Re: Question about EA Tir Na N'og
 

Oh, totally agree that it would be impossible to determine across the entire spectrum of all dominions players. But it gives a handy shorthand to compare to two individual strategies to see which one was more hurt by removing hammers..

All the discussion so far has talked about relative scarcity of gems, whether ultimately you're not hurt as much because you had to forge the hammer initially anyway, etc. However, all of these arguments apply to ANY strategy that employs any forging at all.

What removing hammers essentially did is raise the price in gems of any forging strategy by 33%. This is relative to all other currencies, e.g. gold, production turns, resources.

So for instance if one strategy required 1 forged gems/4 gold invested and another strategy required 1 forged gems/10 gold then the first strategy is much worse off than the the second after the removal of hammers. Similarly, strategy one required 1 forged gems/1 ritual gems and strategy two required 3 forged gems/ 2 ritual gems, in this case strategy two is worse off after removal of hammers.

To give a more specific example. Formoria was mentioned earlier. Formoria has the big kings that make pretty good SC. A strategy could easily be built around them. Each one costs 500 gold. Alternatively, TNN can build a strategy around Sidhe Lord, cost 280 gold. Assume that the strategy usually required the king to be outfitted with 45 gems. Assume the strategy for the Sidhe Lord required 15 gems worth of equipment. What happens without hammers? bump the price in gems of both strategies up by 33%. King was .09 gems/gold, sidhe was .05 gems to gold. Now king becomes .12 gems/gold and sidhe becomes .07 gems to gold. For any given 1000 gold investment the formorians now have to spend 29 additional gems. TNN has to spend 17 additional gems. Assuming the same opportunity cost of gems for other purposes(rituals, spells), in this example the Sidhe are better off after the removal of hammers. Change those initial ratios and you get a different answer.

My point is that to create a good argument about whether a strategy is worse or better off after the removal you have to look at an analysis like this. Just talking about when the hammers pay for themselves, or relative usefulness of a specific type of gem doesn't cut it. These problems are similar between strategies. What really changed is the amount of one resource that you have to invest in that strategy relative to other resources: gold, production turns, gems used in summoning, etc.

Re: Question about EA Tir Na N'og
 

Torgon, the problem with your example is that by the mid game gold stops becoming an issue for most nations, it comes down to fort turns instead. the more gold you have the more forts you can afford, but still you're technically not limited by gold but by forts. another problem is that Kings are capital only while Sidhe Lords aren't, and of course that Kings are much stronger than Sidhe Lords, being SCs as opposed to thugs and all that. so just comparing equal gold investments vs gem investments give a very inaccurate picture, if not false altogether.

Re: Question about EA Tir Na N'og
 

It's not that far fetched a comparison.

- Firbolgs ? Firbolgs.

- Zappy storm ? Zappy storm.

- Fomoria has all the magic paths TNN has, and then some. High Air ? Check. High N ? Not really, but as a giant nation your god will most assuredly have at least 4N, which starts you on the nature path. Water ? Check. The only missing piece is Earth, which TNN probably needs to have on their gods too anyway. Oh, and the W/N combo, which is admittedly worthwhile in vanilla for clams, but more or less worthless in CBM.

- Stealth raiders ? Fomoria can do that just fine by focusing on their capital only units early on, or on Morrigans later. Of course, every time you recruit a stealth leader you're not recruiting an SC - but then TNN can *only* recruit stealth leaders. No SC option.

- Teleporting raiders: Fomorian kings say hi. Hell, with Soul Vortex they don't even need gear to wipe out PD.

- Fomorian druids have the same magic paths as Shidhe Champions; in fact they have better paths since they're not constrained to A1N1. Hell, they can even make better use of A1N1 than them since they have twice the hit points, thus can take advantage of Personal Regen (although in that case they admittedly need forged armour).

- Granted, most of them lack Glamour. Then again, since the nerf Glamour is crap that can be dealt with a dozen shortbows. Since EA is when huge packs of shortbows shine anyway... yes.

Oh, and they're also giants with Death magic and holy undead. I stand by my statement: anything TNN can do, Fomoria can do it and then some.

My reasoning was far from that involved, but it led me to a simple deduction: SC races (like Fomoria) used to be more or less required to squeeze Earth and sleeping on their pretenders, so they'd be able to make hammers early enough for it to matter.
This, in turn, meant they had worse scales and worse end game options than other nations.
Remove hammers and a full-on bless or scales strat becomes not only viable but a no-brainer for them since there's no opportunity cost any more. Which ironically means that removing the forge whore item from the game makes forge whore nations *more* powerful than they ever were.

Re: Question about EA Tir Na N'og
 

i dont really see the point of all the crap you wrote. so formoria is better. that is 100% agreed and everyone knows it. the issue i think is that people want to know what to do with tnn, not what formoria can do better than them

Re: Question about EA Tir Na N'og
 

Torgon's OP wondered why TNN didn't see much playtime. Detailing why they (relatively) suck didn't seem all that out of topic to me.

Re: Question about EA Tir Na N'og
 

@Kobal2 @ Priestlyman

I agree w/ Kobal. What you wrote is actually helpful. Part of the question was what to do with TNN, but also did want to know why no one used them. The stuff about fomoria is helpful.

@13lackgu4rd

Then I guess then my question comes down to forged gems/production turns if production turns is the other constraining resource. In my example I just used gold as a proxy for any constraining resource. Anything other 'resource' could also be used: gems used in summoning, production turns, etc.

what's always changing is the numerator in forged gems/'other resources used in strategy'. The strategy that has the lower initial ratio is less impacted by a % change to the numerator, all other things being equal.

Re: Question about EA Tir Na N'og
 

@13lackGu4rd

But why does it matter that one's a thug and ones a SC. Lets make it more abstract.

I have strategy A that i'm attempting to win with. It requires a certain amount of resource X and a certain amount of resource Y to be effective.
You have strategy B that you are attempting to win with. It also requires a certain amount of resource X and a certain amount of resource Y to be effective.

Resource X and Y can be anything you want them to be (Gems, gold, production turns, mage turns, widgets, etc. the example can also extend to three, four, any number of resources).

Okay, now something happens and suddenly resource X is much rarer (in the dominions example this is gems as a result of the removal of hammers). Who is better off and more likely to win? From the information already presented it is impossible to know. What you need to know is relative intensities of use of each of the resources in each strategy. And whether either one of those strategies was constrained by resource X and at what times those constraints occurred. If both strategies employed roughly equal ratios of resource X to resource Y then they are both going to be impacted equally. They're both less effective by whatever the decrease in X was. However, if the ratio in each strategy was different, or one strategy was constrained on X and the other wasn't, or one strategy was constrained by X early and the other by X late, then the change in the availability of X will have a more dramatic impact on one strategy than the other. However you need this information in order to make that determination.

Up until now the only arguments for each side that I've seen essentially boil down to: 1)Strategy A has to use more of resource x now 2)Because of this strategy A is less effective.

Of course strategy A is less effective. All of the strategies are less effective including strategy B. You just tightened a constraint on everyone. Tightening a constraint always leads to a lower optimal solution. What I have yet to see is a good argument for why the tightening of this constraint has a disparate impact on one strategy than on another. Why is the new optimal point for strategy A lower than the new optimal point for strategy B? They're both lower. The question is which one was lowered by a larger amount.

If gems were the constraining factor on the number of thugs you could crank out, then yes the removal of hammers would be a huge problem. If the constraining factor was production turns then not so much. Same thing with SC's, if constraining factor was production turns then increase in gem cost really doesn't matter. If the constraining factor was gems then it matters a great deal. If your were at times constrained by gem cost for for one, and at other times by gold, and at other times by production turns, then when that constraint from gems occurred is hugely important. If the constraint was early game before you have a lot of hammers, removal of hammers is immaterial. If it was after then removal becomes very important. I guess I just have yet to see an argument that really dives down into what ways gems were really constraining the optimal strategy and at what times. I've got limited experience with multi-player dominions as I stated before, so I have no good idea where those constraints were and how tight they were. Any analysis of the impact on strategy of a scarcer resource has to make those kind of arguments in order to be sound. That's essentially what I'm asking for.

Re: Question about EA Tir Na N'og
 

Your theory is too crude. Just one example: if we again compare thugs and SCs, one of the main differences between them is that thugs are expendable, while SCs are not. So, you equip a thug, he fights in a couple of battles and gets killed. You hire another thug, equip him again, etc. A SC, on the other hand, is geared to be able to reliably survive most battles, so once you equip him you use him for a long time. Of course SCs also get killed, sometimes they stupidly die in their very first battle, but on average they are expected to last longer then thugs. Meaning you spend less gems on replacing lost equipment.

Re: Question about EA Tir Na N'og
 

Torgon, christ.

The minute you abstract anything you devorce it from gameplay. aspects such as hammer time or the effectiveness of scaling down kit (for example) are highly pertinant and don't fit into the theory of relative efficiency.

I'm playing a stratagy game, if I'd wanted to play an economics game I would have bought Master of Orion 3.

sorry for the random grief, but economics sometimes pisses me off.

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I reckon of someone had 100+ hours to put into the problem you could construct an optimal model of forging efficiency when compairing CBM to Stock. but trying to superimpose models of real world export production onto the issue isn't going to provide mathematically pure responses that put an end to the debate. I reckon a general understanding of the hammer change will be achieved much more realistically with a non-mathematical forum debate.

Re: Question about EA Tir Na N'og
 

@Festin

Thank you. This response is exactly what I'm looking for (theory is not to crude, trust me, optimization under constrained resources and uncertainty is essentially what I do for a living, and its a hell of a lot more complicated than what I laid out here).

But, as I said this is exactly what I'm looking for. SC use fewer gems because on average they survive longer. This is a good argument as to why thugs are worse off after the removal of hammers.