[Stormbinder]

Originally posted by johan osterman:

quote:

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Originally posted by Stormbinder:

... But because they don't have "snowball" effect ("feeding on itself" in your own terms), which is the main attribute of geometric progression, they are not abusive, but instead are just good valid strategies that can be countered with others equaly good ones - and that's what this game is about after all.

Any effective investment of resources will have what you term a snowball effect. If you poor gems into summons these summons will allow you to conquer more provinces which will lead you to gain more available searchable provinces as well as income and resources, which in turn will allow you to earn more and summon more to conquer more which will let you ... etc.

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Thank you for reply Johan, I really appreciate it.


Certanly, I agree with your statement. After all
in any strategic game that I can think about once you begin to win territory/resourses from your opponent(s) and get stronger each new conquest is theoretically easer for you because now you have all your old resourses plus resourses of newly conquered
territory/country/province/colony/whatever. And it doesn't matter that much what tactic you are using while doing this because the result still the same.


But what I strongly feel makes clam-hoarding special case is the speed with witch it is happening. Once you have it really going you can double your gem investments very quickly (every 5-8 turns, depending on avaliablity of hammers/forge sites/mages). Look at Peter's two tables below for example, which describe the evolution of just _5_ astral gems invested into clams in the begining of the game. And of course in real game you often invest other water/astral gems into clams once you get additional income from searching your provinces, so it is even faster.


So the speed with wich the "snowball" grows once it gets rolling is much faster(mainly because it is geometrical progression) than with regular linear progression when you conquer enemy provinces. Also when you conquer province in your example you often suffer losses - and that slows your expansion. When you are siting in your castles mass-forging clams there are no losses, other than a bit of lost reseach, since it's just pure mathematic and doubling your investment every N turns.


But there is another factor that you and Kristofer are the only people quilified to comment about.

Please tell me this - when you designed this fantastic game, with all these different unique magic sites, as well as high-level spells for all magic schools - was it you intention that the Magic (gems) that power these spells would come mostly from these uniques sites of yours, from the territory that your Pretender God controls, perhaps with small addition of item-generated gems? Or your vision for the end-game was that by the end of medium and long games anywhere from 90-99% of your magic gems would be coming from hundreds and hundreds of clams siting in your magical treaury? Because as of now, as even opponents of clam-changes agree on this thread, more often than not it is 2nd situation by the end of many of long MP games.

I am sorry, I just can't help but feel that this is not the way it was intended to be by you, designers, since massive clam hoarding that person currently has to do to stay competitive against other clam-hoarders in long games feels so... boring.


Now if you tell me that everything is working the way it was intended in regards of Clams than I'll just shut up and will not bring this topic again on this Boards, I swear!

[ April 03, 2004, 01:52: Message edited by: Stormbinder ]