Conceptual Balance (Discussion)

[NTJedi]

PDF said:
Plus we still get the damned Militia as a "good" event

I recall posts complaining about this good event, yet the event remains unchanged. Personally I would love to see the event changed saying something such as... "Many units from nation (XXXX) have defected and chosen to serve your nation." The units which appear would be a random set of recruitable units from XXXX nation. It would only use nations which exist within the current game.

PDF said:
But no amount of balance tweaking will solve the real issue, the real solution would be that events become moddable...

I asked Illwinter to add events as something which can be modded and/or creating custom events. Perhaps when Dominions_4 arrives.

[dirtywick]

KissBlade said:
Mm... I'm not sure you'll get constantly attacked with M2. I never take M3 though since it does seem a little risky and not to mention you'll never get a hero. Also while Luck is better late game since gold isn't as important, you need to factor in that Order gives you a very strong early/mid game which transitions into a stronger late game compared to turmoil/luck. Though I could see a possible argument for Luck/Turmoil in a low magic sites setting.

I guess that depends on how big your empire is. The bigger it is, the more provinces you have, the more events happen.

[PDF]

NTJedi said:

I recall posts complaining about this good event, yet the event remains unchanged. Personally I would love to see the event changed saying something such as... "Many units from nation (XXXX) have defected and chosen to serve your nation." The units which appear would be a random set of recruitable units from XXXX nation. It would only use nations which exist within the current game.

Or if at least it gave useful standard units (archers, hvy inf, whatever)...
A possible simple solution to implement by IW would just be to create dedicated unit ids for those event guys so they could be modded without impacting national and indy unit pools.

[PhilD]

dirtywick said:
I guess that depends on how big your empire is. The bigger it is, the more provinces you have, the more events happen.

I've seen the "max of 3 events per turn" rule mentioned, but I also seem to remember, in my SP games, some turns with 4 events reported - none of which looked like they could have been caused by a ritual, though I could be wrong here. But it's still true that, with a largish empire, I tend to get exactly 3 events per turn, most of the time.

Still, I tend to be a fan of Luck over Misfortune, even though I do get the occasional bad events. With Luck 1, I get enough gem events, or additional gold events, or "free mage/assassin/item" events, or even permanent gold boost events, that it seems well worth the points. Now, this is SP, but still, SP vs good numbers of Impossible AIs...

[AMF]

Here I am again, back for a repeat performance as "the newbie with a question." Thank you for the applause, I'm here all week.

Today, I have a question related to the AI balance of the game (and, I think, this thread). My question is this: Is there a way to set up an "AI Smackdown" with Dom3?

What I mean and where I am coming from is this: in Space Empires IV, with a little bit of work, a person could set up a game with only AI empires, and run that on their machine until one of the AIs won. If you do this enough times (taking care to be statistically/analyitcally honest, so keeping the same difficulty, skill, era, maps, and other settings for the AIs in play), you can come up with a pretty defensible and statistically signficiant understanding of which empire or empires is/are 'better' than the others, and to what degree.

So, I wonder if there is a way to run Dom3 games using all the AIs (and only the AIs) on a given map, with a given era, and the same skill levels etc...It seems that Dom3 is much more command-line friendly than SE4, and so might even allow this to be done with graphics turned off, thereby making any single AI smackdown game take just a few minutes...and so perhaps hundreds if not thousands of games could be run to test the balance of the empires...and that would certainly give some statistics on how balanced the empires are...

Just curious.

[Endoperez]

Gandalf ran a few tests with all nations of all ages in the same game.

This is from memory, so it might be wrong, but...

The nations that did best were LA Ermor in the early game, but Oceania got past, and much later Arcoscephale got to the first place. I'm not sure which era of Oceania or Arcos was the one that got the upper hand.

[Turin]

I don´t think that those AI tests say much about the relative strength, since the AI still seems to have only a very poor understanding of magic and no understanding of bless strategies.

Both of those aspects are probably far more important to find out the true strength of a nation than to determine who has the better national troops.

[Nerfix]

Not a balance problem per say but perhaps Lady of Love should have Fire instead of Water magic? As of now she is pretty close to that spring goddes with Water/Nature. Fire seems to be a more passionate element anyway.

[FrankTrollman]

She is a literal picture of Aphrodite, a goddess who is most famous for rising out of a sea shell.

So it is of no surprise that the "Lady of Love" is designed to, among other things, make clams.

[Nerfix]

Mmm, that's true. But she is still very close to Lady of Springs.