Re: Overlords - Game Thread. (playing)
 

The victory conditions are stated clearly, or maybe I'm mistaken:
Normal: Must hold 5 Castles (4 of them must be capitals, 1 must be an overlord fort) at the same time for 3 consecutive turns.
Overlord (Option A): Given all other overlords are dead, he must hold 5 Capitals at the same time for 3 consecutive turns.
Overlord (Option B): Must hold 10 Capitals at the same time for 3 consecutive turns.

Consider this "metric" of yours is: Lets say a minimum of 7 turns with 0 resistance. That is to say if I played by myself 7/(33+7) or 17.5% of the game. Or perhaps we should look at it as 40/33, i.e. if I had ~21% more turns than everyone else. That's a pretty significant handicap.

Re: Overlords - Game Thread. (playing)
 

I did start with the intention of making victory conditions pretty obtainable. I have the feeling if I do start another overlords game I'm going to have to make them even lower. I'm starting to think they may be just a little bit too high. Maybe not, it depends on how much the rules do or do not change.

I guess my wording in the OP may be a little imprecise. All the victory conditions lupus pointed out are correct. For a normal, taking one of the overlord starting forts counts as a capitol (you're right, this really was not clear). Yes, this means that you can take an overlord's capitol and one of his starting forts and it will count as two capitols as far as victory conditions are concerned. However, for an overlord the starting forts of other overlords do not count (aside from the capitol). Does that answer your questions?

Hopefully this is early enough in that, now that it's clarified, there won't be some sort of scandal someone wins with two forts from the same overlord.

Re: Overlords - Game Thread. (playing)
 

Every one of an overlord's forts counts as a capitol?! Holy crap, victory is pretty close for a number of people then.

If you do continue in this line of games, there needs to be more of an incentive for normal players to not just team up against an overlord. Starting with some extra territory is valuable, but the restrictions on attacking prevent overlords from being able to fight on multiple fronts. As it is, overlords are pretty powerful, but they can't address the problem of alliances of enemies. Perhaps if overlords had something that they could give to normals at no cost to themselves, that would help the normals. It would encourage people to work to become the overlord's "favored" minion, and betrayal would strip that benefit.

Re: Overlords - Game Thread. (playing)
 

LupusFatalis Pmed me with this.

Okay, here we go.

IF YOU ARE AN OVERLORD: Those extra starting forts you had do not mean anything to you, they are just a perk of being an overlord. They contribute nothing to YOUR victory conditions.

IF YOU ARE NOT AN OVERLORD: The extra forts that overlords STARTED with count as capitols as far as your victory conditions are concerned. Forts they built after the start mean nothing to you and have no more value than any other fort. A fort only counts ONCE, whether it is a capitol or a non-cap starting fort, it is never worth more than one victory point. And finally, all forts that an overlord started with are worth one vp to any normal who captures them. That is to say, if you own an overlord's capitol and both forts he started with, combined they are worth 3 VPs.


Lumen: I think I've already said this before, but if I start another overlords-themed game in the future I am almost certainly lifting restrictions on how overlords are permitted to attack, because at present I think they are too vulnerable to certain situations and they can be put into positions where they can be stuck fighting someone for an incredibly long period of time when they could just roll over and crush them in their sleep. I'd like to change that.

Re: Overlords - Game Thread. (playing)
 

Sure, then there are a bunch of people close to victory. And it also does make stopping people a bit more difficult. That is to say in my position I'd need to take any two of three rather than a specific one plus either of the others. Which adds some options. Suffice to say, I've no intention to actually start a siege of partake in any action gaining me a victory point within the next 8 turns, stale or otherwise. The Vanir have other plans, your childish races toward capital control do not concern us.

Re: Overlords - Game Thread. (playing)
 

wait? so province 100 does not count as an overlord fort?

then everything i've said so far has been totally false, heh...

Re: Overlords - Game Thread. (playing)
 

It counts if it has one of those big, huge defense forts on it. My notes imply that 100 DOES count.

Edit: However, that VP province list I gave you earlier says that it does not count. I would have to check the map to be sure.

Having done so, I can now confirm that 100 does indeed count and that I somehow missed it when adding in the VPs. Does this mean I'm at fault for all the wrong and misplaced VP markers? I sure hope not....

Re: Overlords - Game Thread. (playing)
 

so... anyone wanna make me some antimagic amulets or stone spheres at a reasonable price? anyone who already talked about it with me i'm still willing to deal with... it's just that they stopped replying to me before I got any of either :)

Re: Overlords - Game Thread. (playing)
 

for tc, province 100, 102, and 140 count.

I'm not going to list everyone in the game, but if you start a game of overlords with all human players you'll easily find out on your own.

Re: Overlords - Game Thread. (playing)
 

If there is another such game (and I hope there is) I think the map needs to be a wrap around. And personally I would ban Water nations too. They are too seperate and make balancing difficult.

I am not critical of how this was set up however. No one really knew how it would all turn out - or at least they didn't say ;) And anyone who goes to all the effort of thinking up the rules, designing and making the map placements and running the game deserves respect. So well done Rdonj :)

But the initial plan was to have a sort of grid of Overlords and Normals surrounding them and I think in hindsight this would have been best. i.e. so while each Overlord is surrounded by normals and could be ganged up on each normal was to have two Overlord neighbours meaning going all 'one way' would be tough. That requires a wrap around map.

Instead we had most of the normals with only one overlord neighbour. And in TCs case this was extreme as most of the normals other neighbour was the natural barrier the sea. Baalz could have come out early and normals could have gone in after him. But early on the sea was basically acting as a map edge. So TC faced 6 normals - only one of which had a real border with another Overlord (Pan) and most had few even normal neighbours.

After seeing his terrible strategic position I changed my plan from toadying up to one or more Overlords to trying to organise a gang up on him. Not very successfully I might add :p I suspect that had all 6 of us attacked reasonably early then TC would have not been strong enough to resist. I don't think any of the other Overlords were in such a perilous starting position.

But had the map been a wrap around with all of us having a second (none water) Overlord the diplomatic position would have been very different.

Re the problem of the Overlords in the mid/late game. Please remember it is a problem now not early on. The Overlords could easily crush a normal without the restrictions on normals capitals early on and no dominion attacks.

So any fix should address the mid/late game issue not boost Overlord attack options earlier. So I don't like the prophet idea as it hardly solves Baalz's troubles now but would make an Overlord much tougher to resist earlier on.

You could for example allow an attack outside of dominion per Capital held by an Overlord. So he starts with one but can get more. Or simply add an extra attack every year or 18 turns. If you are worried about cheating you could have each Overlord post which areas he had attacked beyond his dominion without his Pretender - after the turn has progressed - so players can check if they were attacked legally or not. It gives all players some intelligence on where each Overlord is focusing but I don't see that as a big problem.

A restriction could have been placed on normals dominion (max 6? 7? 8?) so that the Overlords could have dom pushed more easily and made defence against that harder for the normals. That would help give Overlords more legal attack options.

I think packing the bonus gem sites in the Overlords forts would have been better than spreading them out as was done. It does make the Overlords core lands very inviting if they are looking in any way vulnerable. The actual forts are hard to take out - you can't just grab one, put up your dominion and enjoy the gem income - as you can with this set up.

Although the Overlords picked their own nations I think some are possibly more Capital focused than others. You could possibly get around this by making all an Overlords starting forts Capitals - i.e. give them the special sites of the Capital so they can build the capital only units/commanders. For variety you could have given other capital sites. e.g given TC his own Capital and the EA Capital in one fort and the LA Capital in another. Giving a wider variety of units/leaders and keeping them 'special' longer. As it has turned out there seems to have been little Overlord v Overlord fighting (that I can see anyway) after Dr P failed to decapitate Atul early on. But with the Gatestones an early take out of an Overlord Capital was very possible. A sieged capital can produce no units or mages which is very serious for some nations even if they have secondary forts. It was certainly my plan to get one of us to besiege TCs capital and stop his flow of good mages if we had been able to attack him early enough.