Balance Challenge -- Come One, Come All!

[Zooko]

As you might have noticed from my repeated postings on the topic, I am skeptical of the widespread idea that Dominions 2 has balance problems and that mods are the way to correct these problems. Rather, I suspect, the "all vs. all" format has balance problems, and those balance problems cannot be corrected by any mod, because they are inherent to the nature of "all vs. all" games.

In order to test my theory, and in order to have fun, I am offering to host (TCP plus a limited service of automated e-mail) and to play in a limited number of "No Mods Balance Challenge" games. The built-in rules for these proposed games are:

1. No mods.
2. No house rules. If you want to play Caelum with the Watchtower and build a Watchtower in every province, more power to you. If you want to manufacture an infinite supply of Clams of Pearls and Fever Fetishes, bring it on. If you want to play the Vampire Queen with, uh, with whatever power-ups and strategies you want, that's just fine. If you want to pump out Wraith Sword-wielding thugs by the boatload, then do your worst.
3. Every game will be one player-or-team vs. one other player-or-team. (No AIs.)
4. Teams can be any size (including size 1).
5. There must be no more than 20 provinces per player. (I'm flexible on that, but the point is to not have huge maps.)
6. The settings will always be all default settings except that Independent Strength will always be 9 and Score Graphs will always be off.
7. I will set the server to run 48-hour quickhost and then I will forget about its existence. I will not spend my limited time manually intervening to pause or rewind the game. If people start staling, too bad for them, but not my problem.
8. Everyone is required to have fun, take pleasure, and be polite to one another, on pain of bolts of blue lightning from the Otherworld.
9. Everyone is required to listen to the Medieval Main Music whenever playing these games.

I'm not flexible about any of these rules except #5. If you want to play a game with a cool mod or some different settings, that's cool, but I'm not going to spend my time hosting that game for you.

Oh, and #8 and #9 are obviously unenforceable, so I'm only kidding about them. But I'm not kidding about #1, #2, #3, #4, #6 or #7.

I will organize and launch one of these games first (and not play in it) in order to see how much of my time it is going to require to host it. If it seems doable then I'll open up a second.

Is anybody interested?

[Zooko]

Oh, uh, and in order to determine who will play in the first game, I ask that you organize yourselves. The first set of people who say they want to play where that set consists of exactly two teams and each team has the same number of players will be invited to play in the first No Mods Balance Challenge game.

Then you'll have to choose a map, and then I'll randomly choose one team to announce their Nation choice first. That team will announce one Nation choice, and then the other team will announce one Nation choice, and so on taking turns until all Nation choices have been announced.

I hope somebody wants to play this way, because I would like to see what happens!

[quantum_mechani]

Hmm, as I said in the other thread, I think there are very few overpowered things on dominions, but a large amount of underpowred things that need modding.

However, just for kicks, I would love to play caelum vs. you on clash of titans and see if I can't just change your mind. I would most like to play it blitz format though(both players taking a number of turns all in a row at the same time).

[Zooko]

That makes sense. Maybe you and I could agree to play a blitz game (the first few turns blitz, I mean), but I'm away for the weekend starting Right Now.

Meanwhile, I'll leave this invitation open to other people for whom I will offer hosting as described when I get back home Sunday.

[Huzurdaddi]

QM and I have done this before. I was the lucky one with Caelum. Good luck Zooko! If you can figure out a way to win please post the strategy!