The next patch

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Stormbinder:
Personally I think it would be better to make Clams cost 20 water gems and require con 6, and make Fever Fetishes cost 10 fire gems and 5 death (same con6).

Disease is a fire/nature effect (seven year fever), so that change doesn't make that much sense.

[Stormbinder]

Originally posted by johan osterman:

I am not ruling out that clams are overpowered, just disputing that the dividends paid by clam hoarding is unique in having geometric growth compared to other forms of resource collection.

Stormbinder, just to clear things up, while I am responsible for some of what have went into dom 2, it is Johan Karlssson and Kristoffer (my brother) who are the principal creators and designers of dom 2.

Got it, thank you for clarification Johan.

I hope that KrissofferO or Johan Karlsson will check this thread again sooner or later and will post their opinion about this Clam-hoarding issue. I know that they both are very acive on this forum and extremely helpfull (more than any other game developer that I ever meet in fact, and this is not ***-kissing statement ), as well as you Jason, so it'll probably happens sooner or later.


Also as I've said earlier I really would like to know if their design vision for the end of medium and long MP games included having 90-99% gem income coming from hundreds of Clams instead of magic sites. If it was by design, than IMHO we all should just drop this topic. If not (as I realy hope it is), than we may hope that they will fix it one way or another.


EDIT: Graeme - you are right of course, I meant to say 10 fire 5 nature. Also current ability for undead to hold fetishes without any bad side effects while producing firegems doesn't seem right to me, but this was mentioned by other people before.

[ April 04, 2004, 03:39: Message edited by: Stormbinder ]

[Zapmeister]

Personally I think it would be better to make Clams cost 20 water gems and require con 6, and make Fever Fetishes cost 10 fire gems and 5 death (same con6).

If there's ever agreement that there's a problem that needs fixing here, then I think that this particular fix would be overkill.

For a start, the problem is really clams leading to massive astral production leading to Wishes ending the game. So Fever Fetishes probably don't need fixing at all.

And if clams were 5 water 5 nature, that would probably fix them as well, since water/nature mages are harder to come by than water-2 mages, and nature gems have other uses that would tempt the potential clam-hoarder.

[Stormbinder]

Originally posted by Zapmeister:

For a start, the problem is really clams leading to massive astral production leading to Wishes ending the game.

I think chain-casting Wishes is just one of the possible use of hoards of clams in the end-game. Granted, it may very well be the most effective current use of huge astral income from clams (that's why Zen killed Wishes in his mod as I understand it), but I don't think elimination or changes to Wishes would solve the real problem of clams abuse. It may lessen the effects of its most-obvious sympthom, but the problem would still be there, since wishes are not the only thing you can do with your huge astral income from clams.

[ April 04, 2004, 09:52: Message edited by: Stormbinder ]

[Taqwus]

Exponential clam growth strikes me as somewhat unlikely, because that requires a corresponding exponential growth in the number of water mages, and that's difficult to do unless you have an absolutely incredible amount of water gems coming in for Sea King's Court and can also deal with the exponentially growing maintenance cost. Not to mention that every mage forging clams is a mage that could be doing research or leading troops or so forth.

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Taqwus:
Exponential clam growth strikes me as somewhat unlikely, because that requires a corresponding exponential growth in the number of water mages, and that's difficult to do unless you have an absolutely incredible amount of water gems coming in for Sea King's Court and can also deal with the exponentially growing maintenance cost.

If all you want is 100 clams, then you'll never need more than between 5-10 water 1 mages to make them once you can build water bracelets.

[PvK]

Ok here's a suggestion:

Make Clams require Water-2, Astral-1, 10 Water and 5 Astral to forge.

This would slow the expansion, and require the forgers to have Astral magic as well, which is appropriate (since they create astral gems), and also harder to get the required forgers.

PvK