[DrPraetorious]

The problem is that we are not in agreement that glamour nations are overpowered. You have asserted that they are, and I have disagreed, I will summarize:

a) It is fair for some nations to be stronger early on, and some nations stronger later.

b) It is fair for some tactics to be easier to use. This, I think, is where the "newbies play vanheim" argument has merit. I don't think glamour rushers are actually more likely to win, even in highly experienced hands, but the double bless strategy is accessible, so it allows new players to at least participate in big MP games, and have some measure of success. You may not like being axed by my little sister on turn 9 with her pretty magic horsies - but somebody is going to get eliminated early and you can at least take it like a man.

c) It is fair for people to be eliminated on turn 8, especially if they adopt a long term strategy. Taking a dormant pretender with good scales and strong diversifying magic should be a calculated risk, with significant risk of death before your god even reappears - vs. for example taking a great sage with a lot of early research or a supercombatant, either of which goes a long way towards repulsing a rusher.

d) It is fair to expect the other players to devote 100% of their effort to repulsing an attack from you, provided you devote 100% of your effort to attacking them. It is fair if strategies exist that will successfully kill your first neighbor 75% of the time, even under such a state of total war, provided that the rusher expects to suffer sufficient losses to allow other players to take advantage of their weakness, most of the time.

e) The game is meant to be balanced on medium sized maps. On postage stamp maps rushers have to be better, because otherwise they'd be weaker on larger maps.

f) It is fair that the game has a significant element of chance. Being next to a rusher position stinks - the only way to make it not-stink is to make all rush strategies worthless, because even when you repulse a rush, you probably suffer losses such that winning is a lot less likely.

There is a problem that I am willing to admit may exist: some nations may be unable to resist the glamour rush at all. It's all well and good to say "rock, paper, scissors" but no pairing of nations should be so unbalanced that you might as well give up - unless you pursued a long term strategy in which case you took your chances and it didn't work, sucks to be you.

If that is the case, those specific nations should be given new tools so that they have means of repulsing glamour rush - NOT a majority of the time (since then glamour rushing would become an unviable strategy) but a significant fraction of the time.

I think that the main game should be altered, if it is altered at all, with the same philosophy. Since it is possible for you to make a mod that nerfs glamour rushers - if this is what you want to do, do it. You can make a much more convincing argument for incorporating such a nerf into the main game if you're willing to take the ten minutes to script it yourself, and then post what you consider to be more balanced results, than if you just, to be blunt, whine about what vague changes someone else should be making. If you can make a "nerf" that leaves glamour rushing as a viable but not, to your mind, overwhelming strategy, great. If I agree with you that it doesn't unacceptably weaken glamour rushes in my games, I'll support including it in the main fork. If it doesn't get it, you'll have your mod and you can try and find opponents who agree with you and play against them.