Patch 'n mod

[Tuidjy]

> You want to see more hoarditems?? Playing with tons of hoard items removes
> most of the strategy imho.

Just in your not humble enough opinion. First of all, hoarding is not 100%
necessary to win. I consider myself a decent player, and I seldom
start hoarding before turn 20-30, by which time many people have gone critical.
Second, hoarding is in no way a guarantee for winning. I would put it behind
diplomacy, race selection, and anticipating the enemy, in that order. Third,
even if hoarding in general were necessary to win, there are still enough
different kinds of hoarding to make things interesting. So, yes, I would
like to see more hoardable items.

> Who cares how many provinces you have when your income comes mostly from
> clams/fetishes.

And this is necessarily bad? If you managed to get to that point with just
your capital province, you must be really good. If not, what are you
complaining about?

> I really like that in games with no hoarding you have to choose how to spend
> your limited resources and the game doesn´t turn into a giant
> wishfest/micromanagement nightmare.

What I really hate more than house rules, is unenforceable house rules.

> Especially since you can get such massive discounts on forging.

You can? Then you must have done something right. Doing something is right is
what the game is about.

[Alneyan]

Technically, you can enforce "no hoarding" from a game, as item modding should now be available. Make clams and the whole thing require 5 Nature and 5 Air, and you will be virtually rid of them (summon spells are easier to remove from the picture).

The other way is, as usual, to have a devoted host (and host only) check the game every single turn. This would, however, not exactly be feasible in this case, unless you only have a few players in the game.

[PvK]

Alneyan said:
...
The other way is, as usual, to have a devoted host (and host only) check the game every single turn. This would, however, not exactly be feasible in this case, unless you only have a few players in the game.

They could check only every 10 or 20 turns, as long as the penalty for violation was doing their turn for them and throwing away all their magic items and gems. Hoarding doesn't do any good unless the hoarder can keep the hoard for longer than that.

PvK

[Alneyan]

Well, a clam would be useful before ten turns are over if you only wanted to alchemise water gems into astral pearls (you would need 10 water to get 5 astral via alchemy, and so a clam is better after five turns in this case). I get your idea though, even if this particular rule does not require an host watch. Setting the hoarding items to cost 160 gems each would make any hoarding strategy slightly counter-productive.

On the same topic, it would actually be possible to enforce a limit on the number of hoarding items per player. They would be set to cost the said 160 gems, and the host would have one nation in the game (and only one province, cut from the rest of the world). Set the Wish spell to cost nothing and make it available only to the host's nation, and the host could still forge enough hoarding items and give them to the players once they pay the regular fee. Once a player reaches the level needed to cast Wish, the spell would be set to normal cost/level, and no longer host-only.

On a somewhat related matter: is there a way to prevent Dominion from spreading for a certain amount of turns? I have been trying to do that, but the best I can think of would be to put Stone Idols in all provinces neighbouring the starting provinces, but that would take several turns at the very least.