Bidding on Nations

[MaxWilson]

It's a nice, simple scheme. It does assume that any putative imbalance could be addressed with an initial infusion of gold (or whatever). Since Dominions seems to work fine already without any bidding at all I think this is a reasonable assumption to make, but Dominions supports nation design well enough that unit changes are also quite feasible as bids. The technical challenge is designing the bidding process to be fair, and the complexities (and most of the "lot of work") come from trying to address that. I think I mentioned that I need to search the multi-agent literature to see if there's not a simpler bidding mechanism, and if I find one I'll report back even though perhaps no one but me will ever use Dominions to play this type of metagame. If you're not interested[1] in nation-design it's a lot of work for no payoff, and you might as well just use gold for bids.

Now, I don't claim to be any kind of an expert on the game, but there are some units that seem to be to be genuinely underpowered. I know as Helheim I've never built a spear-carrying Huskarl because they're nearly as expensive as a Hirdman and have five points less in Defense, 2 points lower Prot, and do 3 points less damage. They're clearly inferior for their gold cost, and in any case where I'd want a cheaper unit than a Hirdman I'd either build serf warriors or indies or maybe take the axe-carrying Huskarl. The spear-Huskarl might as well not exist as far as I'm concerned, and I would be much happier if I could at least conceive of a circumstance where it would be the right unit. It needs a niche. The Marverni noble in comparison to the Ambibate noble comes close to this level of uselessness in my mind, but at least it's 20% cheaper and also thematic. (If Ambibates have nobles Marverni should, too, or have a good reason why they don't exist. Maybe they're all smiths and chainmail-salesmen.) I'm still very new to this game and I may very well be overlooking uses for both these units, but there must also be underutilized units I don't know about yet (Yomi footsoldiers?). I'm all for niches, combined arms, and comparative advantage, but for that to work there has to actually exist some comparative advantage for each unit. I intend to tweak all the nations sufficiently to give every unit-type a reason for existing in my SP games. I'll probably turn off independent pop-types, too, for kind of the same reason (e.g., Marverni slingers are generally inferior to indie slingers).

-Max

[1] I don't mean you specifically here, just the generic "you." IIRC you've heavily involved in modding, which means if a good, simple bidding method can be found you could potentially use it to help balance new mods against vanilla nations.

Edit: Added comments about underused units.