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Enough whining!
Recently, there has been a deluge of 'Balance' whining. It seems that some
people feel that they should be able to win the game by playing the way they feel is right. Instead of trying to figure out counters to whatever their last opponent used to humiliate them, they whine and moan in order to 'balance' the game, which, in their opinion, should be done by taking features out. They left a huge army in the open, and they did not insure that it can rout or kill a mage squad before the battlefield spells do their magic? Let us castrate Wrathful Skies, Flame Storm, Astral Tempest, Fetid Vapors, etc! Their favorite elite army, or worse yet, their pet supercombatant got bogged down in lifeless battlefield summons? Let us cripple the Raise Skeletons/Drain Life combo, or make False Horror prohibitively expensive to cast! A specifically equiped supercombatant wiped out the pride and hope of their empire? Let us nerf the protection items, lifedraining weapons, or buffs that made it possible! They used their pretender in a way that left him unprotected in the magic phase, and he got taken out by a teleporting task force tailored to kill him? Let us introduce teleport sickness which makes magic ambush unviable! They never invested in any gem generating items, allowed their hoarding opponents to reach turn 120 unmolested, and were obliterated by remote spells and highest level summons? Let us give idiotically high path requirements to clams, fetishes, and blood stones! Their besieging army got hit by artillery spells, decimated by Ghost riders, and ultimately wiped out by defenders who teleported inside the castle? Let us make sure that castles cannot, Gods forbid, be used to hinder an opponent's advance! They need the great scales, they need expensive high administration castles, they need rainbow pretenders, they need powerful national troops, but they sure as Hell don't want to allow their opponents to gain advantages from depriving themselves of the above. They had no scouts to warn them that their opponent was massing devils or vampires, and were completely unprepared to deal with them. They left their rear unprotected, and a stealthy army wiped their temples. They tailored their nation for early strength but where hopelessly outclassed in the end game. They aimed for late game power, but were wiped out by a supercombatant pretender before they got their second castle up. They did not bother with answering diplomatic overtures, and got mobbed by all they neighbors. They, they, they... And they sure as Hell will never learn. Instead, they will do their best to cripple Dominions II by removing options or making them irrelevant, until the game consists of building as many heavy infantries as one can, making a big block of them and setting them on 'Attack closest'. Oh, and if any of them whiners think that they are anything but poor, lazy players, I dare them to come forward with their set of moronic house rules and I will still smear their *** all over the map, one on one. Of course, they won't mind me picking my race first, not with their perfectly balanced rules, will they? ------------- By the way, I do not claim Dominions II is perfectly balanced. Personally I think that Zen's Pretender mod is awesome, that the scales mod is shaping up very well, and that the magic mod will eventually be well tuned. But note that instead of making sure that nothing works well, he just tries to give everything a chance to shine or at least be useful. |
Re: Enough whining!
that was funny
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Re: Enough whining!
While your tone is a little harsh, I can understand your frustration. I'd much rather play the game that exists than complain about how it should be. If some particular tactic or combination of spells is very effective, use that knowledge to your advantage.
Note that the settings of the game can have a big impact on how it plays out - easy magic/many sites/rich world is a very different beast than difficult magic/no sites/poor world. I like to change up the settings quite a bit from game-to-game just to keep things interesting. |
Re: Enough whining!
Whining about whining is still whining, you know. I don't mind if people express their opinions on gameplay; in fact I rather enjoy it, why else would I peruse this forum? I'm sure many have found helpful suggestions to enhance their enjoyment of the game on the forum, and I'd be surprised if nobody has found the various 'balance'-mods pleasurable. Thus I maintain that the threads for suggested tweaks serve a purpose, and as such are indeed desirable content for a forum such as this.
If your worry is that the game devolves into something you do not enjoy, nobody is forcing you to pay any attention to the mods and special houserules people use to derive more pleasure from the game. Indeed, you can ignore 'official' patches or mods, too, should their content be not to your liking. If the problem is the perceived whininess in the tone, I'd suggest either taking it like a man or discussing it privately with persons in question. In any case, it hardly is a matter that is proper for a board such as this. Lastly, if you just wanted to vent your frustration, I'm sure there are more suitable ways to do it. It hardly is polite or productive to do so on a public forum, in my opinion. |
Re: Enough whining!
I enjoyed the starting post by Tuidjy. Especially this statement:
They never invested in any gem generating items, allowed their hoarding opponents to reach turn 120 unmolested, and were obliterated by remote spells and highest level summons? Let us give idiotically high path requirements to clams, fetishes, and blood stones! Boron is known to be an extreme hoarder but yet NONE of his neighbors ever attack him. But then people will complain saying they need to nerf clams. It is like saying nerf Ermor because you decided to ally with him but are mad that his dominion went into your lands ruining it. |
Re: Enough whining!
Yeah good post Tuidjy .
Continuous "balancing" which is nerfing normally only ruins even the best game . If ppl want a who has the bigger block game they should play Aow 2 SM or Heroes 4 and not Dominions . Hopefully Illwinter remains strong enough to not listen to the whiners anymore . I already fear though that irreperable damage was done as shown with the ocenia mod where clams cost 3w 1n . If that is how dom 3 will look then goodnight http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/mad.gif |
Re: Enough whining!
Awww... poor wibble boron afwaid of wosing his cwams? My heart bleeds. The people who whine about getting their favorite strategies nerfed are no better than those proposing the nerfing... Besides, the forums wouldnt be half as lively or interesting. Good, healthy debates are always fun.
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Re: Enough whining!
That some strategies are better than others is a given. But when something is agreed on by veteran players as a must or unusable, then it can limit the potential of the game. While some of this may be due 'jumping on the bandwagon', there are many options that would be very hard to argue as viable options. Some people are implying that balancing means reducing dominion's complexity. IMO, quite the opposite is true, more usable options means more complexity.
Take as an example treelords, few would argue that they are equal to the value of a fire king (let alone an air queen). Would the game be harmed by making them better? |
Re: Enough whining!
Actually, I rather liked the idea of changing the paths of clams. Not to 2W1N, but to 1W1S http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif Same amount of total gems, but making them diminishes your stock of pearls just like the fever fetish, but that's just my opinion http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif
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Re: Enough whining!
Not just like a fever fetish; to cascade fever fetishes, you have a 25-turn break-even (ignoring such costs as a ring of Regeneration to maintain your scouts (or the scout's maintenence costs), or summoning black servants to carry them without penalty) via alchemy - 25 Fire -> 10 Astral, 5 Fire -> 5 Nature, 5 Fire; with clams as they stand, it's a 20 turn break-even: 20 Astral -> 10 Water; 5 Water, 5 Astral would reduce the break-even time to 15 turns - 15 Astral -> 5 Water, 5 Astral, and thus increase it's attractiveness.
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Re: Enough whining!
I have to say that this post (on the top) is actually an arguement FOR nerfing hoard items.
You specifically say that you HAVE to have hoard items to win, and shouldnt complain if you are beaten because you didn't use any. This means, that in order to win the game, you must use hoard items, which makes one general strategy a no-brainer and ruins the fun by forcing you into using a specific strategy. |
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P.S. actually I hope this discussion about WS won't end in a discussion like we had with the WQ, I didn't find it funny. |
Re: Enough whining!
I would agree with Tuidjy -- except that I think he is building up a straw-man. Against whom are you directing your polemic? Has anyone here been whining?
I know that I started a post about balance and Wrathful Skies. This is me quoting me: Quote:
I didnt feel there was much whining involved in that thread there. In fact, if there has been any "whining", I have felt it come from persons who feel that their own personal playstyle will be endangered ("leave my clams alone!"). Constructive talk in a non-whining tone is good. Threats and whining is not so good. But have many people here really been whining? |
Re: Enough whining!
This is an excellent thread. I love whining about whining!
Of course, it is impossible to balance a game as complex as Dominions. I mean, Blizzard worked a long time and nerfed several pet things (like the muta rush) over the course of several years with a programming staff maybe 5 times that which Dominions has avaliable. Blizzard even spent nearly a full year with the expansion to introduce just 6 new units! And they had only 3 races and a few dozen units to balance. Even that proved darn hard to do. Balancing 17 races? Balancing 8 schools of magic with 10 levels each? Balancing hundreds of artifacts plus all those summons? No way! Forget it! So, there are several unbablanced things. It can only be expected. That is just the way it is. It would be interesting to make a list of things that people believe are overpowered or too inexpensive, and a list of things that are underpowered or cost too much. Like, for instance: Overpowered: Pythium, clams, false horrors, wraithful skies, astral and death magic, blood summons, life drain, Air Queens, devils, order, mad castling, ghost riders, and so forth. This is the stuff that top players do. Underpowered: T'ien Ch'i, Ulm, sea trolls, water magic, national troops in general, sloth, luck, far too many summons to list, and on and on. This is the stuff that good players avoid like the plague. Anybody else would have their own personal lists, of course. In fact, I would like to see a top player compile a list of all the artifacts that have been built in a game on about turn 70. That way, you can see what is thought best and which ones never get built. I like to see people talking about the balance issues. It makes for an interesting forum. And it also gives people an outlet for complaining, which is always needed. |
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...okay, the solution would be to be like everyone else and play order-misfortune. But I think it's boring, so if that makes me a poor player so be it... But I still think that deciding between good or bad events by averaging luck scale over all the owned provinces or something like that could be cool. |
Re: Enough whining!
I agree with Atul (and with Petar, obviously) that the presence of so many 'overpowered' tactics shows that Dominions II is both fun and balanced. Is it perfectly balanced? No, I am afraid.
Water magic is a poor relation, and Ulm and T'ien C'hi are hopeless. Wrathful skies, skeleton/horror spam, lifedraining weapons do channel late game army makeup into a pattern. Hoarding is a prerequisite for winning on any map bigger than a hundred provinces. All fortifications but the Watchtower and the Castle are overpriced. But as thinktank says, and contrary to what most complainers seem to want, the way to maintain a fun game is to provide counters, not to neuter the effective tactics. |
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The impression I've got lurking around here is that there is at least a vocal click of people dead sure that the only worthy set of scales seems to be something like order3 sloth3 temp(nation_preference) death1/2 misfortune2 magic2/3 and all the points to a jacked up pretender. Maybe a no-brainer choice for a top munchkin... but as a role-player I must say: Bo-ring. If I want to min-max I go play D&D. :p Okay, to each their own, maybe I've just been lucky in my MPs so that a good performance has been possible with sub-optimal (fun/experimental) choices. Of course, the best would be if the different scale/nation/pretender options would be equally viable even to powerplayers, but... well, Dom3 probably improves some in this regard too, we'll see. |
Re: Enough whining!
I wonder whether a pseudo-market feedback mechanism for prices might be good for beta testing. The idea is that the beta keeps track of how you spend your gold and gems and sends the info to Illwinter. After collecting data from many players and games, there would be a pattern of units, items, and spells that are used much more than average and those that are used much less than average. Then in the next beta version, the highly used things have higher prices and the rarely used things have lower prices. The new beta would announce the price adjustments, and the process would repeat until the desired distribution was achieved and prices were stable.
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Re: Enough whining!
It could be useful, but might need adjustement on availablity - a level 8 summonnable critter is going to be a lot less common than a level-1 summonnable critter, simply because you don't have access to the 8's until later in the game. If beta testers tend to play short games, reducing the cost of the summon might have no bearing on how often it's used, making it overpowered in longer games; contrawise, an early summon might have a price well out of proportion to it's effect, simply because it's available sooner. A unit from a rare site might be seldom used (it's rarely found) but be quite powerfull, and have it's cost crash because it's almost never found.
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Re: Enough whining!
You would compare within categories, naturally. Infantry vs. infantry, low level spell vs. low level spell, etc.
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Re: Enough whining!
I'm not sure it would work. There're too many "specialty" items, units and spells. For example, anit-Ermor strategy won't be useful against most of other nations, so anti-Ermor elements would get underpriced by the proposed method. Similar thing is likely happen to "underwater" tools. Certain items that counter certain strategies will suffer the same fate.
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Re: Enough whining!
How about if the price/gem cost (or even fatigue cost) fluctuation is an in-game effect? So if people start casting alot of wrathful skies, seasonal spirits, ghost riders, the cost starts going up in game. Or if certain spells or units remain unused, they become slightly cheaper. Sort of like how the mercenary system works. I expect it would be a lot of work for Illwinter to set the game up like that, however.
On the "whining" thing, I think the problem is that people mistake the means, namely "game balance", for the end, which is to improve the game. Game balance is never an end in itself, it should only be used if the result is to improve the game. Certain games even thrive on game imbalance, anyone else ever play the "Great Dalmuti" card game? If I make a suggestion concerning the game, it is because I think it would be an improvement, whether or not any "game balancing" is involved. If people disagree, I hope they can do so based on the relative merits of my idea, rather than dismissing it whilst making broad generalisations about the motives behind such ideas. My motives? I see a lot of games with annoying house rules, regarding castles, clams and the like. I understand people's concerns, but they tend to go too far, in my opinion, by banning things outright, and restricting gameplay. Like previous posters, I'd rather introduce more counters to effective tactics (part of this is making them more "counterable" in the first place, which I do not see as a "nerf"), as I think this will lead to a more interesting game by increasing the options available. An idea I had whilst I was thinking about this: how about changing the order of the Nation design system, so that national scales are the first thing chosen, and they influence the different pretender Gods that are available (and perhaps the powers of those Gods)? You would have the scales and all potential Gods on the same screen, so you could see the effect of switching the scales around. Unavailable Gods would be greyed out, selecting them would automatically switch scales to the appropriate level. Additionally, scale choice could have more influence on the rest of the nation choices. Perhaps a high production scale could provide a wider range of castles, or castles with improved stats. Cost of magical paths could be affected eg. cheaper death magic with death scale, cheaper fire with heat scale etc. Starting spells, spell availability and spell effectiveness could all be affected by scales eg. ghost riders could be available earlier for death nations, whilst being more expensive for those with growth scales. With these kinds of changes, a balance overhaul would be required. I could even see scale choices no longer costing points, if the benefits of the negative scales were matched sufficiently by those of the positive scales eg. drain scale would provide more significant magic resistance, a bonus to dispel, and perhaps a forging bonus (if you see a drain dominion as one that controls and tempers magical power, rather than banning it outright). This kind of system might provide a more varied selection of viable scale choices, but it would be a lot of work. I couldn't say for sure whether it would make the game "better" though, but it seemed interesting when I thought of it. |
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Re: Enough whining!
Hehe. It seems to me that what some people are referring to as whining is exactly what these boards are for. Discussing the game, debating whether certain features are balanced, proposing mods and house rules, etc. All that is well and good, and makes for interesting reading. I've proposed a few modifications that some might call nerfs myself, but its hardly the case that whenever somebody beats me with a tactic I call for a nerf to stop it. After all, I've been beaten in scores of ways, and only proposed nerfs for a couple of them http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif
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