Province Defence Balance
 

Is it just me, or are the various nations PD horribly imbalanced. Like, worse than before. Lanka, for example, appears to have no PD units with a morale above 8. Likewise, somenations, such as Mictlan, get sacreds and other scary creatures. I know this has always been an issue, but i was wondering if I'm the only one who sees it as something of an issue, not so much because it alters nation balance, since most nations have more to them than PD, but just because it limits options for the nations with really poor PD. Any thoughts on this? Which nations have really awesome PD? Which can't use it for anything other than scout detection?

Re: Province Defence Balance
 

The PD is designed on purpose to not be balanced.

Jazzepi

Re: Province Defence Balance
 

If it limits options for certain races with bad PD I'm sure there are other options for those.

Re: Province Defence Balance
 

I think it's fine that there are some nations with PD that isn't very useful, but when you have PD that is downright awful, that's a different matter. In that case new players to the game are being punished for not knowing just how terrible it is and you are removing PD from the equation entirely, as well as weakening the AI, which likes to use PD quite extensively.

So there is some PD that I would like to see strengthened, though I'd be happy with this being done via a balance mod like CB, because if you're really interested in balanced play you should be using one anyway :]

Re: Province Defence Balance
 

There are some problems with PD, and while it is designed not to be balanced (or rather, to be balanced with the rest of the nation) I'm not sure all the imbalance is intentional.

The manual's mention of Jotunheim's excellent PD and KO's surprise that it is considered one of the weakest make me wonder if all of the other are planned.

Re: Province Defence Balance
 

They are not planned, they just are. If it felt good to add a couple of critters to a nation it was done. PD is not dealt to nations as a way to finetune balance. Some nations have the same PD as they did in Dom2, while some got new setups. If one nation has a powerful PD consider it a feature and a strength of that nation and vice versa. There are PD's that might fall into the category of puny, but that shouldn't be a problem. If your nation has weak PD, and is weak in every other way, ask your friendly neighbour to take your provinces build PD there and recieve all incomes from him http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

If you are fighting with the AI weak PD should not be a problem, just a predispositioning feature of the particular setup uyou run. Like handicapping tha AI or yourself.

If a particular nation has a strange PD it is of more urgent concern (like drowning uw PD).

Re: Province Defence Balance
 

Like so many other balance complaints, keep it in mind that the balance here is not "chess game" balance but more of a "rock-paper-scissors" balance.

Since there is no effort to make each nation balance to each other nation, grading the balance needs to take into account ALL of the features of a nation. PD is one of those features. Where one nation is weak in magic, another weak in armor, another in support, etc etc then the fact that a nation is strong or weak in PD becomes another thing to consider when you choose a nation which best matches your mode of play (or makes up for your lackings).

You know what the standard response on developer forums is..
Dont think of it as a bug. Think of it as a feature http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Province Defence Balance
 

As an aside, MA Agartha's PD looks fairly weak, at least compared to a real army. But, 5 points can hold off three simultaneous Call of the Winds (10 to 63). I haven't found a situation where I've found a lot Agarthan PD useful (what, Pale One Soldiers? Bah. Only useful in a cave province or utter darkness, otherwise, total junk), but I've discovered even a little pd can be very effective sometimes, as not all raid-summon spells have enough strength to penetrate.

Re: Province Defence Balance
 

Anyone run any tests to see if a PD of 10 for any nations CANNOT hold up to a single cast of hawks or wolves or arouse hunger (generally weak spell anyway)?

Would be interesting to see stats (and a huge pain in the butt to implement) on PD of 1-10 vs falcons, wolves, undead, mad priest(?) for all nations in all ages. Ideally multiple repetitions as long as I'm asking for the impossible.

The final ranking would be nice, but more beneficial would be to see any that fail consistently at high numbers vs those that succeed consistently even at low numbers.

While a feature of the race, its still nice to know how useful it is - especially vs. remote attack spells which are somewhat consistent.

Re: Province Defence Balance
 

I beat a call of the winds with a single point of EA Abysia PD.

Jazzepi