Overlords - Game Thread. (playing)

[LupusFatalis]

That makes three?

[rdonj]

Adding a 48 hour extension to the turn for you guys to discuss this amongst yourselves.

[LupusFatalis]

The main area in which I find the rules lacking is province control, but to some extent this can be rectified by different play style. I mean allowing overlords to retake their home provinces (where they could have had strong dominion) isn't necessary--it requires them to actively maintain their dominion. Whats more disturbing is that I don't feel threatened by any lone overlord--I can outpace a 1/turn province loss pretty readily. Sure, 1/turn can be castestrophic if they somehow choose all my best provinces, but that'd just be uncanny.

The main advantage with overlords is the early start, what I mean to say is any overlord not capitalizing on this advantage is probably going to flounder and die. As is, its a little difficult to capitalize on this. Your an overlord, you selected Dom10. But now all your provinces spend the first x turns filling with candles before you aggressively push them outward. Realizing this fatal flaw, you start sacrificing your military might to get some temples, that's ok though, you chose order right? So its a few turns later and your finally pushing dominion outward into all those indie provinces, time to leverage that 3:1 advantage! Oh wait, those normals are starting to butt up against you, carrying their dominion with them. Hmm. Not much left to that advantage of yours now is there?

I think simply allowing them to attack independent provinces regardless of dominion is a huge and necessary change in their favor, perhaps oppressively so depending on how much they can press that advantage. Regardless, I think that simple rule change would be a good start in what is likely to be a pendulum of rules changes until something resembling a balanced set of rules and victory criterion is reached.

I can't say much from the normal perspective, I mean I'd have to worry about people popping in to stop victory conditions. But that's pretty minor in comparison and quite possibly something that shouldn't be corrected.

[LumenPlacidum]

I think it would be a remiss change to suddenly alter the rules that people may have been using for defense without some warning period to allow them to alter their decisions. It's always valuable to include in one's strategies contingencies for possible eventualities that are not necessarily foreseen, but I don't think the eventuality of the rules changing is one that is necessarily fair as a quick change. At the minimum, I think there should be a grace period of some turns before the rule is changed. I'd actually prefer the new game option over changing the rules mid-game, though.

The overlords not being able to siege capitals seemed to have two purposes from the start of the game, only one of which was the protection offered to normals in the early game. The second important concept there was that the overlords needed to work WITH normal nations to fully remove threats. We already noticed a partial lack of friendly diplomacy between normals and overlords (what with normals ganging up on a couple of them) even with this possible incentive to work together. Won't the problem be worse without it?