Glamour post 3.08

[Jazzepi]

vfb said:
If you hadn't been swamped by a whole bunch of nations, you might even have had a chance to test that out! Midgard has loads of Air gems, so even an A2 Galderman can use an extra gem and cast it, right?

And does Storm stack with Mist?

Edit: Nothing to stop MA Van from doing the same with a Vanjarl. All the anti-glamor arrows discussion assumes you're not also casting Mist, right?

Yup, you're guaranteed the ability to cast mist with your Galdermans out of the box. Every one of them comes with A2. The spell requires A3, but you can gem your way to it. It costs 2 gems per casting, per big battle. But that's a pittance, really considering what you're doing to the opponents archers.

Honestly, I made three bad play errors, and then more that followed. One was not attacking you sooner if I was going to. Two was not attacking C'Tis instead of you and taking on that vassalage and tribute. Three was not attacking the one undefended province you had when I was sieging your capital, had I done that, when Mehir routed he would have died instead of retreating there.

I just checked. Experience +1 longbowmen with a base precision of 12, had 4 current precision with both storm and mist up. The same longbowmen had 7 precision with just mist up. This means they stack! My observation would say that each effect cuts precision by half, and together they do by a quarter.

Jazzepi

[NTJedi]

Velusion said:

This is incorrect. Almost all of the people complaining about them here don't play blitzs or "quick game maps".

Vans are capital only units... so the larger the map the less their effectiveness. The only issue is with large maps custom start settings should be placed by the host otherwise five players could be jammed together while one player is far away in the empty garden of eden.
Also considering the game has so so many different nations it's nice to have one or two stronger nations... especially for the SP gamers. I could understand the logic of balancing all the nations if there were only 7 or less to choose as we see from most games... but we have 62 nations to choose thus let there be some variety.
HOW many nations can DOMINIONS_3 have until Illwinter is finally allowed to create one super powerful nation? 100? 500? 5000?
If every single game you play has to have all opponent options balanced then it removes the option of playing a multiplayer or singleplayer game with a very strong opponent.

[sum1lost]

Jedi, perhaps you don't understand. The problem with Vanheim is that playing next to them means death. It isn't that they aren't balanced in the long game, it is simply that in the short game they are unstoppable. Start next to them, and die. Simple as that. That doesn't make for a very fun game, unless you also like self-inflicted eye-wounds and volunteer for unneeded amputations.

[Beorne]

sum1won said:
Jedi, perhaps you don't understand. The problem with Vanheim is that playing next to them means death. It isn't that they aren't balanced in the long game, it is simply that in the short game they are unstoppable. Start next to them, and die. Simple as that. That doesn't make for a very fun game, unless you also like self-inflicted eye-wounds and volunteer for unneeded amputations.

Completly agreed.
It seems that all those defending Van are playing sp, if they had started a mp near van they would be aware of their power. Vans (even unmounted) are so clearly overpowered that a look on the units db is more than enough.
"Van is only strong in the early game". You know better than me because that advantage in the early game means big advantage in the late game, it's characteristic of strategy resource based war games.
Perhaps the only good argument against Van nerfing is "I want a game with some very unbalanced nations". To help newbies? To do rush experiments? To win easily?. But at least is an argument.
I love vans, I ever played vans (and pangea) in Dom2. I hope they will be balanced to reintroduce them on my games.

[Saxon]

Baalz has a good point. They have a ton of advantages, they are great units. That versitility should not be underrated. The nation is balanced by the fact they have a weak end game, but in every 4X game, the beginning is the most important part. The rush is a very valid strategy and if well managed, will give you a great start over your oppenents.

The only other person who has spoken specifically about single player reports that they do not have the "Heim vs human player" effect, so perhaps my experience is not typical. Still, given that humans have a tough time stopping them, I don't see why the AI would do any better.

[Sombre]

The AI is simply not a challenge for me unless I handicap myself, but speaking from a SP standpoint, Vans are still too good. A better balanced game reduces the problems caused by how random the AI is, so resulting in slightly better SP gaming overall. This applies to all units which are miles better than anything else you could build - they just aren't desirable in the vanilla game.

[Gandalf Parker]

Interestingly even before the nerf, on massive AI tests it was not the heims that came out on top. I dont even remember them winning any of the games tho they probably did.

The tests were like endurance tests for the game. All of the nations were in as AI's, the game was run on immeadiate hosting and went for days. Mostly I watched for crashes (of course), CPU loads, hosting time (it started at about 1 hosting every 10 minutes and went to alittle over 30 minutes), and memory leaks. Each game did create a log and a scores page. I did not keep great notes about the winners but I was looking to see if the same nation came up too often. There was nothing worrisome to report to the beta team.

Different maps, map sizes, victory conditions, other settings did make a difference in the game. In abit above average times on standard settings; the games tended to be Undead Ermor doing well in the early game, Oceania in mid game, and Arcos in late game if it had managed to get there.

I had considered automating it all and doing a big batch of one-on-one contests but I never got motivated enough to do it.

[thejeff]

But that's because the AI can't actually play a bless strategy.

It doesn't take a good bless, except by accident. If it does it doesn't recruit enough sacred troops. When it does use sacreds it often doesn't bother to bless them.

Why would expect the AI to do well with an uber-bless rush nation?

[mivayan]

NTJedi - the "Van" unit is only capitol only in LA. MA Vanheim can build them anywhere.

Has anyone seen a difference when fighting ea vanheim/helheim non-sacreds? I'm thinking of flaming arrows and bladewind etc.

[Baalz]

I don't know that in practice they are so magically crippled as all that. Helhiem in particular has easy access to dwarven hammers, owl quils, and skull mentors and with their rapid expansion capabilities and broad path searching it's not unreasonable to expect to have several different indie mages available for recruiting to do the bulk of researching. They certainly don't lack for casting/forging power once the research is going. They may not be a research powerhouse but I certainly don't see them having no late game potential particularly as expansion->gold->mages->research so they can certainly compensate for a bit of cost ineffectiveness on their researchers.

As Velusion points out there is a difference between being rushed by vans and other rushes, it's the difference between being able to come up with a counterattack that has some chance of working (perhaps small, but possible) and feeling completely helpless because you can't think of anything that would even theoretically be realistic. To the people who keep saying vans aren't that bad, I hope I don't sound condescending, but have you actually gone up against a good player wielding vans? The people making these complaints are not newbies who roll over on a firm rush. Mammoths, Jaguar Warriors, and giants are *not* the same thing for the reasons I mention above - the strength of the vans is brutal but the really unballanced part is that the brutal strength is combined with unparalleled flexibility. They're better heavy cavalry than Ulm/Marignon/Man, better raiders than Pangea/Caelum, and better defenders than anybody else.