Dominions Nations Evaluations ;)

[triqui]

Amhazair said:
Units with unbreakable morale are not counted when averaging out the total morale of a squad. Thus, mixing in undead with the monkeys does nothing to help keep them from running away.

and will make them charge to the front becouse they cant use "fire" as squad order.

Besides that, is quite probable that the glamour units will be knocking your door before you have flaming arrows as Lanka or Kailasa or Bandar log, which dont have fire as national path .

Even then, it's the flaming arrow, and not the markata what keep the glamour army at bay. Markata is only useful to die in piles as cannon fodder.

[JimMorrison]

triqui said:

and will make them charge to the front becouse they cant use "fire" as squad order.

Besides that, is quite probable that the glamour units will be knocking your door before you have flaming arrows as Lanka or Kailasa or Bandar log, which dont have fire as national path .

Even then, it's the flaming arrow, and not the markata what keep the glamour army at bay. Markata is only useful to die in piles as cannon fodder.

Not true at all, I group ele/mammoths with archers all the time. Sometimes it causes small placement issues with the big beasts placed behind the archers in the squad formation, but otherwise it's basically 90% effective.

And if you don't like Markata as missile troops, it must be because you use the archers which should never be purchased. The other Markata have Sticks and Stones which get 2 attacks per round. As long as you have a line in front of them, they can barrage an enemy line - and if you did actually do a Flaming Arrows strat, you should see impressive results for your investment.


I still think there is an overabundance of confusion as to what the ratings system actually means. Or at least, a bit much personal bias from most players.

I will continue to look into what can be done about that, and can only encourage people to continue to provide whatever input they can.

[Herode]

I still think there is an overabundance of confusion as to what the ratings system actually means. Or at least, a bit much personal bias from most players.

That's an inherent drawback of those open/subjective questions. The point is : some nations can be powerful and easy to use once you know how to do it (== once you are experienced) but still be difficult and weak in the hands of most (== standard) players.

Then, how will you rate this : after the guru's results or after the crowd's results ?
Essentially, this is a philosophical question : is a thing defined by its essential perfection or by its most common and impure manifestation ? Are you essentialist or phenomenologist ?

Now, your first 3 ratings (early/mid/late game power) can be computed without a poll. If the hosts agreed to deliver some stats on the games they are hosting at defined schedules (let's say turns 25/50/75 or whatever to be tuned by experienced domguys after the initial settings of the game), then you could collect amounts of empirical and objective data.

Also, it could be very interesting if you were able to mix this with additional data about the players themselves (basically, how many MP did they play before the current one as a measure of their experience). Though informations about players themselves may be more difficult to obtain, it should be straightforward to collect the data for or all games running with stats on (provided the hosts collaborate, of course).

[Gandalf Parker]

While I would not want to consider it as absolute "fact",
there is a sticky thread in the MP forum to list winning nations. Has anyone done some numbers on that? Just for curiosity sake?

[Amhazair]

Every so often that list comes up in discussions about this nation or that. Last time I checked the only really significant number was that almost half of all the LA games had been won by Ermor or R'lyeh.

[Gandalf Parker]

That makes me feel better. Anytime a discussion pops up here where various experts proclaim some nations worth or worthlessness I get concerned. But luckily, it tends to actually average out that no matter how strong the opinions are that fly around, the saving grace is that they dont seem to agree with each other.

I am still amazed at how rare that is. Ive been gaming for decades and on internet for as long as its been internet. I can remember many many games where 1 month to 1 year was just about the whole life of the game because some ultimate strategy was developed and posted. Or great games that I found out about too late because by the time I got there the expert players had their tactics so down perfect that you couldnt last long enough in a game to learn the game.

Call me a fanboi if you want but any game that can keep me trying new things years after its release is well worth it.

[triqui]

Gandalf Parker said:
That makes me feel better. Anytime a discussion pops up here where various experts proclaim some nations worth or worthlessness I get concerned. But luckily, it tends to actually average out that no matter how strong the opinions are that fly around, the saving grace is that they dont seem to agree with each other.

However, the "winning thread" shows an "evidence" (if you can call "proof" to such low number of data to make an statistic). There are "first class" and "second class" nations. There is not a "absolute and clear winner" (Except for the admitedly superior Ermor and Ryleh in LA). But some nations get 4 wins, while some others havent won once. Some nations are stronger (or "easier to play and win with" if you preffer) than some others.

Which is not a bad thing, by the way. I used to play a Table Top game named Empire in Arms, about Napoleonic Wars. It was not its intention to create "balanced" nations: France was MUCH better than Otoman Empire. This is not chess, where everybody has exactly same army (and even in chess, whites win much more than black). However, that should not delude ourselves to say that every nation "is balanced out". Some people has been saying so since 3.0. However, each patch some unit get a cost increase (like jaguar warriors), which is a proof that the developers think it was too powerful, while some others get a price reduction (as Onis) or some "nation love" like MA ulm, which is a proof that developers perceived it as weaker than average.

Probably some of the nations that people claim now that "are balanced" will get a nerf or buff in next, or a future, patch. This will discredit the affirmation that it was balanced.

[thejeff]

Well, the problem with relying on a list of games won to determine balance issues is that there are so many other factors - player skill, alliances, location and neighbors, size of game, simple luck, etc - that even blatantly more powerful nations don't always win and our sample size simply isn't large enough to be significant for anything but the most overpowered nations.
If one nation has won twice out of 20 games is it twice as powerful as a nation that has only won once? Or even twice as likely to win?

[Tifone]

Gandalf Parker said:
Call me a fanboi if you want...

FANBOY!!
FANBOY FANBOY FANBOY!!!

Joking, you're true. 2 games unplayable for new players were i.e. starcraft and warcraft. lots of game gurus destroying you in a matter of seconds, you just weren't able to understand what to do. Oh well, at least those weren't my kind of games, I have yet to realize how to enjoy a game in which i have to control every single worker, every singl building, every single unit, every single active ability of every single unit... what the hell am I?? That's not being a general, that's being crazy!!! No fun for me there.

Surely an expert player of dom3 can destroy me easily. But the strange thing is that it would not frustrate me. Really. I have yet to try an MP game, but seeing the tactics of experts would just amaze me. That's the main reason for me not complaining about unbalanced nations - I can choose them for flavour and well, if the game went bad, it went this way Maybe even because while a warcraft is just a matter of numbers (time, damage dealt per second and lots of other things), well in dom3 there are lots of numbers too, you can study them and put on a great strategy, but you can even send them all to hell and just enjoy the theme of your, and your enemies', nations. ^_^

[JimMorrison]

Herode said:
Now, your first 3 ratings (early/mid/late game power) can be computed without a poll. If the hosts agreed to deliver some stats on the games they are hosting at defined schedules (let's say turns 25/50/75 or whatever to be tuned by experienced domguys after the initial settings of the game), then you could collect amounts of empirical and objective data.

Also, it could be very interesting if you were able to mix this with additional data about the players themselves (basically, how many MP did they play before the current one as a measure of their experience). Though informations about players themselves may be more difficult to obtain, it should be straightforward to collect the data for or all games running with stats on (provided the hosts collaborate, of course).

Actually I think that would reflect more on the 5th rating, than anything. Multiplayer Usability. But even then, there are so many other factors - most of the people that I've seen eliminated early in MP games stated that either a) they did something really stupid or experimental with their build, or b) they were just minding their own business and (insert nation here) dual blessed troops landed on their capital with no warning.