Quote:
Originally Posted by 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.
|
Having an income is the same as having a reserve in that you are still spending gems at a fixed rate per turn, and the natural result of no gem gens is that people will keep greater reserves. This seems obvious now and thanks for pointing it out.
But, this means that the very situation you are trying to avoid will still happen.
The only difference is that people will give up and go into "revenge mode" earlier where they decide they can't win and that they are going to try to grind up as much of your forces as possible. They'll do this because without an income they'll have to make that reserve do as much damage as possible, so turtling is the natural choice due to the very advantages you discussed.
Calmon would have still ground up your attacks on his fortress with or without a gem gen income (going into an endgame fortress is always dicey, and it sounds like you were using an "army fighting" army and not a "fortress busting" army). The only difference is that he probably would never have tried to escape since he would have no hope of turning his reserves into the income he'd need to get his provinces back.
Your position is not more nuanced .... it just makes no sense. To achieve the result you want would require modding out fortresses or maybe using that one fortress that has no walls as everyone's fortress. You'll still get ground up by mage-heavy armies, but the only way to fix that is to mod out mages.
Removing gem gens only makes the game less interesting as people horde gems for inevitable sneak attacks (or they auto-lose because their reserve in insufficient).