[Micah]

If your counterattack is "meaningful" you'll be reclaiming provinces and hence income quickly. If you can't recover a significant portion of your provinces you're screwed in either case.

And my "side" of the debate is that gens make it harder to root out a defender from his last few forts, since his income isn't eliminated, but doesn't facilitate a meaningful comeback. It's a bit more nuanced than you make it out to be.

Due to a plethora of factors (first turn advantage, shelter in a fort and having concentrated force being the major ones) the defender's force in Dominions is much stronger than an attacker.

This additional effectiveness of the defenders' units due to defensive advantage combined with a disproportional, concentrated income, leads to what is, IMO, an undesirable situation in which it is neither feasible for the defender to mount a successful counterattack due to losing their defensive advantage, or for the attacker to risk a frontal assault on the defender's stronghold, leading to a non-interactive standoff.

If the defender tries to actually DO anything the fact that his income is still a fraction of the attacker's will quickly catch up to him and he'll have to either abandon his gains or have his forces picked apart since he is then forced to spread them out and risk offensive movement.

I suppose if you think that these kinds of standoffs are a plus we'll just have to disagree, as it is ultimately a matter of opinion, but I'm fairly confident in my analysis of the cause-and-effect game, especially after my experience dealing with Calmon's last stand in Artifacts...After trying to attack his last fort a couple of times and losing significant forces each time I finally stopped trying. He eventually thought he had a moment of weakness to exploit and attacked me, but was easily crushed without his defensive advantage, which concluded the matter. My only mistake was trying to finish him off instead of waiting from the beginning, and waiting isn't a very exciting game IMO.