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Originally Posted by TigerBlood
Practically, at what stage does this occur in a vanilla game? Turn 150, 200? The only reasonable explanation for a game dragging on that long would be multiple players all sitting in the corner turtling.
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No. In the turn 266 game mentioned above, the only player that'd been turtling has been killed swiftly (well...) for turtling.
The game drags mostly due to one player (me)'s inability to take out opponent's forts while another one manages it but still. It also drags because bringing dozens of gate cleavers on a capital and hundreds of troops doesn't harm walls a bit, but the besieged player doesn't stay idle. The thing is that raiding provinces with 200 pop doesn't do much damage to anyone.
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Originally Posted by TigerBlood
In a lab. In provinces you control. Otherwise true.
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No. In a lab you control. If the province is besieged and thus controlled by someone else, you can use it too.
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Originally Posted by TigerBlood
No barriers aside from paths, gem income and the oppotunity cost associated with devoting a commander to the task when they could be doing something else.
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These are in fact insignificant as every survivor in long games managed to build lots of clams, blood stones and whatnot.
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Originally Posted by TigerBlood
50 Naiads with hammers is not a small investment. 50 recruitable W3N1 mages is not a small investment.
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You don't need 50. Plus after 100 turns, you've paid off whatever initial investment you made, without even considering Wish.
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Originally Posted by TigerBlood
turn 30+
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Games rarely end at this stage. They often last to turn 50 or 80. At this point, a RoI of 7 turns (Wish) is definitely worth the cost.
Quote:
Originally Posted by TigerBlood
Yeah. In the land of the Turtle Gods, Astral is King. If you're going to leave another nation to their own devices for 100 turns, you deserve to lose.
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When a player is being defeated and retreats in his last fort, he has little choice but to turtle. If you don't pick winning conditions like majority of provinces or something clever, it happens. Dominions IS the land of turtle gods. Even when you don't let other players to their own, they can still manage to get huge defender advantage.
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Originally Posted by TigerBlood
Oh noes. Ban Blood. Hidden Income is Bad!
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This does not compare. Blood requires hunters, provinces and population. All of these are easily spotted and it's easy to guess what kind of blood economy a player has by counting his number of provinces for instance. You can't do that with BS or clams.
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Originally Posted by TigerBlood
You're talking about a paradigm shift in warfare after multiple players have set up perpetual gem generation forges. Territories are still important.
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No, they are irrelevant at this point in the game.
When people reach the end-game after fighting several wars, defeating several opponents, they sometimes have researched all the way to 9 in every path and have had enough gems and spare wizards to start a clam economy in order to defeat some of the four or five remaining players who also fought some wars. It's not for people who turtled from the start. It's for everyone that clam-hoarding is a reality and a necessity in order to compete.
Seriously, when you have researched 9 in every school, you usually have enough boosters to spare a pair on someone who can build gem-gens without even planning it or turtling for it.