refuting common wisdom on scales everybody knows

[Folket]

I have started to like Production. I used it in 10 player/very large and in Bartered souls. I did very well in both games but production did not save me money it allowed me to burn more money on troops to get a good start. Later it allowed me to produce units where I wanted them. There are other games I would have wanted to have production instead of sloth as well. Not all but production is not a weak scale in my world.

Order is a terrible strong scale. People seem to think that you can't take luck if you take order but as far as I have seen luck works better if you have order as well. you could argue that order is less important then something else at times but in general if you have to sack order either it is a very small game or your strategy is flawed.

[Twan]

I think you may always try to refute common wisdom with theory, but as long it isn't refuted by results of dozen of MP games it just isn't refuted.

I think the base of said common wisdom is games don't finish in turn 20. And if they take good scales people want something still usefull by turn 50 or 80.

Order is good in early and late game, production is not. Growth is as good for income as production in early game, 10 times better in late.

There may be an exception for the few nations having recruitables using magical weapons and with sufficient hp and mr to survive against late game magic (I don't see a lot... LE Atlantis perhaps ?) so heavy national troops can remain usefull, but it's extremely niche.

Drain is bad from early to late game for the 90% not drain immune nations, sloth is only really bad for early expansion with a limited number of ressource intensive nations and if they don't take an awake god. Magic lose power in endgame once research is maxed, but maxing interesting schools / reaching uniques first is such a big advantage a nation who used drain will probably be still weaker than a magic nation 20 or 30 turns after all finished researchs.

But magic has some side effects that may make it more or less interesting, and may even justify in rare cases to take drain (out of researchers quality, some other things may be considered : do your nation usually use many mages and fight long battles (= profits a lot from fatigue reduction) or has the kind of troops making battles short / has better ways to destroy ennemies than mages spaming spells ? do your mages use MR spells ? do your nation use thugs or undeads whose main weakness is against MR spell ?).

Luck is not as good as order in early game (when your empire is small) and not as good as order in late game on big maps (if your empire is big and expanding, you run into the artificial limit on number of events, and the bad ones in recently conquered provinces often replace the good from your luck 3 lands). Luck is anyway better than order for some situations in midgame (if you have about 20 provinces, *all in your dominion and maxed in scales*, so you reliably get 2-3 good events a turn, luck clearly beats order) and is never a bad choice as it's the only gems scale.

[Baalz]

Whew, sorry if this post is all over the place, but I wanted to responnd to points made by several different people.

@Saxon: Assuming for a second that order and production are mutually exclusive, production gives you more flexibility than order. Take my C'tis example, the high production guy not only has more gold but can easily switch to recruiting slave warriors if the situation merits it- or elite warriors more likely (yeah production!). True, he'll burn a larger percentage of available gold in that situation, but this is a flexibility that the order player doesn't have, the option to field heavy infantry even when his opponent starts massing longbows.

@QM & Micah: Yes, a good part of my argument is that order & production are usually mutually exclusive because of the way stuff works out. Certainly there are exceptions, but often you're choosing an awake pretender, strong bless or rainbow, which leaves you fairly limited design points. Magic, growth and temperature scales are largely dictated by your nation. This leaves a tug of war between order, production & luck. It's all fine and well to get order and production, but in practice this usually means you won't have an awake pretender or some other significant consideration. Sometimes production is better than order. Sometimes an awake pretender is better than order. Sometimes a high magic scale is better than order. My point is that though order is often the most efficient use of design points, there are also often other competitive choices to make.

Twan: The fact most everyone does it is a specious argument. I personally have won a couple games and done quite well in several more using "non-standard" scales. Several people in this thread have said similar things.

Drain is a bit more difficult to play, but I think it's viable in more situations than most people realize. You've got to look at the percentage hit to your research and how those design points otherwise effect you. If magic-1 to drain-2 only hits your research by 20% and it allows you to expand more than 20% faster, or perhaps get order-3 and production-3 thus boosting your income by more than 20% then it makes sense. Also, skull mentors & lightless lanterns can be reasonable ways to leverage a drain scale in some situations.

I disagree, I think luck is often much better than order in the early game. Obviously this is going to vary a bit, but between the extra gold, extra casltes, extra labs, etc. I often find luck will give you more gold value than order in the first year. Order pulls ahead in the long run, but it's hard to put a value on a big wad of extra gold in the first couple turns.

[Sombre]

Baalz said:
Twan: The fact most everyone does it is a specious argument. I personally have won a couple games and done quite well in several more using "non-standard" scales. Several people in this thread have said similar things.

Therefore 'I have done well with it and so have a few other people' is an equally specious argument, if not worse. After all for every player that has won or done well using nonstandard scales, there will be more who have won or done well using standard scales. You can't have it both ways.

[Xietor]

To see if anyone is really wants to try and make a rock hard argument, let me hear someone make a case for taking turmoil and misfortune!

[Sombre]

I did hear someone claiming turmoil was good because if you get invaded barbarians will attack the invader since he lacks luck scale, probably.

But the same is true of order misfortune - if you invade you lose the benefit of order and keep the nasty misfortune.

[Folket]

Turmoil/misfortune is the only scales I take. So superior to death/misfortune.

[llamabeast]

Sombre said:

Therefore 'I have done well with it and so have a few other people' is an equally specious argument, if not worse. After all for every player that has won or done well using nonstandard scales, there will be more who have won or done well using standard scales. You can't have it both ways.

I think there's a bit of logical fallacy or something going on there. Being as most people play with a certain set of scales, the observation that most victories occur with that set of scales is indeed uninformative/misleading. By contrast, the fact that Baalz has won games with unusual scales does show that it is possible to do well with such scales, which is the point he was making.

[Radio_Star]

This is speculative on my part, but I'd imagine that you could leverage strong 'undesirable' scales diplomatically, forestalling an invasion by convincing a potential opponent to choose a more profitable target.

[CUnknown]

Baalz, I agree with you on most points. However, production/sloth is pretty clearly the weakest scale and the best bet to sell off for points, imo. It's the only scale that is pretty much obsolete towards the mid-late game. I mean, I take prod-3 as Ulm, but for most other races I'd probably take somewhere slothy, if not all the way to sloth-3.

It's not that prod is never useful, or that sloth will never hurt you, but in general there are better ways to spend your points than prod and no better ways to get points than sloth.

Edit: Oh, I also wanted to say that I agree with you 100% about Drain, it's a great scale to take for points, imo. Not only does it help to protect against Mind Hunts, but it only subtracts 1 research (in base game) and gives you 80 points! 1 research is really not a big deal, although it may make some cheap sacred researchers no longer worth it.

In CB mod, it's not quite as worth it.