[Stormbinder]

Originally posted by Zen:


A good example of this is: Stormbinder's Mirror Image issue. He brought a bit of information that he felt was wrong, enough to spark interest for others to see if it was or was not working as he said it. It doesn't have to be huge mathmatical analysis but it has to be reasoned and tested against more than one or even a few circumstance/stimulus.

Thank you Zen. I am just doing what I can since I love this game a lot and would like to do whatever little I can do to help it become even better. I generally agree with what you have said in your post about purpose of the board, rants, etc.

But I would like to point out one thing though - you have to keep in mind that the Mirror Image issue that I've posted about was a bug, pure and simple. Anybody can do (and did) a quick testing to confirm or deny it.


With "mad castling" it's much more complicated since the issue here is not a bug. Proponents of this "strategy" can (correctly) agrue that they are not using any bugs and therefore have every right to do it. The thing is, however, that the large majority of people (even some of those who defend the right of "mad castling" ) agree that cheap castles/temples in every province makes game extremely boring and mindbogling for everybody involved(except mad castler of course). It also give mad castler (if he knows what he is doing and designed and play to the strength of his tactic) large advantage over not-madcastler.


Therefore it forces everybody, if he doesn't want to be in strong disadvantage in competitive MP with madcastler(s) present, to adopt the same tactic, which is in addition to being cheezy and mindbogling for most people, significantly deminish the diversity of this game (and this is one of the worst thing here in my opinion, since this game is all about different tactics and choices. Where to build castles (as well as which castle type to choose) is supposed to be very importent choice in this game, where you are choosing location based upon the local resourses, magic sites, indep troops available in the province, the resourses of neigborhood provinces, current political situation, your nation overall strategy, other neigboring castles that can provide assistance to new one in case of war, et cetera....

With "mad castling" all these choices are completely irrelevent since you are building castles everywhere, and choose only one of 2(sometimes 3) cheap 300gp castles in the begining.


Now returning to the question of proof. I agree that it is always good to have strong and mathematical evidence to back any claims such as this one. But what kind of evidence you could reasonable expect to have to prove that "mad castling" is cheesy, boring and unbalancing?

We have one notorious madcastler who is infamous for his use of this tactic - Norfleet. He uses the same cheesy and abusive tactic (where "mad castling is the main part of his strategy) it in each and every game of his and because of this win most of them.

You may argue that he wins not because of "madcastling" and other exploits but because he is very good player. Fine. But the only way to prove or reject it is for him to play a game against competent opponents and win without using any of his standard exploits. He, however, strongly refuses to do it, claiming that he don't know how to play without mad castling. (such game was offered to him only yesterday by his friend Haterider). Depsite my personal feeling toward Norfleet for his lying and cheating in my Last game, I agreed to play the game against him just to settle this question and clear the issue of "madcastling". Norfleet, however, chickened out. He understand very well that once (if) he would be beaten in his first and only game, where he would _not_ be using his standarts exploits, the truth about his "strategies" would become crystal clear fo everybody. He just can't risk it.


There is another, although less strict way to get mathematical evidence that you are asking for. If I understand it correctly, yours, as well as Gendalf's positions is that any tactic, including Norfleet's "mad castling + VQ + clam hoarding" can be beaten with good counter tactic. Ideally, I would agree with you, that's exactly what I love about this game. In reality however ad in case with "mad castling", I strongly doubt it, and this was never proven. AhhhFresh sugested excactly the same game to Norfleet and yourslef some time ago. Norfleet indicated that he is not really interested in it. But even if he would play it and win, he could still claim that he won because of his skills, not because of his cheesy strategy. And you could always say (i am not saying that *you* will, I am speaking strictly not-personally here) that he had strong element of luck on his side, or weak neigbors who he could gobble quickly before meeting his stronger oppoentns, or dozens of other possible reasons.


Finally you may argue that this is not about 1 player, but about the strategy. Again, normally I would agree, but Norfleet, as we all know, is special case. He hangs on dom2 Boards and channels 24hours per day (literally), and my guess is that he participate in at least 50% of all MP games going around here. He even went as low as to sneak into other people game under an alias. Therefore unfortunately he can not be ingored, and more and more games are created with house rules to prohibit partly or wholy his standard exploits.


So here you have it - you have a situation which deals with arguably valid (meaning it doesn't exploit bugs) strategy. At the same time it is very hard to gather strict mathematical evidence that you are looking for, in line with "Mirror Image" issue that you mentioned, since the infamous godfather of this lame strategy is certanly not cooperating, and in fact doing everything he can that would obscure the public opinion on this matter. For example he claims that his "mad castling" strategy is "beatable", since according to him he won a game or two(using his standard mad castling of course )against people who tried to copycat his strategy from him! What kind of evidence is that?!?


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People asked here for the solution, not a problem. All right, here is the solution part for you:


Personally I think that an excellent solution to this whole mad castling issue is to make temples burnable just like labs - meaning special "build/destroy" order would need to be issued by enemy commanders, next turn after the province conquered.

Norfleet and his copycats constantly claim that they have no choice but to build castles everywhere, since this is the only thing that can defend their temples against raiders. (and for some reason they assume that you have to build temples in EVERY province in orde to play this game). Than they moan that PD is inadecuate, temples are so expensive, etc...

Fine. With temples requiring an order for the commander to be destroid, it ives you excellent protection against enemy raiders looking to destroy your temples. It's exactly the same the same as with paper castles in this regard - it gives you 1 additinal turn to counterattack.

The best of all is that such solution does not nerf anything, and is in line with already existing mechanism for labs. You want to have crappy castles and build them in every province? Fine, you can do it! You don't want to mad castle but want to use some other strategy? Fine, now you have the opportunity to do it and still protect your teritory against raiders, at least as far as temples concern. IMHO this change would not eliminate mad castling completely, but it would go very long way to resolve this issue.


P.S. BTW historically speaking a lot of medieval monasteries were VERY impressive fortresses, sometimes much better than the surrounding barons castles. So the reqiurement to spend 1 more turn to burn it to the ground for enemy commander makes a good sense from this perspective. Also as a totally separate and optional idea - instead on destroying enemy temple your prist can spend 1 turn "converting" rival's god temple into your own, puryfying it, etc. The price could be the same as building new temple - 200 gp, or a little bit more than that. That little tweak would give priests another little usefull role in the game.

[ May 28, 2004, 23:12: Message edited by: Stormbinder ]