The next patch

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Nephelim:
Hrm... Why a vampire queen instead of a doom horror?

More item slots, and immortality. Think of a vampire queen pretender with rainbow 5, astral 10, and 150 hitpoints in a dominion 10 province. Give her a sword of swiftness or some other weapon, charcoal shield, starshine skullcap, elemental armour, quickness boots, luck pendant and anti-magic amulet. A wish for power brings your attack, defense and magic resist up to over 30, and you are completely immune to the elements. There are very few spells that will get through at this point. You'll also regenerate something like 15 hitpoints per turn. I've had one wipe out an army with about 15 deep seers, 5 kings of the deeps, and 50+ sea trolls.

The doom horrow on the other hand, suffers from a relative lack of item slots, and is still vulnerable to elemental damage. They definetly are superior raiders to undefended provinces in my opinion, since its a rare map that they can't traverse in one turn.

[ April 09, 2004, 00:57: Message edited by: Graeme Dice ]

[Daynarr]

Originally posted by Cainehill:

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Originally posted by Alexander Seil:

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Originally posted by Cainehill:
Just to illustrate the absurdity of this - think of Vanheim, or Pangaea. You can't even _see_ their troops, but somehow you know their military strength? The graphs, as they are, are fine for SP games, but not for MP.

So? You could simply disable the graphs. Besides, as far as "military intelligence sense" goes, it's not like army commanders, modern or ancient, didn't know locations (and thus the number) of major enemy fortifications or the general composition and size of their enemies' forces. In Dom2, however, you don't even have reliable information as to the physical location of the other nation, let alone their army movements or positions of their forts, unless you actually send spies out to investigate.

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You missed the gist of my point, such as it was. Other people were saying that you could, by looking at the graphs, tell if someone was hiding away just building clams, and set forth to wallop them before the clam-hoarding turns into Wishing.

Which isn't possible if the graphs are turned off, and as I attempted to point out, there's many reasons why the graphs would be turned off in a MP game.

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Actually, your point seems to be that graphs are too accurate, and it was responded such way.

As for turning off graphs in MP game there are lots of reasons not to turn them off so it comes down to personal preference.

The thing is graphs are only one (and easiest) way to discover if someone is turtling in a game. Other method would be using scouts or diplomacy (finding out info from another player) to name a few.

BTW. has ANYONE pulled that tactic off in MP game?

As for the Wish - it's level 9-alteration spell and by the time you research it and get enough gem income to cast it, it will be late game. If you fear someone might pull it off, just increase research cost and make SURE it will be cast in (very) late game.

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:
A wish for power brings your attack, defense and magic resist up to over 30, and you are completely immune to the elements. There are very few spells that will get through at this point. You'll also regenerate something like 15 hitpoints per turn. I've had one wipe out an army with about 15 deep seers, 5 kings of the deeps, and 50+ sea trolls.

A wish for power does not grant improved magic resistance. It is impossible to improve magic resistance in such a way: Power only is +50 HP, +20 Str, +10 Atk/Def/Prec. And 15 deep seers, 5 Kings of the Deep, and sea trolls are weaklings anyway. They are by far not equal in cost, so it's hardly a surprise that they failed.

[Chris Byler]

BTW, whoever posted that a nature-1 water-1 clam would be beyond the reach of any national mage without a lucky random pick was wrong: he reckoned without the Marshmaster (Miasma C'tis) and the Master of Five Elements (Spring&Autumn T'ien Ch'i). Both have fixed water and nature magic. So those two nations would become the new favored clam hoarders - but hey, at least they can be easily attacked, having most of their powerbase on land. (Of course, jade priestesses would also be able to forge clams, and any nation with water *or* nature and random picks would be a potential clam hoarder - so add Pangaea, Man, and IIRC Machaka to the list.)

Even before clam hoarding was introduced, I'd already decided not to play any MP game with the graphs off. So that doesn't affect me. I still wouldn't mind seeing the clam raised to Water-3 though, if it really is a problem. It already takes 20 clam-turns to pay for a clam; raising it to 40 would pretty much eliminate clams as anything other than a slow form of alchemy for "excess" water gems. (I don't see how your water gems can be excess unless your *only* opponents are Caelum and Jotunheim and you're playing on a map with no seas, and even then you can probably find some use.)

[Taqwus]

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:

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Originally posted by Nephelim:
Hrm... Why a vampire queen instead of a doom horror?

More item slots, and immortality. Think of a vampire queen pretender with rainbow 5, astral 10, and 150 hitpoints in a dominion 10 province. Give her a sword of swiftness or some other weapon, charcoal shield, starshine skullcap, elemental armour, quickness boots, luck pendant and anti-magic amulet. A wish for power brings your attack, defense and magic resist up to over 30, and you are completely immune to the elements. There are very few spells that will get through at this point. You'll also regenerate something like 15 hitpoints per turn. I've had one wipe out an army with about 15 deep seers, 5 kings of the deeps, and 50+ sea trolls.

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A Vampire Queen that's rainbow 5 is also an incredibly enormous investment. Empower up to Astral 6, lend 3 astral boosters (could rely on items more if you don't mind horror-marking), that's somewhere around 350 extra astral above the initial 100-astral VQ wish.

Wish for power, that's +100. Wish for magic power x 5, that's plus +500. Now you're at 1050 astral. Then throw in the cost of the gear too.

You could get 10 doom horrors for that price, for instance, which gives you a lot more strategic flexibility (raid 10 back-end provinces in a turn, for instance; oh, can also fly all-weather IIRC) and won't all die to a single unlucky die roll or get auto-paralyzed by Petrify or fall to a lucky hit from a Golem with a gate cleaver or what-have-you.

The doom horrow on the other hand, suffers from a relative lack of item slots, and is still vulnerable to elemental damage. They definetly are superior raiders to undefended provinces in my opinion, since its a rare map that they can't traverse in one turn.

It also is pretty decent even without gear or a massive investment in empowering.

[ April 09, 2004, 01:51: Message edited by: Taqwus ]

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Chris Byler:
Even before clam hoarding was introduced, I'd already decided not to play any MP game with the graphs off. So that doesn't affect me.

Graphs do not effectively reveal clam hoarding, since clam income, like fever fetishes, earth blood stones, and certain summoned units, receive their gems directly and not in the score graph. Besides, clam hoarding wasn't "introduced", it's always been around. The concept of accumulating things that give you income is as old as time itself, and this is generally a rather slow investment process anyway, barring some lucky sites. Since there are no nations that can naturally produce all of the apparatus involved in the creation of clams, this is a greatly exaggerated issue.

[PvK]

Originally posted by Teraswaerto:
Limiting the amount of Clams that can exist in the world at the same time would stop excessive hoarding while still leaving Clams useful.

I agree. This is about the same as my earlier suggestion, which I like a little better but would be a little for complex (but perhaps more fun) to code. That was, that there are only so many pearls generated by all the clams in the world per turn, split between all the clams, max 1 per clam. The number could be say equal to the number of sea provinces in the world, or perhaps twice that number. Clams work normally until that number is exceeded, but beyond that start having a less and less chance of getting one of the limited number of pearls that will be generated.

PvK

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Taqwus:
and won't all die to a single unlucky die roll or get auto-paralyzed by Petrify or fall to a lucky hit from a Golem with a gate cleaver or what-have-you.

Petrify is about a 4 turn paralysis, that's not nearly enough to kill a beast that regenerates 15 per turn with invulnerability. That's also a rather lucky die roll. Magic resist of 35 gives about a 0.004% chance for an effect to take hold with standard penetration. If you do manage to kill the VQ, then it's only a couple of turns till it's back and ready to fight again, even if it dies outside of its dominion.

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Norfleet:
Since there are no nations that can naturally produce all of the apparatus involved in the creation of clams, this is a greatly exaggerated issue.

Every nation with a water 1 national mage, or a relatively inexpensive random pick has the "apparatus" to build clams.

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Norfleet:
And 15 deep seers, 5 Kings of the Deep, and sea trolls are weaklings anyway. They are by far not equal in cost, so it's hardly a surprise that they failed.

They are very similar in cost, when you consider the gold spent on upkeep and purchasing, and don't consider the astral pearls from clams as part of the cost. After all, they are entirely free after 20 turns. Those mages cost 4000 gold, and the troops alone had an upkeep of 150. The water gem cost was around 140. That kind of conventional army should be able to destroy any lone unit with only minimal losses, or there is a serious balance problem.