Re: Battle Afflictions: Gimp Gods
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Hear hear!

I think a lot of these suggestions go against the grain of some of the more fun parts of Dominions - that is to say being forced to deal with setbacks, learning how to use the various options available to do so or simply learning that some strategies are risky and learning how to minimise those risks, such as getting a God with a gammy leg, one arm and no eyes.

There are no unbeatable strategies, no Supercombatant without an effective counter. And this adds to the fun, even if you are the Pretender god whose supercombatant just got wasted/cursed/afflicted. One of my favourite parts of General Tacticus' AAR ?A Tale of Fire and Blood? is where his Pretender does get a nasty affliction and seeing how this dominated his game play for the next several turns - this was a lot more interesting to read, and hopefully to play, than just saying ?mute Pretender, bummer. Oh well, reload/restart/use instant-heal-for-Gods? as would happen in so many other games.

There are a plethora of options now for dealing with an affliction, from the Faerie Queen to the Gift of Health to the Chalice to kidnapping an Arcosephale Priestess with Enslave mind/Charm/whatever and Gift-of-reason-ing her back to full commander status. Or even retiring that God to researcher/Dominion space heater duties until he can be healed, or he is really needed despite his handicaps. I wouldn't want to see more.

PS: you'll never get rid of threads like this. People always want to strengthen X or nerf Y or add an option to Z, until they find the existing ways of dealing with the problem.

PPS: think how irritated you would be if they did weld on an early-access ritual only castable by the Pretender on the Pretender... and then your Pretender got feebleminded on Turn 4. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

Re: Battle Afflictions: Gimp Gods
 

People who complain about battle afflictions are just being whiny. Sure, they're annoying. But it's not as if they're an unsolveable problem, with so many ways to work around it. If it were COMPLETELY unsolveable, then certainly this would be a real issue, but it's not the end of the world here: You can get them removed if you go about it the right way, and there's plenty of ways to work around it: Pick an immortal SC chassis, use Gift of Health, Arco Priestesses, Fairy Queens, a specific Tien Chi immortal, forging the Chalice....at least ONE of these options will be available no matter which nation you are. The only excuse is not using your head.

Re: Battle Afflictions: Gimp Gods
 

To add to Norfleet's comments, the only 'problem' in Dom with no resolution is getting cursed or horror-marked. And even these are not that bad, if you understand what they are, how they work, and how to (sort of) work around them.

Re: Battle Afflictions: Gimp Gods
 

Being cursed is mostly a nuisance. It just means you're going to get more afflictions, but seeing as it's going to happen sooner or later, you just deal with it. It causes more afflictions, but this can already be handled.

Being horror marked is also more of a nuisance than anything else. I've never actually been attacked by a Horror in the first place, and a good SC should be able to take out a Horror or two anyway, not that this actually happens often. Only the Doom Horrors really pack a huge wallop, and they aren't all that invulnerable either. I've found they have their fair share of weaknesses.

Re: Battle Afflictions: Gimp Gods
 

The OP might be interested in Poger's "Healing Gods" mod, which IIRC can be found on Illwinter's site. All pretenders receive the "recuperation" flag.

Re: Battle Afflictions: Gimp Gods
 

Zen:
Thank you for your comments.

I am not certain I agree with your first point. If every wave of fresh players stumbles across the same issue, then it may be useful to take another look at it every now and then to see if if action is required or if some different approach to the issue has turned up.

While I personally haven't had excessive trouble with battle afflictions (although, like everyone else, I did trash a pretender with them early on), enough other people seemed to have a big enough problem with them that I thought I'd throw an idea or two out there.

I don't understand how a tutorial would work with respect to this issue. Care to drop a few notes?

(BTW I find the suggestion of a "God Mode" for _this_ game highly amusing!)

Thanks for mentioning the mod. I'll look at it eventually, but I suspect I'll find it of marginal interest. It sounds too much like an over-simplification, like pulling all the plants out of a garden to get rid of the weeds.

If it is a global change to recuperation, then it differs markedly from the suggestions in my original post. God recuperation, as I understand it, is an automatic effect that runs until the afflictions are gone, right? No player decision points there. No real cost to take the option, or tradeoffs in god design. No potential tactical complications. Boring.

Norfleet:
When I ran into the issue, I just changed my playing style. I did try a regenerator and picked up an affliction, but five turns later I misclicked and got it killed. It had not regenerated by that time. I never did find Gift of Healing until I started reading threads on the forum, but then I deliberately built up to it and tried to pick up an affliction or two. While I avoided getting killed and did pick up an affliction, the spell never seemed to have any effect (though I stopped checking on it after eight or nine turns). My current guess is that there is a per-turn percentage check that is fairly low, and I just had a run of bad luck with that test.

How long do you find it takes GoH to get rid of an affliction when you play?
(Everyone is invited to chime in on this one.)

PvK:
Your opinion definitely seems to be in the majority in this thread so far.

GavinWheeler:
Good points. But "nerf" as a verb? Not sure I've seen this usage...explain?

Everyone Else: Thanks for posting. RAE all.

I guess the consensus is that if a workaround to battle afflictions is provided too soon, it would dilute the player's incentive to find other solutions, and that, overall, this would slow a new player's move up the learning curve. That, and the current mid- to late game workarounds are seen as wholly sufficient to deal with the issue. Fair enough.

Anyone care to come back on the Disbandment issue?

(See my second post in this column, "Gimp Units", which probably should have been a different thread.)

Re: Battle Afflictions: Gimp Gods
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">1-2 turns on average, per affliction. I have had many units with 4 wounds lose them all in well under 10 turns. Unlike fickle immortal gods, GoH heals quickly and consistently.

Re: Battle Afflictions: Gimp Gods
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Then I ran into a bug in one of my games because my immortal god didn't. Not until he cast Gift. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Never-healing wound? The one affliction that (in my limited experience so far) seems to stick around against all internal affliction healing mechanisms and requires external sources to deal with.

Re: Battle Afflictions: Gimp Gods
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">This is one of those interesting questions that makes you realise you don't actually know where you picked up the word/fact/whatever in question.

I think I picked it up in discussions about games such as Baldur's gate. It was used to refer to something being reduced in power considerably, probably when it had been overpowered originally. Such as someone saying "the new patch has nerfed the Robe of Mirroring, so it is no longer ridiculously powerful." Presumably derives from the foam toys, but all I found from a Google search is other people speculating on the derivation.

Re: Battle Afflictions: Gimp Gods
 

"nerf" originated in either Everquest or Diablo, depending on who you ask. It does indeed reference the foam toys - originally it was "you turned my <insert ability here> into a nerf gun!". That quickly got turned into just "nerfed" and it's stuck for years and years.