Will Vanheim Ever Become Spayed?

[HoneyBadger]

Ok, second day. I decide to drop Atlantis (Atlantis, despite having lots of advantages over Helheim doesn't stand up sacred to sacred, only due to the fact that you can't produce sacred living pillars nearly fast enough. I'm certain that Atlantis has lots of ways to beat Helheim, but not in a blitz. That doesn't mean that Atlantis conveniently folds before SP Helheim W/F, it just means that all day I kept doing poorly when I played poorly, aka at the level of normal AI, fighting Helheim on it's terms. In a Multiplayer, the Living Pillars and the ocean home province should and most likely would ensure that Atlantis remains untroubled by quick blitz.)

So, since the experienced players and regulars with more posts than me seem to agree that Tien Ch'i generally and Spring and Autumn in particular is one of the weakest, sorries, no hope nations out there, I spent today playing them vs Helheim, again on their terms, on land, with a high-bless strategy (in this case D10/B9/F4), vs Helheim W9/F9 Father of Winters Dom10, Order3, Magic -2, Cold1 etc as recommended in an above post.

I promptly beat Helheim like a red-headed stepchild.

I captured their home province in the first 6 months, successfully defended it, demolished their fortress, raised a province defense of 105, and finally gave up playing the game so that I wouldn't have to experience my very first total victory with a test game.

Now for the critics: I realise this is SP. This is also the first time I've ever played Tien Ch'i, so I don't have the advantage of nation familiarity. It's on a small map-intentionally, both because supposedly Helheim starts strong and gives good blitz, and because my strategy for dealing with them is to find their home province and take it out, killing their god in the process, which I did many times. AI was on normal. Basically I discovered a few things. 1-cheap troops with length 6 pikes are very effective against Helheim. 2-death bless 10 gives hearts like crazy, combined with added attack, 2 attacks per round, and death curse horror marking, I usually killed the few Hangedrotts leading whichever army without a hitch. I could produce 16 sacred troops for every 1 Hangedrott, and I did better than that because my scales were better, even though until the last big land-grab, Helheim had twice my overall territory. 3-composite bows help. They're not all that, but they take out some glamour, not as good as my warriors of 5 elements though. In the end, it came down to massed, cheap, pike. Helheim simply couldn't get to me before I got to them.
It was pitiful.

Now, in MP games, better strategies are going to be used by both sides, yes, but in MP games one knows one's playing vs a human, and one tends to think more deeply on both sides. Helheim has powerful mage/warriors in the Hangedrott, but Tien Ch'i has just as powerful mages, who are much, much more flexible, and who cost far less. Tien Ch'i comes ready-made with rainbow mages who can find almost all the special sites, and masses of those truly evil pike in combination with Tien Ch'is other national troops are enough to hold territory from Helheim.

Result of the day: Tien Ch'i 1, Helheim 0

[Cainehill]

NTJedi said:
Hopefully the post from Kristoffer will water down your tainted mind. I've listed many reasons above for all ways the game can be played and why Vanheim and Helheim should not be nerfed. All your reasons revolve around MP only games. Changes to the game must consider those which play SP only, MP with AI opponents, and MP only.

Obviously the post from Kristoffer was unable to make you post politely - wonder if a previous poster was correct, and you won't even get a proper warning, one so blunt that you realize that it was referring to you also?

Sheesh. I don't so much mind the forums being hostile and whatnot - but I do mind the way that Dominions 3 is so broken in terms of balance, and yet a few rabid people insist that it's fine the way it is.

*shrug* As people have pointed out, people kept / went back to playing Dom2 largely because of the Conceptual Balance mods - the base game was _never_ fixed. And Dom3 essentially ignored all the play-tested balancing touches in the CB series, and introduced worse imbalances.

And yet two or three of y'all keep saying it's perfect, it's working as designed, etc. Feh.

It's working _so_ well as designed that I've found myself unable to even think of providing friends with the demo, much less suggesting they consider the full game.

[Cainehill]

NTJedi said:

I agree... I remember all the threads about the dreaded Ermor in dominions_2. In my opinion this adds nice variety into the game as players are challenged to improve strategies. During blitz games Vanheim/Helheim is too much, yet these nations can be modded or removed using the #allowedplayer command.

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?

[HoneyBadger]

I think the VQ should get Etherial back, personally. In Dom 3, SCs just aren't as powerful as they apparently were in Dom 2. I've equipped massive SCs with riduculous stuff and sent them against independents armed with nothing and they still get bit with hearts. I wince every time I send my Pretender in battle unless I've chosen one with rejuvenation (and that's what? ancient kracken? maybe 2-3 others?) and even then I worry about curse and horror-mark. I think the argument about Vans etc. is really just an old argument dredged up from Dom 2 when individual fighters and their abilities were more important than overall armies, and when magic outweighed basic economics. I don't honestly think anyone has been playing Dom3 long enough to say that any nation is totally broken, or to get as emotionally attached to this argument as people have. That's my gut-feeling anyway.

I'm still testing, and I plan to test atleast every Early Age nation against Helheim and post the results and my interpretation of those results to this thread. Hopefully it'll add some insight. I don't know if I can say that I'm totally objective, but I'll attempt to be, where Helheim's merits and flaws are concerned. Personally, I'd rather be playing on Glory of the Gods with Yomi or Aboleths or something vs 18 odd randoms. At the very least, the exercise should give me a deeper understanding of the game as a whole.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Corwin]

HoneyBadger said:

So, since the experienced players and regulars with more posts than me seem to agree that Tien Ch'i generally and Spring and Autumn in particular is one of the weakest, sorries, no hope nations out there, I spent today playing them vs Helheim, again on their terms, on land, with a high-bless strategy (in this case D10/B9/F4), vs Helheim W9/F9 Father of Winters Dom10, Order3, Magic -2, Cold1 etc as recommended in an above post.

Tien chi *what*? Who told you that? I am playing EA Tien Chi in our forum game, and my main arch enemy is Helheim. (who is played by very good player BTW). Just this turn I've smashed 300 strong army of Helheim which included a lot of sacred, using 200 strong army of my own, and Helheim is currently losing the war. (granted, it's not 1 vs 1 war since Helheim was allied with Ulm, and I was allied with Caelum. However this was the first real battle that Helheim fought in our war, and Helheim has been preparing for this battle for many turns. And before the war started Helheim was by far the most powerful nation on all graphes except one - they hold almost twice as many provinces as nation number two for example).

Perhaps you are confusing Dom2 S&A Tien Chi with Dom3 EA Tien Chi? In Dom2 S&A Tien Chi was pathetic, it's true. In dom3 they can be quite strong nation, if played right. Sure, their sacred are not nearly as strong as Hehleim's sacred, and would lose 1 vs 1 short blitz. But they are very far from "the weakest, sorries, no hope nation out there", as you put it.


Seriously, I would realy recommend you to play some MP. Your conclusions of nations strengths and weaknesses based upon your SP experience are often very far from reality when it comes to MP. Humans plays very differntly from AIs.

[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.