Conceptual Balance (Discussion)

[curtadams]

I'm certainly biased towards luck, because I'd play it often SP in Dom2 just because it's more fun. But the things that happen to me in Dom3 even at flat or light luck make me totally terrified of Misfortune. I really notice the effects on conquered Misfortune provinces. I just had Bogus drop in on a critical bottleneck province (with my first outside temple, even), cutting my empire in two and leaving my pretender almost alone facing Ermor. In Dom2 I got the feeling - notwithstanding my preferences - that Order was ohsogood and Turmoil was asking for it, while Luck/Misfortune was flavor. Now, I feel it's reversed.

[Endoperez]

curtadams said:
In Dom2 I got the feeling - notwithstanding my preferences - that Order was ohsogood and Turmoil was asking for it, while Luck/Misfortune was flavor. Now, I feel it's reversed.

Order is still ohsogood, but now Misfortune is asking for it as well.

[PDF]

Well, I think the problem with Luck/Misf is rather with ..events themselves !
As Zen said they were not scaled to new gold standard
Plus we still get the damned Militia as "good" event
And then some gamebreaking events (such as Plague) can occur even with Luck and Growth on the first game turn !! So the best solution is to have the less possible events (Order3) and just hope the bad won't occur too soon - after that they're not that bad.

With that there's really few point in taking Luck, the good'ol O3/M3 combo is still the thing to do.
But no amount of balance tweaking will solve the real issue, the real solution would be that events become moddable...

[dirtywick]

PDF said:
With that there's really few point in taking Luck, the good'ol O3/M3 combo is still the thing to do.
But no amount of balance tweaking will solve the real issue, the real solution would be that events become moddable...

M3 is just crazy in a longer game, even with O3. M2 is better, but you'll still be constantly attacked by Barbarians to where you'll need a significant amount of PD in every province you want to keep.

But really, the only big advantage that Luck/Turmoil gives is you'll have a lot more gems that route, it's not even close. Nations that need a lot of summons/battle magic gems would probably do better with Luck than Order IMO.

[KissBlade]

Mm... I'm not sure you'll get constantly attacked with M2. I never take M3 though since it does seem a little risky and not to mention you'll never get a hero. Also while Luck is better late game since gold isn't as important, you need to factor in that Order gives you a very strong early/mid game which transitions into a stronger late game compared to turmoil/luck. Though I could see a possible argument for Luck/Turmoil in a low magic sites setting.

[dirtywick]

KissBlade said:
Mm... I'm not sure you'll get constantly attacked with M2. I never take M3 though since it does seem a little risky and not to mention you'll never get a hero. Also while Luck is better late game since gold isn't as important, you need to factor in that Order gives you a very strong early/mid game which transitions into a stronger late game compared to turmoil/luck. Though I could see a possible argument for Luck/Turmoil in a low magic sites setting.

I guess that depends on how big your empire is. The bigger it is, the more provinces you have, the more events happen.

[PhilD]

dirtywick said:
I guess that depends on how big your empire is. The bigger it is, the more provinces you have, the more events happen.

I've seen the "max of 3 events per turn" rule mentioned, but I also seem to remember, in my SP games, some turns with 4 events reported - none of which looked like they could have been caused by a ritual, though I could be wrong here. But it's still true that, with a largish empire, I tend to get exactly 3 events per turn, most of the time.

Still, I tend to be a fan of Luck over Misfortune, even though I do get the occasional bad events. With Luck 1, I get enough gem events, or additional gold events, or "free mage/assassin/item" events, or even permanent gold boost events, that it seems well worth the points. Now, this is SP, but still, SP vs good numbers of Impossible AIs...

[AMF]

Here I am again, back for a repeat performance as "the newbie with a question." Thank you for the applause, I'm here all week.

Today, I have a question related to the AI balance of the game (and, I think, this thread). My question is this: Is there a way to set up an "AI Smackdown" with Dom3?

What I mean and where I am coming from is this: in Space Empires IV, with a little bit of work, a person could set up a game with only AI empires, and run that on their machine until one of the AIs won. If you do this enough times (taking care to be statistically/analyitcally honest, so keeping the same difficulty, skill, era, maps, and other settings for the AIs in play), you can come up with a pretty defensible and statistically signficiant understanding of which empire or empires is/are 'better' than the others, and to what degree.

So, I wonder if there is a way to run Dom3 games using all the AIs (and only the AIs) on a given map, with a given era, and the same skill levels etc...It seems that Dom3 is much more command-line friendly than SE4, and so might even allow this to be done with graphics turned off, thereby making any single AI smackdown game take just a few minutes...and so perhaps hundreds if not thousands of games could be run to test the balance of the empires...and that would certainly give some statistics on how balanced the empires are...

Just curious.

[NTJedi]

PDF said:
Plus we still get the damned Militia as a "good" event

I recall posts complaining about this good event, yet the event remains unchanged. Personally I would love to see the event changed saying something such as... "Many units from nation (XXXX) have defected and chosen to serve your nation." The units which appear would be a random set of recruitable units from XXXX nation. It would only use nations which exist within the current game.

PDF said:
But no amount of balance tweaking will solve the real issue, the real solution would be that events become moddable...

I asked Illwinter to add events as something which can be modded and/or creating custom events. Perhaps when Dominions_4 arrives.

[PDF]

NTJedi said:

I recall posts complaining about this good event, yet the event remains unchanged. Personally I would love to see the event changed saying something such as... "Many units from nation (XXXX) have defected and chosen to serve your nation." The units which appear would be a random set of recruitable units from XXXX nation. It would only use nations which exist within the current game.

Or if at least it gave useful standard units (archers, hvy inf, whatever)...
A possible simple solution to implement by IW would just be to create dedicated unit ids for those event guys so they could be modded without impacting national and indy unit pools.