Will Vanheim Ever Become Spayed?

[Gandalf Parker]

Its definetly a workable strategy. What I see is that Vanheim/Helheim are not imbalanced. They ARE the balance. Against certain nations and certain strategies. This is a variation on other threads Ive seen about Ermor, or Ulm, or Jotunheim, etc etc.

Dominions does not balance nation to nation. It balances by rock-paper-scissors. So a nation is not imbalanced if its extremely difficult to beat on a certain map size with certain game settings when facing certain nations who are playing a certain way. (altho, the devs will certainly examine that and see if a tweak might improve one type of gameplay without affecting others)

[Aseth]

Gandalf Parker said:
Its definetly a workable strategy. What I see is that Vanheim/Helheim are not imbalanced. They ARE the balance. Against certain nations and certain strategies. This is a variation on other threads Ive seen about Ermor, or Ulm, or Jotunheim, etc etc.

Dominions does not balance nation to nation. It balances by rock-paper-scissors. So a nation is not imbalanced if its extremely difficult to beat on a certain map size with certain game settings when facing certain nations who are playing a certain way. (altho, the devs will certainly examine that and see if a tweak might improve one type of gameplay without affecting others)

yep, that`s exactly what I mean, but can`t tell because of lack skills in English

[NickW]

Gandalf Parker said:
Its definetly a workable strategy. What I see is that Vanheim/Helheim are not imbalanced. They ARE the balance. Against certain nations and certain strategies. This is a variation on other threads Ive seen about Ermor, or Ulm, or Jotunheim, etc etc.

I'm sorry, but are you doing any MP play at all? That statement seems to be completely unsupportable. Dual Blessed Van/Hel against anyone else in an MP game is going to go in favor of the Van/Hel sacreds assuming all else equal. Unless there is vastly unequal skill involved, or third party interference from another nation, the Vans/Hels are almost a lock to win.

Obviously there are a few counter strategies that work but they all revolve around being very specific nations and playing with very specific anti-Van strategies.

If the choice is between playing only a limited list of nations/strategies or losing, then the game is sadly broken.

I'd like to think I'm overlooking some obvious F9/W9 Van counter but I don't I am. Most nations simply can't beat the F9/W9 Vans without having a lot of research and being able to spend more significantly more resources defeating the Vans than the Vans themselves cost.

Gandalf Parker said:
Dominions does not balance nation to nation. It balances by rock-paper-scissors. So a nation is not imbalanced if its extremely difficult to beat on a certain map size with certain game settings when facing certain nations who are playing a certain way. (altho, the devs will certainly examine that and see if a tweak might improve one type of gameplay without affecting others)

I'd generally agree with that statement, but the imbalances that do exist and have long existed are not severe ones. Some nations didn't match up well with others but that just meant having to use clever tactics or get allies or simply be bigger/richer before engaging X with Y.

The Van/Hel dual bless thing is a bit different. If you want to start charting out all the possible scenarios and all the possible situations Van/Hel can face the sad fact is they should win almost all of them, all else being equal in terms of player skill.

[Graeme Dice]

NickW said:
I'm sorry, but are you doing any MP play at all? That statement seems to be completely unsupportable.

He doesn't and it is. Gandalf approaches every single post in this forum from the fanboy position that the game is perfect in whatever form the devs have currently built it and that any problems people have are problems with the people, not the game.

[Epaminondas]

Graeme Dice said:

He doesn't and it is. Gandalf approaches every single post in this forum from the fanboy position that the game is perfect in whatever form the devs have currently built it and that any problems people have are problems with the people, not the game.

I have to agree with you on Gandalf as a long-time lurker, even before I started posting. According to him, there are no units that are more powerful/useful than others, nor units weaker/less usesful than others (see the thread on redundant/useless units I put up).

It's really an intellectual malady. Some people just have an intellectual framework where every position or argument or thing is valid or just as good as one another, and Gandalf seems to be the representative of them.

On the topic at hand, I agree that Vanheim/Hellheim are noticeably stronger than their competitors. And while I do agree that it's impossible to perfectly balance everything in a game of this nature--and one nation has to be top and one has to be the worst--Vanheim/Hellheim may be too far above other nations to have a fair, workable MP game within them if the map is small.

[DrPraetorious]

Nerfing pisses me off.

Let's compare two sorts of cardboard crack^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcollectible trading car d games: Magic the Gathering and Shadowfist.

MtG tried to rebalance the cards by nerfing everything. The result is a very flat game with no cool and powerful stuff in it, because if anything was any good it might be unbalancing.

Shadowfist, on the other hand, starts with more robust underlying mechanics, and then rebalances cards by making them *better*, not worse. As a result, shadowfist is a very well balanced game with lots of cards that do awesomely powerful stuff.

It is absolutely untrue, and I think demonstrated by various posts, that it is impossible to beat *heim. It may be true - and I admit that I haven't played every nation - that *some* nations have no viable strategy to oppose vanheim, particularly in the early game.

If that is the case - the question becomes, what can we add to those nations that would enable them to oppose vanheim more effectively, without changing them beyond recognition? Note that if you have a 33% chance of repulsing the rush, you are mounting effective opposition, especially if you can cause significant losses even in defeat.

So, in the *modders* forum, I have included a "which nations need bennies" thread, where I discuss this in some detail.

http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...b=5&o=&fpart=1

[Cerlin]

While I did start another post about Helheim, I thought I might post here as well after reading all 8 pages :O

First I agree that van/hel are STRONG but I never yelled Nerf I just asked for a tactic to beat them, if these are hard to find they should still exist. Dont wave the nerf bat too widely please, just give us a new spell or something.

On tactics that can hold off or beat hel/van I think I may have found a passable one. Im playing a Single player/hotseat game with a friend and I am Agartha. Our world has both Van and Hel and the only thing that really works is in fact blade storm (It does hit more often than not but takes a lot of tries) and turtling in forts. I am able to repair the walls faster than they can take them and this has enabled me to stall them on a few forts and expand away from them and into the oceans, which allow me to raid without losing many guys or being chased down. It is tough but works somewhat. My friend is Bandar Log and was able after some initial losses to use the magical and horde troops they get to beat Van, which shocked me as I suffed under Hel.

Lets do less bashing and more what we can do to fix or deal with this, please?

[Twan]

I think it's illogical to have to make mods for so obvious balance fixes.

Most MP games don't use the mods with the new nations players have created because they may be unbalanced, and many even don't use worthy heroes. Cbmod won't be as popular as in Dom2 as it would make the very well done dom3 manual obsolete.

The vanilla game *is* and should be the default MP setting when mods of all kinds are mostly a thing for SP.

So I vote adjust glamour / **heim nations in the official vanilla game, then allow to unnerf them (or not) via a mod for the minority of SP players that would do so (personnally even in SP I can't find the interest of overpowered nations, they force me to chose all my opponents instead of letting them be random if I play at high difficulty levels -try playing against an impossible AI with glamour units and compare with any other nation-).

[DrPraetorious]

The problem is that we are not in agreement that glamour nations are overpowered. You have asserted that they are, and I have disagreed, I will summarize:

a) It is fair for some nations to be stronger early on, and some nations stronger later.

b) It is fair for some tactics to be easier to use. This, I think, is where the "newbies play vanheim" argument has merit. I don't think glamour rushers are actually more likely to win, even in highly experienced hands, but the double bless strategy is accessible, so it allows new players to at least participate in big MP games, and have some measure of success. You may not like being axed by my little sister on turn 9 with her pretty magic horsies - but somebody is going to get eliminated early and you can at least take it like a man.

c) It is fair for people to be eliminated on turn 8, especially if they adopt a long term strategy. Taking a dormant pretender with good scales and strong diversifying magic should be a calculated risk, with significant risk of death before your god even reappears - vs. for example taking a great sage with a lot of early research or a supercombatant, either of which goes a long way towards repulsing a rusher.

d) It is fair to expect the other players to devote 100% of their effort to repulsing an attack from you, provided you devote 100% of your effort to attacking them. It is fair if strategies exist that will successfully kill your first neighbor 75% of the time, even under such a state of total war, provided that the rusher expects to suffer sufficient losses to allow other players to take advantage of their weakness, most of the time.

e) The game is meant to be balanced on medium sized maps. On postage stamp maps rushers have to be better, because otherwise they'd be weaker on larger maps.

f) It is fair that the game has a significant element of chance. Being next to a rusher position stinks - the only way to make it not-stink is to make all rush strategies worthless, because even when you repulse a rush, you probably suffer losses such that winning is a lot less likely.

There is a problem that I am willing to admit may exist: some nations may be unable to resist the glamour rush at all. It's all well and good to say "rock, paper, scissors" but no pairing of nations should be so unbalanced that you might as well give up - unless you pursued a long term strategy in which case you took your chances and it didn't work, sucks to be you.

If that is the case, those specific nations should be given new tools so that they have means of repulsing glamour rush - NOT a majority of the time (since then glamour rushing would become an unviable strategy) but a significant fraction of the time.

I think that the main game should be altered, if it is altered at all, with the same philosophy. Since it is possible for you to make a mod that nerfs glamour rushers - if this is what you want to do, do it. You can make a much more convincing argument for incorporating such a nerf into the main game if you're willing to take the ten minutes to script it yourself, and then post what you consider to be more balanced results, than if you just, to be blunt, whine about what vague changes someone else should be making. If you can make a "nerf" that leaves glamour rushing as a viable but not, to your mind, overwhelming strategy, great. If I agree with you that it doesn't unacceptably weaken glamour rushes in my games, I'll support including it in the main fork. If it doesn't get it, you'll have your mod and you can try and find opponents who agree with you and play against them.

[BigJMoney]

Guys, can I please weigh back in for a moment? I left this post behind me and it exploded, leaving shrapnel (no pun intended) all over my back.

Okay, I have to agree with all of Graeme's points for once, even if I don't agree with him breaking forum protocol so regularly. (Grame, trust me, I have a feeling you are going to get into some trouble if you can't be more polite). I agree that Vanheim and Ermor's overall power are completely overlooked by the developers, even though Doms 3 is a great game. NT Jedi, I'm sorry but you've had each one of your points about strategy game balance shredded to pieces, yet you still maintain your position. I don't know why it's so hard for you to admit that balance is a positive thing. Balance does not have to mean a lack of diversity, options or strategy.

Which brings me to my response to all this. DrPraetorious, I don't know which version of Magic: The Gathering you are talkng about, but I have played many, many, many tabletop and card strategy game and I always come back to Magic because it is one of the most robust and well crafted complex strategy games in the world. There are plenty of cool and powerful cards (ridiculously powerful) in MtG, but each of them requires some kind of sacrifice in order to field that kind of power. There are cards that can make you win the game instantly, but even the most powerul ones all have their requirements.

DrPraetorious, you seem to have the strongest defense in favor of leaving Vanheim alone, so let me challenge you. You made a lot of very valuable points in your last post, but the problem is that they don't apply to this situation. Let me exlain what I'm thinking.

a) It is fair for some nations to be stronger early on, and some nations stronger later.

Yes, this creates a diversity of strategy in the game.

b) It is fair for some tactics to be easier to use. ... I don't think glamour rushers are actually more likely to win [over all], even in highly experienced hands, but the double bless strategy is accessible, so it allows new players to at least participate in big MP games, and have some measure of success.

I'll remark on this potentially being a good point, except that for Vanheim it doesn't work the way you seem to imagine it. Let us do something here, Doctor. Let us pretend that every nation has something called a "Power Strategy" (PStrat). Some nations' PStrats are easier to field, while others require the experience and skill of the veteran to make work. Assuming that all PStrats are at least somewhat balanced, this would be quite a yummy aspect of the game. Many games are balanced in this way -- PC and live games. As you say, it gives new players the ability to at least be competitive, yet not necessarily guaranteeing them the win. For this to work, however, you have to be careful to make sure that the easy to use PStrats can not be further empowered by the more skilled players, turning them into something we shall call (for the sake of discussion) an "OverPowered Strategy" (OStrat). PStrats are good; OStrats are bad. The point people seem to be making in this thread, and I tend to agree, is that Vanheim (and in other news, Ermor...) utilize OStrats, not merely easy to discover PStrats.

c) It is fair for people to be eliminated on turn 8, especially if they adopt a long term strategy.

d) [...]

e) [...]

f) [...]

Yes, rushing is quite legitimate, even if newbies can do it. I hope nobody argues with you here, because the topic of this thead is not called "Should Rushing Be Allowed?". It's about whether Vanheim should nerfed. If Vanheim's rush happens to be an OStrat, then Vanheim should be nerfed, but it doesn't mean they shouldn't be able to field a PStrat rush strategy.

There is a problem that I am willing to admit may exist: some nations may be unable to resist the glamour rush at all. It's all well and good to say "rock, paper, scissors" but no pairing of nations should be so unbalanced that you might as well give up[...]

Precise and congent.

I think that the main game should be altered, if it is altered at all, with the same philosophy.

Exactly. I like NT Jedi just fine, and I have nothing but positive things to say about his forum contributions, but I do think it's counter-prodctive to reply to peoples' concerns with "If you don't like it, MOD it." Not only is that an ideal that ends opinions and discussion; not only is it an ideal that promotes the notion the game is perfect as it is; but it also goes without saying. Of course, if we, the community, think the game needs fixing, we will mod it. That's what the Conceptual Balance series is all about. But because of DrPraetorious' points above, we shouldn't have to do too much to allow ourselves a fun MP experience.

Finally, let me throw a bone of discussion back into the pit

I've seen blade wind and archers mentioned as a counter to Vanheim. When I originally asked the question that embodies this thread, it was if Vaheim needs nerfing, in general. You see, I don't pick F9W9; nor do I rush. I choose Air magic for Vanheim. Not only does an A10 bless give high air shield to my Vans, but it also gives me the spell that turns the entire world stormy for the mid/late game. This further reduces the effect of missiles against me. So, as you can see, my sacred troops are never afraid of missile counters. That is easily prevented by Vanheim.

=$=

Play nice, children!!