I fully appreciate that you know much, much, more about this game than I do. However, for a Van Bless-Rush strategy your scales are going to have problems.
Quote:
Also you leave yourself very vulnerable to getting negative scales pushing into your lands, which is very hard to get rid of with a low dominion of 3 or such.
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It is far more likely that the Vanheim are leaching good scales off their neighbors than that the neighbors are managing to impose even worse scales on a dual-bless rush Pretender. The Vanheim also benefit by NOT having their poor scales imposed on conqueored provinces rapidly.
Back to the point. What puts Vanheim over the top is that they can continue putting ALL their income in sacred's far after every other bless-rush nation has maxed out their capital investment per-turn in sacreds. This is because Unit Power is at least partially balanced around capital cost. Thus the Army Power per turn for a bless rush that has reached maximum capital invested is:
(Sacred Army Power built per Turn)=(Dominion)x(Cost of Sacred Unit)
Thus, as it currently is, the more expensive(powerfull) the Sacred Unit the more powerful a sacred army that can be built per turn for any given Dominion.
The solution is to have the stronger sacreds take more "Dominion Points" to build. For example(using 1.5 cost, rounded down)
Dom 1-1 Van per turn max
Dom 2-2 Van per turn max
Dom 3-2 Van per turn max
Dom 4-3 Van per turn max
Dom 5-4 Van per turn max
Dom 6-4 Van per turn max
Dom 7-5 Van per turn max
Dom 8-6 Van per turn max
Dom 9-6 Van per turn max
coding wise, this is extremely difficult, but could probably be simulated by adjusting Dom by a "racial modifier" lookup table before calculating maximum sacreds per turn.
if (race=Vanheim)
{
switch(Dominion)
{ case 1:
Max_Sacred=1;
break;
case 2:
Max_Sacred=2;
break;
case 3:
Max_Sacred=2
break;
case 4:
Max_Sacred=3
break;
case 5:
Max_Sacred=4
break;
case 6:
Max_Sacred=4
break;
case 7:
Max_Sacred=5
break;
case 8:
Max_Sacred=6
break;
case 9:
Max_Sacred=6
break;
}
}
It's been awhile since I used C. So pardon errors.
Van should have thier cost reduced by 10 gold(or some other number) to make up for this. And maybe make them non-capital again. As the making capital damages them in non-Bless rush play as well. That will allow a non-Bless Rush to build them without blocking up his capital.
Again, as to the exact degree of change required for balance... I don't know. But this change allows Van to keep it's powerfull sacreds.