Can I get some cheese with that...

[Stormbinder]

Originally posted by Reverend Zombie:

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Originally posted by Kel:

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Originally posted by Reverend Zombie:
I believe that there is a burden to provide evidence if you are proposing changes, and that burden should fall on the "whiners" and not on those who are more or less happy with the game as it is.

That's the whole problem. People often provide evidence which is then dismissed based on these illegitimate tactics. You can't say they didn't provide a 'burden of evidence' if you can't refute it, logically.

- Kel

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How are these tactics illegitimate, and what is the evidence?

It's hard to refute opinions, and other than reports of "I hate playing against a castlespamming VQ clam-hoarder" I have not seen much evidence put forth that any of these are in any way illegitmate.

I will grant that VQs appear to be underpriced compared to some other Pretenders, or rather, some of the 125 pt. Pretenders are probably overpriced.

But...how can buidling castles be illegitimate? Where does that particular line of thinking stop? Should we limit the number of temples a player can build? Number of labs? Number of uber summons? Number of mages? Number of provinces to take a turn? Why not, and how is it different for the reasons given for outlawing castlespamming?

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Easy. The best suggestion I've heard so far is to make temples destructable only by the order of commander (the same as with labs). This way you can protect your temples against raiders without having castels in every province, which is the main reason of "mad castling".

I don't think it'll elimiate mad castling alltogether, but it'll go very long way toward making it less promiment, without actually nerfing anything or adding some artificial limits. With such sustem you can still build as many temples as you want and protect them against raiders using your network of castles as strongholds and nodes in your defense system.

[ May 28, 2004, 01:19: Message edited by: Stormbinder ]

[Stormbinder]

Kel - very intelligent and well argued Posts.

With recent local emotional level raising, it's a rare sign to see these days, especially when discussing controversial and provocative topics such as this one.

[PvK]

Originally posted by Norfleet:

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Originally posted by Stormbinder:
You forgot to mention mad castling. Did you play without it as well?

The castles were built to keep out pesky enemy VQs, since everyone knows vampires can't come inside unless they're invited. Besides, what ELSE would you build in a province? Temples would explode constantly. Plus that annoying sacred troop limit requires castles to enable their churn-out, temples to increase the rate at which they can be churned out...and castles again to protect said temples.

Everything in Dom2 boils down to those temples, after all, and when your production bandwidth depends on those temples, even losing control of one temporarily as suggested in a proposed solution would be unacceptable.

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Apparently, that's a "no, he didn't do without castle-spamming"!

Sometimes Norfleet makes a lot of sense to me, and sometimes, like above, he makes very little sense to me:

"Everything in Dom2 boils down to those temples, after all..."

It does? Temples do several things, but I don't think any of my games have "boiled down" to temples. Then, I haven't used many immortals, nor relied on blessed national units.

"Besides, what ELSE would you build in a province?"

What kind of question is that? How about, nothing, building things in production centers instead? How about, an occasional good indy unit that is worth buying? How about, a lab? Or, PD?

PvK

[ May 28, 2004, 00:58: Message edited by: PvK ]

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by PvK:
"Everything in Dom2 boils down to those temples, after all..."

It does? Temples do several things, but I don't think any of my games have "boiled down" to temples. Then, I haven't used many immortals, nor relied on blessed national units.

If you don't build temples, enemy dominion gets into your land. I've tried building temples in every single province, and it STILL wouldn't stay out. Clearly, what the game is trying to tell me is that I don't build enough temples.

"Besides, what ELSE would you build in a province?"

What kind of question is that? How about, nothing, building things in production centers instead? How about, an occasional good indy unit that is worth buying?

An occasional indy mage doesn't really consume that much of you funding that you can't build a temple. Besides, see above problem with dominion maintenance.

More importantly, while this is certainly an alternate approach to spending your gold, it does not address the problem of what you do with the empty province! Yes, you could buy a ton of troops, and conquer a ton of empty provinces. When you do that, I'm going to go, "Hey, thanks for the provinces", and start taking them from you - which will be easy because there's nothing stopping me from doing it, now that you have so generously removed the pesky indies for me!

As I've stated in the past, if you're not able to hold what you conquer, you're just conquering it for someone else's sake.

How about, a lab?

Well, yes, duh. Building labs goes alongside building temples, particularly if you have mage-priests to churn out. Of course, you can't crank out your mages anyway without building a fort, and once you have a fort, you may as well situate a temple there.

Or, PD?

You're joking, right? Besides, 3 PD costs all of $6. That hardly represents a major expenditure.

[Huzurdaddi]

IF castle spamming is a problem then a simple linear increase depending upon how many currently exist sounds like a decent solution.

But I don't know how much of a problem they are. I do know that I like building them though! They are great!

[Vynd]

Originally posted by Reverend Zombie:
Although people may have made good points pro and con the various changes advocated, I don't think we have seen much hard evidence on any of them.

What kind of evidence, you might ask? The kind of stuff Zen talked about:

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Long ago I did a breakdown of Clam's and later Peter (may he rest in peace with many women and large tracts of land) gave another breakdown. With the #'s presented it was shown that you can abuse it, but only in specific circumstances with a specific gameset and only really viable for a very slim selection of circumstance.

If you advocate a change without taking the time to gather evidence like that, you are basing your arguments on preferences and opinions, whose relationship to reality is questionable.

Advocating change without the type of evidence above is what's been called whining.

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I think you're being unreasonable. I saw Peter's clam evidence, and while I'm sure it took some time to put together it was still relatively straightforward to develop. As I recall, it was essentially a mathematical formula that calculated how many astral gems you would get if you started making clams from water gems, and then more clams from alchemized astral gems, etc., etc. Forgive me if I've oversimplified it a little. But the point is, it required absolutely no in-game testing. It was just a matter of determining what the proper formulas were and then crunching some numbers.

There's no way I can see to do this sort of abstract number crunching for the issues of castling, or VQ, or raiding, or other things that people have "whined" about lately. There are no numbers to crunch here. No forumla to extrapolate from. The only way to gauge the impact of these various strategies and issues is to see them in action, in a game setting. Which takes a heck of a lot longer than running a few formulas.

Even if you could somehow run a big set of games in which to test your argument about, say, castling, there's no way to control for the variable you are interested in. The endless possible choices that each player can take means that you'll never know if a particular person won because they built lots of castles. Maybe they won because their opponents were just generally incompetent. Maybe they won because they found some nice indie provinces early. Maybe they won because they hoarded clams. Most likely they won, or lost, based on an interaction of a lot of factors, many of them not readily apparent.

So it is impossible to provide the sort of rigorous evidence you are looking for. And I don't think it is at all fair to tell people that their arguments carry no weight because they can't meet an impossible standard. Besides, it won't work. People will keep making their arguments, based on whatever logic and annecdoatal evidence they can muster. (And I say more power to them!) I suggest that you learn to live with this fact, rather than, um... whining about it.

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Huzurdaddi:
IF castle spamming is a problem then a simple linear increase depending upon how many currently exist sounds like a decent solution.

But I don't know how much of a problem they are. I do know that I like building them though! They are great!

That's the thing: Castle spamming isn't the problem, castle spamming is the solution: Raiding is the problem: Without castles, anyone can simply raid your provinces at whim: PD is utterly impotent and cannot stop anything raiding force more serious than a single cast of Call of the Winds or Wild. Thus, a response to contain the damage caused by raiding had to be devised, and, as in real life, that answer has turned out to be castles. Lots of castles.

Now, of course, people are upset that they can't simply raid at whim, and that their attacks run into these stumbling blocks placed in their paths....ironically for exactly that reason.

Boo frickety hoo. Since when was the defender supposed to be accomodating of the attacker's wishes?