Are heavy bless strategies the best ones ?

[KissBlade]

Graeme Dice said:


Their main strength before turn 20 is blessed warriors of the five elements. Before turn 20, which is when the eventual winner of the game is decided, magic plays virtually no role in Dom 3.

Agree for the most part on most points save this one. I find once it gets past the nitty gritty early game, even dual bless nations use magics to augment their armies. For example, alteration tree for luck/body eth, summons such as jag fiends and river demons, etc. However, if your nation doesn't have strong expansion abilities (of which heavy bless strategies /is one/), it is harder to compete in a normal game without at least a good solid awe or dragon pretender. Effectively enough, good players who stumbles upon you early will recognize you have no real credible threat to them by choosing a "late game" path, and just attack you. Often it only takes 4-6 turns to meet your first neighbor, 8-10 roughly for borders to solidify. Once borders solidify, there are almost NO more expansion into indies. Which generally means at this stage, people start looking for "soft targets" to hit. You don't want to be one of them by having no bless, a human pretender and only average national troops. All the scales in the world won't help you then.

[Teraswaerto]

KissBlade,

What you say is true, however in larger games diplomacy can keep a soft target from getting into early wars. Granted, it's a gamble, and you're leaving survival up to things you can't really control.

[Gandalf Parker]

On larger maps most of that becomes untrue also. Drain? magic plays no role? Death has no affect? Im not sure if Victory Point games might also make a difference on some of it and since the devs love VP games I sure wouldnt write those off. And thats not to mention games that might crank up the magic, or crank down the resources, or boost magic sites.

Some people tend to play Dom3 with the same settings all the time. Same map size, same number of players, same victory conditions. That cant help but paint a "do this and always win every game" feeling.

Interestingly many of the same people tell Solo players that staying inside that limitation will get old and ruin the game for them.

[Graeme Dice]

Gandalf Parker said:
Drain? magic plays no role?

Magic plays a very large role if the game lasts to turn 40 or so. The drain scale, on the other hand, has almost no effect on the power of magic.

Death has no affect?

The death scale has precisely the effects I just listed. It reduces your population in your home province by 24% over 50 turns, and by a lesser amount in other provinces. Otherwise it has little effect on any nation other than those with mages that were made old arbitrarily (ie. the fire nations).

Im not sure if Victory Point games might also make a difference on some of it and since the devs love VP games I sure wouldnt write those off.

Victory points make games finish sooner, not later.

[Velusion]

Gandalf Parker said:
Some people tend to play Dom3 with the same settings all the time. Same map size, same number of players, same victory conditions. That cant help but paint a "do this and always win every game" feeling.

And some people don't even play multi-player games but still paint a "MP in dominions 3 is perfect" picture...

And I don't play blitz. I'm not sure why you assume that everyone who critques the balance of Dom3 only plays on small maps with a few people.

[Tyrant]

For all the forum chatter about dual 9 bless i've so far only seen it twice in 6 net games. In both cases it was 9W9S. Once it worked great (MA Ermor), the other guy (Lanka) got clobbered straight away.

[Aleph]

It may be that the game simply does not take its main purpose for nation design tight balance for hyper competitive MP? Certainly, the manual itself suggests in the last paragraphs before the beginning of the Grimoire that there are units (and possibly even whole nations) that are in there to be neat, to provide fun and interest, rather than be min-maxxed into unstoppableness.

In this regard it is somewhat similar to many fighting games. There's usually about 20% of a fighting games roster that makes its way into serious tourney competition. The others are there for beginners, or for people who think that a character that looks cool or has an enjoyable theme is more important than frame advantage. Unless there is a much smaller ratio of actually usable characters, though, or one or two are massively overpowered, most in-the-know fans don't criticize game balance.

Edit: And I don't know crap about MP, but Lanka IMO is really better off with E9N9, not F9W9.

[Gandalf Parker]

Velusion said:

And some people don't even play multi-player games but still paint a "MP in dominions 3 is perfect" picture...

And I don't play blitz. I'm not sure why you assume that everyone who critques the balance of Dom3 only plays on small maps with a few people.

Heehee. Some probably do.
But I run most of the server MP games and have played in many MP games. Many of those with the beta-tester team (inluding the devs) which include many of the best players from the IRC channel. For a good year more than most others have had Dom3. I dont do all that badly in such games.
Dont think you can talk to me like Graeme or Quantum

[Valandil]

!
Gandalf, regardless of MP ability, at least responds to ad hominum attacks with a measure of equanimity.

Of course, it's not exactly necessary to play the game with the intent of winning. As some of you might remember, I played Yomi so that I could send cryptic messages in Japanese to all the pretenders. I died by turn 30. And it was fun. Oh, and being backstabbed by the treacherous Lankan dogs was probably my favourite moment of Dom3 thus far. Call me a masochist.

[Meglobob]

Valandil said:
Of course, it's not exactly necessary to play the game with the intent of winning.

Yes I agree, its perfectly ok for a person to join a MP game with no intention or expectation of winning. The aim should be to have fun, enjoyment and winning is just a bonus if it comes along.