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Ironhawk said:
1) Hard/Very Hard Research: Blesses work from turn 1. Hard research means that all magic-heavy nations will be very vulnerable to attack for like all of the early game.
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Agree. But the prospect many nations having researched all of the paths in the end game is too unappetizing to me. I'm sort of rooting for Hard research though instead of Very Hard...
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Ironhawk said:
2) Low Magic Sites: Even if you do bust your butt and get research done, what good is it when you dont have any gems to cast those spells or summon those units?
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Not sure this will be much of a factor in this large/chaotic a game. In theory yes, but I'm not really worried. Besides I don't think 40 is that low.
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Ironhawk said:
3) Map Size: Poor scales can be easily balanced if you constantly expand. A map of this size makes that easier. Not to mention the number of players means there will always be a nice weak neighbor to be found.
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Can't agree here. As you said it should "balance" out. Heavy blesses will get more provinces due to expansions while the others should have better scales in thier provinces to counter this. IMHO I doubt map-size really makes that much of a differnce.
While I do think in theory the bless nations should do a little better than they already do, I'd rather wait to see what the actual results are. If the top 5 nations at the end are all heavy bless nations I'll consider a house rule for next game - but from what I've seen in larger games bless nations don't exactly end up winning that much more than normal ones. (i.e.
http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...t=&PHPSESSID=)
I also think you'll have a lot of players expecting this and building their magic-nations to try and survive a bless rush (i.e. Awake Pretender)
Besides... I shudder at the thought of trying to come up with a balanced "bless" House Rule that most people would agree on. more likely I'd just start a never-ending argument...