Re: The next patch
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Who is saying anthing about passive play? Water gems are not particularly useful for expansion, or attacking your enemy until the late game. You can always save those pearls that you get from sites to use for your defense, and only use those generated by clams to fuel more clams, and experience no effective reduction in magical power over the person who is not making clams. It adds a few turns to the time to 100 clams, but who says that you blindly go for 100 clams, and ignore your other needs? Even an astral income of 50 per turn from items is ridiculously large.

Re: The next patch
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Greame: The income from one captured province will indeed linearly increase your money. The thing is that the gold you recieve from this province will in turn allow you to field bigger armies that will allow you to increase your speed of expansion, which will allow you to recruit even bigger armies etc. Thus making expansion by conquest a geometric growth as well. This is then somewhat hampered by upkeep and the need to replace losses in combat etc. But on the other hand the increased return on the investment from conquering a province is often faster than the 7-20 turn investment return from clam forging. A good province might well recompensate the losses of capturing it within the next turn or two.

I am not ruling out that clams are overpowered, just disputing that the dividends paid by clam hoarding is unique in having geometric growth compared to other forms of resource collection.

Stormbinder, just to clear things up, while I am responsible for some of what have went into dom 2, it is Johan Karlssson and Kristoffer (my brother) who are the principal creators and designers of dom 2.

Edit: Capturing provinces also potentionally denies them to other players. Possibly hemming their growth. Every clam, like every province, provides a linear increase in a resource, or potentionally several resources for a province, but since both clams and provinces can be used to acquire more of the same (provinces by allowing you to field more armies) they both alow for geometric growth, both snowballs both feed upon themselves. Clams however does not hit the roof in the way provinces does when territores come into short supply.

[ April 03, 2004, 20:03: Message edited by: johan osterman ]

Re: The next patch
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I'm not suggesting that they be removed entirely, or even have a hard cap placed on them. I'm just suggesting that perhaps something like horror marking the user (Say that the horrors are attracted to this source of magic), would be an effective limiter. With 5 people holding clams, you won't see too many horror attacks, and your losses will be small. With 50 holding clams, you will most likely see enough attacks by horrors to limit the growth potential.

Re: The next patch
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I'm not suggesting that they be removed entirely, or even have a hard cap placed on them. I'm just suggesting that perhaps something like horror marking the user (Say that the horrors are attracted to this source of magic), would be an effective limiter. With 5 people holding clams, you won't see too many horror attacks, and your losses will be small. With 50 holding clams, you will most likely see enough attacks by horrors to limit the growth potential. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I am not 100% sure if horror-marking clam hoarders would be enough to limit clam-abuse. It'll all depends on average life expectancy of standart clam's owner, and I don't have numbers to make a qualified guess.

Personally I think it would be better to make Clams cost 20 water gems and require con 6, and make Fever Fetishes cost 10 fire gems and 5 death (same con6). But if for some reason High Powers (developers) disagree with such changes, than at least making clam owners horror-marked would definetly be a step in right direction.

Re: The next patch
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Disease is a fire/nature effect (seven year fever), so that change doesn't make that much sense.

Re: The next patch
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana"><nod> Got it, thank you for clarification Johan.

I hope that KrissofferO or Johan Karlsson will check this thread again sooner or later and will post their opinion about this Clam-hoarding issue. I know that they both are very acive on this forum and extremely helpfull (more than any other game developer that I ever meet in fact, and this is not ***-kissing statement http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif ), as well as you Jason, so it'll probably happens sooner or later.


Also as I've said earlier I really would like to know if their design vision for the end of medium and long MP games included having 90-99% gem income coming from hundreds of Clams instead of magic sites. If it was by design, than IMHO we all should just drop this topic. If not (as I realy hope it is), than we may hope that they will fix it one way or another.


EDIT: Graeme - you are right of course, I meant to say 10 fire 5 nature. Also current ability for undead to hold fetishes without any bad side effects while producing firegems doesn't seem right to me, but this was mentioned by other people before.

[ April 04, 2004, 03:39: Message edited by: Stormbinder ]

Re: The next patch
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">If there's ever agreement that there's a problem that needs fixing here, then I think that this particular fix would be overkill.

For a start, the problem is really clams leading to massive astral production leading to Wishes ending the game. So Fever Fetishes probably don't need fixing at all.

And if clams were 5 water 5 nature, that would probably fix them as well, since water/nature mages are harder to come by than water-2 mages, and nature gems have other uses that would tempt the potential clam-hoarder.

Re: The next patch
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I think chain-casting Wishes is just one of the possible use of hoards of clams in the end-game. Granted, it may very well be the most effective current use of huge astral income from clams (that's why Zen killed Wishes in his mod as I understand it), but I don't think elimination or changes to Wishes would solve the real problem of clams abuse. It may lessen the effects of its most-obvious sympthom, but the problem would still be there, since wishes are not the only thing you can do with your huge astral income from clams.

[ April 04, 2004, 09:52: Message edited by: Stormbinder ]

Re: The next patch
 

Exponential clam growth strikes me as somewhat unlikely, because that requires a corresponding exponential growth in the number of water mages, and that's difficult to do unless you have an absolutely incredible amount of water gems coming in for Sea King's Court and can also deal with the exponentially growing maintenance cost. Not to mention that every mage forging clams is a mage that could be doing research or leading troops or so forth.

Re: The next patch
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">If all you want is 100 clams, then you'll never need more than between 5-10 water 1 mages to make them once you can build water bracelets.