Will Vanheim Ever Become Spayed?

[NickW]

HoneyBadger said:
I think the trick to the Vans is not to give them a fight, just go around them and take out their principle provinces until you've destroyed their ability to make war.

That's not a workable strategy. If you send your army to the front and they send the Van army to the front, then you go around them and attack the backfield, they will have another Van army building up in the capital that you must contend with. You'll still lose your army, just a few turns later plus you'll be losing all your home provinces from the original front line Van army as they take out your "principle" provinces and ability to make war.

[thejeff]

Yeah, a raiding strategy against Vanheim doesn't sound too workable.

They have the reputation as one of the best raiders in the game. They'll be better at it than most nations. Caelum might be able to make it work.

Add to that glamour, meaning you can't find their armies to avoid and you'll need to use significant force in your raiding parties to handle running into even a few blessed Van.

[Gandalf Parker]

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.

Dominions does not balance nation to nation. It balances by rock-paper-scissors. So a nation is not imbalanced if its extremely difficult to beat on a certain map size with certain game settings when facing certain nations who are playing a certain way. (altho, the devs will certainly examine that and see if a tweak might improve one type of gameplay without affecting others)

[Aseth]

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.

Dominions does not balance nation to nation. It balances by rock-paper-scissors. So a nation is not imbalanced if its extremely difficult to beat on a certain map size with certain game settings when facing certain nations who are playing a certain way. (altho, the devs will certainly examine that and see if a tweak might improve one type of gameplay without affecting others)

yep, that`s exactly what I mean, but can`t tell because of lack skills in English

[NickW]

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'm sorry, but are you doing any MP play at all? That statement seems to be completely unsupportable. Dual Blessed Van/Hel against anyone else in an MP game is going to go in favor of the Van/Hel sacreds assuming all else equal. Unless there is vastly unequal skill involved, or third party interference from another nation, the Vans/Hels are almost a lock to win.

Obviously there are a few counter strategies that work but they all revolve around being very specific nations and playing with very specific anti-Van strategies.

If the choice is between playing only a limited list of nations/strategies or losing, then the game is sadly broken.

I'd like to think I'm overlooking some obvious F9/W9 Van counter but I don't I am. Most nations simply can't beat the F9/W9 Vans without having a lot of research and being able to spend more significantly more resources defeating the Vans than the Vans themselves cost.

Gandalf Parker said:
Dominions does not balance nation to nation. It balances by rock-paper-scissors. So a nation is not imbalanced if its extremely difficult to beat on a certain map size with certain game settings when facing certain nations who are playing a certain way. (altho, the devs will certainly examine that and see if a tweak might improve one type of gameplay without affecting others)

I'd generally agree with that statement, but the imbalances that do exist and have long existed are not severe ones. Some nations didn't match up well with others but that just meant having to use clever tactics or get allies or simply be bigger/richer before engaging X with Y.

The Van/Hel dual bless thing is a bit different. If you want to start charting out all the possible scenarios and all the possible situations Van/Hel can face the sad fact is they should win almost all of them, all else being equal in terms of player skill.

[Graeme Dice]

NickW said:
I'm sorry, but are you doing any MP play at all? That statement seems to be completely unsupportable.

He doesn't and it is. Gandalf approaches every single post in this forum from the fanboy position that the game is perfect in whatever form the devs have currently built it and that any problems people have are problems with the people, not the game.

[Epaminondas]

Graeme Dice said:

He doesn't and it is. Gandalf approaches every single post in this forum from the fanboy position that the game is perfect in whatever form the devs have currently built it and that any problems people have are problems with the people, not the game.

I have to agree with you on Gandalf as a long-time lurker, even before I started posting. According to him, there are no units that are more powerful/useful than others, nor units weaker/less usesful than others (see the thread on redundant/useless units I put up).

It's really an intellectual malady. Some people just have an intellectual framework where every position or argument or thing is valid or just as good as one another, and Gandalf seems to be the representative of them.

On the topic at hand, I agree that Vanheim/Hellheim are noticeably stronger than their competitors. And while I do agree that it's impossible to perfectly balance everything in a game of this nature--and one nation has to be top and one has to be the worst--Vanheim/Hellheim may be too far above other nations to have a fair, workable MP game within them if the map is small.

[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?

[Twan]

I think it's illogical to have to make mods for so obvious balance fixes.

Most MP games don't use the mods with the new nations players have created because they may be unbalanced, and many even don't use worthy heroes. Cbmod won't be as popular as in Dom2 as it would make the very well done dom3 manual obsolete.

The vanilla game *is* and should be the default MP setting when mods of all kinds are mostly a thing for SP.

So I vote adjust glamour / **heim nations in the official vanilla game, then allow to unnerf them (or not) via a mod for the minority of SP players that would do so (personnally even in SP I can't find the interest of overpowered nations, they force me to chose all my opponents instead of letting them be random if I play at high difficulty levels -try playing against an impossible AI with glamour units and compare with any other nation-).