Gem Producing Items
 

Ok, another noob guestion. I'm dabbling in creating gem producing items in a game. While it is true that I didn't specifically set my nation up to farm these items, I don't feel that I could have *substantially* increased the current production rate of 3 a turn. So, when I come across a post referencing gem production in several hundred range, I have to wonder how this is possible. Are these posts referencing a game that is 100+ turns along? and massive buildups on either side? or a mod? Otherwise, I can't see how this is possible with a normal nation. Anyone care to explain?

Thanks!

Re: Gem Producing Items
 

Generally speaking, it's easiest with Clams. Clams generate Astral Pearls, which for a 2-1 correspondence can be more of the gems used to make it. Someone better than me showed the slippery slope of Clam production, but here's a small analysis.

Say you start the game as Atlantis.

Turn 1:
Production: +5W
Make a Deep Seer.
EOT Gems: 5W
Turn 2:
Production: +5W
Make another Deep Seer.
EOT Gems: 10W
Turn 3:
Production: +5W
Make a third Deep Seer.
EOT Gems: 15W
Turn 4:
Production: +5W
Assuming you've hit Construction 2 by now, have 2 of your Deep Seers make Clams.
EOT Gems: 0W
Turn 5:
Production: +5W
Assign the 2 Clams to someone.
EOT Gems: 5W
Turn 6:
Production: +5W, +2S
Have a Deep Seer Forge a Clam.
EOT Gems: 2S
Turn 7:
Production: +5W, +2S
Assign the Clam to someone.
EOT Gems: 5W, 4S
Turn 8:
Production: +5W, +3S
Forge a Clam.
EOT Gems: 7S
Turn 9:
Production: +5W, +3S
Transmute your 10 pearls into 5 water gems, Forge a Clam, and assign your Clam to someone.
EOT Gems: 0
Turn 10:
Production: +5W, +4S
Assign your clam to someone.
EOT Gems: 5W,4S
Turn 11:
Production: +5W, +5S
Make a Clam.
EOT Gems: 9S
Turn 12:
Production: +5W, +5S
Assign your clam to someone, transmute 10 pearls to water gems, and forge another one.
EOT Gems: 4S
Turn 13:
Production: +5W, +6S
Assign your clam to someone, transmute 10 pearls to water gems, and forge another one.
EOT Gems: 0
Turn 14:
Production: +5W, +7S
Assign your clam to someone.
EOT Gems: 5W, 7S
Turn 15:
Production: +5W, +8S
Assign, forge.
EOT Gems: 15S
Turn 16:
Production: +5W, +9S
Assign, transmute, forge.
EOT Gems: 14S
Turn 17:
Production: +5W, +10S

At this point, you can forge a clam a turn. Soon, you'll be able to forge 2 a turn, and it snowballs even faster.

Note this assumes you find no sites to increase your gem income. If you do, you can transmute them to more water gems, and ramp up faster.

The other gem producers aren't so easy to exploit. The Fever Fetish diseases its owner, so basically you have to give it Undead to 'feed on'. OTOH, it does produce fire gems, which are needed in its construction. Transmuting 4:1 to get to Nature, though, is a killer.

Finally, the Blood Stone is rather hard-set, because you can't 'transmute' blood slaves.

Re: Gem Producing Items
 

Depends on the play style. Some hoard from the get go, others wait until mid game. As Scott described above, it can take a bit of time to really get rolling in gems. As he noted, if you have more gems coming in from other sources, you can get it going much faster.

Re: Gem Producing Items
 

Ok, I was wondering if it had to involve cyclical transmutes. Seems wasteful to me, at least in the short term. Doubtful I'd ever do the transmute part. Good use for excess water gems, though.

I imagine that you'd be using fragile units to hold all these items. I think it might be fun to catch a player doing this, and use a few choice spells against those units...before they pay off. :-)

Thanks!

Re: Gem Producing Items
 

Mostly you put them on stealthy troops (typically scouts or black servants). Some (all?) of the remote damage spells can kill them, if you can find where a bunch of them are.

Re: Gem Producing Items
 

Roi as astral from water gems is 10 turns, from transmuted astral 20 turns. There are very few things you can put those astral gems to get better returns, and very few other uses to use them for combat. While eary-game you might be weaker, enough people do hoarding that almost any game ends up with a hoarder winning. As the whole thing is one damned huge positive feedback loop, the earlier you start the better.

The most hardcore hoarders use pretty much all their gems until midgame for accelerating the hoarding machine, and do the fighting with just units bought with gold. Once the machine starts rolling, you get some dwarven hammers, etc, the returns are just huge.

Re: Gem Producing Items
 

Hopefully Dominions_3 will allow people hosting games to disable specific items and/or spells.
This way if some spell or item is unbalanced or bugged gamers will be able to disable it.

No more complaints about Ghost Riders being too powerful. No more complaints about hoarding clams... because gamers have the choice of only joining the games they feel are fair.

Re: Gem Producing Items
 

I like clams set at 2W1S costing 10W + 5S http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif It slows down hoarders, but kinda gives Atlantis the shaft. It's fine if no one wants to play Atlantis though.

Re: Gem Producing Items
 

So you are asking that client checks what mods host has enabled, and downloads them if you don't have same version of that mod?

Re: Gem Producing Items
 

Not necessarily.
If you view my UI summary I posted on the Wishlist thread, you can see that under the "Advanced Parameters" section in Game Setup there could easily be a way to make certain pre-flagged items, much like has already been suggested and hence summed up there by me for certain spells, more expensive. It requires only that the developers pre-flag certain game information (I had summed up the suggestions: Summon, Summon SC, etc.) as such, much like "Event Frequency" is currently adjustable in the current Dom2 game; in Game Creation, whoever sets up the game can decide whether factor X, Y or Z (e.g.: Spells flagged as Ritual Summons, or Unrest caused by Bloodhunting, or Gem Producing Items...) will be increased or decreased.

Re: Gem Producing Items
 

Many games allow the downloading of maps/mods from the host computer. This would be a more elegant solution to that problem.

Re: Gem Producing Items
 

This has nothing to do with MODS. Take a look at the HeroesIII map editor and you'll see those developers had spells, skills and items which could be disabled before the start of any game.
Or take a look at the advanced options for the creation of new games within AgeofWonders:ShadowMagic. Here the host can decide many options for how the game will be played.
BOTH of these done without any MODS.

Re: Gem Producing Items
 

I don't own Heroes III or AoW:SM.

What you ask, and much more, can be done with mods. Automating the process of downloading and enabling the mod would make using mods in multiplayer games much easier. Also, adding mod auto-managment would theoretically fix all spell and item cost and unit issues, and wouldn't need more and more things to be added to the game setup. Mod automatization would enable us to do more, with less work on Illwinter's side.

edited to be more understandable

Re: Gem Producing Items
 

Endoperez:

Yes, I suppose it would, but it is (or should be) actually easier to hard code the enable/disable and increase/decrease flags into the spell/item objects and do a simple interface (checkbox)where you set those flags to the appropriate values than to code a procedure that first runs a checklist of mods and the properties of each mod, then contacts a server or otehr client, downloads stuff and puts it in some folder (possibly overwriting something if different versions of same mod have same names and no internal versioning), then checks that and discards if the check comes up with some shortage, at which point the whole ridiculous thing has to run through again.

Do you understand the concepts of design? Any design in general, not just software design? If you need something done and you can do it two different ways to achieve the exact same effect, the simpler implementation is always better, because it requires less resources and is less error prone and less likely to break other things. Never mind being less work to do.

In this case, your idea of doing it via a mod download system has the following drawbacks:

• Requires a lot of routines that do not contribute anything toward the end goal itself (all the network resolution stuff)
• Is overly complex
• Greatly increases probability of errors being compounded and these compounded errors being propagated (in addition to the possibility of code bugs, the system relies on user-provided components that may or may not have been error-checked, and it propagates these, possibly overwriting other data).
• Requires more active agents in the setup phase, instead of just the host setting up the game and defining the parameters (this is another place where errors and compound errors can appear)
• May cause version conflicts (software versions, mod versions)

That's just off the top of my head, and I can barely code a program that calculates the distance from grid zero to a given point. I'm quite certain the professional software developers on the forum can easily come up with half a dozen more reasons for why the enable/disable or increase/decrease cost implementations via mod download are a bad idea.

Edi

Re: Gem Producing Items
 

No, I do not understand the concepts of design. Atleast, I have not studied it, I have next to no experience in designing and lots of experience in not following my own designs. I just suggest what I think is the best possible solution to the problem, and then wait to see if Illwinter reacts.

• The mod solution is overly complex to fix clams, but not overly complex to fix clams, ghost riders, wrathful skies, overpowered Caelum, false horror, freespawn spamming (vampire lords, contracts etc.)... Most big balance issues, castling excluded.
• The fact that users do not check if their mods work is just as bad as them not checking if the map they are using works. The difference is just in the size, and in the fact that mod can be corrected "on the fly" unlike maps. One could argue that modding tools are useless, because mods just "greatly increase probability of errors being compounded and these compounded errors being propagated".
• I don't understand why you bring version conflicts to this. The game doesn't check software (if that means Dominions) versions atm, and mods are marked with version number, so checking those conflicts should be as easy as checking Dominions versions.

The routines/agents/whatever problems are valid, and these mean lots more work for Illwinter, some more work for host and little time connected to the internet for those wanting to play a game using system.

I don't know if the idea is good enough to be added, but it surely is good enough to be suggested.

P.S. I couldn't get list to work on preview, but it shows right after posting. Is this normal?

Re: Gem Producing Items
 

Why it may be more complicated to automate mod downloading, I think Endoperez has a very good point here.

However, for PBEM you can't really enforce mod downloading. But it would be helpful to have a check that the .2h files you are using were built using the same set of mods.

Re: Gem Producing Items
 

Whew, no time with computer for two days. School. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif

But now, to business:

What about a confirmation box "You need to enable mod XYZ. Do you want to enable it? [YES] [NO]", and if [YES] is clicked but the mod is not found or it is different version than the host's, new box appears. "You don't have version 1.23 of the mod XYZ, do you want to download it from the host? [YES] [NO]". Of course, host could disable the option of downloading that mod.