[Pickles]

Mark the Merciful said:

"1. There will always be a best tool for a particular job. The only way that can not be true is if all the tools are the same! Let's not kill the diversity that gives Dominions its unique flavour."

This seems to be self contradictory. If people always pick the ghost king there is no diversity. And arguably there are at least 17 jobs in dominions being pretenders for the different nations. So it would be nice if they used different chassis. (not that I have seen that many Ghost kings so I am not sure it needs tweaking. It is I think the best in a particular role - high level rainbow but then something has to be as Mark says.)

"2. (snip tweaking) Such a process, if it had any chance of working, would require repeated, controlled testing, with detailed quantitative analysis of results. Any volunteers? "

Actually there are a bunch of people blitz testing the pretender mods it seems. I expect they will get more testing than many of the original chassis will have (he speculated wildly)

"3. There's a distinct lack of argument based on evidence in these discussions. Does anybody even have numbers for how many games have been played and which nations have won them? How can we sensibly discuss play balance without that?"

The game is more about the journey than the destination. If the same familiar faces keep coming up in every game it gets boring it does not matter who wins (which will ultimately depend as much if not more on diplomacy)

"4. Generally "problems" or "broken tactics" are discussed as though they happen in isolation from the rest of the game, or in the face of purely passive opponents. Yes it's true that life-draining weapons are widely used; but anyone who unthinkingly uses them all the time is going to see their SCs killed by C'tis, Ermor, Pangaea CW or anyone else who has access to death magic (to name only one counter option)."

The situation is that there are undead & constructs and there is everything else. I have fought more undead than anything it feels like but even against them the life draining weapons are not dramatically worse than the other choices for bashing hordes of rubbish. The berserk from the hellsword can even be useful. There are better choices of course but that still only gives two different strategic situations in one of which life draining weapons are the best by far.

"5. So just because it's popular, doesn't make it over-powered."

This is true and is why I prefer buffing to nerfing as it seems less like stitching someome up.

It should mean that good counter strategies come out too as lots of people will play against these popular races/strats. Do we see that?

"But lets leave the vanilla game alone. There are enough bugs and needed UI improvement for the devs to work on, should they be feeling generous enough to do so, without constant demands for nerfs to this and that "broken" feature. And should there be really be some sort of balance problem, let's see someone actually collect some evidence and present it to the community and the devs before they start the traditional wailing."

This is not a whiny thread.

The basic game is not going to change.

If it were my solution to too much sub par stuff would be to cut out the 75% of the stuff that is and then add it back under controlled circumstances a bit at a time as it was tested. Then the devs would only have to worry about 1/4 as much content and could do a good job on those failing aspects. I still think less is more.

The game is far too small time to have proper deep testing such as warcraft etc will get so we willl be stuck with impressionistic views. But that applies to what we already have - to assume it is best because it is like this now is just knee jerk reactionary.

Pickles

(apologies to the thousands of playtesters out there!)