Are devils worth 7 blood each?

[Soapyfrog]

Thufir said:
Thirdly (and what this post is mostly about), I believe soapyfrog is misguided in objecting to exponential growth. I mean every kind of bootstrapping game since the beginning of time (with recent, relevant examples being Civ, MoM, MOO2, et al) has featured exponential growth prominently.

Well I do not object to exponential economic growth, of course, if you take Moo2 or Civ as examples these games integrate such growth very well into the game itself: You MUST grow to survive and economic growth is ubiquitous. Further, the games scale very well... you dont start producing the best unit in the game on turn 60, thats for sure.

Secondly growth in these games is tied to and constrained to various factors such as population, resources, geographical areas, whichs caps your maximum growth, and as the game continues you will constantly find youself resource constrained, so if you want to REALLY grow exponentially, you must physically expand and thus conflict with your neighbours.

In Dominions2 you have this exponential growth strategy in clamming etc. as well. However it is not tied to expansion, it is self-sustaining (i.e. you will never really be resource constrained once your clamming etc oeprations get going)... so you do NOT need to attack your neighbours, in fact you shouldn't since its counter-productive. That's not a very good game mechanic IMHO.

The clam/fetish/stone hoarding strategy needs to have a continual external cost to constrain that growth. My "conVersion instead of creation" suggestion would accomplish this, i.e. a fever fetish would let you produce 2 fire gems a turn, but you need 1 nature gem to feed it. At some point you will need more nature gems, and have to look beyond your borders to get them.

In the end it is not the exponential growth specifically whcih is bad, it is the self-sustaining nature of that growth which is highly unnatural for most games.

I hope the suggestions this thread have generated have been constructive. I would love to see some of them implemented. Hopefully with item/unit modding some of it can even be done without the need for an official patch...

[Soapyfrog]

Actually my suggestion doesnt work sicne you'd just alchemize the nature gems from your astral/fire production. Doh!

Well I dont know. For sure forcing Mages to use them would be a huge step in the right direction.

[johan osterman]

Soapyfrog said:

Well I do not object to exponential economic growth, of course, if you take Moo2 or Civ as examples these games integrate such growth very well into the game itself: You MUST grow to survive and economic growth is ubiquitous. Further, the games scale very well... you dont start producing the best unit in the game on turn 60, thats for sure.

You seem to labour under the absurd notion that 1 turn in one game is directly translates to 1 turn in another. By turn 60 in MOO2 you would have researched less than half a dozen technologies and would just be getting started with the game, in dom2 you could very well have, for all intents and purposes, won a midsize game by turn 60.

Secondly growth in these games is tied to and constrained to various factors such as population, resources, geographical areas, whichs caps your maximum growth, and as the game continues you will constantly find youself resource constrained, so if you want to REALLY grow exponentially, you must physically expand and thus conflict with your neighbours.

In Dominions2 you have this exponential growth strategy in clamming etc. as well. However it is not tied to expansion, it is self-sustaining (i.e. you will never really be resource constrained once your clamming etc oeprations get going)... so you do NOT need to attack your neighbours, in fact you shouldn't since its counter-productive. That's not a very good game mechanic IMHO.

....

If you do not expand and use your resources in other ways than trying to get clams and hoard them you will get stomped, even if you play just 2 players on a enormous map. If you are to acquire any significant number clams you will have to expand etc in order to get the reources you need to produce the clams and the money to get the mages you need in order to use them.

[Soapyfrog]

johan osterman said:
If you do not expand and use your resources in other ways than trying to get clams and hoard them you will get stomped, even if you play just 2 players on a enormous map. If you are to acquire any significant number clams you will have to expand etc in order to get the reources you need to produce the clams and the money to get the mages you need in order to use them.

You will use resources in other ways, and you will expand in the early game, clean up the indeps around, maybe shoot a cripple or two if its convenient, but once your clamhoarding operations get under way, the actual NEED to expand to continue your growth will disappear.

[Thufir]

Soapyfrog said:

Well I do not object to exponential economic growth, of course, if you take Moo2 or Civ as examples these games integrate such growth very well into the game itself: You MUST grow to survive and economic growth is ubiquitous. Further, the games scale very well... you dont start producing the best unit in the game on turn 60, thats for sure.

Secondly growth in these games is tied to and constrained to various factors such as population, resources, geographical areas, whichs caps your maximum growth, and as the game continues you will constantly find youself resource constrained, so if you want to REALLY grow exponentially, you must physically expand and thus conflict with your neighbours.

In Dominions2 you have this exponential growth strategy in clamming etc. as well. However it is not tied to expansion, it is self-sustaining (i.e. you will never really be resource constrained once your clamming etc oeprations get going)... so you do NOT need to attack your neighbours, in fact you shouldn't since its counter-productive. That's not a very good game mechanic IMHO.

The clam/fetish/stone hoarding strategy needs to have a continual external cost to constrain that growth. My "conVersion instead of creation" suggestion would accomplish this, i.e. a fever fetish would let you produce 2 fire gems a turn, but you need 1 nature gem to feed it. At some point you will need more nature gems, and have to look beyond your borders to get them.

In the end it is not the exponential growth specifically whcih is bad, it is the self-sustaining nature of that growth which is highly unnatural for most games.

I hope the suggestions this thread have generated have been constructive. I would love to see some of them implemented. Hopefully with item/unit modding some of it can even be done without the need for an official patch...

You misquote me. In the sentence right after you chop my quote I said:

Perhaps the real objection is to unconstrained exponential growth (maybe soapyfrog is already saying this, and I've misread).

So, we are in agreement, at least at a theoretical level. The problem is that in practice, building in constraints in growth needs to be done at design time. It's not just clams (or even clams +ff's +soul contracts +summoners +...) it's really the way the whole magic system works. In a real sense, anything that has an ongoing effect, without an ongoing cost constitutes a "free lunch" or a perpetual motion machine, of a kind.

And the fact is, that the game as it stands is not broken, so I'm pretty happy with the current state of affairs, myself. I like some of the changes that you list, namely that clams could only be used by mages (as Cohen had earlier suggested), and soul contracts could only be used by Blood Mages.

However, undoing the unconstrained growth of clams and other items will unbalance the game, as it stands. For example, Tien Chi S&A (one of my favorite themes, but already weak to begin with) is truly hosed. So, I would guess are Atlantis and R'lyeh.

[Soapyfrog]

Thufir said:
So, we are in agreement, at least at a theoretical level. The problem is that in practice, building in constraints in growth needs to be done at design time. It's not just clams (or even clams +ff's +soul contracts +summoners +...) it's really the way the whole magic system works. In a real sense, anything that has an ongoing effect, without an ongoing cost constitutes a "free lunch" or a perpetual motion machine, of a kind.

Yep we agree on this... and the game is just not really designed with this stuff in mind, it was kind of tacked on as an afterthought.

I disagree that removing it would unbalance the game in the other direction unduly, though... Tien Chi has excellent sacred summons and a dynamic capital only mage, Atlantis and Ryleh are effectively unassailable for the first part of the game, these things are very good even in the absence of clamming.

I would however agree that the BEST thing to do (as upposed to simply excising the items in question) would be to add some additional constraints to these strategies as has been suggested by plenty of very smart people in this thread. Simple things like making them mage-only items and eliminating vampire lord summon allies ability would be welcome changes that might result in a common ground being found between those who think clamming is too strong and those who think its just fine.

[Boron]

I like dominions and i like the lategame . I am a little clamhoarder myself

But i think it is a bit too good . I list a few things which i think are problematic :

- Clams require exactly water gems . Water is one of the weakest schools . If you are not an underwaternation you basically only spend a few watergems on boots of quickness / jade armours . You could summon sea trolls but since they require upkeep and are rather expensive they are not a top choice . In the water queens you don't invest normally too because the underwater nation will have them already probably .

So normally almost all your watergemincome goes into clams . If you are not in danger you can always convert your astral gems back to water and get clams quite quick .

- Clams and the other items are absolutely save from everything when stocked on stealth units . So you never lose this income unless you are dead .

- There could be no better output for clams than astral gems . This makes them for every nation worthy since every nation can convert the astral gems quite cheap in exactly the magic they need .

- The soul contracts give you one of the strongest troops of all , devils . Devils and Storm demons are probably the strongest troops of all costwise . If you don't look at costs then torrasquen and abominations would be good too .
The time you get the soul contracts is very interesting too : if you have a blood 5 pretender once you have 80 slaves and even without you only need Construction 6 .
Construction 6 is anyways a very important research goal for most nations and as blood nation since you have blood for summoned troops you can invest all your earthincome on dwarfen hammers making Soul contracts even more profitable .

- False horror spell : Stormbinder started a long thread about this 1 month ago . False horrors make almost all national troops worthless . 2-3 false horror casters are normally already enough to scare away even 50-100 national troops .


Finally Johan you are right that Mictlan can be defeated earlygame by rushing them . But with Caelum / Abysia this requires lots of effort .
These 2 nations are earlygame horrible strong already .
Every player is glad being at peace with Caelum in the first 20-30 turns , probably a lot longer because he knows that Caelum normally always wins the economic warfare earlygame .

I think most ppl will agree here with me :
Earlygame wars are normally not very profitable because they tend to Last very long and hurt both participants because of movement guessing / enemy dominion / castle siege . Only if the enemy is extremely weak earlygame because of special things like he chose a crappy pretender / got hurt too bad with lots of bad events like early lab/temple blow , indy attacks etc .

Last but not least most games are played with scoregraphs on . People tend to gangbang the "leader" . Because clamincome is hidden the main criterias to estimate who the leader is are provinces/income/gem income/army size .
So the early warmonger is normally very often attacked and this way kept busy while the "boomer" grows secretly and when you recognize it finally it is too late .

[Soapyfrog]

Boron: Well said!