Dominions Nations Evaluations ;)

[quantum_mechani]

Endoperez said:

Feudal system, longbowmen (yeomen), the traditional three witches (daughter, mother, crone), Tower and Forest of AVALON, questing Knights of X (stone, round table, whatever), Green Knight - it's pretty strongly Arthurian legends influenced by feudal Britain. It's nice that you like the nation, but I can't see any connection to Wheel of Time.

I'm pretty sure KO said at some point that the wardens/witches thing was inspired by the Wheel of Time.

[Endoperez]

quantum_mechani said:
I'm pretty sure KO said at some point that the wardens/witches thing was inspired by the Wheel of Time.

Oh, that. Hmm. I always thought of them as some kind of an experiment, not as elite bodyguards like the guys in Wheel of Time were. And it seems they're even called Warders in English.
The all-witch magic could also be Jordan-inspired, since there isn't even a Merlin hero. It's strange, though, because Bards surely didn't come up with LA Man's magic. Some kind of MA Man mage that could work in the transition after they lost the Nature magic would be nice.

[Xietor]

I want to add a balance of power rating for the middle era, as it the only one I feel qualified to do. But it will take a bit of work, and I am not up to it yet.

But, I will add a few thoughts:

Tartarians were effectively nerfed, which means that MA Pythium and Marignon's endgame rating has been boosted.

I agree with KO that Man is playable. They are not a broken race. They could be improved, but so could other nations. I do feel that MA Ulm was broken, and am grateful KO fixed them.

When you have people messaging you at the start of Perpetuality for a MA Ulm sighting, then you know that race was broken. It was often a race to MA Ulm's capital, which of course, to some degree, highlighted their deficiencies.

I also like the fact that not all races and spell lines are equally powerful. WOW recently bowed to its vocal minority and gave the evil races "paladins" just so everything could be identical. Identical is boring.

It requires no challenges. LA Ermor and LA Ryleh were not excluded from Kingmaker because they were unbalanced, but because of the unit cap. If there was no unit cap, they would have been viable race selections.

It is the players' fault that LA Ermor and LA Ryleh were allowed to ascend to world domination in perpetuality. Petty bickering should have been set aside, and those races should have been terminated by group effort in the beginning phase.

[thejeff]

Not to go into the full Man is broken argument, but part of the reason you see people begging for an Ulm location and not Man is that Man is actually decent at the start, though not strong enough to rush, but lacks in mid/late game power, while Ulm was weak along, but especially vulnerable to an early rush.

Longbows & lightning do fairly well against elephants and some sacreds.

[Xietor]

I am glad KO is not fooling with Man. Hopefully I will get motivated and finish my Kingdom of Avalon Mod and actually get
someone to test them in a mp game setting.

Sort of a beta test to some of the numerous suggestions. If the changes stand up to a good mp test, maybe some could be considered.

[Gandalf Parker]

I totally agree on the "same is boring". I hate games that balance the multiplayer aspect by creating matching armies that simply wear a different colored coat.

Hence the problem with some "fix" requests. Saying that a nation needs xxxxx for a fix might be considered step one. Then comes the problem of creating that fix in a way that fits the nation in question. If we just wanted to toss units around between the nations then we can do that easily enough with mods. Kristoffer isnt likely to do that without his usual amount of heavy researching. If he cant find a thematic match, then Im guessing the "much needed fix" is unlikely to occur.

Lesson to be learned: dont just say it needs it. Make an effort to pitch it thematically. And along the same lines, remember that you are making a request, not placing an order.

[Xietor]

One reason people want Ulm and Man to be decently strong, is we identify with those races.

Most players' 1st races are Ulm and Man. We grew up with Robin Hood, King Arthur, and Knights, so it is natural to gravitate to those when you start playing.

Until you meet a banelord. oh, love at 1st sight!

[thejeff]

I completely agree that "same is boring". It's however annoying when any suggestion of balance issues is met with dismissal by such arguments. Especially when no one has suggested making all the nations the same.

A bunch of thematic suggestions were made in the last thread this came up in. No need to hijack this thread further by repeating them here. It sounds like Xietor trying to incorporate some of them into a mod. I don't play with mods much, there's too much in the base game I haven't really seen yet, but I look forward to this.
There were several mods improving Ulm before the patch changed them. Most of the changes didn't come from them though.

[JimMorrison]

Xietor said:
I also like the fact that not all races and spell lines are equally powerful. WOW recently bowed to its vocal minority and gave the evil races "paladins" just so everything could be identical. Identical is boring.

Since I used to be addicted to that drug, I have to comment, for sake of veracity. The Horde (evil WoW races) did NOT want paladins. Facing the wall of rejection and ignorance they were getting from the devs, eventually the pleading did change to "fine, then just give us paladins.....". But what the Horde wanted, was simply for shamans to not suck horribly compared to paladins in the same raid encounters.


Taking the analogy back here again, I don't think anyone here wants all the nations to be vaguely similar. There is just a feeling that some weaknesses and drawbacks are more crippling than others, and some strengths and bonuses are less useful than others. One of the points of this thread, was to help highlight problems. So rather than people running around smacking about "MA Man is weak", and yada yada, if 10 people all rated MA Man at 4/4/2 for the power ratings, or 4/3/2 or whatever, then this would directly show that there is a widely accepted problem in their late game specifically.

By pinpointing the weak areas of the weaker nations (and conversely, any nation rating too highly, might use a small tweak down in some way), allows the discussion to then become more focused, and useful. So if we say MA Man has late game issues, then we can start to look for late game specific solutions, such as new national summons, perhaps a special nation specific Nature evocation of some sort. Also I had the thought that if they are seen as great woodsmen and "rangers" as a whole, their national troops could thematically receive a mobility increase, specifically boosting all national units +1 to their map move, and being more liberal with FS/MS so that later in the game as mobility becomes ever more important, their less relevant troops can at least be present.

Let's not ask that MA Man play like any other nation, but request it be added to in a meaningful way that makes it a stronger opponent in the late game. Then let's take that philosophy and extend it to other nations.

A theoretical example - nations who are weak in the early game might benefit from adding +1 DEF to their national troops, or +1 PRE for their ranged units. It's not that you just grab them and say "what are they weak at, let's fix it", but rather to ask what are they strong at, and see if that can be turned into something that can be relied upon more. One thought I had for early game weakness, is to give a potentially useful low level summons. EA Agartha has Rhuax Pact for example, which gives them 5 Magma Children for 2 F gems, and only takes Conj 3. These units are not singularly powerful, and don't make an "I win" strategy alone, but they are a powerful tool in their arsenal - and they are one of the only nations that gets an early national summon worth burning gems on. A number of nations could get their early game improvement simply by buffing the low level summons that they already have, preferably not by making them stronger (too easy to make them too strong), but by increasing the number per cast, or gem cost efficiency to make them a viable option.

[Tifone]

A really nice and important post JimMorrison. Even if my opinion surely doesn't count, I'd like to express my agreement with every single word you said