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Wooooooooooo!!!!

I am at work so I havent even seen my turn but I'm amazingly gratified to hear that my hours of planning and scheming have paid off. Neither of you actually said it explicitly, but I assume that my gambit was successful and I have won the game??

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

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I didn't want to ruin it for anyone else, but since you brought it up, congratulations http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

I was enjoying that game, though, and was looking forward to some upcoming battles. Amazingly unsatisfying.

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Yeah, that sucks. What actually happened?
This feels like it was a waste of time; did you barter for VP provinces?

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He teleported a few Angels onto my VP province. I guess the moral of the story is that if you play with VPs, build a fortress on the VP site.

Maybe the game should make you hold the VP province for a turn or two.

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Ahhhhhhh! This was such an enjoyable game too. The game should force you to hold onto the VPs for at least 1 turn. The game ending like this is just not fun at all.

Well time to start the next game with the balance mod. I vote for late age this time, and I want to play as Jomon. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif

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Well, forts on those VP provinces would have avoided the problem. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

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Heheheh, thanks guys. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif Sorry to take your battles from you... I actually do feel bad about that. I know that some of you were fighting some hot and heavy wars. If it makes you feel any better, I actually had some preparation to hold enough of those provinces to win for a single turn. On the possibility that some of my raids would fail and I would fall short by one VP, you know? Like 3-4k gold in the bank to buy absurd amounts of PD. And arch theurgs waiting to teleport in to support endangered provs.

Moral of the story: Never trust the astral player in a VP game http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

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The players who werent on the recieving end of my attacks might like an explaination of how I managed to pull this off since they didnt get to see it first hand. Long story short, I attacked every single non-water un-fortified VP province that was left on the map in a single turn. My forces included a load of heavily armed SCs, a couple of arch theurg hit-squads, and a pair of conventional armies. SCs and theurgs all cloud trap'd or teleported to their destinations and the regular armies just attacked as normal.

The SCs in question were 5 Harbingers and a single Angel of Wrath. These forces attacked every 2 and 3 vp province available. I basically invested every gem in my entire treasury summoning and equipping them very heavily. The key with them is that they had 3 Air magic! So, not only could the Cloud Trapezee but they could cast Mistform/Mirror Image in combat. Extremly potent!

In addition, 3 arch theurg hit-squads composed of 5-6 men each attacked the remaining 1vp provs that were too far to reach with conventional armies. I scripted them to spam Thunderstrikes and handed out about 70 air gems to them as a whole for spell boosting. An astonishing amount of gems, but hey - it got the job done. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

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Go Ironhawk! I'm so happy I don't have to worry about getting my turns in anymore. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/biggrin.gif

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Please remember this game when people argue for a low threshold of victory point provinces to win. 40% was too low.

Very spectacular job though Ironhawk. I have got to hand it to you. Kudos.

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I suppose Xox has some point although I think Ironhawk managed to easily exceed any plausible VP threshold. I haven't counted exactly but you would have needed a 60-65% threshold to prevent this, of course, if things were that tight he might not have launched the attack. Expecting a player to control more than 40% of the game map before winning is too high, but, apparently, 40% of VP provinces does not correlate to 40% of the map. I assumed when I was laying out the game that VP provinces would be heavily defended and not likely to be at risk from a raid.

What really happened is Ironhawk looked closely at the victory conditions and realized he could satisfy them and no one else did this, either because they were too busy with warfighting to build the necessary raiding parties, or because they lacked resources or magic to build the necessary raiding parties, or because they just didn't see it. Simultaneously no one defended their VP provinces! If just one of the two 3-VP provinces, and a couple of 2-VPs, or both of the 3-VPs, had been castled, the attack would have been thwarted. Yet no one castled these extremely valuable provinces!

I suppose to some degree that was also my fault as the original war between Caelum and Oceania, back on, like, turn 4, was touched off due to a battle over building a castle on one of those 3-VP provinces. The other one - Pangaea's IIRC - wasn't contested and could have easily been castled. For shame.

I intentionally created a handful of multi-VP provinces to encourage combat. Which it did. I would never have attacked Oceania so early in the game over a 1-VP province. And he might not have come out of the water to get it. However this also made it possible for Ironhawk to win by raid.

Of course, one problem in dom3 is that castles cost a king's ransom. No one WANTS to build a castle on a VP province unless it's also a good economic province. I know the southeastern 3VP province was in crappy terrain. I don't remember about the northwestern one.

Cumulative VPs prevent this particular problem, but introduce their own issues.

When I laid out the game I specifically avoided making capitals VP provinces thinking capitals were valuable enough, and not requiring a potential winner to fight a zillion capital sieges would make the game more interesting.

There's also perhaps something of a "tragedy of the commons" going on. It might be possible for some players to realize the world's VPs are underdefended, but no one really wants to sound the alarm because they will be wanting to attack those VPs later.

So, in summary, I only partly agree with Xox. The victory conditions weren't perfect, although I think the flaw is with the nature and geography of the VPs rather than the number of them. However, the actions of the players are really what made this possible. No one defended their VP provinces, and one of the game's economically and magically strongest nations was left in peace to build a force capable of launching this attack.

I'll leave the server up for a day or two with turn generation off.

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Or having 3 victory points in one province is too much. If they are spread out more it may be better.

By the way Pangea, I was planning a big attack against you. I was about three turns away. It would have been interesting.

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At least I thwarted one of his attacks. But nice gaming everyone. In general I'm not satified with CB and prefer to play vanilla.

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An accurate assessment. Tho, personally I disagree with Xox: 40% of the VPs was more than sufficient for a victory condition based on the assumption of a traditional land-war. As sheap has pointed out, my victory was only possible because the 3vp and 2vp provinces - the most important provinces on the entire map - were left basically undefended against a seriously determined raid. If they were castled, I would have been forced to fight a traditional war and 40% of the VPs would have been quite enough. I completely understand why those provinces were uncastled tho. Even in my own empire, only one of my four VP provinces was castled - it just wasnt economically or militarily feasible to put castles on them all.

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Grats Ironhawk,

i wanted to write something about the unprotected VPs but i didn't do it. Mainly because i won't remind players to do it. I just wrote pms to players like oceania to build up a castle to the 3vp province very soon. After the capture of pangaeas 3vp province from a neutral attack together with the ai controlled other 3vp province it was self-evident that someone would try it.

Its like the other game frank trollman won. Its unbelieveable how players let thir VP provinces unprotected. Mabye there should be an auto fortress or something like that. Like i post on the start of the game i didn't want the 40% win chance because i feared exactly this.

Maybe 40% of provinces works better or if VPs than only 1 VP max and all the homeprovinces are auto-vp.

I would also agree to have a feature in the game like holding the thing for some turns before you get the VPs.

However this game was fun, congratulation ironhawk at least you wasn't able to conquer one of my points http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/smile.gif

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The game ended due to raiding forces on turn 43. I think that speaks for itself as to the victory conditions being too easy. I really don't see any arguments to refute what happened in our game and apparantly another game according to Calmon?

I mean one can say one thing or another theoretically., but i think whatever position you take on this we have seen the game itself show us what happens in practice.

How can you argue otherwise? Against what you just saw happen in the game?

None of which takes away from a brilliant and well executed plan Ironhawk.

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Assuming a traditional war, 40% of VPs is plenty. I actually would have set it lower, but was worried about winning by raids. Apparently I was not worried enough. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif My concept was that, yes, winning by raid would be possible, but only if you were able to build up such a strong raiding force, and the other nations weren't defending. I figured any nation powerful enough to seriously mount such an attempt would either 1) already be in a war, sapping their strength, and encouraging their enemies to defend, or 2) be opposed by a similarly powerful peaceful nation, which is more of an arms race situation. I think that would be fine also. But, everyone left Ironhawk in peace, while all the other strong nations got into wars. This is the most important part, more important than victory point ratios or anything like that. Even a minor war would have been enough to prevent this from happening. He was barely able to mount this operation as it was.

I think it boils down to: No reasonable VP percentage will prevent win-by-raid if the VPs are undefended and a player with the wherewithal is left alone to do it. Ironhawk captured enough VPs to meet a 60% threshold, which would have met even Calmon's high suggestion at game start. The question is only whether the defenses get built in time, because they will have to be built eventually.

I'll go along with calmon on one other point: home province VPs means lower VP threshold needed to win, and vice versa.

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I do not agre with Xox, from this game we will learn that VPs can't be left undefended. In next game a raid will be much harder.

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I don't think you should be able to see VP locations unless you have adjacent dominion.

I would also like to see a trial game where VPs were magic sites automatically found on entering a province http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif.

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For the record, I was rather unsatisfied with CB version used here as well, and infact some of the changes that were later redone in 1.00 ended up annoying me too. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

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So since this ended, any comments on the worthy heroes mod? Or did everyone go with the usual misfortune 2-3 ? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

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I played with luck 3 but only got 1 mictlan hero. The flying snake with astral/nature 4. Were there more heroes for ME mictlan? Maybe not in the version we start the game.

The flying snake was good enough. It has the same magic like my recruitable snakes but 1 better and i could shapeshift him in human to use some hand slots.

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Well said - I concur. I think if another MP game is done with VPs the host should state for any new players that it is imperative that VPs be castled, without question. Lesson learned.

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I was happy with Worthy Heroes, it was great. I played with misfortune so I only got one hero (the sentient hydra) but I thought it was a very good unit and was excited to have gotten it. If I was in a game with Worthy Heroes again, I would definitely take Luck (since dom3+cb makes that a feasible choice) so that I could get more of the heroes.

Is it possible to increase the number of heroes available to a nation?

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I didn't get any heros http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif

but cb made dwarven hammers unrealistically expensive/rare. Dwarven smiths couldnt forge them, even with boots.

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Hammers should be no problem for dwarves, 1/4 have e4, or get them using boots. However, I assume you mean Ulmish smiths, which people repeatedly refer to as dwarves for reasons I can't fathom. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

While I don't intend to lower the cost of hammers (they are still a incredible deal if you can get them), I do plan to help Ulm's access to them by separating out the smiths 10% earth random from the astral/air/fire. With 10% of smiths getting e3 (and you should be pumping these like crazy anyway) you would have to be pretty unlucky to not be able to reach hammers via boots.

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I played with Luck 3 and, while I accidentally knocked myself out of the game before I could use them, I was really happy with the heroes I got. I think that with CB + Worthy Heroes luck is more valuable than order, because you can get heroes early on that can really help out. But, I have always been a fan of strong heroes.

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I played with luck 3 and got just the one wolf rider hero whihc still did not seem useful really.

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I thought that hammers were pretty steep too, yeah. I understand that they are a big savings when you start forging high level items... but it does make regular forging quite a bit tougher. Over the course of this game I built two hammers (my pretender happened to have E4) but later on I regretted it. All the earth gems that went into the second hammer was equipment I could not make for my SC.

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Due to emergence of official 3.06 game version I will now remove this old 3.04 based game. I will, of course, still have all the game files for posterity.

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Ironhawk, Folket,

Back to the 40% vp condition being in my opinion to easy and perfectly fine in your opinions.

On my side I point to the sudden, sort of trick move, end to our game and others using these low threshold victory conditions.

Your counter argument is that people should have built castles on the vp provinces right away,

The reality is that people don't build the castles on those provinces early on to the detriment of their regular buildup. Ironhawk even mentions the gamemaster should urge players to build early castles on their vps.

Sounds a little gamey doesn't it? The game victory conditions should naturally reflect a victor, someone with the dominant position, without playing to the victory conditions themselves. Hosts should not have to advise players to alter their gameplay to avoid certain victory condition pitfalls.

Folket says "from this game we will learn that VPs can't be left undefended. In next game a raid will be much harder."

Truth there, but you miss the next move down in this logic. If a certain number of players are aware of this tactic they will indeed sacrifice their normal objectives to fortify every vp province in their possesion, which may fall very nicely into the hands of those players who do NOT make the sacrifice and gain an advantage over them. As long as a good number of vp provinces are early fortified, the strategy is foiled, therby benefitting all players including those who do not make that sacrifice.

Another point is we have tried the low threshold victory condition game. It requires, at best, no choice stratagies to accomodate and specific host warnings to players.

Would it kill you to just crank up that threshold just a wee bit and see how that goes?

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Xox- The threshold isn't the problem either, I believe someone said that Ironhawk snagged 60% of the VP provinces...changing the threshold to anything reasonable wouldn't have prevented the win there.

How about a province-based victory? Or capital only-VPs, since they come with a free fortress (and are generally fairly well-defended)?

Also, astral nations seem to have way too much of an advantage if raiding VPs is a viable option. I know I couldn't have spared the cash to castle my two VP provs. I was on the ropes from TC attacking me, and the only reason I survived to begin with was because he staled a couple of times and let me pick his army off in chunks...losing 2000 gold worth of troops from my army to build forts wasn't a possibility if I wanted to stay in the game.

I haven't played with a province % victory myself (well, I'm in one now, but it just started), is there a good reason to use VPs instead of provinces? Granted raiding could still push someone the last few % they needed to secure a victory by provinces, and would be harder to stop, but on a large map it's going to be hard to get a huge swing out of it in a single turn...maybe upping the % to 50 or so so you get 40% of real control and then the 10 of raiding to make sure you have a real decisive winner...either way.

Just a thought.

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12 VPs was needed to win (40% from 30).

I'm not 100% sure but if i remember right ironhawk conquered 16 Vps.

To achieve 60% he would have need 18.

But as i said before the main problem wasn't the VPs to win. It was the nonexistent protection of the VPs to win.

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If you want to play so that the militarily/economically dominant nation is guaranteed the win, then the best thing to do is to just have no victory condition at all, and simply play until all the players agree that someone is the winner.

I find that these sorts of games often turn into a late game chore and in a big game can go 100+ turns. NewbieNuzzling just shut down after 77 turns without a genuine clear winner because no one wanted to play any more - and this was on a map that in the beginning was commonly derided as being too small. That is why I put VPs in this game: To give people something concrete to fight over. Encourage combat and make a real military route to victory something other than a long, drawn out reduction of all the other nations to rubble. I didn't expect both 3VP provinces and most of the 2VP provinces would still be almost totally undefended 40 turns into the game. But, that's just the way the game worked out.

Ironhawk did this with the cooperation of all the other players in the game, who left the second strongest nation (who was not far behind the strongest) in complete peace for the entire game to prepare for this. Obviously this could have been prevented. Castling the VP provinces is one way, but people, as a group, realizing that the possibility existed and arranging for some way of keeping Ironhawk from building up the strength. Or a community fund to castle the two 3VP provinces, making a raid impractical (arranging THAT is left as an exercise for the players...)

I do feel that it is the responsibility of the players to keep an eye out for what other players might be doing to try to win the game, and to use diplomacy or strength to prevent them from doing that. Calmon is the only player to admit to having even considered the possibility, but obviously he didn't really believe it (or at least, believe it was about to happen) or he would have been raising the alarm rather than sending quiet PMs to one other nation. But, beating an enemy with raids is hardly a new idea. The Germans almost won both world wars that way, and I used it to great effect vs. Ironhawk in a game of Starz!@# once...

Warnings from the host aren't needed. If we played this game over, exactly the same setup, I guarantee the ending would not be the same. Nobody is going to let this happen again. When research is at a level that makes this sort of thing possible, people have to be prepared, and next time they will be.

The specific way this game ended might have been unsatisfying. But I don't think it is a flaw in the game design. If we just wanted to build forces until they become unstoppable and have enemies do the same, we might as well play against the CPU. IMO, what happened in this game is one of the best parts of playing against other humans. I don't like games that devolve into "who can horde clams the most efficiently" or "who can pack the best bless into the fewest points" or whatever other minmax approach is most optimal. Multiple paths to victory is good!

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I like Micah's idea of changing the victory conditions to % of provinces rather than % of vp provinces. that sounds like it might work well.

Sheap I was in the newbienuzzling game and you are incorrect in saying it ended with no clear winner. Whollaberg clearly won as Vanheim. All players agreed with no dissension.

We could have gone on, but we decided to call it at that point.

I actually like the late game and am happy to play in those games if others wish to. But you are right in that some people do not like the massive army and complicated magics of the late game. But again, some of us , me included, do like the late game.

I think actually most people like the late game its just it will take an increasing chunk of time and if you are in several games and as pesky real life intrudes, inevitably it becomes to much for some people.

It comes from the game taking about 5 minutes to do a turn to 2 hours a turn as time goes on. Hosts need to properly scale the time limits for the turn as the game progresses. That newbienuzzling game never left a 24 hour host and that just became too much to keep up a still interesting game when it become obvious Whollaberg was probably going to win anyways. Two hours a day is too much for one game, every day. At that point it should have been on a 3 or even 4 day timer.

Just scale out the time limits as each game ages and that particular late game fatigue problem will be solved.

Lets hope we see a few province % victory condition games hosted and see how that works.

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I've nothing to do with this game, but decided to chime in on the interesting VP discusion.

Anyone tried the cumulative VP option? That sounds promising to me.

One issue that comes up for me sometimes on the regular VP thing is that i hate it when someone who is far away from me wins the game by taking VPs. It's a very unsatisfying game exeperience to suddenly lose a game without being beaten. Sounds like that is what happened here.

One thing i did in DomII that seemed to work was regular VP victory with crap tons of VPs such that one had to control a big chunk of territory to win. It worked well, but i only did it in 3 and 4 player games, and now in Dom3 VP provences have an extra dominion spreading effect that might complicate things.

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Congrats, Ironhawk. You've become quite the condender: you've won both of the large-scale games that I've played (you did win Artifacts, right?)

I'm up for a new one, if you'll let a hopeless scrub try again. I'm all for VP victory. Know what's important in the game, for it is just a game!

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Thanks Morkilus http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Technically, no, I did not win Artifacts since the game just kind of went into limbo after Arch quit. But given the direction the game was headed I do think it is safe to say that I would have eventually won.

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I would love cumulative vps if the threshold was a total percent. I know that sounds strange, but as an example:

Soneone could win if they got to 40% total cumulative vps.

I am kind of leery of total vps as a flat number winning, unless it was a big number. Maybe 40% of total vps after 100 turns. That might be worth a try.

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We had cumulative VPs in the Dawnstrike game, which Caelum played by Jurri won. Not a fan myself, the problem with someone far away winning with little you can do about it is still there.

Something to consider is also that VPs favor nations with Air or Astral magic. Magical travel is already extremely powerful, and made more so by the use VPs. Without it striking at VPs half the world away is much more difficult.

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Valid points about air and astral having an advantage over vp province games Tera,

But I think that may not be true in CUMULATIVE vp games. The raiding will not work. And if you can go across the world to take and HOLD vp provinces from the nations in that area for a considerable amount of time..... well then that is a win that makes sense.

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I don't think there's that big a difference. Timing the attack close to when the VPs as calculated is possible, and if there is castle there you'll have to siege it either way.

If VPs provinces are not fortified it really is no surprise when they are taken by a "surprise" attack.

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All we would need ot do is increase the number of VPs, and their wouldn't be a raid problem. If there was double the maount of VPs in the game (but still a 40% victory conditoin( Iron Hawk woudn't have been able to pull it off.

I am up for a new game, that uses the balance mod, preferably late age. Sheap are you up for hosting another one?

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I have the following comments about the balance mod. Through most of the game , as Man, I was fighting double bless Vanheim. For the most part I felt like it was fairly balanced, but it is possible Vanheim might have been two nerfed. Rasing the cost of the gods that are good for blessing, rasing the cost of the Vans, and reducing the cost of some troops for other nations, may have been too much.

As it was, since Vans troops are so expensive it took serveral turns before Vanheim was able to create enough troops to expand. By then I was already in the process of building my second castle , and way out incomed him. I was able to build enough forces to counter his Vans, and it was hard for Vanheim to both fight my troops and route out my bards. It was just one game though, and hard to tell how balanced it was. We both made mistakes which mad the war a lot longer then it should have been, and Vanheim may have been unlucky enough to have strong independents surrounding it.

But the war with Vanheim was a lot of fun. Things were deffinatly a lot more balanced then they were before.

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Darrel has a good point on the number of VP provinces. That, more than increasing the required percentage, is something I would go for.

I can host another game if desired. But, I probably won't play in it (regardless of victory conditions http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif )

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I'm up for it. There were some big battles that were about to take place before the game suddenly ended.