Clams versus magic sites...
Ate too much cheese Last night and had some thoughts about clams...
Clams versus gem sites
A recent game as Atlantis got me thinking (sites 40, Old World). I conquer the seas, and use voice of tiamat to search my 15+ underwater provinces. I find a few gem sites (a smattering of earth, fire and astral), but work out I would have had a higher income (albeit solely astral) had I forged clams. I suppose it can be put down to voice of tiamat being inefficient at 40% sites, manual site searching being more worthwhile (but costing more mage time overall, and therefore more research).
A comparison of clams and magic sites:
- Magic sites are linked to provinces, clams can be passed around.
- Magic sites are spread around an empire, making it hard to defend all of them. Clams can be stockpiled in well defended provinces, and moved via the lab if threatened (and on to other commanders if available).
- Discovered magic sites can be seen with scouts and astral window-type spells, whilst total site income is known if graphs are enabled. Clams are only visible on a commander's inventory.
- Both clams and gem sites require micro-management: searching for sites, forging, placing and gem collection for clams.
- The site count of a well searched empire is proportional to its province count (times the site frequency). Clam count of a nation using hoarding strategy is proportional to the turn count.
- Magic sites are capturable. Clams are somewhat less capturable.
Two balancing factors have been suggested that should naturally limit use of clams: diplomacy and map size.
Diplomacy can't be levelled directly against clams, as they are invisible to scouting and world graphs. Clams have low costs, so they won't necessarily overly weaken a player in the short term compared to one who spent the gems on summons eg. winter wolves.
A small map size can be chosen, which should give a quicker game, and thus limit effectiveness of clams. The number of players, and aggressiveness of their respective playstyles will have as much influence on the length of the game, however.
I'm leaning towards thinking that a potential Dominions 3 should have a few more choices on the game set-up screen, beyond site frequency, indy strength and richness etc. Perhaps a choice to alter blood hunting (easy, normal, hard), and one to tweak gem generators (perhaps: Dom 2 style, limited in some way, or removed). Whether you think blood hunting and gem generators are perfectly balanced or not, they have enough effect on the game that the ability to tweak the game setup in this way may be beneficial.
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