Quote:
Kristoffer O said:
Would anyone prefer formulas that are complex enough not to be deciphered and broken down into statistics?
The current morale system for example. [...] Is this good or is it just fustrating?
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I guess that I have not really answered this question in my previous post as I liked to, so please let me elaborate my view on this topic a little further by telling a little example story:
In an MP game on Karan, around turn 6?, almost all my forces had been annhilated by a vicious global alliance of my enemies, but all I was needing for ascension where two more victory points. My own victory points where secured by currently unsieged wizard towers, with no adjacent enemy forces and my enemies did not possess any substantial flying armies (thus giving me three turns time). I had just a few scattered provinces, no money, but plenty of gems, some items, two air queens, that astral ice devil (three IDs total), almost no ordinary troops and only about seven seraphs left (Yep, I just had won a couple of pyrrhic victories). I had scrying spells active on all victory points (which were all defended by fortresses) and thus knew exactly what awaited me there. There were indeed two easy ones left (Fools!). Thus
I pulled out my calculater and determined the total sieging strength of my remaining teleportable forces. Thanks to that I could divide them up accordingly, distribute the gate cleavers, sieging horns, strength increasing items and set them all to cloud-trapeze/teleport to the other end of Karan. Thanks to the exact arcane reconnaissance, I knew that instead of cloud trapezing I had to cast "call of the winds" to gain enough sieging strength (the hawks are weak, but they are flying (siege+1) and I knew exactly how many would appear). It was close, but both sieges immediately broke down the walls of the defenders (Why couldnt they teleport right inside the castle anyway?).
So the points of my little story are:
- It is good that the exact sieging mechanics are available, since otherwise I would just have run boring time-consuming tests to determine it - after all, my ascension depended on it! Hence all mechanics should be revealed!
- It is bad that this information is not easily available within the game itself: My friends do not read this forum, so I was using knowledge not available to them (like the exact sieging power of a "call of the winds" spell), so I felt a bit like cheating. Hence all information on game mechanics should be readily available from the game or its manual! It should not tell me to use "Call of the Winds" for sieging, but once I have that quite simple idea, the game should provide the necessary information (i.e. average number of summoned units and their strength). (Of course I had sent my friends Zen's quick references beforehand to address such issues.)
- I did not like it that I used a calculator (pen and paper) and that I knew in advance that I was automatically going to succeed. However, making the sieging mechanism complex somehow and adding random elements (e.g. like adding an unscoutable, terrain-biased +2d6(oe) to defense-point at castle creation time) does not solve this problem in my view, since the outcome of a siege is still a simple yes/no answer and I can still be on the safe side by preparing for the worst case. Hence I can again run repeated tests to obtain some simple percentage values. Thus things that are simple should be kept simple, after all it was me had prepared this tactical move (by item forging, arcane scrying, thinink of long distance summons, etc.)
(Nevertheless, adding a small random element like that random bonus depicted above might add some nice tension in those cases where availables resource are between min and max. Its usually nice if one is sometimes forced to take a small gamble.)
So my simple answer to Kristoffer's questions is
yes, but it is only good since moral is naturally a complex thing without an easy yes/no answer, unlike sieging for example.
(BTW, in the end my victory has not been as easy as one might guess, thanks to an enemy pretender being able to teleport a whole army of sacred marignonian knights...
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