[alexti]

Zen, it's good you've decided to do this again for Dom3. I greatly appreciated your CB work for Dom2.

I have feeling that in Dom3 there're too many design points (due to dormant option and no need to spend points on fortresses). The indication is that I often find that I have spare points (meaning that I already got everything I need to get the nation working but I still have plenty of points left) that I spend on some minor improvements (like taking awake pretender, just for extra research and earlier searching) or couple of growth scales (extra gold won't hurt even though I'd have enough). That is in contrast with Dom2, where the pretender setup was usually full of difficult compromises. I think there're several contributing factors:
1) There's more money in the world, so it's easier to come up with required amount despite worse scales;
2) Magic scale seems somewhat weaker. +1 research for 80 points? Together with fewer cheap mages Magic+3 seems to offer little advantage over Magic+1;
3) Uber pretenders were somewhat weakened and I think that makes fewer reasons to invest a lot of points into powerful multi-path SC.

This issue is also somewhat related with the bless issues on small (and not-so-small maps).