Tragic poor pretender design is limiting MA Van!!!

[Lord_Bob]

The reason why MA Vanheim is such a powerfull rusher has nothing to do with "the awesome power of the Van". The Van are reasonably priced for their power. Probably slightly weaker... The problem is that they are so EXPENSIVE. And this expense is not being exploited, I suspect, by even the best Vanheim rushers. I hear people say "you need Dom 6 at least" to rush with Vaheim. Why?

Vanheim Pretender Dom 3:
Maximum capital invested in Van per turn:
75 gold/16 resources per unit (x) 3 units per turn:

225 gold/48 resources maximum investment in sacreds per turn without temples.

Ermor Pretender Dom 6:
Maximum capital invested in Shadow Vestals per turn:
20 gold/3 resources per unit (x) 6 units per turn

120 gold/18 resources maximum investment in sacreds per turn without temples.

Clearly MA Vanheim is able to put vastly more of the gold income obtained from conquest into building more super-blessed Van before they hit the "sacred limit". Even with HALF THE DOMINION of Ermor they can put in TWICE AS MUCH MONEY.

Second, all Van built flawlessly switch from early game expansion to mid-game raiders. This super-blessed Sacred is easily close to, or is, "The Most Powerful Raider in the Game". Every gold piece you spend on these guys will keep paying off in mid-game.

Since MA Van is protected from "Dominion Kill" by a frightenly fast expansion, there is absolutely no reason why they should waste points on a high Dominion. What's more, because their dominion would then spread much slower, they can now take advantage of the points saved to get Earth 4(using a low New Path Pretender... also made possible because of the lowered Dominion). What's more, I believe this is important, because EA Vans certainly, and possible MA Vans do have a weakness.

Fatigue/Beserk on an expensive relatively high encumberance unit that should always be significantly outnumbered.

"Ceasar's men shall grow tired simply with killing!"-reportedly a statement made by one of Ceasar's enemies.

This really isn't funny. It doesn't really matter if the 10 gold(and decent defense) unit is cut in half by the Van or if the 20 gold high prot unit(neutralized by F9) just has his neck "half cut off". The fatigue is the same. Swarms of relatively high defense but low protection slaves will exhaust the Van. At that point their defense drops. Then they get hit for damage, and the glamour drops. Then their defense HALVES. Things go downhill from there. Did I mention that swarm units get an attack bonus? WEAK summons and WEAK units are the way to go. Make them swing and swing.

That's why they need the Fire Bless. It ups their damage to the point where they avoid exhaustion from normal units while being able to kill high level units.

As for Van's "weak mid-game".... their scales take a long time to reach full effect, and they should have vastly more territory than their enemy(s). This gives them more gold.
Gold=Mages=Research. And their enemies CANNOT share research levels. That means Van should, in the Mid-Game, ALWAYS HAVE A MUCH HIGHER LEVEL OF RESEARCH. They also have a F9W9E4 Rainbow pretender about to wake up. Also, the Super-Van raiders.

How many ordinary kingdoms would it take to beat this? Quite a few. And they simply couldn't unless they shared gems and items and coordinated.

The solution to this craziness is two-fold.

FIRST:
Unit power is balanced on price vs. power in "normal game", and Maximum Recruitable vs. Dominion for Bless Rushes. Van is FINE for normal game. For Bless Rush, Vanheim's expensive unit sacreds need to cost more "Dominion points" to recruit. This brings the maximum capital investment of Vanheim's high cost Van into line with other powerfull Bless-Rushers with lowerer cost units. Other Sacreds may need this change as well.

SECOND:
This is a tough nerf. Vanheim needs some love for this. Lower encumberance, remove the "arrow versus's glamour" change, up one of Vanheim's non-sacred's. Something real.

[Baalz]

Your logic is flawed, if I understand you're saying the Vans are too powerful because they're too expensive? (I'm just teasing, what you really mean is that Vanheim is even more powerful than people already think) Aren't vans cap only now though? Even with a ridiculous bless 3 vans aren't gonna go far alone, and 6 have to be careful who they pick a fight with...so you're looking at a real expansion/raiding force once every 2-3 turns? I find this is the real number I look at for very early game - how often can I send out a force capable of taking out most indies, and how long until I can set up a second recruitment location (not for a long time if you're initially based on cap only recruits)? If you plan on riding on the Van's strength taking a 3 dominion seems suboptimal - I'm hardly a Vanheim player but seems much better to have 5-6 vans per turn than an extra minor earth bless. Reducing the number of vans is not the way to go if you're worried about fatigue buildup, and it seems outside of resource constraints that with a rapid expansion it's not difficult to get the gold income to field that many per turn very rapidly.

I also don't personally believe the common wisdom that whoever has the most provinces also has the most gold, gems, and research. Most every game I've played the most aggressive expanders in province count initially fall well behind in research (they're buying expansion parties rather than researchers), gems (site searching gets put off in favor of expansion), and gold (often poor scales to support the rush/rapid expansion). Because of the compounding nature of research/site searching and the fact that successful rushing/rapid expansion often breeds *more* resources put towards expansion it can be well into mid game before the inherent advantage of holding more territories can catch back up compared to somebody with good researchers, good scales and a modest expansion - and that's assuming you can hold all that territory with no problems (rapid expansion tends to breed enemies quickly).

[Lord_Bob]

You raise two good points. Kristoffer O also pointed out that Shadow Vestals had been raised to 35 gold per unit. However, it is relatively hard for an early game player to put in more than 300 gold per turn into units... That gives new numbers for "resources invested":

Vanheim Pretender Dom 4:
Maximum capital invested in Van per turn:
75 gold/16 resources per unit (x) 4 units per turn:

300 gold/64 resources maximum investment in sacreds per turn without temples.

Ermor Pretender Dom 6:
Maximum capital invested in Shadow Vestals per turn:
35 gold/3 resources per unit (x) 6 units per turn

210 gold/18 resources maximum investment in sacreds per turn without temples.

Not nearly as bad, but you can still see that Vanheim has a significant edge. And I limited Dom to get an Earth 4 Reinvigoration Bless. This even more "super-stacks" the Van very early game. However, if you say this "isn't optimal" I'll agree... I didn't really crunch the numbers, it was more to show that Vanheim gets ALOT more bang per each point of Dominion than other races. Combined with an easy switch from expansion to raiding is what gives it such rush power.

The reason why I stressed the possibility of Van Sacred's becoming exhausted is lowering the number of Van's recruitable WILL heavily increase their fatigue problem. This means that it is important to avoid over-nerfing them.

[Endoperez]

Is this what you are saying:

1) Vanir are very good units, and worth their high cost.
2) Due to being so good, Vanir cost more gold than many other sacreds.
3) Because of this, Vanheim gets away with much lower dominion when bless-rushing. They can't afford more than 3-6 Vanir any way, and each of these can go toe-to-toe with other sacreds of about the same cost.
4) Thanks to low dominion requirement and ability to take sloth (Vanir have low res cost), death (no old age), cold (preferred cold 1, due to seasonal change cold 2 doesn't hurt much more than cold 1) they can afford better pretender, that helps them even further.


That's how I understood it. Quite clever. We all know that Vanheim is good, though. I'd rather see a good explanation, AND a good solution, for sacred units with high resource cost.

[Jazzepi]

Hey I would just like to say that getting dominion killed with dom 4 is quite possible when fighting against someone with an awake pretender, who has Dom 9 or 10.

Jazzepi

[thejeff]

In the very early game you can get away with the low dominion/few sacreds approach.


Heading into the mid-game, Vans are still great, and you'll have the cash to make your dominion limit. Then there's a big difference between 3-6 and 6-8 a turn. You can build temples to boost that up, but it's an expensive and vulnerable process.

[Meglobob]

Jazzepi said:
Hey I would just like to say that getting dominion killed with dom 4 is quite possible when fighting against someone with an awake pretender, who has Dom 9 or 10.

Jazzepi

This is very true, I don't believe I have ever took less than 5 dominion myself ever.

Also you leave yourself very vulnerable to getting negative scales pushing into your lands, which is very hard to get rid of with a low dominion of 3 or such.

I have been the victim of someone elses misfortune-3 or death-3 and its no fun. Especially when you took turmoil-3, luck-3. The evil game engine conspires to put turmoil-3 misfortune-3 in all your border provinces. Very, very unpleasent...

The clue is in the name of the game Dominions, ignore it at your peril...dominion death is rare but not unheard of.

[Jazzepi]

I'll have to post some screen shots of this exact situation after it's all over. I'm playing MA C'Tis in a fight against MA Emor with a bless rush strategy. He has almost no dominion on the map, and only four in his capital, but I've got a prophet, pretender, and very shortly, 4 temples, pushing out dominion into his territory.

One other thing to note. It's not just bad scales which get pushed into your territory. If you don't control dominion there, you get no benefit from the good scales. Sometimes, even if your opponent has good scales, not having your order +3 or whatever in that province can be just as bad as terrible scales.

Jazzepi

[thejeff]

Hard to do to a bless-rush Vanheim though. His raiders can burn your temples. If the plan went well he'll have a lot of territory to soak up your dominion before it gets the last of his.

In a last ditch defense he can blood sacrifice as well.

And he's planning for bad scales and hoping to have other people's good ones to reach neutral.

It's a risky strategy, but could be fun. The biggest problem is only getting 3-4 Van a turn.

[Lord_Bob]

I fully appreciate that you know much, much, more about this game than I do. However, for a Van Bless-Rush strategy your scales are going to have problems.

Also you leave yourself very vulnerable to getting negative scales pushing into your lands, which is very hard to get rid of with a low dominion of 3 or such.

It is far more likely that the Vanheim are leaching good scales off their neighbors than that the neighbors are managing to impose even worse scales on a dual-bless rush Pretender. The Vanheim also benefit by NOT having their poor scales imposed on conqueored provinces rapidly.

Back to the point. What puts Vanheim over the top is that they can continue putting ALL their income in sacred's far after every other bless-rush nation has maxed out their capital investment per-turn in sacreds. This is because Unit Power is at least partially balanced around capital cost. Thus the Army Power per turn for a bless rush that has reached maximum capital invested is:

(Sacred Army Power built per Turn)=(Dominion)x(Cost of Sacred Unit)

Thus, as it currently is, the more expensive(powerfull) the Sacred Unit the more powerful a sacred army that can be built per turn for any given Dominion.

The solution is to have the stronger sacreds take more "Dominion Points" to build. For example(using 1.5 cost, rounded down)
Dom 1-1 Van per turn max
Dom 2-2 Van per turn max
Dom 3-2 Van per turn max
Dom 4-3 Van per turn max
Dom 5-4 Van per turn max
Dom 6-4 Van per turn max
Dom 7-5 Van per turn max
Dom 8-6 Van per turn max
Dom 9-6 Van per turn max

coding wise, this is extremely difficult, but could probably be simulated by adjusting Dom by a "racial modifier" lookup table before calculating maximum sacreds per turn.

if (race=Vanheim)
{
switch(Dominion)
{ case 1:
Max_Sacred=1;
break;
case 2:
Max_Sacred=2;
break;
case 3:
Max_Sacred=2
break;
case 4:
Max_Sacred=3
break;
case 5:
Max_Sacred=4
break;
case 6:
Max_Sacred=4
break;
case 7:
Max_Sacred=5
break;
case 8:
Max_Sacred=6
break;
case 9:
Max_Sacred=6
break;
}
}

It's been awhile since I used C. So pardon errors.

Van should have thier cost reduced by 10 gold(or some other number) to make up for this. And maybe make them non-capital again. As the making capital damages them in non-Bless rush play as well. That will allow a non-Bless Rush to build them without blocking up his capital.

Again, as to the exact degree of change required for balance... I don't know. But this change allows Van to keep it's powerfull sacreds.