[Keir Maxwell]

Originally posted by Zen:
Edit: Where is the love for taking the time to write it out!?

Thanks Zen. I'm in full on child care part of the week so getting back to Posts becomes slower. I do appreciate your effort.

re extra design points.

The point was relative to Dom1.

In Dom1 most races I designed had Order3/Luck1. I tried luck0 but never had the courage to play it in mutli-player due to concern over the horrific events you can get early in tests.

As an aside I think Johan underestimates the impact of losing population/gold early as the extra early gold is often the difference between expanding fast enough or going under. My experiance of MP suggests that early events (good or bad) have hugely disproportionate impact.

In Dom2 most races I design have order3/misfortune3. Thats 160 extra design ponts over Dom1 and that, in my estimation, is what makes the possibility of a wide range of bless effect races worth trying. Without the points only the most extreme temp races have enough points for the high level starting magic. Its not a question of quantative differrence in race power, as you suggest Jasper, but qualitiative - thats how the bless effects work. Its the level 9 ones the tend to matke the race desing viable or not. Got enough for the effects you need to make the troop type work - yay. Not enough and the race is simply lame. To me the difference in power between a tight race and a bitsa is not 10-20-30% but more like 50-150+% because of the way low casualty expansion feeds upon itself.

I'm sorry for not providing lots of concrete examples on this Jasper but it would take alot of work to do. All I can say is that the races I am trying to make work are very hard to get enough points for to make viable. To me this seems obvious but its clear its not for people who have approached things differently. I don't know what more I can say.

I realise that my initial post was just too flippent and not obvious enough in its humour. The whole post was supposed to be funny but obviously some people didn't get it - maybe you have to be spending alot of time around young kids to appreciate the joke. In future I will be more restrained.

I really do believe that a formalistic approach to balence which says that every feature should be individualy balenced with every other feature is just plain wrong. Its the overall balence and the possibilities this produces I'm concerned about and not wether certain options are necessary to get a good race. Does it really matter that much if most players take order 3 misfortune 3? I think the extra points from this creates ideas I don't think this strangles ideas. I do think, and have posted elsewhere, that cutting back the worst events is a good idea so I'm not adverse to any change and I am in favour of making turmoil/luck races viable. Its just that some of the changes recommmended would have disastrous implication on the overall balence.

Now I must withdraw from this discussion as, as you may have noticed, I'm not in the frame of mind to enjoy it, and why else would I want to post for? Doing some more work on my Mictlan design is a much better prospect.

Cheers

Keir