Will Vanheim Ever Become Spayed?

[Beorne]

My experience.
For me Dom3 (and Dom2) is only MP, I find exrtremely boring playing with AI, I'd prefere read a book. In MP s beautiful.
But we banned Vanheim (and Helheim), it is overly unbalanced and it has ruined our first MP game.
For me it is painful because it is way long my favored nation (along with the Tuathas, hoping they return soon ...), has a wonderful theme and it is very fascinating in general. But it is ovewrpowered, no way.
I think that the argument about people saying it is not overpowered are made by boys that easily win MP using Van and are very satisfied of this. I can't find any other reason to say "it is clearly unbalanced but I like it.".

I too prefer Devs correct bugs before expand, I think Van is bugged.

[Ygorl]

For what it's worth, I agree that these mounted sacred glamorous high-defense types are too good a value. They were also quite powerful in Dom2, but people didn't cry about them as much. The dual-bless vans were acknowledged to be powerful, but not overpowering; why are they a bigger problem in Dom3?
I don't think it's just the extra design points that it's possible to get, since it's possible to build an absolutely brutal Helheim nation even with an awake pretender.
I don't think it's that other nations have gotten weaker; they're not.
Maybe it's that it takes longer to research useful counter spells? Or that gold income is so much higher, allowing the purchase of many more of the cavalry in question? Any other ideas as to why they seem to be relatively more problematic than in the previous edition? I can't think of any, offhand...
Seems like pretty much everyone agrees that the number of viable strategies that lose to this strategy is greater than the number that lose to any other strategy. Not everyone agrees that this is a problem, but I do - as has been already said lots of times, if you want an easier game, play single-player against wimpy AI, or against other new players, or against an experienced player who's fooling around with a weird sub-optimal strategy. If you do think there should be built-in handicaps, make a mod to do that. I don't see any reason why the pure game should be unbalanced ("flawed"?) in any preventable way.
Assuming everyone out there now agrees with me (ha!) it doesn't seem very hard to fix. Glamor is a nifty ability, and I'm happy with it the way it is - just make the troops that have it cost more (and especially the problematic sacreds). I'm pretty sure dual-blessers would still happily buy Vans and their cousins at 90 or 100 gold a pop, or even more. I'm also pretty sure that they'd still do well with them, just not as overpoweringly well. Folks not going the mega-bless route would then probably do a bit better to stick with the non-sacreds (whose cost might only be slightly increased), which seems fine to me.

There are plenty of good strategies out there. The mega-blessed, glamorous, super-high-defense unit, though, is very good against most of them. Those strategies which can counter it are (I think?) not nearly as universally powerful. An army of blessed Vans does very well in nearly all early-mid-game circumstances; slave-lizard hordes not as much. My opinion of this strategy is not as high as that of some folks, and I think some very nice tests have been run by people here showing that it is definitely possible to beat MBGSHD (especially in pitched battles), but even so it is so generally powerful that I'd be happy to see it weakened.

[NTJedi]

Ygorl said:
I don't see any reason why the pure game should be unbalanced ("flawed"?) in any preventable way.

I agree Vanheim is very powerful... and the reason they should remain powerful is because this game is not MP only. If the game did not include SP as an option or MP with AI opponents as an option I would not be defending Vanheim from the NERFing bat. Having an option to create an unbalanced game verses AI opponents allows the game to be easier, equal or more difficult. More options verses AI opponents increase replay value.

[tibbs]

NTJedi said:

I agree Vanheim is very powerful... and the reason they should remain powerful is because this game is not MP only. If the game did not include SP as an option or MP with AI opponents as an option I would not be defending Vanheim from the NERFing bat. Having an option to create an unbalanced game verses AI opponents allows the game to be easier, equal or more difficult. More options verses AI opponents increase replay value.

Your reasoning doesn't make much sense really. Starcraft, Warcraft, Age of Empires, Dawn of War are all multiplayer and single player games yet each game was patched to fix multiplayer imbalance issues. I've never seen a game designed or patched using your reasoning.

[Saxon]

A point or two if I may.

Is SP, which is all I play, it seems that most games end up with me having to knock out Vanheim at some point. Either I meet them early and have to kill them to live or I meet them late, where their early expansion leads them to have huge resources and they are a monster. Either way, pretty much every game comes down to me vs. Vanheim. That takes some replayablity out of the game.

They run over independents and take next to no casualties. They expand fast and stay strong. Sure, magic can help, but I am also finding that in vanilla games, magic is slow to come. This is for another thread, but magic comes so late in Dom 3 that many, maybe most, games are already decided. In any case, my point is that the higher level spells come when Vanheim is already the 300 pound gorilla, having stomped most other nations out of the way.

The raiding strategy is a good one and I have used Joton’s troops to do it. However, you have to get lucky with Vanheim going after someone else’s empire, rather than eating the heart out of yours. In other words, it works sometimes.

Also useful are the armour destroying spells, particularly destruction. However, you need good earth paths, so again, it works sometimes.

Ermor has (had) an easy counter, available to all nations. Priests. And to get those you needed temples, which gave you the bonus of dominion, it was an attractive solution. Sure, they would run over a newbie in SP, but after their first trip to the forums, Ermor was in trouble. I argue that Vanheim does not have an easy or even somewhat easy counter.

To summarize, in SP, this nation dominates all map sizes and takes some of the flavour out of playing. They do not have an easy counter (unlike Ermor). In my opinion, they are too strong and it is all about those glamoured troops. Having played Dom 1, 2 and 3, I have never before felt something was so badly unbalanced (I did not use the CB mod, I thought vanilla Dom 2 was good). I am not an amazing player or a terribly competitive one. I am Joe Boring and Normal, so I won’t even pretend to give you numbers or detailed analysis. I just want to say the nation is too strong for SP and it really stands out. I don’t want to use a mod (someone else said the vanilla game should be the standard) and I don’t want to take the nation out, it has a nice flavour.

Thus, I vote for an increase in price, probably in both resources and gold. It would reduce the numbers available, particularly early against independents, yet retain the cool unit. It would make the massing of armour and morale to counter it possible by all nations, at a cost, but a cost which has other benefits. Really, who doesn’t have a use for armoured units with good morale? Just like everyone has a use for more dominion.

[Foodstamp]

Balance does not matter as much in the single player arena, but I will add that in my last 3 EA games Vanheim was the last remaining nation versus me. But the AI Vanheim was massing serfs and other cheap troops

HoneyBadger, your tests do not prove anything because the AI is not going to play as though it were using a bless strategy.

A few nations are overpowered... it happens in a game this vast. Will it get fixed? Who knows, but I imagine if it does not, players in multiplayer games will regulate it by choosing bless nations in blitzes to fight (insert uberbless here) or several players will gang up on the bless nation in larger games, hopefully before the nation is allowed to expand too much.

I think you can determine if a nation/strategy combination is overpowered by holding it up to the following test...

If you have no concern about what your enemies are doing, and are able to focus on YOUR strategy, then the nation may be overpowered.

If you have to completely adapt your nation to stand a chance against a certain enemy, then the enemy nation is probably overpowered.

From my limited experience in multiplayer, it seems that the idea is to have a mixture of both, trying to work your strategy and trying to adapt to enemy strategies. If you place an overpowered nation into the mix, that goes out the window, and your either the overpowered nation massing a troop, or the balanced/underpowered nation trying to work a strategy to survive.

[Foodstamp]

@beorne

I love tuatha as well, but I am afraid that vanheim/helheim may RUIN tuatha for us because the sidhe may not have glamour this time around due to the issues with those two nations.

[NTJedi]

Cainehill said:
Actually, until the Vampire Queen was severely hitten by the nerf stick, Ermor was still extremely dreaded. Say - _why_ would one pretender being overpowered have been such a problem in Dom2? After all, there's umpteen different pretenders, and we need one or two overpowered pretenders for the newbies, and for people who want to be able to beat the SP AI without ever bothering to learn the game.

Isn't that essentially your argument regarding the Heims?

Actually NO, the vampire queen was Nerf wacked because she was available to multiple nations. As a result multiple nations would more frequently choose the vampire queen. The issue being discussed only exists if the host chooses to include this one nation and chooses to not mod the nation.

[Cainehill]

NTJedi said:

Actually NO, the vampire queen was Nerf wacked because she was available to multiple nations. As a result multiple nations would more frequently choose the vampire queen. The issue being discussed only exists if the host chooses to include this one nation and chooses to not mod the nation.

Yes, the VQ was available to everyone - but it was also what made Ermor so overpowered, because Ermor could take _all_ negative scales, high dominion, and have the VQ as the most whacked out SC pretender in the game.

And for ratraping's sake - if you're saying that a nation (or _TWO_ in at least one era) needs to be modded or deliberately left out, you're admitting there's a problem.

Some of your comments have been ludicrous. "Oh, the newbies need a couple strong nations so they don't quit playing Dominions after getting whacked in MP"?

Yep, guess that's why chess, go, civilizations, etc, all have a couple over-powered sides to help newbies get into the game. Errr - with chess, is that black or f-ing white?

In dominions, the newbies wouldn't know to _choose_ the nations, and they wouldn't know the cheesy mandatory strategy required to do well with them.

Even if they did - it wouldn't do squat to help them learn the game, because W9F9 Vanheim/Helheim plays so differently from other nations.

As far as the "It can be modded" argument : a lot of people (including you in the past, I believe) haven't wanted to play using mods - some people don't trust them, other people don't like to get playing experience that isn't going to match a "real" (ie, unmodded or other, more standardly, modding) game.

It can be left out of games? Yep, _EVERY_ person who plays the game should be forced to learn and use map commands so other players (and the AI opponents) can't choose the nations, and then get into arguments with players who say, "Hey, how come I can't select Vanheim? They're the only nation I like playing!?!?"

The situation ought to be fixed, _IN THE VANILLA, STANDARD GAME_, instead of being left in because it's working "as designed", and the law of unintended consequences be damned. (Changes to gold income, supplies, shield mechanics, research speeds, dormant pretenders, not picking national fortification, etc, all having added to the problem inherent with glamour (mirror images) and stealth already having been somewhat overpowered.)

Then, as far as making things easier for newbies in SP or MP? Give _players_ the same sort of creation option that already exists for AIs, only reversed. Setting a player to expert would give _fewer_ pretender creation points, while novice would give extra points, possibly some bonuses to research, resources, etc. That way they have an easier time trying to keep up, with more than just a SPECIFIC nation or two, and are learning more of the game itself rather than a single overpowered uberbless cheese strategy.

Bah.

[Gandalf Parker]

Hmmm some of these comments are long drawn out discussions of what should be done, and probably would be done, IF it was agreed that anything was broken.