If there is another such game (and I hope there is) I think the map needs to be a wrap around. And personally I would ban Water nations too. They are too seperate and make balancing difficult.
I am not critical of how this was set up however. No one really knew how it would all turn out - or at least they didn't say
And anyone who goes to all the effort of thinking up the rules, designing and making the map placements and running the game deserves respect. So well done Rdonj
But the initial plan was to have a sort of grid of Overlords and Normals surrounding them and I think in hindsight this would have been best. i.e. so while each Overlord is surrounded by normals and could be ganged up on each normal was to have two Overlord neighbours meaning going all 'one way' would be tough. That requires a wrap around map.
Instead we had most of the normals with only one overlord neighbour. And in TCs case this was extreme as most of the normals other neighbour was the natural barrier the sea. Baalz could have come out early and normals could have gone in after him. But early on the sea was basically acting as a map edge. So TC faced 6 normals - only one of which had a real border with another Overlord (Pan) and most had few even normal neighbours.
After seeing his terrible strategic position I changed my plan from toadying up to one or more Overlords to trying to organise a gang up on him. Not very successfully I might add
I suspect that had all 6 of us attacked reasonably early then TC would have not been strong enough to resist. I don't think any of the other Overlords were in such a perilous starting position.
But had the map been a wrap around with all of us having a second (none water) Overlord the diplomatic position would have been very different.
Re the problem of the Overlords in the mid/late game. Please remember it is a problem now not early on. The Overlords could easily crush a normal without the restrictions on normals capitals early on and no dominion attacks.
So any fix should address the mid/late game issue not boost Overlord attack options earlier. So I don't like the prophet idea as it hardly solves Baalz's troubles now but would make an Overlord much tougher to resist earlier on.
You could for example allow an attack outside of dominion per Capital held by an Overlord. So he starts with one but can get more. Or simply add an extra attack every year or 18 turns. If you are worried about cheating you could have each Overlord post which areas he had attacked beyond his dominion without his Pretender - after the turn has progressed - so players can check if they were attacked legally or not. It gives all players some intelligence on where each Overlord is focusing but I don't see that as a big problem.
A restriction could have been placed on normals dominion (max 6? 7? 8?) so that the Overlords could have dom pushed more easily and made defence against that harder for the normals. That would help give Overlords more legal attack options.
I think packing the bonus gem sites in the Overlords forts would have been better than spreading them out as was done. It does make the Overlords core lands very inviting if they are looking in any way vulnerable. The actual forts are hard to take out - you can't just grab one, put up your dominion and enjoy the gem income - as you can with this set up.
Although the Overlords picked their own nations I think some are possibly more Capital focused than others. You could possibly get around this by making all an Overlords starting forts Capitals - i.e. give them the special sites of the Capital so they can build the capital only units/commanders. For variety you could have given other capital sites. e.g given TC his own Capital and the EA Capital in one fort and the LA Capital in another. Giving a wider variety of units/leaders and keeping them 'special' longer. As it has turned out there seems to have been little Overlord v Overlord fighting (that I can see anyway) after Dr P failed to decapitate Atul early on. But with the Gatestones an early take out of an Overlord Capital was very possible. A sieged capital can produce no units or mages which is very serious for some nations even if they have secondary forts. It was certainly my plan to get one of us to besiege TCs capital and stop his flow of good mages if we had been able to attack him early enough.
Re: Overlords - Game Thread. (playing)
Linear Mode
