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I wondered about taking a Phoenix after doing some testing, it's a great way to expand in this game. As long as you send it to friendly Dom it will clear defenders by exploding, with no risk of your pretender taking an early bath because of immortality. Tow the start army with it and on the few occasions the explosions don't clear the indies, there won't be much left for the grunts to mop up.

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no. he almost staled yesterday [technically, I think QM extended host for a bit and he got it in after the deadline; QM extended it by a 1/2 hr today too], and was last one in - he should have just submitted a draft turn right then...

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Much along the lines of my thinking. In a game of limited magic that spell is not too shabby. As far as synergy with Mictlan... we shall see.
-ssj

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The Council of Cardinals is shocked to see that our great and glorious Smaug was defeated by a gaggle of lowly Machacan militia! What shame we feel!

Still, our lands are secured by our static defenses, and our flagellants stand ready to inflict grevious afflictions on any who dare cross our borders. And we have put out priests to work in calling Smaug back from the underworld, and he shall soon grace us again with his presence.

-- The Marignon Council

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As I'm playing Frozen's Forge turns atm, I appreciate VFB's handing over his pretender on a silver platter. And this one even had magic!

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The sun glints off the bloody moss of the two towering Dark Vines. The Bloodhenge Druids clutch daggers reminiscent of an earlier barbaric Mictlan age. Mabel decrees this blood sect must be purged and so we stand. She takes the lead. The Druids Bleed her as she closes. She smiles as her life force immolates the right flank. She attacks again. I feel the heat wash over me even from the rear ranks as her second immolation leaves smoldering husks of blood slaves. I call on Mabel's power even as she shakes off another wave of attackers. One of the Dark Vines succumbs to my spell. Limbs paralyzed. The Jags, filled with my blessing, fell a flailing Dark Vine and close on the one still gripped in my power. Soon the only sound is retreating woodsmen.

Lilly- Prophet of Mabel

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Upon seeing the death of Machaka's so-called god, the Council did not take long to come to a decision to attack the foul spiders, fearing that their treasure would soon fall into the hands of others.

We do not believe that you are currently in possession of our pretender, as our priests have already begun communicating with him from afar. Smaug assures us that he is currently in the 49th level of Hell, and expects to appear by our side most imminently.

-- The Council of Cardinals

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Phoenix with phoenix pyre makes me think once again CBM unbalances as many things as it fixes.

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I don't follow, what's unbalanced?

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I'm not sure I agree. It's useful only in your Dom, you can't realistically send it anywhere else without risking its loss. Secondly, it will almost certainly not stop your average SC god, even in its own Dom. After that it retains other limitations with limited slots, mediocre initial Dom (2), and new magic paths are very expensive.

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also it gains afflictions very rapidly by doing it's thing

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My understanding or perception of CBM is that it doesn't make great strides in balancing things out (in a sense of making units/nations balanced), but it does do wonders for making unloved and unusable units/Pretenders, a far more viable option. This subsequently opens up a lot more tactics and strategies.

The Phoenix in particular is a good example. In vanilla I can't see any reason to take it for any nation. As F/A paths are not that useful, and as a chassis the Phoenix (in vanilla) offers almost nothing of value. But under CBM the Phoenix is transformed into a definite candidate for several nations, and this is entirely due to it's auto Phoenix Pyre ability.

So in this case, CBM has done it's job (as I see it) in making a useless Pretender chassis into something that is useful.


A game like Dominions can never be 'perfectly balanced' IMO, so pointless to even try. This isn't a RTS game (thankfully!). All you can do is improve the things that are never used, and nerf the things that are abused/overused. Once you start seeing every unit/spell/Pretender in use on a regular basis, then I'd say CBM's job is done :)

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CBM's great, it makes things useful rather than useless. The Phoenix being a very good example, never seen it picked as a pretender until CBM made it better. The phoenix is in no way overpowered just by having phoenix pyre ability.

Overall, CBM makes the game more balanced and fairer.

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That's not a big deal. Immortal beings automatically have recuperation and recover from afflictions. At worst you might get some short-term inconvenience if you suffer something nasty like Feebleminded.

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I hate realizing that you've made flaws in your initial gameplan during testing you do... AFTER you've already started!

don't you hate that as well?


Is it just me, or does this map have waaay too few wastelands and swamps? I can't hardly find ANY! (well I can find a few...)

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I disagree. I think CBM makes EA Agartha worthless for instance, but this is off-topic so I'll stop here.

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CBM definitely makes the game far more balanced and DEFINITELY more interesting. Who on earth would want to play vanilla any more these days? Like half the units in the game in vanilla are just unsalvagable garbage. At least with CBM, everything has a niche use, however small.

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CB is ever a work a work in progress, certainly not every change turns out to be a good one. But corrections usually take feedback and debate on the subject, something that crops up suprisingly rarely. It doesn't generally take a lot reverse a CB change, a good argument or just a number of people all agreeing the change is bad.

Of course, perhaps if you consider half of all CB changes unbalanced this may seem far too steep a road to travel. If you still play in CB games though, seems worth a little effort though.

Oh, and I don't really think balance discussion is far off topic in a game thread, after all most balance has a direct effect on the very game we are playing.

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I think it's off-topic here thus I posted my comments in the CBM thread where they belong imo so I'm sure you could see them and get the feedback, and others can voice their opinion too.

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On the topic of the phoenix (and yeah, I should bring this to the CBM thread), it doesn't just get afflictions and become temporarilly inconveinenced, it racks them up so quickly that end of year 1 you'll have a phoenix with 6 or 7 afflictions and it'll take literally 4 or 5 game-years for that to heal fully, assuming you never throw it into battle again (unlikely). Plus, although it does work as an SC, the range of indeps it can take on solo or even supported by the starting army is very small. There are far more unbalanced combat pretenders. Phoenix is kind of like the Ghost King, except instead of being crappy SC + rainbow its crappy SC + Fire bless.

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Yeah, either place is fine with me, wouldn't be bad to reignite the CB thread.

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Wow! Carrion woods = Gem income * 3!

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it's pretty sick - I blame QM :)

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Oh Ermor, I was wondering which of your neighbors you planned to crush into dust first, and it just so happens to be me.

Oh well, I won't go down without a fight.

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Toran will temporarily be taking control of Marignon for a few days. I've PM'ed QM.

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So do I :p

Sadly the troop generation (which was why I did cast CW) seems to be pure crap (I got a grand total of three manikin this turn), but the gem income sure rocketed. If I just had something to spend those gems on :cold:


Btw, as we are using this thread to comment CBM, it might be worth to consider making CW available for LA Pans only, but perhaps lower the gem cost there. Not only is CW thematic for LA Pans, but CW is actualy easier for EA and MA Pans to cast; CW needs 50 gems, which means EA and MA Pan can get it up after 10 turns (recieve 5 N gems per turn) unless there has been some random events granting more gems (when CW could be cast even earlier, say on turn 8...).

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A lot harder to move those manikins around however, w/out recruitable D mages.

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True that (even though there are blood mages available, but they can't move masses), but all it takes is one empowerement. Either empower one dryad to D1 or a Revenant to N1, and there is basically an un-limited stream of Mound Kings and Carrion centaurs to lead the masses. Of course, in MA the Pans have a 25% chance to be at least D1, so no Empowering needed (although it would feel *wrong* to use a Pan to just summon Mound Kings and Carrion Centaurs; it's just *so* below them :D ).

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Have we got a potential problem with 'P3D' / T'ien Ch'i? The last turn was staled, and are currently the only nation still to submit a .2h file for this turn.

Still a few hours to go until hosting though, so plenty of time for the turn to arrive, but thought I'd flag it up just in case. The forum activity stamp says that 'P3D' was last on the forums around 13 hours ago, so it does't look to be an AWOL case.

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yeah 3 stales or close to it in the first 9 turns. wth

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TC technically should have staled this turn but I extended and found a sub for one turn (Atul), unless P3D posts I guess I will start looking for a permenant sub.

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Also, Marignon's sub Toran has requested another 24 hours so I've moved the host time.

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Not much point in me continuing to do my turns, and my lone scout is getting tired of running all around the capital battlements, shooting at the fish men. So, Shin is going AI.

Have fun ya'll.

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I'm back and ready to resume command of the Council of Cardinals. Perhaps some miracle has occurred and Smaug already graces Marignon with his blessed presence? One can only pray and hope.

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The nation which requested the delay already has their turn in quite early....


now I know you can't undo a delay because it might confuse someone but... could everyone try to get their turns in on the original schedule instead of waiting an extra 24hours that no one needs?

pls k thx bai

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The Marignon delay request may have been asked for so that the returning Marignon player (vfb) gets a chance to do his own turn rather than the one submitted by the sub (Toran). As I'm sure vfb would like the chance to ruin the chances of his own nation ;)

It's also possible that the current Marignon turn is just a 'token' turn (just recruitment), and submitted to avoid a stale (just in case the delay request got missed/refused)

So I suggest that rather than everyone getting their turns in by the original deadline (so that the quickhost kicks-in), that the quickhost should be turned off to give vfb a chance to get a proper Marignon turn in, or until vfb confirms that he is ok with the quickhost being on (ie. He is happy with the current Marignon turn that has been submitted)

My own opinion is that regardless of whether or not a turn has already been submitted for a nation, if that nation asks for a delay, they should be given the chance to use it. The quickhost feature is not always a good thing IMO (and in fact I won't be using it in future games that I organise)


Edit: Having just checked the admin logs, the email for Marignon hasn't been changed back to vfb yet (which is to be expected given qm's timezone). So another good reason to turn the quickhost off for the moment.

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I have no objections to using the currently submitted Marignon turn, but I don't think it's a good idea to undo a delay (as namad already said) (not that Calahan is suggesting that we undo the delay).

P.S. There was no arrangement for a delay with the intention of me redoing the turn, AFAIK.

P.P.S. I like quickhost, I especially like it when the last person to submit does another turn immediately (in the early goings, of course). I've only seen quickhost cause problems in network games when people try to do a turn offline but accidentally upload. What other problems have you had with it, Calahan?

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Not so much a problem, it's just I've really come to dislike an encroaching hosting deadline, which easily and regularly results with quickhosting.

From playing in Pasha's RAND game, and the fixed hosting days and times that has (since he hosts it privately), I've found it really helps my enjoyment of games, and I feel in far less of a 'rush' doing my turns.

Since with Pasha's RAND game I know I have all of Tuesday / Thursday / Sunday evenings, to do my turns in. But for example with the llamaserver, and entirely due to the quickhost, and on a 48 hour schedule, the following scenario almost always happnes occurs.

On Tuesday evening I might have until 10pm to do my turn, but then come Thursday that could be down to 9pm, then Saturday it's 8pm, and by the following Monday it's 7pm. So over the course of the week the amount of time I have to do my turns in the evening has gone from about 4 hours to 1 hour. Which either leads me to having rush my turns, or ask for regular delays. Neither of which I like doing.

It also doesn't help that I'm not a player who likes doing two turns in one evening. As I like to do a turn, look at any new turn that might arrive (or look at it the following morning), and then think about that turn over the next day or so. I like my thinking time :)


So the next game I organise will have the quickhost turned off after the first 10-15 turns, as then the game will host at the same time each day thereafter (and so won't suffer from an encroaching deadline)

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I think a better option than turning quickhost off might be to just use 28 or 30hour host cycles and then move to like 50hour or 52hour or some such...

I've always wanted to try that.

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I tried a 30 then 54 hour schedule in the 'CarCrash' game that I organised. Some players didn't like it (too slow apparantly). It also didn't help that much in solving the encroaching deadline, which I was surprised by. As that was the entire reason I decided upon that schedule (as I thought it would prevent it)

But as I said, I'm finding the fixed hosting times in Pasha's RAND game to be a very nice schedule indeed :) So I'm hoping a llamaserver game with quickhost off will be the same, or similar to that.

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I don't like those mid host schedules, 30h, 36h or so, I always end up staling the turn due to the constant time differences the turn arrives.

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I prefer quickhost personally. 25 and 49h make more sense than 24/48 imo because you can safely play at fixed times yourself if you want to.

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I've tried this, but it only works if you can leave it until last to submit your own turn every time. Which is not always possible if you have any RL plans at all, and sometimes risky if you have an unreliable internet connection. So it is far from a safe way of ensuring a fixed hosting time each turn (like quickhost off does). And if you submit just one turn early, that means that turn could host early (due to quickhost), and then you're back to 'the', well 'my', encroaching deadline problem.

There are not many things I haven't tried to lessen my own problem with the quickhost feature, since it became a problem for me almost immediately when I stated playing MP games.

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Settings and host time will stay as they are, to avoid confusion. However, I will try to submit my turn so it ends up hosting roughly on the schedule it was on before.

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still needs pyth, Pan, and BL. c'mon boys! and naked manic women. and monkeys.

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I'm going to declare war on any nation whose turn is not in within the next.... 5 hours. Thx

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Hmmm... I could swear I already sent my turn... Anyway, (re-)sent now.

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My main problem right now is the lack of home 'net access, should be able to take back TC this Thursday or so.

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qm, if you are the last one to submit, and you are waiting to submit until near the deadline... it might be more efficient to simply submit whenever you notice and then add a delay equal to however many hours you submitted...

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I'd understand if noobs always teamed up against someone, but in dominions, it's always the opposite for some reason, vets tend to do it for more, it's a little disappointing...

Hm, who would have expected that Lich to be so resilient.

Well, come and get me ya bastards!