Countering Master Enslave...

[JimMorrison]

I would tend to have to disagree with this, on principle.

The art of warfare, is to work with known quantities - be they positive or negative for your cause - and engineer a situation that is likely to result in victory for your cause.

If 2 armies are unwilling to engage - a scenario that has historical precedence - then other tactics such as stealthy/flying raiding, and assassination, need to be implemented to either force an unfavorable maneuver by your enemy, or erode their position of strength so that your assault has the weight of success already in your favor.


Introducing any wholly random element takes this away, it says that no matter how well you plan and organize your decisive strike, you may be throwing everything away - not because you failed to accurately predict your opponent's behavior, but because you could not rely on a known quantity.

The great leaders of history, often were credited as achieving astounding victories through the taking of "great risks". I would argue wholeheartedly against this assertion. It is a simple fact that a mind that weighs everything in abstract possibilities will see a situation from that perspective, where the reality is that the highly ordered and focused mind of that great leader, took every possible factor into consideration, and as if the battle were a giant chessboard, predicted the reactions of his opponent to each of his moves, thereby engineering a dramatic victory over a numerically stronger opponent.


Thus, rather than requesting that your opponent be divested of a known quantity, it would better suit a commander to better plan for the implementation of that tactic. Know thine enemy. As many battles are lost because someone pursued a tactic that wasn't able to compete with their opponent's tactic, as were won because someone learnt what tactic their opponent was developing, and specifically arranged to render that tactic less effective, ineffective, or detrimental.

[DonCorazon]

Jim,
Have you been in the situation where you don’t want to attack the other guy because you know he can enslave you?
It sounds very strategic and Sun Tzu-like in theory to have to rely on other tactics like raiding, remote damage spells, or assassination but my experience is that, by the late game, a powerful nation has so much gem income and resources that resolution of the standoff will not be found easily with these types of maneuvers. Instead you get a boring cold war with neither nation willing to cede the huge tactical advantage of going first. (check out Twan’s thread a while back for an example of the magnitude of defeat simply from going 2nd – I saw the same thing happen in Alexandria). So you get increasingly long turns as the micromanagement of the endgame bogs down. My preference would be to fight and get the game over with and anything that helps encourage that would be welcome.

[MaxWilson]

JimMorrison said:
Introducing any wholly random element takes this away, it says that no matter how well you plan and organize your decisive strike, you may be throwing everything away - not because you failed to accurately predict your opponent's behavior, but because you could not rely on a known quantity.

That's kind of an odd attitude to hear coming from somebody who plays a probabilistic wargame, as opposed to (for example) Diplomacy or Go. There are many, many wholly random factors in the game, e.g. whether Ritual A will be cast before Ritual B, whether army X will attack province P before army Y (and thus which will be the defender if/when they do fight), which and how many nations you'll go up against in the Arena Death Match. By your own argument, these random factors are known quantities and the essence of strategy is to anticipate both your opponent and the unknowable random complications and devise a (probable) counter to each.

You can certainly make the case that the current initiative system is fine as is. I wouldn't dispute that. You could make the defender advantage even stronger than it is and it will still be a playable game, in the same sense that Diplomacy is a playable game (one which offers options to both sides, none of which options dominates all the others). I would like a more random initiative system because in the endgame the defender is so strong--in a way uncorrelated with reality--as to seem unthematic. I love the game as it is, but I happen to think thejeff's suggestion would be really awesome and thematic if it were implemented, and it would probably make the MP players happier in the endgame at the same time. It's not likely to happen unless JK also thinks it would be awesome, so I'll just hope he reads this thread and agrees.

-Max

[JimMorrison]

MaxWilson said:
...There are many, many wholly random factors in the game, e.g. whether Ritual A will be cast before Ritual B, whether army X will attack province P before army Y (and thus which will be the defender if/when they do fight), which and how many nations you'll go up against in the Arena Death Match...

1. How often do multiple rituals get cast in the same turn, that actually affect eachother?

2. You are introducing a third party into this equation, and also working from an inknowable quantity, "will my opponent move to that province this turn?".

3. No one cares about the Death Match.



In all seriousness though, if turn resolution could be worked out with ordinary movement taking place according to predetermined attacker/defender initiative as it is, but casters were interspersed, such that 1 defender casts a spell, 1 attacker casts a spell, 1 defender, and so on, then at least you could say that the change is being made in name of balance. Else, if it will be randomly decided which side gets the "defender" initiative advantage to casting, then at the very least this should have Luck scales used as a modifier.

And finally if a game actually ends up in a deadlock, I fail to see how you can blame that on game mechanics that ARE known throughout the play of the game, and will have obvious effects that you can expect. If you face a nuclear power and you continue to spend decades building nuclear weapons in the vain hope that you'll end up with enough that your opponent either capitulates, or you finally feel confident committing to deployment, then you will probably be waiting for a very long time. Does it take extra game time to broaden research, collect gems, and deploy other alternatives? Of course it does, but the argument that the income is so huge and the turns just take longer and longer only says to me that you need to adjust your map settings to compensate for playstyle - that's why they're there. If you play on too large a map with too fast research (even 200+ with normal research and people will simply hit "end game" fairly early), then you can complain that there is no way to get a clear advantage, but the reality is that if you had arranged the game so that it would take more time and effort for both sides to have equal access to all things, then you would have arrived at a situation where hard choices would have to be made in order to gain anything as powerful as Master Enslave.

I am becoming more and more convinced that MP games would remain more competitive with harder research, and threads such as this, with arguments such as these, only make me more sure that forcing hard choices on spell selection will lead to more complicated player interactions, and games that are less dependent on the Astral-Death-Blood paradigm of "what is powerful enough to win the game".

[MaxWilson]

Did I just happen to pick the only three random factors in the game? Surely you can think of some more--I can. Dominions is intentionally probabilistic. I just think it's odd to see a player of a probabilistic wargame arguing that there's a irreconciliable tension between random elements and strategy and that wholly random elements ruin the game. I can understand why people play e.g. Low-luck Axis and Allies, but I can't imagine such people playing a game which is INTENTIONALLY set up so that a lowly slinger can kill a Tartarian with the right DRN roll.

-Max

[Ironhawk]

While I'm not supporting any change to the combat system yet (I still need to get wrecked by these spells first) - I would favor randomly picking which side goes first rather than randomizing at the squad level. Doing at the squad level would just be too chaotic. You'd lose even the minor semblance of control over your formations that you currently have now.

[sector24]

I think if it was 50/50 whether the attacker or defender went first, that would just reduce the defender's advantage to blind luck. Either he enslaves me and then fog warriors and rain of stones and I lose, or I do it and he loses. That's kind of silly.

Do you guys play SRPGs? The Final Fantasy Tactics series in particular allows your units to move based on a speed/initiative score. This would be possible using existing dominions stats (AP).

Basically at the beginning of each combat round, each commander and formation rolls 1d6oe + AP to determine the order in which everyone acts. So there it's random, but it's also predictable.

The unit with the lowest AP in a formation sets the formation's speed. Commanders have their own AP value. Unit composition would also become important. High morale infantry mixed with elephant would take their turn based on the infantry unit's AP value, etc.

Obviously this would completely unbalance the current game, but it sounds like that's what some of you are looking for.

[JimMorrison]

Hah Max, I wasn't intending to claim that there are no random factors in the game (Luck scale, anyone? Would you like barbarians with that?), but simply that these random factors become inherently inconsequential in the face of a "final cataclysmic battle". Yes, obviously DRN is capable of doing anything it wants to, I still remember one of the first threads I read on this forum (long before I registered) about someone losing their Cyclops or other SC pretender, to a single flagellant scoring two critical hits. But that is a REMOTE possibility, nowhere near the order of a 50% chance of things happening one way or another. Even taking into account all of the many DRN rolls in an enormous battle, statistical probabilities will bring them closer to a predetermined outcome the larger the battle becomes - the difference being the spin that the players place on the factors that CAN be directly controlled. All other meaningful random factors in the game are, through recruitment, equipment, or scripting choices, mutable by the player. Adding in a straight 50% variable that can in no way be influenced, only serves to break stalemates that I have already postulated to be caused by human error in game setup - at the expense of reducing the level of strategy demanded in the other 99% of confrontations that will happen during the game.


And Iron, as I said, I think the mundane troops (all non-casting movement) should be done with defender first as it is now, and alternating as a whole, as is currently done. I was just suggesting that rather than randomizing the entire initiative (and crippling strategic choice, as well as removing defender advantage), that perhaps the spellcasting could be interleaved, which would serve to actually add a strategic element based on what is known about caster ID and such, where the player who is relying on the larger communion will take longer to get the spell off, etc.

But at the same time, to make that work the best, you would need to be able to set your casting order, so you don't get some fruitcake popping up with an Air Shield or a Flying Shards, costing you the loss of the game-deciding battle.

[MaxWilson]

Okay, Jim. I agree with your and Sector 24's point that 50/50 attacker/defender goes first would not be satisfactory. (I guess you were concentrating on the 50/50 scenario and not on the broader picture.) I still like the idea of squad-level initiative for thematic reasons, but Ironhawk dislikes that for valid reasons and some other people might too. Since I haven't ever actually been bitten by this problem in my SP games, I won't be worrying too much about this in the near future.

I hate the idea of alternating, though. It's neither thematic nor a solution to the current problem--you'll simply scramble to find low-numbered casters and lots of high-numbered chaff casters to pad them with. Look to BattleTech for an example of how those kinds of systems play out; I think it's artificial.

-Max