Tip: Template for reducing late game MM hell

[Psycho]

I meant that the fortresses are useful. I didn't express myself well. It was the response to Squirrelloid saying they aren't useful.

[K]

Originally Posted by Micah

If your counterattack is "meaningful" you'll be reclaiming provinces and hence income quickly. If you can't recover a significant portion of your provinces you're screwed in either case.

And my "side" of the debate is that gens make it harder to root out a defender from his last few forts, since his income isn't eliminated, but doesn't facilitate a meaningful comeback. It's a bit more nuanced than you make it out to be.

Due to a plethora of factors (first turn advantage, shelter in a fort and having concentrated force being the major ones) the defender's force in Dominions is much stronger than an attacker.

This additional effectiveness of the defenders' units due to defensive advantage combined with a disproportional, concentrated income, leads to what is, IMO, an undesirable situation in which it is neither feasible for the defender to mount a successful counterattack due to losing their defensive advantage, or for the attacker to risk a frontal assault on the defender's stronghold, leading to a non-interactive standoff.

Having an income is the same as having a reserve in that you are still spending gems at a fixed rate per turn, and the natural result of no gem gens is that people will keep greater reserves. This seems obvious now and thanks for pointing it out.

But, this means that the very situation you are trying to avoid will still happen.

The only difference is that people will give up and go into "revenge mode" earlier where they decide they can't win and that they are going to try to grind up as much of your forces as possible. They'll do this because without an income they'll have to make that reserve do as much damage as possible, so turtling is the natural choice due to the very advantages you discussed.

Calmon would have still ground up your attacks on his fortress with or without a gem gen income (going into an endgame fortress is always dicey, and it sounds like you were using an "army fighting" army and not a "fortress busting" army). The only difference is that he probably would never have tried to escape since he would have no hope of turning his reserves into the income he'd need to get his provinces back.

Your position is not more nuanced .... it just makes no sense. To achieve the result you want would require modding out fortresses or maybe using that one fortress that has no walls as everyone's fortress. You'll still get ground up by mage-heavy armies, but the only way to fix that is to mod out mages.

Removing gem gens only makes the game less interesting as people horde gems for inevitable sneak attacks (or they auto-lose because their reserve in insufficient).

[Micah]

My still-limited experience with genless games argues to the contrary on your last point, the latest RAND game is perhaps the best game of Dominions I've been involved in.

If the defending player wants to hole up in their fort in supposed "revenge mode" without gens they're welcome to do so, the world will pass them by, and eventually a player with income will be able to muster a force strong enough to crush them without significant casualties.

With gens the defender is able to constantly bolster their forces and have the effectiveness of their reinforcements multiplied by their defensive advantage, and/or the defender can fire off 10 earth attacks a turn from their blood stone income.

Gens cause the attacker to have to take stupid risks to eliminate the threat of an opponent with significant resources/income, but don't allow the attacker the benefit of being able to capture those resources. In fact, the defender can send those gem items to the attacker's enemies if it becomes clear that they're doomed, creating a double-jeopardy situation. Late game this can easily result in the winner of a hard-fought war ending up with less to show from it than the loser's ally, since the gen income can exceed the province income. I don't see how that is in any way a desirable mechanic to have. Do you disagree?

[WraithLord]

K, you present plausible arguments that makes sense.

However, I must say that my experience with gems gens agrees with Micah's assertions. I found myself in the situation he describes on a number of occasions. It boils down to penalizing the attacker which increases turtling. A partial remedy to that is adding house rules that disallow sending gems but I personally think that such a rule will have negative impact on the "fun" factor in diplomacy. Removing gem gens altogether seems like a cleaner solution. You know you've lost and want to give all your gem income to your attacker's enemies, better (for game balance) that it be 100 instead of 1k gems.

I still have very little MP experience w/o gem gens so I can't tell whether or not the perceived issues with gem gens are indeed solved when removed.

[K]

Originally Posted by Micah

Gens cause the attacker to have to take stupid risks to eliminate the threat of an opponent with significant resources/income, but don't allow the attacker the benefit of being able to capture those resources. In fact, the defender can send those gem items to the attacker's enemies if it becomes clear that they're doomed, creating a double-jeopardy situation. Late game this can easily result in the winner of a hard-fought war ending up with less to show from it than the loser's ally, since the gen income can exceed the province income. I don't see how that is in any way a desirable mechanic to have. Do you disagree?

In parts.

You've correctly identified the problem of sending magic items to your ally, but again your solution does not solve the problem. The same problem exists if I send say....20 Phoenix Rods to my ally; my ally just gained a pile of power and the attacker is not going to take any part of that power if he conquers me. The solution to that is to remove forging altogether.

Heck, the very issue of allies creates unfairness where good players are dogpiled by lesser players and a skilled attacker might be crushed by not just the troops of his foe but the spells of his foe's ally. I personally have fought bloody wars with an opponent and over many turns eventually taking 95% of his provinces only to have his turtling neighbor come in and take all his provinces back for him. Again, this is not an issue that is fixed by killing gem gens.

I disagree that sneak attackers should have an easy time killing off other players. There is a short list of ways to take an entire empire in a few turns, and I'd prefer if the win did not always go to the few players lucky enough to be playing the right nation that neatly dovetails into one of those tactics.

You should have to take a person's fortress to end them as a threat, and I think it's shear laziness that prompts people to want the thugs they use to kill province defense to be the same thing they use to take a fortress. There should be a price to take another nation that you pay up front, and the pay-off takes several turns to mature.

It should take a while for people to get used to playing games without gem-gens, so I expect at least a good 6 months before people get used to keeping stockpiles.

[Micah]

Please, your comparisons to other items don't hold up. Most of them need to be *risked in combat* to be useful, meaning the attacker gets a crack at taking them out any time they're actually used. Boosters and the like for rituals are an exception, of course, but those generally take up a minor fraction of a nation's forging, and aren't nearly as useful to duplicate en masse, hence shipping them to an ally is much less unbalancing. Clams of course never want to see a battlefield and have *increasing* returns as you leverage wishes to make more of the things.

Additionally, if you ship off items that don't yield gems eventually the income of the provinces that were conquered WILL catch up in favor of the player that's actually attacking, making the attack worthwhile as at least a longterm investment. With gem items you can simply eclipse the value of the territory altogether.

[vfb]

Originally Posted by K

In parts.

You've correctly identified the problem of sending magic items to your ally, but again your solution does not solve the problem. The same problem exists if I send say....20 Phoenix Rods to my ally; my ally just gained a pile of power and the attacker is not going to take any part of that power if he conquers me. The solution to that is to remove forging altogether.

...

I think a better solution is to disallow trading/sending of items (and might as well disallow sending of gems and gold stockpiles too) (and while we are at it, disallow intentional gifts/trades of units through charm/enslave).

[WraithLord]

I think three types of games are possible:
1. No diplo games. e.g. RAND. nothing can be sent between players.
2. All allowed diplo games.
3. Diplo games that disallow transfer of gems/income/units/VPs etc.

All have their place. The important thing is to make the ground rules clear from the get go.

[Sombre]

I think you can run a game with no diplo which isn't RAND but just ND. You just have to play with people who are trustworthy. Note that many of the problems with untrustworthy players (or general disagreements) stem from the huge size of games.

[WraithLord]

RAND can easily enforce the ND part due to A factor.
In ND games that would be much more difficult and may also become a source of disagreement between players. I can already imagine such disagreement at game end like some endless exhange:
while true:
Player A: That was completely unfair. Players B and C had an all game alliance and worked together against me so that B would win.
Players B,C: nonsense.
end while

At least ND games can inherently enforce the rules of no transfers of goods (so long as game turns are kept for later revision).
Anyway, I'd say ND games go to the first option.

Now, I must ask myself what does all that have to do with end-game MM?