Dominions Nations Evaluations ;)

[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?

[Gandalf Parker]

Good points. And this is the MultiPlayer notes which only reflects part of what the game is.

Some of my favorite nations probably rate low in wins but I love them because they are more FUN to play (at least in solo games). Or because, in MP games they are excellent as allies so that can be a selling point for me. I tend to do better as an ally than in trying to conquer the world.

[Amhazair]

thejeff said:
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?

Aye. That's actually what I meant by my previous post. There are nations without a win yet, but is that significant if there's only ~30 games total played in the era, many of which won't have had all or even nearly all nations in them, regardless of all those other factors? Marverni is widely regarded as one of the weaker nations in MP, and yet they have 2 wins, putting them squarely in the middle. Is this significant? Or pure coincidence? Around the time when everyone was claiming Helheim was overpowered they hadn't recorded a single win yet - which some people thought intresting. Yet a short time later there suddenly were 3 Helheim wins in a short time, putting them near the top. I doubt it was because Helheim suddenly got stronger. (In fact it was just after Helheim got significantly weaker, though all 3 those games were started before the nerfs. )

Basically, all what Thejeff says.

[triqui]

thejeff said:
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?

No. But if you find that the 4 nations that win more total 50% of the victories, and happen to be 4 nations with strong sacreds, and that most of the nations that has never won dont have strong sacreds, or sacreds at all, that might be a trend.

2vs1 is not relevant. 4 vs 0 is a bit more (even if not deffinitive)