Message from Abysia

[Taqwus]

Oh, no worries there. I don't think there's a known perfect strategy for Go yet, and Go is a 2-player game with no hidden information and at most 361 legal moves from any legal state.

Dominions offers up to 21 players, has mostly hidden information, and has a far higher branching factor combined with a degree of deliberate measure-countermeasure in (that is, there are specific counters to different approaches... but exploiting the counters has opportunity cost. Pure minimax says you're screwed.)

Dominions offers a fair bit of variability, but when you're dealing with armies of 400+, the law of averages is going to come into play. It's mostly the random events hitting early that can make a huge difference (imagine the 1500 free gold + an item event at the start... or losing 99.9% of the population of your capital to the Ancient Presence event), and IIRC some events are restricted as to how soon they can happen, and that probability can be reduced on game creation.

Randomness frustrates me more in Diablo (farming monsters for item drops is tedious) and Nethack (which is pretty much the embodiment of 'arbitrary'). Here, I would be annoyed if an SC died to a randomly lucky arrow or Soul Slay... but it does mean that it's actually possible to counter SCs without resorting to SCs oneself, and that's probably a good thing.

[Valandil]

There is a nice proof that the person that goes first should always win. Unfortunately, there is no way to know how.

[Cainehill]

Kristoffer O said:
> I wonder why there is no game option to have old age or not though.

You mean like in real life . If there is a wider consensus among fans there will probably appear an MP mod that alters the startage or maxage of nations with shorter lifespans. Perhaps an (EB) emotional balance mod to remove irritating or overly rewarding random elements such as age and heroes .

Ah, Real Life. In Real Life, one doesn't get to skip over hours of boredom simply to get to the interesting bits. Why does Dominions allow one to skip forward an entire month in seconds via the turn mechanism? For that matter, Real Life doesn't have graphics options to speed things up - why does Dominions? People (and not-people) are _dying_ and getting _maimed_ in those battles, why should the player be able to fast forward through their suffering???

For that matter - does this mean that we can look forward to Babies Crying, Inlaws, and Nagging Spouses ("Zeus, when_ are you going to finally clean up Thebes?") in Dominions 4?

[Kristoffer O]

> Ah, Real Life. In Real Life, one doesn't get to skip over hours of boredom simply to get to the interesting bits. Why does Dominions allow one to skip forward an entire month in seconds via the turn mechanism? For that matter, Real Life doesn't have graphics options to speed things up - why does Dominions? People (and not-people) are _dying_ and getting _maimed_ in those battles, why should the player be able to fast forward through their suffering???

My real life has splendid graphics and i accidentally skipped this month

> For that matter - does this mean that we can look forward to Babies Crying, Inlaws, and Nagging Spouses ("Zeus, when_ are you going to finally clean up Thebes?") in Dominions 4?

Dominions 4 - Infant Gods. Ares still in dipers attacking Afrodite with a fork

[Morkilus]

Cainehill said:
Ah yes - yet another bloody way to have to pay expensive upkeep on troops because you don't dismiss them from service when they become crippled & useless. Nifty.

You mean you're not having any fun sending those feeble old wrecks to the front lines, ahead of the pikemen to slow down a cavalry charge? You either have no sense of humor, or are just a soft excuse for a pretender god bent on the destruction of the world for your glory.

An aside: I immediately sent that joke of a mercenary Madame Fortuna into the front lines when she hired on with a feeble mind. Then I realized my commander had was feebleminded immediately after the battle. Off he goes to the front! It happened again. I then read the text for this slave collar that was being passed down. Oops.

[Archonsod]

PrinzMegaherz said:
The old age itself isn't that bad, but it's one rather unbalanced factor in the game. Best solution to solve the problem is to take a nation with long living mages like Yomi. It's just a shame that my favorite nation (which was never one of the top dogs) has been degraded this badly.

It's the best solution if you don't want to or can't deal with old age. To be honest, I wouldn't agree that it's a disadvantage, apart from in the early game. For any blood nation, research construction and a relatively cheap (10 blood slaves) item is available which negates ageing alltogether. Given that old age is payment for increased abilities or lower than normal value, this is going to give you a cheap, powerful or otherwise advantaged mage which you can ignore the downside of. In other words, you just became slightly more powerful than everyone else.
You could even build a strategy around this. Consider the crone or other pretenders who get a points or abilities break because of old age. Select imprisoned for maximum goodness, and bank on getting one of the age negating spells or items before your pretender breaks free. You can then prevent old age from ever affecting your pretender, thus effectively giving you free points.
It's down to playing style really. Some people are going to rule out nations with older mages because it doesn't suit their style. Others will embrace them and find ways to deal with the ageing problem or even turn it to their advantage.

[Archonsod]

Taqwus said:
If you want brutal injuries, read the critical-hit tables in the Middle Earth Role-Playing System. Everything up to and including amputations and instant-death, IIRC.

That was -not- a "heroes kill kobolds, suffer a little bit, and instantly recover from Cure Light Wounds" game.

Wasn't that based on Rolemaster? The only game to include critical hit tables for chair legs?

Started an EA game up with Abysia. To be honest, it's not too bad. Great troops (especially burning one's) and the apprentices are good enough for research and blood hunt, especially once you can build lanterns.

For that matter - does this mean that we can look forward to Babies Crying, Inlaws, and Nagging Spouses ("Zeus, when_ are you going to finally clean up Thebes?") in Dominions 4

From what I hear it's the new events which are to be most feared, like the Inland Revenue demanding back taxes for all this land you apparently own, and Health and Safety preventing research because of the fire risks in the lab...

[Twan]

Personnally I'm not against the aging system but I think making global mod commands to change it would be a good idea to please everyone(something like #longlives [x years] adding for all characters x years to the old age limit, or #allyounger [x years] reducing all start ages by a number of years).

Anyway mods will probably be done to change max ages, even if the modding stay manual, but giving a command like #allyounger would make more players use a soft version of the age system instead of using the "10000 years max mod" that will very probably be made.

[Tyrian]

Age system is a good idea for the gestion of effect like burden of time. It is silly than near-immortel creature like the illithid are equally affected than simple human. Age system is a good solution for this problem's type.

[Fate]

Ok, as I mentioned above I was playing a MA Agartha game. I had Growth +1, and my only land opponent (after knocking of Machaka) is Jotunheim, with Death 3.

To date, around 3 - 4 years (I need to check), I have had exactly 2 mages contract disease in my dominion, and 2 others get exactly 1 wound each (neither was disease or feeblemindedness). That was out of at least 16 mages.

I have also sent an army of ~10 mages through Jotunheim's death 3 dominon in the war. They all died in a large attack from Jotunheim, but prior to that 4 got diseased, another 2 got wounds, and none were feeble minded.

So, to recap, I lost 5 to disease (1 got feeblemindedness at the same time, so I think that counts more), 1 to feeblemindedness, and 4 got non-debilitating wounds. Keeping in mind that I have another 10+ turns of use after a mage gets diseased, I don't think it is that bad at all.

It could be that growth scale help. I know death scale really hurts.