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[quantum_mechani]

Originally Posted by WraithLord

I personally don't care much for the new suggestion re. Tartarians. I agree that they're too common by far so would like to put another suggestion on the table:

How about tartarians become nation specific spell for nations that have a strong thematic connection to death and/or that need such a uber spell to compensate for innate weakness. So for example, make tarts available only to:
- Ermor (yes, LA Ermor don't need tarts but this is the nation that thematically should have them)
- MA Machaka
- Sauromatia
etc.

That way you kill two birds with the same stone - reduce tarts from very common status and grant or not grant the spell as a further tool to address nation balance issues.

Care to offer some counterpoints about the other tart suggestion?

I don't see how leaving tarts as they are and restricting them to some nations does much good, especially as death nations are by and large the best nations anyway. If won't change the fact that nations with access will use them almost exclusively, it just means those that don't are fighting a massively uphill battle.

I'll look in to posting a possible change list before release.

[Valerius]

Originally Posted by Executor

Valerius, they would be really nice imo, all resistances, high protection, high HP and mindless. Would be able to capture forts alone too of course. But yes they have terrible stats like Golems, however you add a good shield and a brend weapon.
I think they should be allowed hands, it goes along with late stage thug/sc diversification. They'd be like a bigger version of the Mechanical Giant.

Sounds good to me. It's certainly not OP and the greater variety of summons on the field, the better.


SSJ reminded me of something when he mentioned the Momentum 3 rules in the EDM thread. In that game one of the boosts I gave the elemental royalty was 100% darkvision for those that didn't already have it. What about making the elemental royalty either blind or have darkvision 100? It seems odd to me that, for instance, the Queen of Storms can summon blind air elementals but isn't blind herself. Same goes for the earth kings. Then the fire and water royalty have odd situations such as summoning blind elementals but having darkvision themselves. Seems like it would be thematic and a nice little boost to make this consistent and give all the elemental royalty blindness/darkvision (I don't think anyone would argue they're OP and they are in any case unique).

Originally Posted by quantum_mechani

I don't see how leaving tarts as they are and restricting them to some nations does much good, especially as death nations are by and large the best nations anyway. If won't change the fact that nations with access will use them almost exclusively, it just means those that don't are fighting a massively uphill battle.

Agree completely; I'd rather stick with the current situation than go this route.

[WraithLord]

Yes please.
You said:
"
At the moment I'm toying with the idea of removing their default magic in favor of 'potential' magic. They would have no magic when you summon them but 50 gems empowerment of the appropriate type would get you direct to level 4 in a path (thematically speaking, it's just a different way of representing the feebled mind, but in a way that anyone could heal them, not just the GoH/Chalice). This way, with the right investment they could well surpass most EDM summons, but they wouldn't have the huge diversity advantages.
+
Yes, I think the only way to remove afflictions would be to swap out the summoning spell, which has side effects I'd rather avoid. I think having plenty feebled would still be OK though- it's true GoH/Chalice is great now but the concern with the direct raising prices was that it would make them better- this would just leave them at about their current power. After all, how many tarts can you really empower? At 10 gems each you should easily have plenty of healthy empowerment candidates. Also, under this tart scheme GoR could probably get cheaper and they could be used with whatever afflictions as thugs (I actually think seeing some still feebled tarts used in battle would be quite cool).
"

let me see if I get you right, your suggestion consists of:
1. Tarts won't have magic.
2. 50 gems worth of empower would give them lvl 4 of ???
3. Tarts would still have afflictions
4. Tarts summon price would be 10D

So basically to get a 4X tart I'll need to spend 10D *(avg # of times to get non feeble mind tart) + 50D. My gripe with the suggestion is that: a- it keeps the current unthematic "all nations take death to get to tarts" tendency. Yeah, it really makes sense to see MA Mari + Pyth deploy tarts and go hvy on death...
and b- The price raise and losing diversity seem to take all the fun out of tarts - or in other words are too extreme.

Except LA Ermor the other nations could use both diversity and row power. Think what it would do to MA Machaka status to have near exclusive access to tarts. So perhaps don't give Tarts to LA Ermor but do give to other underpowered death nations.

Tarts are fun the way they are but not everyone should have them. To prevent ppl from taking them you'll need to make them suck and then nobody will summon them

[quantum_mechani]

Originally Posted by WraithLord

Tarts are fun the way they are but not everyone should have them. To prevent ppl from taking them you'll need to make them suck and then nobody will summon them

That seems a defeatist attitude towards balance- either they are so good people use them exclusively or they suck and no one uses them.

Originally Posted by WraithLord

let me see if I get you right, your suggestion consists of:
1. Tarts won't have magic.
2. 50 gems worth of empower would give them lvl 4 of ???
3. Tarts would still have afflictions
4. Tarts summon price would be 10D

That more or less sums it up, yes. Though given for 10d they are quite good troops anyway, the cost for an empowered tart chassis is more like 50 of whatever gems you can spare + GoR cost. I do sympathize with your objection to unthematic nations getting tarts, but honestly I don't see any option to stop that without very unwanted repercussions. To me, having Mackaka get Tarts but not LA Ermor seems even more unthematic than everyone getting them. And allowing high powered death nations privileged access is just asking for trouble. In any case, restricting tarts by nations is more of an and/or suggestion than directly in opposition to changing their magic.

As for the point about removing fun, I admit I get as much fun from rolling randoms as the next person, but there are plenty of places to do that in dominions. You could even look at the empowerment as simply a more round about way of rolling randoms, based on what kind of gems you get extra of from sites. And as much as rolling randoms is fun, so are strategic choices and this seems to actually increase those.

EDIT: Boosters would work as normal, i.e. they would not boost anything unless you already had that path.

[TheDemon]

The vote options like any vote choice are far too simplistic and shortsighted. I wondered if I should have voted at all.

Hammers - should be removed but only after adjusting everything they affect properly. Forge bonuses to all types of smiths, const sites in the cap for thug nations (yes I know likely unmoddable), gear cost adjustments, etc.

SDR - I see no problem with SDR; they don't take much micro. Unlike gemgens their effect on gameplay is obviously intentional. And if you bellyache about them "generating" gems, THAT'S WHAT ALL BLOOD HUNTERS DO. A B2 mage for 160 gold "generates" half a dozen slaves a turn. This is obviously how a blood econ is intended to work, although the costs might need to be adjusted to find balance. If you want to remove SDRs, ideally what would happen is the formula for blood hunting would start at 90% for B1 with B0 staying as it is. Since this is impossible, I say leave SDRs in.

Gemgens - sure take them out it's certainly a different game without them

Sites - 30% sites aren't the problem. The problem there is ALL alt sites, ALL blood sites, ALL const sites, and 30%+ conj sites. Personally I say remove all discount sites, especially with EDM.


I note Jade Knives aren't on the poll. Why?

[WraithLord]

Originally Posted by TheDemon

...
Sites - 30% sites aren't the problem. The problem there is ALL alt sites, ALL blood sites, ALL const sites, and 30%+ conj sites. Personally I say remove all discount sites, especially with EDM.
...

I note Jade Knives aren't on the poll. Why?

Sure, let's remove all discount sites. We don't need any rational to lynch them and why the best solution is removing content from the game

Good point re. Jade knives

[Executor]

Valerius, they would be really nice imo, all resistances, high protection, high HP and mindless. Would be able to capture forts alone too of course. But yes they have terrible stats like Golems, however you add a good shield and a brend weapon.
I think they should be allowed hands, it goes along with late stage thug/sc diversification. They'd be like a bigger version of the Mechanical Giant.

Deamon, there are only 10 poll questions that can be used, so the poll can't be anything else than simple. My intent was to get some general ideas and feedback on the given subjects and have this thread generate some possibilities regarding some CBM choices, which seemed to work.

As fare as jade knifes go, well, I did intend to put them originally, however I forgot about them when I made the poll.

[thejeff]

I agree that removing the magic and making them cheap to empower removes much of the interest that comes from the diversity.
Being able to get the magic you want on the chassis you want, as long as you have the gems takes away alot of the flavor. Trying to figure out something useful to do with the weird path combinations (or getting that random 7S titan) is all part of the fun.

And I'm not sure about the mechanics of this. What happens if you stick a RoW on one of these?

[llamabeast]

My worry about the empowerment thing is that it might actually increase the tendency of Tartarians to give you diversity. Generally it's possible to scrape together 50 gems of any colour by late game, so if you get to Tartarians you might just empower one of each path you don't have strong access to, and then have strong access to all paths.

[quantum_mechani]

I'm not sure it could really be worse than the current set up in that respect... it's true you can't guarantee any particular path right now but I think you can generally acquire diversity at a much lower price. 50 gems of a type you don't have good access to is not easy, and having one x4 mage of the type is not really that great of overall access- compared with usually having a largish pile of tarts with usually several of each path.