Tip: Template for reducing late game MM hell

[Burnsaber]

IMHO, if anyone loses 90% of provinces to a sneak attack, they likely just had some PD in those provinces and thought "I bought 3-5 pd and now I never have to worry about anything happening to them, ever!".

If that is the case, that guy deserved to lose. That lose was a result of that guy's own stupidity, not because he didn't have any gem gens.

[Squirrelloid]

Originally Posted by K

1. So they are not unbalancing the game. That's a flaw?
2. Yeh, and defending provinces, castles, mages, etc is so tedious.
3. The funny thing about the endgame is that you can take 90% of a person's provinces in a few rounds with thugs and SCs and then you have to actually fight their armies. It's actually good that the win doesn't always go to the sneak attacker.
4. Yes, having a gem income adds a level of complexity to the game. This is the wrong game for you if you don't like complexity.
5. Let's face it, any gem income and Wish causes weird things to happen. I once ended a game just by using my non-Astral, not gem-gen, gem income to Armageddon the place to death to force the end of the game because 15 players were stuck in terminal turtle mode and the game was never going to end.

Gem gens only cause MM when you spend a lot of time turtling and have extra gem income and mage time to spend on them. The fact that you want to hit people early and hard before they can build a hundred gem-gen items actually means that the endgame should be shorter if people are not stuck in terminal turtle mode.

If you spend a lot of time fighting, scripting a single large complicated army can take an hour or more. That and incentives to turtle should be the place where people should be spending their energies if they want to cut down MM.

Originally Posted by Burnsaber

IMHO, if anyone loses 90% of provinces to a sneak attack, they likely just had some PD in those provinces and thought "I bought 3-5 pd and now I never have to worry about anything happening to them, ever!".

If that is the case, that guy deserved to lose. That lose was a result of that guy's own stupidity, not because he didn't have any gem gens.

Lets assume that I'm playing Eriu and you're playing someone with notoriously bad PD. (Agartha maybe?) There is no amount of PD that will stop a sidhe lord with a vine shield and a frost brand, a decent bless, and appropriate buffs. (Mistform generally) I can have a lot of Sidhe Lords - more than you have provinces. Those sidhe lords can sneak and cloud trapeze. Its completely reasonable an Eriu attack deprives Agartha of every province that doesn't have a castle or army sitting in it before Agartha even knows there's a war on, plus as many armies as their main armies can destroy. (Eriu can even field armies that sneak, and are glamoured so you'd never know they were at your door regardless).

Even if Eriu can't take your fortresses/armies for a large number of turns, you've lost the game right there because you just lost most of your gem production, and Eriu is hardly the only nation who can do that.

[Sombre]

In fairness knowing that Eriu can do that, you'd expect Agartha to have done something about it. If they can't do anything about it, realistically, that's a national balance thing and doesn't really belong in this thread.

[Psycho]

@Wraithlord: I don't claim that removing gem gens unbalances the game (except for a few nations that should be compensated somehow). I am all for removing them. I just replied to your post about MM and balance.

@Squirrelloid: No, you won't protect some sites. You will protect most of them. You really need to be popping castles everywhere as lategame approaches as well as patrolling provinces (with your mages and thugs also) and putting domes all over the place. If you protect critical resources, provinces with many neighbors, chokepoints, then you will hamper Eriu's ability to raid you a lot.

[Micah]

Attacking gets you income but leaves your forces spread out and vulnerable. That's the tradeoff. Taking 90% of someone's lands in a turn means a huge investment of either time/money (sneaking) or gems (teleporting/trapezing) for the attacker, and then the defender has full knowledge of what each of those attack forces consists of and can prepare their counter attack accordingly. If they don't have the gems banked to survive for a few turns without their unforted gem income that's a play choice they decided on. A single SC kill by the defender can be worth a full turn's gem income, and the defender can take their pick of targets.

[Squirrelloid]

Originally Posted by Micah

Attacking gets you income but leaves your forces spread out and vulnerable. That's the tradeoff. Taking 90% of someone's lands in a turn means a huge investment of either time/money (sneaking) or gems (teleporting/trapezing) for the attacker, and then the defender has full knowledge of what each of those attack forces consists of and can prepare their counter attack accordingly. If they don't have the gems banked to survive for a few turns without their unforted gem income that's a play choice they decided on. A single SC kill by the defender can be worth a full turn's gem income, and the defender can take their pick of targets.

...

A single SC kill is worth your gem income... ok... except your opponent is *getting* your gem income, so attacking you just paid for itself in gems alone. And if you can't take everything back in one turn (unlikely), he'll net profit in the long run even in the corner case where he refuses to engage you while you take your lands back.

How many multiples of your lost gem income in SCs do you have to be able to kill for it to be worth it? What if it's merely thugs with cheap gear?

And of course the entire time you're fighting in your territory, which may have morale bonuses for dominion, but that means its your land getting crapped on. 200% taxes, pillaging, and your economy is in shambles if you ever repel the attack and regain your provinces.

-----------

Psycho: so, you want people to spend their money on castles everywhere and make ending the game even more tedious than it already is? Not to mention funneling cash into making useless fortresses and not into units that could be winning the game for you?

(1) I'm virtually certain this loses to the person who only builds a reasonable number of castles for unit production and in strategic locations, because they have more mages and thus more mage turns (forgings/ritual castings/RPs) with which to work.
(2) Isn't the whole point that endgames which last forever are obnoxious? Needing to siege every single province is just pointlessly turtly.

I have to agree with K on at least one point, its the tendency of people to Turtle which leads to unfun gameplay.

[K]

Originally Posted by Micah

Attacking gets you income but leaves your forces spread out and vulnerable. That's the tradeoff. Taking 90% of someone's lands in a turn means a huge investment of either time/money (sneaking) or gems (teleporting/trapezing) for the attacker, and then the defender has full knowledge of what each of those attack forces consists of and can prepare their counter attack accordingly. If they don't have the gems banked to survive for a few turns without their unforted gem income that's a play choice they decided on. A single SC kill by the defender can be worth a full turn's gem income, and the defender can take their pick of targets.

Any investments in gems (spells or lost SC/thugs) of the attacker is immediately paid by the seizure of 90% of an enemies sites. Only in the most extreme cases would it take more than a single turn of income from those sites to pay off that investment.

Also, now the defender is an attacker, so those thugs get to move first in those provinces that they now own and can move to a safe location where the defending nation cannot reach them.

There really is no way around the fact that without gem-gens, the sneak attacker always gets a killing blow against the defender. When the defender retakes some small portion of his lands, the attacker can now focus his forces to wipe them out having fatally crippled the defender's empire.

As an aside, I'm amused that no one thinks turtling is a cause of MM in the late game.

I'm also amused that people think they can remove things from the game and not have a balance discussion.

[Psycho]

I don't want people to do anything. I am telling you how to play the endgame if you aspire to win. Empty fortresses are not useful, you are very wrong there.

[Illuminated One]

edit: Sorry, OT
(Of course fun gameplay has nothing to do with MM. Some MM can be fun, it's only the repetitive actions that could be automated that's bad.
Fixing the MM thing doesn't stop with clams, everything where you a forced to do a repetitive action just to stay competitive should be changed imo)

Originally Posted by Squirrelloid

I have to agree with K on at least one point, its the tendency of people to Turtle which leads to unfun gameplay.

Yes, you are right. However that's not due to the player's character (genuine turtlers won't survive into the late game, with gem gens or without, if only for the reason that the weakest looking nation is often on the receiving end of the dogpile). Let's look at some late game facts:
1) Taking a single province means 1% or 2% of the enemies income go to you
2) except for discount sites, which are not a good strategic option as they can either be hidden (summon something, move it away, don't call your mages D5 (*), don't build special forts...) or defended just by concentrating forces and exploiting turn 1 or turn limit defender advantage.
3) Loosing on of your "big guns" >= loosing 10 raiding parties.

So what do you do?
You don't use nuclear weapons on peasant villages, so even if you are on the offensive you use the cheapest thing that reliably routs the PD and keep your SCs and SC counters in reserve to drop on the enemies counteroffensive.
That's all fine if you are fighting an enemy who moves around his SCs or giant armies without expecting you to pick them off one by one. Or when you have a huge advantage through artifacts, uniques, recruitable SCs, or simply income (Well, I guess clams have been widely used in the 3 years the game is out. Only now everyone knows about them).
But when fighting a player of equal skill and situation this is rather a mess.
So, how to fix lategame?
Add a operational component into the game. Make the map so that strategical goals can be formulated (when I take this mountain range I will deprive the enemy of 90% his earth-gem income and his low prot thugs look rather poor), forcing both the attacker and the defender to bring their real forces into play (i.e. it shouldn't come down to just having to concentrate on a single province, it shouldn't need taking 90% of the enemies territory, more like 10-20%, and it should be worthwhile - i.e. research and magic diversification should be hard enough that noone can just change his strategy spontaneously).

(*) Sorry mate, you know who you are.

[WraithLord]

Are you by chance referring to VPs?- Raid all you want, if you don't bring your heavy guns out and take those VPs you are toast anyway.