Trading commanders, exploit or not?

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Originally Posted by Jarkko

I fail to see the problem of sending in chaff armies to slow down hostile armies.

It's unrealistic to completely prevent forward movement of an entire huge army for possibly several consecutive months, by attacking it with some trivial force that immediately retreats. I can't think of how the developers could have implemented this differently. But it's still a lame tactic.

If you scripted commanders to burn hundreds of gems, then maybe the scripting wasn't that well thought out? I mean, it is not like only your opponent can do the Ghost riders attack, or? Do unto thy opponent what they do to you.

The game mechanics do not allow you to script for several different situations. The game mechanics do not allow you to limit the number of gems a mage can use from his supply, per battle. It's unrealistic that a mage in the backfield would really burn all his gems summoning up fire elementals in an easily winnable fight.

Edit: About Assassins: yeah, assassination targets can do some dumb stuff too. But I can write this off as caused by their surprise when attacked by the assassin. Does not break my suspension of disbelief.

[Sombre]

Originally Posted by Jarkko

I fail to see the problem of sending in chaff armies to slow down hostile armies.

Well it's hard to find fault with your argument there.


Regarding assassins being the counter, I'm afraid this simply isn't reasonable. The small force attack>retreat requires virtually no resources whatsoever and is available to everyone. Assassins on the other hand are far from commonly available and require more resources. They're also riskier, since they need to go do their thing in enemy territory and will quite often get ganked in the process.

Simple exercise - what are you likely to have more of - assassins or scouts/indy commanders?

You might also say fliers are the counter, but again they aren't commonly available, cost more resources and are riskier. They also don't prevent the tactic, they just make it very slightly more costly.

It's certainly true that in history small harassing forces have been able to slow and even halt powerful enemy forces. But I don't see what that has to do with dominions. We all know that you can justify anything if you try hard enough, taking examples from history, making up fluff to explain unintuitive game mechanics (like the explanations for poison arrows bypassing shields and prot),.. the fact remains that in dom3 it feels buggy when 10 militia with attack/retreat manage to stop an army of hundreds of elite troops turn after turn apparently at random (since eventually your army of hundreds will manage to attack, but no-one can work out why this happens). I'm sure that can be explained away with some anecdote from the battle of Stalingrad of whatever. That's cool, I'm glad people can explain stuff like that away and feel happy about it, I just don't like it in the games I play in, that's all.

Edit: Btw I strongly suspect, though I can't know for sure, that KO and JK did not intend this to be a usable 'tactic' in much the same sense that I suspect they didn't intend stuff like slave collar spam.

[Micah]

You can't ghost rider an army in a fort, and you can't effectively storm a fort in the late game without burning gems. "Not ever attacking" isn't an acceptable solution here.

Supply wagons and the like are able to be defended, it's not a good comparison. Stealth raiding on an opponent's lands IS supported though. Likewise, mages in the back can sometimes be massacred by flying or fast cavalry units.

Again, though, I think force-fitting comparisons to real life guerrilla tactics is disingenuous. If you can't GUARD your supply wagons because of a engine limitation it's a problem when your opponent can "raid" them.

[Jarkko]

Originally Posted by Micah

Stealth raiding on an opponent's lands IS supported though. Likewise, mages in the back can sometimes be massacred by flying or fast cavalry units.

But aren't you basically claiming such attacks too should be considered exploits? If I send a sneaky army to attack your mages, but you wipe them out while burning your gems, you would cry foul game?

I don't think you want to claim any attack which fails but that burned your gems to be exploits, do you? If you don't, then where is the line? Who decides which attack are legitimate and which ones are not? I've seen Ghost Riders wipe massive armies (mostly because the opponent mages nuked their own troops which resulted in a rout), but should using Ghost Riders be always considered foul play if they do not wipe the army? What guerrilla attacks would be legitimate, should all remote spells that target an army be exploits?

Is using assassins an exploit? How many times have I, and I bet you too, used assassins from inside a besieged fort to attempt assassination as the last desperate move; but if the target is a mage and has scripted spells that burn gems, wouldn't that too be an exploit?

What about fires from afar or seeking arrow spam, they can kill many mages with lots of gems, isn't that an exploit too?


I am sorry, but I do not agree with your view.

[Zeldor]

Micah was really clear, I think. Sending attacks that have no chance of doing any harm. It's really obvious.

When you are about to storm any fort, he can just cast some remote-attack spells, so your mages execute the script meant for storming. And there is nothing you can do about it. And you can't do the same to your enemy, as he is in the fort. Good luck winning without BEs or buffs.

Sure, it's sometimes hard to decide when you want to really weaken someone before storming and when you want to burn his gems. But many situations are obvious. You don't send GRs to kill few chaff units. You don't send one weakly equipped thug to attack 30+ mages, without even scripting it.

[Micah]

Jarkko, are you deliberately being obtuse? Flanking attacks can be stopped by putting troops on your flanks. Fliers can be stopped with storm or putting decoys behind your squishy mage types so the attack rear hits them instead.

I admit that enforcement of a rule like this would be problematic, but I don't think it's a bad thing to put in an expectation that it not be done, at least as a potential house rule. If someone feels the need to cheat and do it anyhow, well good for them.

Additionally, as with many of the issues I've been bringing up of late the borderline cases do not break the game. If someone sneaks in 5 reanimating priests with LAD it's not a problem, but when they have 100 of them the game breaks. People continuously bring up borderline cases and point to them with a great deal of hand-wringing about unfairly persecuting people. I'm not advocating for anything of the sort, just house rules against clear cut abuse of the AI. The truly abusive cases will be visible as such, the borderline cases don't provide enough of an advantage to cause a major problem.

Assassins and remote spells both fall back into the obtuse camp, since those are clearly some of the intended uses for them, and they are, again, counterable with bodyguards or resistance items. (Though I REALLY wish the assassin AI script was better.)

I wouldn't agree with my view the way you're interpreting and presenting it either, so I guess there's not much of a problem.

[Squirrelloid]

You know, strangely enough, assassins *are* the counter to armies which intercept and then retreat, blocking your army movement. Since his commanders are scripted to retreat, they auto-die to assassins. So you can 'protect your wagons', or whatever analogy we're trying to make. The counter doesn't really fit the above metaphor, but it is a counter...

Is it an exploit to drop a remote attack spell on a fortress with sufficiently low PD that the remote attack spell will win, thus stopping any armies inside from moving?

[Jarkko]

Ok, so my previous examples were not exploits. So who is the judge of what is obvious exploiting (as that seems to be agreed term, "obvious exploit") and what is not? Is the first suicide attack an obvious exploit, or the third, or fourth attack?

Is the usual Pan harassing tactics of Summon Lammashtas Retreat an exploit? Is it an exploit if 10 Pans does it? Is it an exploit only if done against a besieging army? If Lammashtas are not an exploit, then why is Ghost Riders an exploit (they are effectively the same thing, send in suicide troops to cause maximum carnage).

[Micah]

Again, I'm not concerned with policing this stuff, if someone decides to cheat and violate house rules they can go ahead, it's not any better than busting out a file editor. Cheating is cheating, and I'd hope the community would be mature enough to not do it, at least the players that are good enough to really abuse such exploits, or play well enough in a larger context for abuse to win a game for them.

I still think "don't abuse the AI by casting spells to bleed gems without any chance at actually hurting the army you're attacking" is a good house rule, even if it's hard to prove. I'd like to play with people that can be taken at their word, is that so much to ask?

[Dimaz]

Micah, I agree with you, but the point is that it has to be explicitly specified in game house rules, because otherwise it gives unfair advantage to players who exploit these tricks. So even if I dislike gem burning very much, when I see that someone in a game where I play goes that way, I will certainly use it myself (if house rules say nothing about it). However, as it's really sometimes tough to say if it was abusing or not, such rules may become too strict. So I see no good solution here.