Some ideas: raiding, seiging, spell AI and more..

[baruk]

Ate too much cheese Last night and had some thoughts about clams...

Clams versus gem sites

A recent game as Atlantis got me thinking (sites 40, Old World). I conquer the seas, and use voice of tiamat to search my 15+ underwater provinces. I find a few gem sites (a smattering of earth, fire and astral), but work out I would have had a higher income (albeit solely astral) had I forged clams. I suppose it can be put down to voice of tiamat being inefficient at 40% sites, manual site searching being more worthwhile (but costing more mage time overall, and therefore more research).

A comparison of clams and magic sites:

- Magic sites are linked to provinces, clams can be passed around.

- Magic sites are spread around an empire, making it hard to defend all of them. Clams can be stockpiled in well defended provinces, and moved via the lab if threatened (and on to other commanders if available).

- Discovered magic sites can be seen with scouts and astral window-type spells, whilst total site income is known if graphs are enabled. Clams are only visible on a commander's inventory.

- Both clams and gem sites require micro-management: searching for sites, forging, placing and gem collection for clams.

- The site count of a well searched empire is proportional to its province count (times the site frequency). Clam count of a nation using hoarding strategy is proportional to the turn count.

- Magic sites are capturable. Clams are somewhat less capturable.

Two balancing factors have been suggested that should naturally limit use of clams: diplomacy and map size.

Diplomacy can't be levelled directly against clams, as they are invisible to scouting and world graphs. Clams have low costs, so they won't necessarily overly weaken a player in the short term compared to one who spent the gems on summons eg. winter wolves.

A small map size can be chosen, which should give a quicker game, and thus limit effectiveness of clams. The number of players, and aggressiveness of their respective playstyles will have as much influence on the length of the game, however.

I'm leaning towards thinking that a potential Dominions 3 should have a few more choices on the game set-up screen, beyond site frequency, indy strength and richness etc. Perhaps a choice to alter blood hunting (easy, normal, hard), and one to tweak gem generators (perhaps: Dom 2 style, limited in some way, or removed). Whether you think blood hunting and gem generators are perfectly balanced or not, they have enough effect on the game that the ability to tweak the game setup in this way may be beneficial.

[Cainehill]

What, a reasonably balanced post about clams, cheese, and wine? What is this, Usenet or Fox News? (A fair and balanced look at prostituting the political process. )

A few game options would indeed be good. Blood is definately imbalanced right now with certain game settings - Quantum's Twilight of Magic games, for instance, have sites set to 5% or 10% tops, but blood keeps rolling in. A switch to modify blood would definately be a Good Thing, as it would simply balance blood nations the same as site frequency does already. ( Not sure, but I think that modifying blood hunting by the site frequency itself might be better - if, after all, there is a very dismal amount of magic sites, people (and kings, and gods) are going to protect their virgins that much more, as the main source of magic. Alternatively, some 'patriots' will 'protect' the virgins from becoming blood sacrifices through time honored methods.

Gem generators are more complicated, as some nations are arguably much more affected then others. Atlantis, some say, lives or dies by its clams. But on the other hand - Caelum can eak out a few fire gems by fetishes that it would have a hard time getting otherwise. Hrm. No sympathy for Caelum, eh? Machaka is another case in point - without the ability to bring in extra fire gems, it is arguably hosed.

But still - if it's a game option, then people can play around with these options, if need be avoiding games that either say "no gem generators" or "1/2 price sale on gem generators, reasonable credit".

[baruk]

I think with the clam thing, what I'm getting at is that I have no problem with the "1 astral income for 10 water gems" dynamic. Its their invisibility (on power screen) and uncapturability that are slightly annoying (unlike with magic sites, for instance). Perhaps the addition of a magic item counter on the Power screen could be handy.

Local Labs

One idea I had was to have a new spot in the lab, for special, "commander free" items, that would give the province or nation as a whole a boost. Perhaps you could call it the "hoard", "cache" or "items of regalia", that kind of thing (perhaps someone could think of a cool name for it). It would have some interesting properties:

1. It would act as extra, local, magic item storage (for when the main, national lab is too full, and you don't want to lose track of items on random commanders).

2. The items within it would be captured if the province was lost to the enemy. So if clams, for example, were designed to be a "cache-only" item, it would make them more capturable.

3. Items would be untransferable directly from the "stash" to the main lab, a commander would be needed to transfer them (to make it a little harder to evacuate precious items). Some "cache-only" items could be cursed once they are assigned to a cache, so that they are unremovable (perhaps a specific ritual could exist that would allow them to be moved).

4. New types of magic items would exist that would provide benefits to the province or nation when stored in a cache. They would not necessarily confer any benefit to a commander, however they would be carryable in the misc. slot. For example, items could exist that would: push dominion (such as a holy relic), affect dominion scales, give benefit to the commanders in the province (such as research or morale bonuses), or provide gem income direct to the treasury.

5. (Optional, perhaps a choice during game set-up) The number of slots available in the cache could be dependent on magic scale and/or dominion strength.
Alternatively, the number of slots could remain constant, but the number of "active" slots could be dominion dependent (the active slots would be highlighted). An active slot would be one that allowed a special item to provide benefit.
A further option could be to only allow special items to be placed in active slots, where they would continue to provide benefit even if dominion dropped afterwards.

6. A new lab-based order would exist: use cached item. The idea is that certain cached items would require interaction with a commander before they provided their benefit. For example, if fever fetishes were a cache item, they would still require a commander to "use" them before producing a fire gem (the commander being diseased in return).

Gem usage in battles

Its a pet peeve of mine that the AI sometimes disregards my spell orders, when it feels that they are "overkill", such as wrathful skies on a call of the winds. The meddling AI is basically a result of the turn sequence. It allows several battles in a turn, meaning that it is important to conserve gems between fights in the same turn, as players can exploit the turn sequence by using remote summons to run enemy armies out of gems before the main battle of the turn.
I've been trying to think up solutions to this for a while, I have a couple of (I think) new ones, based on making it easier to have gems available in each battle on the same turn:

1. The gem wallet! This is a new magic item that provides the owner with magic gems whenever he is involved in a battle. There would be a different wallet for each type of magic gem, and perhaps various size classes of wallet available at different levels of construction, producing between 1 and 5 gems in each battle. The gems would be temporary, available for that battle only, disappearing afterwards.

2. A two tier system of gem usage. Certain battlefield spells would now have a partial gem requirement. Instead of becoming used up, the gems would "grey-out", becoming unavailable for use until the next battle. I thought this would be suitable for defensive and summoning spells, such as wards, storm, the lesser elementals, and howl, and perhaps for fatigue reduction. Offensive spells, such as wrathful skies, would retain a requirement for permanent gem usage, perhaps along with partial gem use. However, I think the permanent gem usage could be restricted to 1 or 2 for most spells.

3. Blood magic. I can't see how a blood slave could be "partially" used, or that an item could produce slaves in response to a battle, so blood would require a different approach. My idea is that certain blood spells would have a "virginal blood spillage" requirement, ie. the spells would become usable once a certain number of blood slaves has been sacrificed on the battle field, by either side. This blood spillage requirement would carry over between battles that occur in the same province, in the same turn. Some spells would retain a sacrifice requirement (reinvigoration, for example), and any spell order requiring a spillage of blood would allow the blood requirement to be met, if slaves were available. A new battlefield order could be introduced: sacrifice x blood slaves, for when you want certain blood spillage requirements fulfilled, but without spell casting. An additional effect could be that certain spells grow in power in proportion to the total blood spillage.
This system would mean on overhaul of all the current battlefield blood spells, much tweakage would be needed to get the relative power level right.

National Enchantments

A quick thought: the limit of 5 globals can be a little frustrating in a large multiplayer game, it would be nice to see an option to extend the allowed globals to 10 or 15 (like the hall of fame).
My other thought was to introduce national enchantments. These would comprise any global enchantments that only affect the nation that cast them, without being clearly intended to be unique, (eg. forge of the ancients would remain a global, whilst mechanical militia would be national). Each nation would have a limit of 3 national enchantments, and they would be available for dispel as with the globals. The difference is that multiple nations would be allowed to have the same national enchantment up at the same time (I am probably thinking in terms of the minor wonders in civ 3).

[Ygorl]

I kind of like the idea of being able to plug magic items into a lab. I think it's much harder to make a case for hoarded items being a problem when they only work "plugged in" to a lab (which can then be conquered and despoiled). Also, you could have other nifty thematic setups (like a massive lightning rod that makes corpse men much easier to animate, or an enhancement to the castle's artillery, or ... dang it, it's time to go drink some beer)
Being able to choose the number of globals wouldn't be so bad either.