Re: Please don\'t take my toys away!
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I suspect it would be difficult to beat the roleplaying notions out of him. It is more fun to win a MP game with a "rolplaying god", and diplomacy accounts for more balance issues than god design anyway (but he doesn't like diplomacy too much). http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

He would probably create a god with too high death or blood magic and turmoil. Probably combined with luck and death scales. What he wouldn't do is have a value of 0 or 1 in any of the scales (perhaps except heat).

Re: Please don\'t take my toys away!
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I suspect it would be difficult to beat the roleplaying notions out of him. It is more fun to win a MP game with a "rolplaying god", and diplomacy accounts for more balance issues than god design anyway (but he doesn't like diplomacy too much). http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

He would probably create a god with too high death or blood magic and turmoil. Probably combined with luck and death scales. What he wouldn't do is have a value of 0 or 1 in any of the scales (perhaps except heat). </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">If I where to make a maximised design I would most likely go for order 3 luck 3. But as Kristoffer indicated I think other factors such as alliances, starting location, luck (not the scale variety)will dominate the outcome of MP to a much greater degree then the difference between designs of players playing with reasonably competent race designs.

When I first started playtesting dom 1 perhaps 5 years ago I was into maximising race design much more than I am at present. But I think I conduct myself reasonably sucessfully against players that are more heavily into optimising than me anyway these days. So I guess what I am saying is that in the end I do not think it is terribly important to squeeze out every Last drop of advantage from your design points, as long as you do not mess up to badly and is adaptable, you should be able to get by anyway.

Re: Please don\'t take my toys away!
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">My experiance is that generally a strong player with a tight design will win playing MP unless they get beaten by similar or better. This was my experiance in Stars! as well even though we couldn't establish fair starting positions for players - which I do when hosting Dom games.

I have to admit that its along time since I played in full diplomacy games and this can change things but in my experiance the skilled diplomicists also were skilled players with tight designs. Part of the reason I play no alliances is to avoid the way in which the top players run away with the game.

I may well have been somewhat lucky in my years of PBEM but fortune has not seemed decisive while focused race designs have done me proud even when I'm using "weak" races - I never MP the traditional power races although I have come up with some new ones. I think alot of what wins and loses any game of skill is *pressure* and loose designs put those running them under pressure while tight ones hold your hand. Probably the biggest thing in favour of tight designs is reliability and ease of play - once you have got them down pat. I have generally found that a tight but not very strong race has the advantage over a loosly designed power race.

Perhaps my usage of the word tight is a part of the difference here? Tight does not mean powerful to me so much as that the different elements combine together to make each more powerful - syncronicity/synergy.

But hey each to their own and the particular nature of my experiance of PBEM may have mislead me.

Cheers

Keir

Re: Please don\'t take my toys away!
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">No wonder our experience differs, we seldom if ever use fixed starting positions, the dynamics sprung from the starting positions tend dominate the game more than tight race designs. This is fine by me, I do not want dominion to be chess. Although I can certainly see why other people do want to play with balanced starting positions to me it might detract from gameplay.

We usually play with some form of informal diplomacy, mainly because we like to blabber away about dominions over a beer or a cup of coffe. This has some effects on our diplomatic interactions since it often does not seem worth the bother to conspire with or against people you meet on a more or less daily basis. So most often our diplomacy is limited to players joining the fray on one side or the other when there allready is a war in progress, or occasionally banding together if one player appears to be getting to far ahead of the rest.

[ November 26, 2003, 21:54: Message edited by: johan osterman ]