Tragic poor pretender design is limiting MA Van!!!

[Meglobob]

Jazzepi said:
Hey I would just like to say that getting dominion killed with dom 4 is quite possible when fighting against someone with an awake pretender, who has Dom 9 or 10.

Jazzepi

This is very true, I don't believe I have ever took less than 5 dominion myself ever.

Also you leave yourself very vulnerable to getting negative scales pushing into your lands, which is very hard to get rid of with a low dominion of 3 or such.

I have been the victim of someone elses misfortune-3 or death-3 and its no fun. Especially when you took turmoil-3, luck-3. The evil game engine conspires to put turmoil-3 misfortune-3 in all your border provinces. Very, very unpleasent...

The clue is in the name of the game Dominions, ignore it at your peril...dominion death is rare but not unheard of.

[Jazzepi]

I'll have to post some screen shots of this exact situation after it's all over. I'm playing MA C'Tis in a fight against MA Emor with a bless rush strategy. He has almost no dominion on the map, and only four in his capital, but I've got a prophet, pretender, and very shortly, 4 temples, pushing out dominion into his territory.

One other thing to note. It's not just bad scales which get pushed into your territory. If you don't control dominion there, you get no benefit from the good scales. Sometimes, even if your opponent has good scales, not having your order +3 or whatever in that province can be just as bad as terrible scales.

Jazzepi

[thejeff]

Hard to do to a bless-rush Vanheim though. His raiders can burn your temples. If the plan went well he'll have a lot of territory to soak up your dominion before it gets the last of his.

In a last ditch defense he can blood sacrifice as well.

And he's planning for bad scales and hoping to have other people's good ones to reach neutral.

It's a risky strategy, but could be fun. The biggest problem is only getting 3-4 Van a turn.

[Lord_Bob]

I fully appreciate that you know much, much, more about this game than I do. However, for a Van Bless-Rush strategy your scales are going to have problems.

Also you leave yourself very vulnerable to getting negative scales pushing into your lands, which is very hard to get rid of with a low dominion of 3 or such.

It is far more likely that the Vanheim are leaching good scales off their neighbors than that the neighbors are managing to impose even worse scales on a dual-bless rush Pretender. The Vanheim also benefit by NOT having their poor scales imposed on conqueored provinces rapidly.

Back to the point. What puts Vanheim over the top is that they can continue putting ALL their income in sacred's far after every other bless-rush nation has maxed out their capital investment per-turn in sacreds. This is because Unit Power is at least partially balanced around capital cost. Thus the Army Power per turn for a bless rush that has reached maximum capital invested is:

(Sacred Army Power built per Turn)=(Dominion)x(Cost of Sacred Unit)

Thus, as it currently is, the more expensive(powerfull) the Sacred Unit the more powerful a sacred army that can be built per turn for any given Dominion.

The solution is to have the stronger sacreds take more "Dominion Points" to build. For example(using 1.5 cost, rounded down)
Dom 1-1 Van per turn max
Dom 2-2 Van per turn max
Dom 3-2 Van per turn max
Dom 4-3 Van per turn max
Dom 5-4 Van per turn max
Dom 6-4 Van per turn max
Dom 7-5 Van per turn max
Dom 8-6 Van per turn max
Dom 9-6 Van per turn max

coding wise, this is extremely difficult, but could probably be simulated by adjusting Dom by a "racial modifier" lookup table before calculating maximum sacreds per turn.

if (race=Vanheim)
{
switch(Dominion)
{ case 1:
Max_Sacred=1;
break;
case 2:
Max_Sacred=2;
break;
case 3:
Max_Sacred=2
break;
case 4:
Max_Sacred=3
break;
case 5:
Max_Sacred=4
break;
case 6:
Max_Sacred=4
break;
case 7:
Max_Sacred=5
break;
case 8:
Max_Sacred=6
break;
case 9:
Max_Sacred=6
break;
}
}

It's been awhile since I used C. So pardon errors.

Van should have thier cost reduced by 10 gold(or some other number) to make up for this. And maybe make them non-capital again. As the making capital damages them in non-Bless rush play as well. That will allow a non-Bless Rush to build them without blocking up his capital.

Again, as to the exact degree of change required for balance... I don't know. But this change allows Van to keep it's powerfull sacreds.

[Baalz]

Oh no, that would introduce a decent amount of unnecessary complication and I think you're attacking the wrong thing based on your premise. If your point is that Vans are too powerful and it needs to be more expensive to use them effectively (a point I'm neither conceding nor contending) a far easier change is to increase the resource or gold requirements for Vans rather than revamp the whole sacred recruiting logic. Dominion, particularly if you have a high dominion pretender is trivially cheap to raise from 3 to 6 while you only get 15% more resources for 40 design points and gold is always scarce.

[Folket]

that should be

if (race==Vanheim)

in your code all races become Vanheim.

[Lord_Bob]

I would like to bring things back to my main two points, which only some of the posters seem to mention.

1.The fact that you can build a more powerfull army of sacreds if those sacreds are more powerful(expensive) before hitting the sacred dominion limit. That Vanheim is very good at this and that is part of the reason it is so good. A part that can be fixed without messing with the Vanheim concept.

2.That Van may very well have fatigue problems in large fights with many more high defense, cheap units. Since they are 75 gold, it is very easy to have them outnumbered by an impressive amount.

-----
that should be

if (race==Vanheim)

in your code all races become Vanheim.
------
Which is yet another way to make Vanheim balanced!

Your right for C. I did say it was a while since I had coded in it. HOWEVER, it is likely the Sacred Limit is imposed when people use Recruit, ie. you hit try to recruit more and the game doesn't let you. This would only be one place in the code.

---------
You can't leech "good" scales from your neighbour - they don't take effect in your provinces. The best you can hope for is an effective "+/- 0" if your neighbour does not have any negatives, what is highly unlikely.

E.g.
With Order-3, Misfortune-3 you'll end up without order, but with full misfortune. Good luck ..
With Turmoil-3,Luck-3 you'll end up without luck, but with full turmoil. Try to get that straight ..
-------

Since Van rushers will probably only have order-3, Misfortune-0 with Sloth, Cold, Death, and Drain you have 4 negatives to lose, a zero, and one positive.

I wouldn't hold your breath for "a devastating loss of scales"... especially since the Van Pretender has been benefitting from weaker dominion in all his captured provinces during the entire expansion phase.

[Arralen]

Lord_Bob said:
It is far more likely that the Vanheim are leaching good scales off their neighbors than that the neighbors are managing to impose even worse scales on a dual-bless rush Pretender.

You can't leech "good" scales from your neighbour - they don't take effect in your provinces. The best you can hope for is an effective "+/- 0" if your neighbour does not have any negatives, what is highly unlikely.

E.g.
With Order-3, Misfortune-3 you'll end up without order, but with full misfortune. Good luck ..
With Turmoil-3,Luck-3 you'll end up without luck, but with full turmoil. Try to get that straight ..

[Mind Elemental]

By the way, now that MA Vans are capital only... how distinct is MA Vanheim from Midgard?

Okay, they still have Valks, Vanadrotts, and dwarves, and their skinshifters are 5 gold more expensive, but making their sacred capital only feels like a really huge change, particularly from a thematic perspective -- it implies Vanir are already very thin on the ground by the MA.