MP Game - "Throne Of Heavens", veterans and experienced players only (full)

[Stormbinder]

Greetings All.


The purpose of this announcement is to organize a long, epic and fun Dominions 2 game with challenging, interesting and friendly group of players. The game will have several carefully designed house rules to prevent standard "cheese" and exploits, and to increase the fun for all participating players.

Only serious Dom2 players may apply. That means those who are reasonably sure that they can keep up with game schedule as the game progress and turns will take longer, and those who don't quit the moment things go wrong for them and who generally determined to stick to the end, no matter if it is sweet one or bitter one. If due to some RL emergency you will have to abandon the game, you promise to try to give other fellow players as advanced warning as possible and you will do your best to find a human sub for your nation. The goal is to avoid AWOL players as well as AI nations in this game.


Here are the rules of the game:

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1. The “Throne Of Heavens” is no-newbies game, sorry. Only experienced and veteran Dom2 MP players are allowed to join.

2. The settings will be set to Indep 7, Magic 50, HOF15, Score Graphs Off, Renaming allowed.

3. We will play on either Zen's Cradle of Dominion or Karan map, depending on the number of players and the MP public opinion on Zen's Cradle, which some people are trying right now.

4. The total number of players will be 6-8 for Karan map, 8-10 for Zen's Cradle of Dominion.

5. The house rules will be:

5.1 No massive clams hoarding. Each nation is allowed to have only 20 clams max. This purpose of this rule is to give each nation ability to get nice additional astral income, if they will choose to follow this path, while preventing possible severe imbalances at the end game, where some nations could get 200 astral gem income per turn from clams alone, and chaincast Wishes spells, et cetera.

5.2 No VQ pretenders allowed.

5.3 No Ermor nation allowed.


5.4 No "madcastling" in this game.

This rule is intentionally left informal. A lot of people, me including, think that the strategy of covering your entire territory with 300gp castles/temples makes game mindboglingly boring for other players and is very "cheesy". I've thought of several ideas how to formulate this rule in hard terms (percentage of territory, limit on how often you can build castles, limit on total number of castles, prohibiting Watchtowers and Mausoleums, etc...). However they all either require constant counting and bookkeeping, which is annoying, or may not be very efficient.

So at the end I've decided to put it simple:

If you do not know how to play without "madcastling", and/or intend to madcastle in this game, please do NOT join it.

I will not give exact definition in numbers of what "madcastling" is, but you all know what I mean. Generally if you have castles in more than half of you provinces, especially in the beginning and in the middle of the game, than you are likely to be madcastling. Again, this is just a general rule for your convenience, but I've decided to rely on players good faith and common sense here, rather than force everybody to count their castles.

6. The game will run on 24h quickhost. Later in the game we may switch it to 48h quickhost, if the players would prefer to run it this way once the things will get really hot.


7. Some additional information:

The writing of AARs and in-character interactions though diplomacy thread and though other in-game and out-of-game channels are encouraged. However it is not a requirement by any means, there will be no RPG police here. But if you want to use your imagination and add nice RPG flavor while playing your nation and your ruler, and/or write AAR after the game, you are most welcome to do it in the "Throne Of Heavens" game.

Diplomacy and trade communications between players through emails, IRC channels, forum threads, or other means are fully allowed.


For cheating in his previous games, Norfleet is Banned from joining this game.


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Please keep in mind that this is not a thread for discussion of house rules. If you have some questions or some comments about the rules of this game, you are most welcome to send them to me in PM, and I'll do my best to address your questions or your concerns. But I do not want this thread to become swarmed with discussions about Clams, Madcastling, etc. There are dozens of threads dedicated specifically to these controversial topics, but this is not one of them. Thank you for your understanding.


Please post the nation of your choice here if you have read the rules and interested in joining.


With best regards,
Stormbinder

[ August 06, 2004, 16:24: Message edited by: Zen ]