Will Vanheim Ever Become Spayed?

[Hullu]

However you want to twist it the reality is that humans are good at adapting. But an average human is pretty weak. It's hard to compare a TRAINED human and an animal, since animals hardly practice anything but their natural talents at all.

Like it's very hard to measure the strength of apes. Since it's next to impossible to get them interested in it. How are you going to tell a gorilla 'now lift that car please' - they don't care enough.

Wonder why humans trained dogs to pull sleds. If people are more durable?

[PDF]

Yes but noone outruns a W9 blessed Van

Back to topic !!

[Corwin]

PDF said:
Yes but noone outruns a W9 blessed Van

Back to topic !!

That was subtle.

[mivayan]

Hullu said:
However you want to twist it the reality is that humans are good at adapting. But an average human is pretty weak. It's hard to compare a TRAINED human and an animal, since animals hardly practice anything but their natural talents at all.

On the other hand you cant compare an untrained human since he/she would be dead quickly in the wild.

Wonder why humans trained dogs to pull sleds. If people are more durable?

A pack of dogs need less tents/booze/money to pull a sled than a group of humans would.

[Saxon]

Why do humans train dogs to pull a sled? Why did some humans make other humans slaves? Why do some humans hire other humans to clean their toilets? Is it about durability or is it about avoiding hard/disagreable work? I do not think you can use this argument to say humans are less durable, just that we tend to be lazy.

As for the issue of training, put aside ideas of modern humanity and go back 4000 years. Humans then tended to use their bodies a lot more than we do today. The average human then could be more fairly compared to an average wild animal. We did not die in the wild and our durability had something to do with it. Our brains are great, but they need the body to execute their plans. In Dominions terms (vain effort to stay on topic) a nation with 100 Sages and no infantry will be quickly over run by 100 slingers... You need both body and brains. If we are as weak as some suggest, how did we ever survive this long?

[HoneyBadger]

My point-which got out of hand and went badly (but I don't think boringly) off-topic-is that Van and Hel have weaknesses which can be exploited by an experienced player. And so I suggest: 1-if you want to beat Van, learn how to beat Van, and 2-if you don't think there's a good way to beat Van, petition for more lines of strategy, quite a few of which I suggested up there in the thread not too far back. This is after all a game of strategy, and in war all is fair. If you think this or any other computer or board game is a comprehensive strategy simulation, I direct you to Sun Tzu's the Art of War and Caesar's campain in Gaul, for starters.

[curtadams]

It makes no sense to try to fix a few overpowered units which are obviously out of whack with everything else available by designing new strategies for 10-15 other nations. Effectively, that's a game redesign. You don't redesign a whole game to fix a minor design error, regardless of how serious that error's effects are. First, it'll take ages - it's equivalent to designing 4 or so nations from scratch, which means it will take a year or so at the rate Illwinter can work. Second, with that much major redesign, it's a guarrantee that there will be something overpowered in those dozen major strategy alterations, so *that* needs to be fixed, presumably by another round of major strategy alterations by half the nations...

[krpeters]

Corwin said:The reason we got to the top of the food chain and become dominant lifeform on this palnet, despite being rather weak race, is our brain, which helped us to overcome all these weaknesses. One might argue that humans developed intelligence exactly because they were so weak, and they needed it to survive competing against better prepared species and hostile enviroment.

Wow, we're way off topic.

Anyway, you have it backwards. We became so physically weak because, thanks to a larger brain, we discovered we no longer needed claws, fur, etc. "Devolution" in action, a trait which is not needed atrophies. In 1000 years I predict most people will be nearly blind.

But there are a few human physical traits which still exceed those of most animals... vision is an obvious one, and endurance is a big one too. (What use is having a disciplined brain capable of focusing on tracking the same animal for several days if your body can't keep up?)

In the tortise vs. hare race, humans are the tortise, and we win every time.

[solops]

This stuff is interesting on Van, but I think I'm playing a different game. The biggest difference is that I play against the AI, but I also ratchet down the money, etc and I make R&D as expensive as possible. Vanheim does not seem to be the problem described here.

[UninspiredName]

Again, the AI doesn't really have the necessary coding to pull off a Bless strategy.