Will Vanheim Ever Become Spayed?

[DrPraetorious]

Nerfing pisses me off.

Let's compare two sorts of cardboard crack^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcollectible trading car d games: Magic the Gathering and Shadowfist.

MtG tried to rebalance the cards by nerfing everything. The result is a very flat game with no cool and powerful stuff in it, because if anything was any good it might be unbalancing.

Shadowfist, on the other hand, starts with more robust underlying mechanics, and then rebalances cards by making them *better*, not worse. As a result, shadowfist is a very well balanced game with lots of cards that do awesomely powerful stuff.

It is absolutely untrue, and I think demonstrated by various posts, that it is impossible to beat *heim. It may be true - and I admit that I haven't played every nation - that *some* nations have no viable strategy to oppose vanheim, particularly in the early game.

If that is the case - the question becomes, what can we add to those nations that would enable them to oppose vanheim more effectively, without changing them beyond recognition? Note that if you have a 33% chance of repulsing the rush, you are mounting effective opposition, especially if you can cause significant losses even in defeat.

So, in the *modders* forum, I have included a "which nations need bennies" thread, where I discuss this in some detail.

http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...b=5&o=&fpart=1

[Cerlin]

While I did start another post about Helheim, I thought I might post here as well after reading all 8 pages :O

First I agree that van/hel are STRONG but I never yelled Nerf I just asked for a tactic to beat them, if these are hard to find they should still exist. Dont wave the nerf bat too widely please, just give us a new spell or something.

On tactics that can hold off or beat hel/van I think I may have found a passable one. Im playing a Single player/hotseat game with a friend and I am Agartha. Our world has both Van and Hel and the only thing that really works is in fact blade storm (It does hit more often than not but takes a lot of tries) and turtling in forts. I am able to repair the walls faster than they can take them and this has enabled me to stall them on a few forts and expand away from them and into the oceans, which allow me to raid without losing many guys or being chased down. It is tough but works somewhat. My friend is Bandar Log and was able after some initial losses to use the magical and horde troops they get to beat Van, which shocked me as I suffed under Hel.

Lets do less bashing and more what we can do to fix or deal with this, please?

[NTJedi]

DrPraetorious said:
MtG tried to rebalance the cards by nerfing everything. The result is a very flat game with no cool and powerful stuff in it, because if anything was any good it might be unbalancing.

This is what I'm trying to avoid, where these nations are nerfed without considering how it affects SP games or MP games with AI opponents.

[curtadams]

DrPraetorious said:
MtG tried to rebalance the cards by nerfing everything. The result is a very flat game with no cool and powerful stuff in it, because if anything was any good it might be unbalancing.

Shadowfist, on the other hand, starts with more robust underlying mechanics, and then rebalances cards by making them *better*, not worse. As a result, shadowfist is a very well balanced game with lots of cards that do awesomely powerful stuff.

But which game is played in every school cafeteria in the nation and which game do I find almost impossible to find? This isn't making your point.

The proper response to a game imbalance too big to live with is to fix it by whatever requires the fewest fixes. Fixes are a lot of work and often introduce their own problems. If *one* nation is a basket case you should buff it rather than nerf 25. But, if *one* nation is too tough, you should nerf it rather than introduce 25 major buffs - mostly because you can be virtually guaranteed that one of the buffs will overdo it and you'll just have a different supernation.

So far there have been several counters proposed - almost all of which hinge on AOE effects, which is basically what us nerf proponents have always said. AOE isn't available for a quite a while. (Nobody's yet considered countermeasures, either) If the majority of the nations get early AOE, Dom becomes a VERY different game. I really don't want most nations to be able to handle armored def 24 units early in the game. I LIKE the fact that human-level units have some use as opposed to becoming soap-bubble screens from turn one.

Incidentally, although I think it's high priority to fix the Heims I don't think it's the prime "official" priority. The Conceptual Balance mod became almost standard, so balance issues can be fixed without designer action. I think it's a better approach for the players to work on balance mods and the designers to work on bugs and modability. An example where things can go awry would be the VQ nerfs due largely to Norfleet's rampages, which turned out to be cheating.

[NTJedi]

Gandalf Parker said:
Its definetly a workable strategy. What I see is that Vanheim/Helheim are not imbalanced. They ARE the balance. Against certain nations and certain strategies. This is a variation on other threads Ive seen about Ermor, or Ulm, or Jotunheim, etc etc.

I agree... I remember all the threads about the dreaded Ermor in dominions_2. In my opinion this adds nice variety into the game as players are challenged to improve strategies. During blitz games Vanheim/Helheim is too much, yet these nations can be modded or removed using the #allowedplayer command.

[calmon]

I don't understand this discussion here. If something is overpowered it should be nerfed.

A nation in which i need just 1 sacred unit (in my test example a helheim helirding) and a priest commander (Vanherse) and can conquer Level 7 independence provinces without bigger problems is somehow in such a catagory.

- the sacred troops have no undead/demon weaknesses of being banishable.
- instead they are the best stealth units from all national troops.
- they need a F9/W9 blessing for this true but this didn't means very bad scales just some researching disadvantages and some unluck. Order 3 is still possible.

With most of the other nations i've to stack some troops even the blessed one to attack more then 2-3 provinces in a row but here very few troops and a leader are enough to conquere province after province. Casualties are very rare.

Thats to strong in my eyes apart from any player vs player strategies.

[Cainehill]

NTJedi said:

I agree... I remember all the threads about the dreaded Ermor in dominions_2. In my opinion this adds nice variety into the game as players are challenged to improve strategies. During blitz games Vanheim/Helheim is too much, yet these nations can be modded or removed using the #allowedplayer command.

Actually, until the Vampire Queen was severely hitten by the nerf stick, Ermor was still extremely dreaded. Say - _why_ would one pretender being overpowered have been such a problem in Dom2? After all, there's umpteen different pretenders, and we need one or two overpowered pretenders for the newbies, and for people who want to be able to beat the SP AI without ever bothering to learn the game.

Isn't that essentially your argument regarding the Heims?

[mivayan]

Gandalf Parker said:Dominions does not balance nation to nation. It balances by rock-paper-scissors.

It's more like... we have a game of scissors-paper-rock-dog-cat-mouse-pony. Scissors beat paper, which beats rock, which beats dog, which beats cat, which beats mouse, which beats pony, which beats everything but mouse.

White centaurs with dual bless are very strong, but vans/helhirdings are twice as hard to kill (for 5 gold / 4 res more), and can be combined with better battle magic. A big step over the next-best.

NTJedi said:I remember all the threads about the dreaded Ermor in dominions_2. In my opinion this adds nice variety into the game as players are challenged to improve strategies. During blitz games Vanheim/Helheim is too much, yet these nations can be modded or removed using the #allowedplayer command.

I dont remember much ermor whining from experienced players, I do remember a lot of ermor-with Vampire Queen whining, and a lot of VQ whining in general. Some of it fueled by a cheater, some of it was warranted... changes were made to the VQ. I dont think the changes by dom2 patches were too much, the loss of ethereal in dom3 might have been but had that anything to do with the whining?

[curtadams]

AE Ermor is certainly a bigger problem in SP than the Heims, even now (partly, of course, because the AI doesn't exploit double-bless). However, in multiplayer, it's more controllable. Ermor takes a while to crank up - it starts a bit weak, actually. Player politics can usually control it. The Heims are gross right out of the box and they can cause a lot of trouble before multiplayer interactions kick in.

I much prefer games that are relatively balanced on their own. Multiplayer dynamics are fun and it's sad that they have to be directed toward rebalancing the game. And, of course, they're not available in SP.