Scales under CB

[Cainehill]

OG_Gleep said:
The question comes from looking at the changes made to the scales in CB, and talking to a couple people who echoed both of your sentiments, and reading old threads. Need Gold? Low Resource Units? Take Order/Sloth.

But when looking at the scales under CB, I don't think that Production/Sloth is only related to resources anymore. Yes, it has a huge impact on them, but the impact on income is significant (to me atleast). And on top of that if your strategy involves building troops, your going to need resources. Even if you have a booming economy, your only going to be able to build troops up to your resource point. Taking potentially 45% hit in resources will significantly limit the amount of troops you can build in your forward forts. Its a double whammy. Your taking a hit to your economy, and a hit to the amount of troops you can build.

Some players almost never built troops with certain nations / themes. Or at least, never want to build enough troops that they're going to be resource bound. If a unit costs 70 gold and 16 resources (Vanheim's Van) I'm rarely going to be able to afford so many that I care about the resources - I'll run out of gold, I'll run into the 1 sacred per point of dominion limit, etc. Since I essentially never buy any troops other than Vans, I can easily afford Sloth.

As you say - I take a hit on income. But if I also took Order (which, actually, I rarely do), I'm still making a net profit. And if I take Sloth-3, I only have enough resources to buy 3 Vans a turn - but I can't afford that many initially at any rate.

I take my first province - even with Sloth-3, I now have enough resources in the capitol (with a 30-admin fort) to build 4 vans a turn. Don't I wish I could afford that many!
Second province I take, I now have 81 resources, but have never been able to afford more than 3 a turn gold-wise.

In any case - taking a high-admin fort can gain back a lot of resource lost to Sloth. And, if by taking sloth I get more of a badass pretender, I can expand more quickly. That means more resources, more gold, more gems - and gems are what I really want. Provinces I don't own _never_ give me any gold or resources.

Another tactic to minimize the effect of Sloth (and other bad scales) - don't bother spreading your dominion.

Edit : But anyway - yes, there is rarely a totally free ride. That was kinda the point of the CB mods - to make it so that there were no "no-brainer" choices anymore, where in the base game, taking sloth, or death, or heat / cold had so little effect that they were easy choices, as was Order/Misfortune. Similarly, the base game had a number of "no brainer" pretender choices - the Ghost King and a few others were so superior to 90% of the others that you'd see mostly those few pretenders, over and over.

Some players have one set of priorities with the scales and whatnot, other players have different ideas, making for a more varied game. Some players go for monster scales (Order, Productivity, Growth, Magic _and_ Luck), at the expense of a relatively weak pretender. Some go for balance; others go for the monster pretender or monster bless, and some do different things in different games.