In earlygame the niefel giants are very useful, in midgame you can then also use niefel Jarls with equipment.

In earlygame good blesstroops dominate, but in midgame they can still dominate if you support them with battlemagic or other tricks and in lategame they can still be useful if you buff them with battlefield wide enchantments or for raiding.

[B0rsuk]

WraithLord said:
I think that adding some obvious counters and limitations to bless might bring more diversity to the game. I like the idea of "dispel" bless by priests and/or mages. Also it would be nice to have a single target spell that causes damage or fatigue or something negative to a blessed unit, and also larger scale versions of this spell.

I don't like the idea of explicit counters. Remember what happened to Celestial Masters ? It's not like their astral magic cripples the game balance, but they suffer a lot from magic duel.
If you add explicit counters/spells against blessed/holy units, you'll see a disturbing trend: people will either use bless9, or no bless at all. Because mildly strong bless will just invite hard counters.
You could refine these explicit counters by making them proportionally strong depending on bless effect strenght, but I still don't like the idea. I'd prefer counters come naturally, or prerably - bless is switched on when pretender arrives, but I already said I like it.

About bless dispel: it would be a 'who-has-more-priests' fight. It would look very silly.