Enough whining!

[tinkthank]

I would agree with Tuidjy -- except that I think he is building up a straw-man. Against whom are you directing your polemic? Has anyone here been whining?

I know that I started a post about balance and Wrathful Skies. This is me quoting me:

I like WC and I think it is a valid, if somewhat boring, tactic to use it. I do think, however, that options for utilizing valid counters to it could be increased. Here are a couple of small suggestions.

Suggestions include a way to dispell a storm (NOT the WC, just the storm), making a SoS more expensive, and making WC more expensive.

I didnt feel there was much whining involved in that thread there. In fact, if there has been any "whining", I have felt it come from persons who feel that their own personal playstyle will be endangered ("leave my clams alone!").

Constructive talk in a non-whining tone is good. Threats and whining is not so good. But have many people here really been whining?

[The Panther]

This is an excellent thread. I love whining about whining!

Of course, it is impossible to balance a game as complex as Dominions. I mean, Blizzard worked a long time and nerfed several pet things (like the muta rush) over the course of several years with a programming staff maybe 5 times that which Dominions has avaliable. Blizzard even spent nearly a full year with the expansion to introduce just 6 new units! And they had only 3 races and a few dozen units to balance. Even that proved darn hard to do.

Balancing 17 races? Balancing 8 schools of magic with 10 levels each? Balancing hundreds of artifacts plus all those summons? No way! Forget it!

So, there are several unbablanced things. It can only be expected. That is just the way it is.

It would be interesting to make a list of things that people believe are overpowered or too inexpensive, and a list of things that are underpowered or cost too much. Like, for instance:
Overpowered: Pythium, clams, false horrors, wraithful skies, astral and death magic, blood summons, life drain, Air Queens, devils, order, mad castling, ghost riders, and so forth. This is the stuff that top players do.
Underpowered: T'ien Ch'i, Ulm, sea trolls, water magic, national troops in general, sloth, luck, far too many summons to list, and on and on. This is the stuff that good players avoid like the plague.

Anybody else would have their own personal lists, of course. In fact, I would like to see a top player compile a list of all the artifacts that have been built in a game on about turn 70. That way, you can see what is thought best and which ones never get built.

I like to see people talking about the balance issues. It makes for an interesting forum. And it also gives people an outlet for complaining, which is always needed.

[atul]

The Panther said:
Overpowered: Pythium, clams, false horrors, wraithful skies, astral and death magic, blood summons, life drain, Air Queens, devils,

Hm, did you realize you just listed half of all the game's magic in your overpowered list? Astral, death, blood and air. Good enough balance for me here. ;p But seriously, water magic's a bit of a bore, fire/earth/nature have their uses. Nearly seven okay paths out of eight isn't that bad.

Underpowered: T'ien Ch'i, Ulm, sea trolls, water magic, national troops in general, sloth, luck,

You didn't mean turmoil by any chance? If national troops suck sloth should be a no-brainer... I think a lot would be to luck scale if the event's were resolved differently from the current (frequency by the capital's dominion, random location, effect by target province's dominion). As it now stands trying to expand into hostile dominion (order-misfortune as a standard) when playing turmoil-luck nation is a real pain due constant bad events in borderlands alone.

...okay, the solution would be to be like everyone else and play order-misfortune. But I think it's boring, so if that makes me a poor player so be it... But I still think that deciding between good or bad events by averaging luck scale over all the owned provinces or something like that could be cool.

[Yvelina]

I agree with Atul (and with Petar, obviously) that the presence of so many 'overpowered' tactics shows that Dominions II is both fun and balanced. Is it perfectly balanced? No, I am afraid.

Water magic is a poor relation, and Ulm and T'ien C'hi are hopeless. Wrathful skies, skeleton/horror spam, lifedraining weapons do channel late game army makeup into a pattern. Hoarding is a prerequisite for winning on any map bigger than a hundred provinces. All fortifications but the Watchtower and the Castle are overpriced.

But as thinktank says, and contrary to what most complainers seem to want, the way to maintain a fun game is to provide counters, not to neuter the effective tactics.

[The Panther]

atul said:

You didn't mean turmoil by any chance?

Oh sorry, I did write this wrong. I meant Productivity is vastly underpowered, just like Luck. Sloth (almost always to the +3 level) tends to be a no-brainer on practically every single decent pretender design I have seen. Mistfortune (but normally only +2 here) is also a no-brainer for the top players, but it is not quite as one-sided as productivity/sloth is.

[atul]

The Panther said:
I meant Productivity is vastly underpowered, just like Luck. Sloth (almost always to the +3 level) tends to be a no-brainer on practically every single decent pretender design I have seen. Mistfortune (but normally only +2 here) is also a no-brainer for the top players

Thanks for the clarification.

The impression I've got lurking around here is that there is at least a vocal click of people dead sure that the only worthy set of scales seems to be something like order3 sloth3 temp(nation_preference) death1/2 misfortune2 magic2/3 and all the points to a jacked up pretender. Maybe a no-brainer choice for a top munchkin... but as a role-player I must say: Bo-ring. If I want to min-max I go play D&D.

Okay, to each their own, maybe I've just been lucky in my MPs so that a good performance has been possible with sub-optimal (fun/experimental) choices.

Of course, the best would be if the different scale/nation/pretender options would be equally viable even to powerplayers, but... well, Dom3 probably improves some in this regard too, we'll see.

[sushiboat]

I wonder whether a pseudo-market feedback mechanism for prices might be good for beta testing. The idea is that the beta keeps track of how you spend your gold and gems and sends the info to Illwinter. After collecting data from many players and games, there would be a pattern of units, items, and spells that are used much more than average and those that are used much less than average. Then in the next beta version, the highly used things have higher prices and the rarely used things have lower prices. The new beta would announce the price adjustments, and the process would repeat until the desired distribution was achieved and prices were stable.

[Jack Simth]

It could be useful, but might need adjustement on availablity - a level 8 summonnable critter is going to be a lot less common than a level-1 summonnable critter, simply because you don't have access to the 8's until later in the game. If beta testers tend to play short games, reducing the cost of the summon might have no bearing on how often it's used, making it overpowered in longer games; contrawise, an early summon might have a price well out of proportion to it's effect, simply because it's available sooner. A unit from a rare site might be seldom used (it's rarely found) but be quite powerfull, and have it's cost crash because it's almost never found.

[alexti]

I'm not sure it would work. There're too many "specialty" items, units and spells. For example, anit-Ermor strategy won't be useful against most of other nations, so anti-Ermor elements would get underpriced by the proposed method. Similar thing is likely happen to "underwater" tools. Certain items that counter certain strategies will suffer the same fate.