Re: Late Era Team Game
 

Oracle, Cyclops, Father of Winter, Mother of Rivers, Lady of Springs, Gorgon.

Re: Late Era Team Game
 

Mostly watery ones http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Late Era Team Game
 

Water and earth really are the most popular blesses. I'd say they get abused about equally, it's just there is a slightly wider range of pretenders to do water with. The other important distinction is that the earth ones also tend to be awake for SCing. The oracle is mostly just there because it's the easiest to duel bless with.

Re: Late Era Team Game
 

ZOMG oh noes, someone could *win*! We can't have that.

Beware thou the terrible Nerf Bat, which comes in the night and strikes down the proud and the powerful.

I'm much more concerned with balance between overall strategies (Supercombatant vs. Bless, for example,) than with balance among chassis choices. There is infinite room for cool powers, and more are always welcome - so if a given chassis never gets used, give it cool stuff until people want to play it.

Re: Late Era Team Game
 

Yeah, a good bless is just as good as an awake pretender with the right sacreds (which is why you see blesses so often), and a lot of nations without sacreds really need the early province-taking boost to get resources into their capital. I know I was relying on my pretender this game to clear out the stuff around my capital early so I could start building troops...Marignon's starting army + one turn of recruits with only your capital's resources isn't a reliable turn 2 expansion force, and if you have to wait til turn 3 to get a second province you're pretty much sunk...I'd also vote for buffs vs nerfs. (Especially the production scale, I'm still quite in favor of upping the gold coefficient, I think it would help a lot and not make it such an obvious loser scale). Similarly upping dragon's base dom by a point or two would help them out a LOT in terms of competitive pricing. Other chassis would be more difficult to balance, but that's an easy start.

Re: Late Era Team Game
 

I think I would find the game less fun if everything suddenly became super balanced. A lot of the fun for me is learning, over time, which pretenders are good SCs, which ones are good for which bless, which ones have some special ability that you might need for a certain strategy.

These are things you don't know when you first start playing the game, and it is really enlightening when you find them out. Now adding things to make less desirable pretenders into suddenly viable ones, that would be interesting.

Re: Late Era Team Game
 

I wonder who dares put his SC against mictlans trip bless jags in the first 20 turns and probably even the 20 ones after that

Re: Late Era Team Game
 

KO could look at the CBM (?) mod for pretenders and scales.. I liked it when I had a look at it in one game I played it really seems better balanced.

Re: Late Era Team Game
 

While of course, all things being equal, boosts are preferable to nerfs, I think pretty much any reasonable plan of balance has to include some nerfs. If you look at the good options and bad options, most are relatively close together, but there are some outliers that are just exceptionally good or exceptionally bad. For those exceptionally powerful outliers, it just does not make sense to try to figure out a thematic way to bring everything to their level. In addition, if you want to bring some level of balance in a few strokes, it is much easer to do with nerfs. As KO has said, he'd rather be making new content than tweaking things, and as far as I'm concerned that probably makes for a better game too. With just a few nerfs, it's easy enough (in most cases) to come along behind boosting what's needed.

On a side note, the poor solar disc needs a fire shield much more than the moloch.

Re: Late Era Team Game
 

Lets not take the PoD the way of the Vampire Queen though if you catch my drift.