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DrPraetorious said:
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.
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If you rephrase this as "It is for a nation to be either stronger than average early on or stronger later on" i'd sign it. This is one of the big problems with Van/Helheim though. They don't actually sacrificy late/midgame power for their rush power.
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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.
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As BigJmoney pointed out aptly, it is important that easy to use strategies don't get more powerful in the hands of a skilled user than hard to use strategies. Or to put it another way, ease of use and power of a strategy have to be proportional. Or else the skill of the players is far less important than dumb luck.
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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.
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Yes. As in all good games there is an element of risk vs. reward coupled with return on investment to modify the mere basics: stone/paper/scissors. With regard to rushs, the player taking a long-term strategy sacrifices early on survivability for an advantage later in the game. I.e. he risks being taken out very early for the reward of having a better pretender design for mid/late game. Again, it is very important for balancing that the reverse is also true. A good rush built must only be possible if you have to sacrifice lategame advantages for it.
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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.
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No.
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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.
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No.
In both cases, a player putting all resources into defense needs to have the advantage over a player putting all into offense.(note: defense. That is not the same as production buildup) This is very basic game balancing. Resources invested in defense are only useful in one special case: you being attacked. In dominions that means that for every viable offensive army/SC design there should exist and anti-built that can win against it for less cost. See for example priest spam and Ermor AE. Priest win consistently against undead, especially on a cost per cost basis, but are pretty useless against most everything else. There is no real counter to dual blessed sacred troops of some nations.
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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.
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Agreed.
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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.
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Only where chance and skill are seperate. I.e. positioning is random. Landing next to Helheim with a longterm strategy even on a large map is bad luck. Having your temple earthquaked in turn 3 is bad luck. However there are other things were player skill is important, i.e. which strategy to choose, rush/buildup/balanced, and in those areas luck should not be more important than skill. It should never happen that one nation always looses against another, no matter what the player does.
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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.
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Yes, this is a problem, but not the major one. The problem is that some nations are in effect Rockscissors.
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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.
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Incorrect. If you use an offensive strategy, and the guy you attacked knew about it / made a good guess and employs a strategy specifically designed at countering yours he should nearly always win. Having one strategy that can beat all other strategies the majority of the time, as you want glamour rush to be, is plainly imbalanced. It is the very definition if imbalanced. The point of rock/paper/scissors not that rock is a "means of repulsing glamour rush - NOT a majority of the time" but that rock ALWAYS beats scissors. Period.