[PvK]

Originally posted by Leif_-:

quote:

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Originally posted by Blitz:
I'd have to disagree. Idealy the game should have perfect balance. It's never going to happen, in any game... but there are few advantages to having dominant themes and pretenders, as imbalances hurt diversity.

I don't see why. A game with 17 default themes that are perfectly (or close enough to perfect for government work) balanced and then has 17 less well balanced themes, is still more diverse than a game that only has 17 default themes that are perfectly balanced - as long as none of the unbalanced themes are better than the default ones.

Not all play is knife-edge competitive play, so I don't see why all themes must be a real option for that kind of play. So what if you can't expect to win with a certain theme in an intense multi-player game? Winning isn't all there is to having fun, after all.

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Certainly. One of the reasons I like gaming and am bored by sports is that there are more lifelike situations involved. The real world isn't fair, and real situations are almost never "two opposed forces have perfectly fair starting conditions, and are competing for the same goal" (except in sports - yawn), but real situations still have plenty of ways to turn them around, and real situations tend to be more interesting and compelling (to me) than artificially "balanced" ones.

Similarly, one of the many reasons I like Dominions II is that it offers so many different possible approaches to play (even to play that is constrained by playing strictly competetively). Discussions of balance are thankfully made fairly irrelevant because each nation and play style and magic path and map etc. is so different that it's more about finding good approaches for new situations, than trying to break it down into a generic contest of "what is best".

PvK

[ June 23, 2004, 19:28: Message edited by: PvK ]