Balance on small maps

[alexti]

DominionsFan said:
Uber bless strategy will be still available even with an awaken pretender. Truper's suggestion is excellent, just adjust the settings before you start the game, if you want to "nerf" the bless strategies.

Uber-bless with awaken pretender will mean really bad scales, which would mean somewhat limited ability to produce sacred troops quickly. So overall, it will become much less dominant strategy.

What uber-bless would you suggest with awake pretender?

[quantum_mechani]

alexti said:

What uber-bless would you suggest with awake pretender?

I'd try f9w9 Mictlan, ME Ermor, Van/Helhiem/Midgard, or e9n4 Pan.

The problem with blesses is many fold, first there is the option of imprisoned pretenders, as mentioned. Then there is the also mentioned slower research/more gold. But those aside, there are still some nations with sacreds far above the rest.

[alexti]

I'm looking at F9W9 father of winters Dom 6, order 2, sloth 2, cold 1 everything else -3 (maybe sloth 1 cold 2 would be better?) for Van/Helheim/Midgard. It doesn't look anywhere near as strong as with dormant pretender. Initial start will be slower and even if the first neighbour is successfully overrun, I think that the further game is not going to be easy. Facing someone like Caelum at turn 15, even having twice as many provinces doesn't look promising. I think it's better to take F6W9 or F4W9 - blessed troops will still be very good, but it will allow sort of reasonable scales with some future prospects.

For Pan E9N4 is a good strategy, I don't consider it an uber-bless. Giving their weakness in magic they must have something

Mictlan F9W9 looks pretty good (they can easily take sloth-3 and they don't even need high order). Dominion has to be somewhat lower, but with non-capital sacred it's not a big problem. But that's Mictlan - no matter how you play it, it's going to be very strong

[quantum_mechani]

alexti said:
I'm looking at F9W9 father of winters Dom 6, order 2, sloth 2, cold 1 everything else -3 (maybe sloth 1 cold 2 would be better?) for Van/Helheim/Midgard.

I can't see why you would not go full order and full sloth. My build would have order 3, sloth 3, cold 2, drain 2, all else minimum. If you need faster expanding, try a e9w9 cylcops that can expand from turn 2.

For pan, it may not be as unbalanced looking at the whole nation, but it is a far better option than most else you can do with them, particularly early era. And it is still very suffcient for an early rush.

And saying Mictlan is good no matter what is like saying balance of any kind is pointless.

[KissBlade]

Awaken really doesn't hurt too much of most of the imbalanced bless strategies. If anything it hurts the nations that can make an effective uber bless without teetering in the imbalanced range.

The REAL tweaking needs to happen around the order/magic/luck area ...

[WraithLord]

There's a second thread running about the bless balance. In this thread Twan has made a suggestion I really like - why not give holy units different costs according to their strength. vanhere for example can have a holy cost of two which well reduce their number by 50%.

[Endoperez]

"I am holier than thou"?

[Agrajag]

WraithLord said:
There's a second thread running about the bless balance. In this thread Twan has made a suggestion I really like - why not give holy units different costs according to their strength. vanhere for example can have a holy cost of two which well reduce their number by 50%.

The only problem I see with that is that currently holy is too small an integer to use with different costs, if perhaps you would have dominion*10 holy points of recruitment and most sacred would cost 10 points, then you could perhaps differentiate the different sacreds a bit more.

[Zen]

I would say:

Bless strategies *should* work. But perhaps not as well as they do right now. Also there is no effective 10 turn counter to the initial bless rushes, whereas this doesn't specifically turn the entire game into a game of blessings, it does however allow heavy sacred nations an alternative to standard groundpounder/archer troops.

However, it does create a very real balance issue especially in the EA, but not limited to it, and due to the nature of magic in the Dom3 world.

Reasoning: Magic is now weaker than it was in Dom2, so solutions to such problems like turn 8 quickness/flaming weapon (or just quickness or flaming weapons is often enough) are few and far between. Especially with nations that are lopsidedly designed.

Also this doesn't account for it's psychological impact on nation design (you have to have a plan if your a near a rusher) if your nation has no viable alternative to stop or hold steady against such a strategy, you can only trust to luck to save you from being in a 3 province rush.

A good example of this is EA Arco. While the nation has it's strengths, it's fun, and a different style of play, you will not be able to handle Mictlan, Ermor, Vanheim, Helheim, Sauromatia and to a lesser extent: Pangaea and Kailisa if they play a heavy blessing strategy.

My feeling in this particular case is that that most of the nations who benefit most from the blessings have cheap medium/heavy cavalry whose size limits the use of trample. Which is a half-strength of the EA Arco theme.

However, EA Arco's problems are not just their own, but they span different parts of the game and troop/pretender usage in a competitive enviroment (one where you have to be prepared for some heavy bless strategy).

Back to the heart of the matter: While this is true with any game, most have alternatives or at least ways of handling such early game strength. While Dragons and Monsters can give you an early game province lead, when it comes to fighting sacreds with powerful blessing, the swarm has now rendered early half-SC's and incompletely equipped/poor slot pretenders very inneffective to use as a counter.

My own personal feelings is this isn't just one factor but many including:

Dormant/Imprisoned bless mechanic (2 outta 3 ain't bad! Blessing/Scales or Pretender/Blessing) Hello Dragons!

Order Scale overeffectiveness (1 Scale can get you 240 points with minimum early or midgame impact, thanks!) Gold is King.

Lesser spells imbalanced in terms of new combat/troop effectiveness (see Water Path, Fire Darts, etc - so that even lesser mages [with 1 path or 2 in different paths] can't effectively kill/weaken/synergize to cost the opponent their weight in gold, so you are stuck with researchers or last ditch use)

Invididual sacred units being hyper cost effective while the nation sees no real weakness for it (See Sauromatia, *heim's)

Same ol' problems (Raise Skeletons, Blade Wind, Bad efficency on Magical Trinkets/Lesser items, Spell AI is a poor team player, Gem standard on Summons is way off (See Drakes and Vine Ogre arguments), Ease of Bootstrapping non-nation/pretender paths, Superpowerful Globals and their counterpart the "Man I spent 60 gems on this?"

All in all, balance is fun to discuss, harder to impelement. This is probably why IW has taken such a positive stance on Modding

3.5 cents

[alexti]

quantum_mechani said:
I can't see why you would not go full order and full sloth. My build would have order 3, sloth 3, cold 2, drain 2, all else minimum. If you need faster expanding, try a e9w9 cylcops that can expand from turn 2.

That's a good idea. I was taking Order 2, Sloth 2 to have faster initial expansion, but with Cyclop you solve it, even it gets killed, not a big deal.

quantum_mechani said:
And saying Mictlan is good no matter what is like saying balance of any kind is pointless.

No, I'm just saying that traditionally Mictlan was always very strong nation. In any case, it's good to have something for newer players...

I don't think there's a big problem if 1 or 2 nations are super-efficient with uber-bless, I'm concerned that half or more nations are best played with uber-bless.