Re: Are heavy bless strategies the best ones ?
 

Right. Only one person gets to win any given game, hopefully everyone gets to have fun. To achieve maximum fun, each person has his or her own balance between striving for optimal play and the best chance at victory on the one hand, and tinkering, fooling around, exploring, diplomacy, role-playing, doing whatever else there is to do that's *not* a min-maxed drive to victory on the other hand. This balance may well change from game to game, day to day, nation to nation, whatever, for a given person. Most people recognize this and accept it; sometimes it dictates what games a person joins, sometimes somebody gets frustrated at having joined a game in which a lot of people are playing with vastly different goals. Mostly, people are civil and have fun.

Re: Are heavy bless strategies the best ones ?
 

Actually in a multiplayer game, it is VERY frustrating when someone's not playing to win. You can end up having completely pushing over neighbors who have no intent to win and triple the size of your empire because of that and completely mess up a game.

Re: Are heavy bless strategies the best ones ?
 

Yeah, that's most of what I was referring to about people getting frustrated. From my (admittedly limited) experience, that kind of thing happens more often when experience or skill levels are vastly different than it does when motivation levels are really different, though (by motivation, I mean motivation to win, not motivation to play, a lack of which is possibly the worst possible trait in a player).
But yes, I completely agree, it can really screw up a game when essentially people aren't even *playing* the same game.

Re: Are heavy bless strategies the best ones ?
 

Yeah. I recall, I've been on both ends of this scenario too. There were at least two games I won where I got no real satisfaction from winning simply because half my neighbors just decided to stale out of the game.

Re: Are heavy bless strategies the best ones ?
 

If and when I play MP, I play to win, but that doesn't mean that winning is the be-all end-all for me. In the two games I took part in during the Dom2 days, I had tons of fun even though I finished fourth or so in the first and got totally clobbered in the second (which incidentally also resulted in several improvements on sections of the Faerun map as I saw firsthand some problems there that I had not originally noticed or paid attention to).

Of course, staling out of a game is unacceptable. Better to go AI than stale away.

Edi

Re: Are heavy bless strategies the best ones ?
 

I always play to win, but I don't let that stop me from trying weaker nations or non-optimal pretender designs.

Re: Are heavy bless strategies the best ones ?
 

If you enjoy competing you usually enjoy challenge too. Sometimes that means you enjoy putting some 'artificial' limitations on yourself - after all these limitations are really no different from the rules of any game.

I personally enjoy forcing myself to use a certain ratio of weaker troops, for instance.

Re: Are heavy bless strategies the best ones ?
 

Sometimes they aren't artificial limitations. The danger with falling into the "best strategy & counter" line of thought is that someone cropping up with a completely wild strategy, even if not usually considered a victorious one, can catch you completely off guard.

Re: Are heavy bless strategies the best ones ?
 

I don't have the vast experience some of you do, but it does seem to me that luck has as much to do with who will be the winner as skill. Don't get me wrong, a good player obviously has a much better chance of doing well, but as far as who is going to do good enough to beat everyone else in the game it's going to be the player that is good AND has the best luck. Factors you may or may not have much control over and may significantly effect your chances of winning:
1) What nation you're playing
2) Who your neighbors are (How aggressive/good are they). If you attack player A do players B and C take that opportunity to attack you, or are they fighting with each other?
3) What random events hit your capital during the early turns
4) Who you're able to ally with (this is as much a function of the situation as your diplomatic skills)
5) Who allies against you (if you take a strong early lead you're likely to be ganged up on. Taking a nation perceived to be stronger, or being perceived as a strong player is likely to have people gang up on you as well)
6) What type of provinces are close to your capitol (do you have resources for your resource intensive troops? Suitable blood hunting sites? Enough gold income?)
7) Are you able to trade for some good path boosters?
8) What indie mages are you able to recruit?
9) What magic sites do you find? Do you get the gem income that fits your nation? Any good ritual discounts?

etc. etc.

So, I guess my point is that you've got to "play to win" with a certain lack of intensity because if you're playing against any significant number of players remotely near your skill level you're probably not going to. There is enough variation from luck that many, many different strategies are competitive and offer a different play experience. Obviously Dominions isn't perfectly balanced, look at how hard it is to balance games like Warcraft and consider the difference in scope. So what if <nation 1/setup 1> is definitely stronger that <nation 2/setup 2>, I can take <nation 2/setup 2> and have almost as much of a chance of winning assuming I play a good game.

Graeme, your bleak depiction of the game doesn't correspond to my experience. Your implication is that you either don't know what you're doing or you're not playing to win if you do something different than the things you list as being optimal (dual bless, death scales, etc), and that the game is almost completely determined in the first 20 turns so the rest is just going through the motions. Perhaps that is the case if you're playing one on one competitively with the primary purpose to win, but that doesn't sound to me like you're playing a very fun game.

Re: Are heavy bless strategies the best ones ?
 

If you play optimally, and your opponent doesn't, then you will win, all other things being equal. The reason I refer to dual-blesses is because they are something that makes national troops completely obsolete from the first turn of the game. People complained that troops became obsolete too quickly in Dom2, yet Helhirdings make every other purchasable unit obsolete on the first turn. If your opponent comes at you with one of the effective types of dual-blessed sacreds, and you don't have at least a three to one numerical advantage in gold spent on your army, then you are almost certainly going to lose the battle.

Have you ever seen any games of Dom3 where the eventual winner was not one of the top nations at turn 20? Thee eventual winner of _any_ 4X game is decided in the early turns of the game.

It's not anywhere near as fun as Dom2. The neutering of magic, and presence of a morale system that's just as broken as Dom2's provides little reason to play the game.