Enough whining!

[atul]

The Panther said:
Overpowered: Pythium, clams, false horrors, wraithful skies, astral and death magic, blood summons, life drain, Air Queens, devils,

Hm, did you realize you just listed half of all the game's magic in your overpowered list? Astral, death, blood and air. Good enough balance for me here. ;p But seriously, water magic's a bit of a bore, fire/earth/nature have their uses. Nearly seven okay paths out of eight isn't that bad.

Underpowered: T'ien Ch'i, Ulm, sea trolls, water magic, national troops in general, sloth, luck,

You didn't mean turmoil by any chance? If national troops suck sloth should be a no-brainer... I think a lot would be to luck scale if the event's were resolved differently from the current (frequency by the capital's dominion, random location, effect by target province's dominion). As it now stands trying to expand into hostile dominion (order-misfortune as a standard) when playing turmoil-luck nation is a real pain due constant bad events in borderlands alone.

...okay, the solution would be to be like everyone else and play order-misfortune. But I think it's boring, so if that makes me a poor player so be it... But I still think that deciding between good or bad events by averaging luck scale over all the owned provinces or something like that could be cool.

[Yvelina]

I agree with Atul (and with Petar, obviously) that the presence of so many 'overpowered' tactics shows that Dominions II is both fun and balanced. Is it perfectly balanced? No, I am afraid.

Water magic is a poor relation, and Ulm and T'ien C'hi are hopeless. Wrathful skies, skeleton/horror spam, lifedraining weapons do channel late game army makeup into a pattern. Hoarding is a prerequisite for winning on any map bigger than a hundred provinces. All fortifications but the Watchtower and the Castle are overpriced.

But as thinktank says, and contrary to what most complainers seem to want, the way to maintain a fun game is to provide counters, not to neuter the effective tactics.

[The Panther]

atul said:

You didn't mean turmoil by any chance?

Oh sorry, I did write this wrong. I meant Productivity is vastly underpowered, just like Luck. Sloth (almost always to the +3 level) tends to be a no-brainer on practically every single decent pretender design I have seen. Mistfortune (but normally only +2 here) is also a no-brainer for the top players, but it is not quite as one-sided as productivity/sloth is.

[atul]

The Panther said:
I meant Productivity is vastly underpowered, just like Luck. Sloth (almost always to the +3 level) tends to be a no-brainer on practically every single decent pretender design I have seen. Mistfortune (but normally only +2 here) is also a no-brainer for the top players

Thanks for the clarification.

The impression I've got lurking around here is that there is at least a vocal click of people dead sure that the only worthy set of scales seems to be something like order3 sloth3 temp(nation_preference) death1/2 misfortune2 magic2/3 and all the points to a jacked up pretender. Maybe a no-brainer choice for a top munchkin... but as a role-player I must say: Bo-ring. If I want to min-max I go play D&D.

Okay, to each their own, maybe I've just been lucky in my MPs so that a good performance has been possible with sub-optimal (fun/experimental) choices.

Of course, the best would be if the different scale/nation/pretender options would be equally viable even to powerplayers, but... well, Dom3 probably improves some in this regard too, we'll see.

[sushiboat]

I wonder whether a pseudo-market feedback mechanism for prices might be good for beta testing. The idea is that the beta keeps track of how you spend your gold and gems and sends the info to Illwinter. After collecting data from many players and games, there would be a pattern of units, items, and spells that are used much more than average and those that are used much less than average. Then in the next beta version, the highly used things have higher prices and the rarely used things have lower prices. The new beta would announce the price adjustments, and the process would repeat until the desired distribution was achieved and prices were stable.

[Jack Simth]

It could be useful, but might need adjustement on availablity - a level 8 summonnable critter is going to be a lot less common than a level-1 summonnable critter, simply because you don't have access to the 8's until later in the game. If beta testers tend to play short games, reducing the cost of the summon might have no bearing on how often it's used, making it overpowered in longer games; contrawise, an early summon might have a price well out of proportion to it's effect, simply because it's available sooner. A unit from a rare site might be seldom used (it's rarely found) but be quite powerfull, and have it's cost crash because it's almost never found.

[sushiboat]

You would compare within categories, naturally. Infantry vs. infantry, low level spell vs. low level spell, etc.

[alexti]

I'm not sure it would work. There're too many "specialty" items, units and spells. For example, anit-Ermor strategy won't be useful against most of other nations, so anti-Ermor elements would get underpriced by the proposed method. Similar thing is likely happen to "underwater" tools. Certain items that counter certain strategies will suffer the same fate.

[baruk]

How about if the price/gem cost (or even fatigue cost) fluctuation is an in-game effect? So if people start casting alot of wrathful skies, seasonal spirits, ghost riders, the cost starts going up in game. Or if certain spells or units remain unused, they become slightly cheaper. Sort of like how the mercenary system works. I expect it would be a lot of work for Illwinter to set the game up like that, however.

On the "whining" thing, I think the problem is that people mistake the means, namely "game balance", for the end, which is to improve the game. Game balance is never an end in itself, it should only be used if the result is to improve the game. Certain games even thrive on game imbalance, anyone else ever play the "Great Dalmuti" card game?

If I make a suggestion concerning the game, it is because I think it would be an improvement, whether or not any "game balancing" is involved. If people disagree, I hope they can do so based on the relative merits of my idea, rather than dismissing it whilst making broad generalisations about the motives behind such ideas.

My motives? I see a lot of games with annoying house rules, regarding castles, clams and the like. I understand people's concerns, but they tend to go too far, in my opinion, by banning things outright, and restricting gameplay. Like previous posters, I'd rather introduce more counters to effective tactics (part of this is making them more "counterable" in the first place, which I do not see as a "nerf"), as I think this will lead to a more interesting game by increasing the options available.

An idea I had whilst I was thinking about this: how about changing the order of the Nation design system, so that national scales are the first thing chosen, and they influence the different pretender Gods that are available (and perhaps the powers of those Gods)? You would have the scales and all potential Gods on the same screen, so you could see the effect of switching the scales around. Unavailable Gods would be greyed out, selecting them would automatically switch scales to the appropriate level.
Additionally, scale choice could have more influence on the rest of the nation choices. Perhaps a high production scale could provide a wider range of castles, or castles with improved stats. Cost of magical paths could be affected eg. cheaper death magic with death scale, cheaper fire with heat scale etc. Starting spells, spell availability and spell effectiveness could all be affected by scales eg. ghost riders could be available earlier for death nations, whilst being more expensive for those with growth scales. With these kinds of changes, a balance overhaul would be required. I could even see scale choices no longer costing points, if the benefits of the negative scales were matched sufficiently by those of the positive scales eg. drain scale would provide more significant magic resistance, a bonus to dispel, and perhaps a forging bonus (if you see a drain dominion as one that controls and tempers magical power, rather than banning it outright).
This kind of system might provide a more varied selection of viable scale choices, but it would be a lot of work. I couldn't say for sure whether it would make the game "better" though, but it seemed interesting when I thought of it.