[Dom3] Brainstorming for a late era draft game.

K · Post by K » Thu May 03, 2012 9:38 am

Akula wrote:
K wrote:If you can protect 20 provinces from assassination spells,
Domes.
enemy armies,
Takes time
and disruptions of your blood hunting supply for a year
People can stockpile slaves.
AND no was was smart enough to be preaching,
You have to be kidding. Preaching is not the same as temple checks.
I mean, your neighbors let a blood sac nation build 20 temples. That's basically letting you win the game.
Note that that example had the other players building 130 temples.

So you put up 60-80 Domes and built 20 temples and 20 labs. You stockpiled 1000 slaves. You put armies in 20 provinces that can resist all takers.

Guess what? You could have won the game by then. Maybe you didn't realize it, but you could have.

A better player than you would have won 50 turns ago.

At the point where you are blowing gems and tossing down Darkness, people are tossing down crap like Earthquake or Rain of Stones.
Earthquake is not good and they are welcome to try. Rain of stones requires a crosspath that is not common at all.

Sadly, I deleted my old Oldestprofession saved games a few days ago. I could have shown you what a few Earthquakes do to an army of 1000 longdead or what ten cheap priests do to 1000 ghouls.

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Thu May 03, 2012 9:45 am

Was this the Hinnom Earthquake run? I think they killed around 700+ undead out of 1000 for just 3 Earthquakes.

Ulm never had to fight a horde as big, but the 200+ undead we encountered per battle tended to die pretty quickly against some Banishment, Cleansing Water, Withering Bones, and Flambleus + Quickness Boots.

Chaff is useful (I built up a huge pile of wolves myself), but it can be dealt with. I never attacked with a huge chaff army against Lanka because I knew it'd just make me rout faster once they died to an Earthquake. They're only really terrifying if you cast stuff like Mass Protection spells on them to make them more durable.

K · Post by K » Thu May 03, 2012 9:56 am

Yeh, that would be the file I would show.

Akula · Post by **Akula** » Thu May 03, 2012 9:56 am

K wrote:So you put up 60-80 Domes and built 20 temples and 20 labs. You stockpiled 1000 slaves. You put armies in 20 provinces that can resist all takers.

I specifically didn't do all that. You only need the domes if your enemy is using earth attacks and army killing spells, which require lots of research. You don't need much in the way of armies at all, one or two that are mobile will probably be enough unless the world is against you instantly, the point is that they have to siege down a fuckton of forts at once, and in order to do that they need massive gem expenditure or time. They don't have time. You also don't need 1000 slaves at once unless your hunting is instantly shut down in it's entirety. Also 1000 slave is 5 turns of saved blood income, less than half a year of prep is not that much time.

Guess what? You could have won the game by then. Maybe you didn't realize it, but you could have.

A better player than you would have won 50 turns ago.

Players better than us win with sac. Maybe we should both step our games up. I would find it hard to win on turn -5 though.

K · Post by K » Thu May 03, 2012 10:19 am

Akula wrote:Players better than us win with sac. Maybe we should both step our games up. I would find it hard to win on turn -5 though.

A vast majority of Dominions games played in the wild go stupidly long because everyone is turtling and making gem gens and not actually doing anything to actually win. When they do attack, it's four nations on one.

Heck, few even use victory points or number of provinces win conditions, the few ways to actually end the game in a reasonable fashion.

That being said, no one is getting 20 temples on turn 5. At best, they might be able to overwhelm a nearby neighbor who has weak dominion with three or four temples and considerable luck. People are going to come gunning for you when they see that so even surviving the gold loss that early in the game is going to take a lot of luck.

If anyone has 20 temples in the late or middle game, someone should have already won. Obviously this player has been left alone for way too long with too much time to blood hunt, not build troops so they could spend gold on temples, and build mages that didn't need to be researching or fighting.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu May 03, 2012 10:56 am

Oh for fuck's sakes. 20 Temples backed up by Jade Knives on High Priests of the Sun for five turns? Jesus fuck. That's fourteen thousand gold, eighty mage turns, sixty nature gems, and three hundred and sixty blood slaves. I have an idea: instead of doing that, how about you take the same resources and march 80 Jaguar Fiends, 30 Monster Toads and one hundred and twenty Jaguar Warriors into enemy territory backed up by twenty casters and see how many castles you can conquer in ten turns.

Even before we get into the comical suggestions of backing all that shit up with castles and domes (increasing the cost by another... four hundred gems and twenty thousand gold), we're still talking about more investment in this crap than it takes to build an army that can just fucking kill someone.

-Username17

Korwin · Post by **Korwin** » Thu May 03, 2012 11:14 am

So the chances are increasing that I will get blood sac, even if I'm not first in the draw.
Good

DrPraetor · Post by **DrPraetor** » Thu May 03, 2012 11:19 am

Akula - I'm not sure what other gaming community you're thiking of, where domkill is considered a viable strategy to do anything other than meet a formal win condition when you've already won. I mainly play on the shrapnel forums with, among other people, the authors of the game. Over there, a dominion strength of 5 or 6 is considered plenty and hardly anyone ever gets a domkill.

It does happen on occasion, and in the situation you describe - you have a huge edge of resources and everyone else is turtling, hoping to wear you down when you attack - domkill can be very useful. How exactly is that a problem?
* Oh, no, the major advanage you took might actually be good for something!
* Oh, no, someone could win! Get the nerfbat!

Anyway, enough of that. Akula doesn't want to play at all but I'm confident now that if we got 10 people there'd be enough discord over the best picks that people would have a good shot at getting what they wanted.

K · Post by K » Thu May 03, 2012 11:55 am

Here's an idea:

What if the various special powers were not a separate draft, but actually built into various points in the draft? For example, reanimation might show up in the Build Anywhere Commander Draft and reanimating nations would be down one Built-Anywhere Commander. That'd make it a true trade-off.

koz · Post by **koz** » Thu May 03, 2012 11:57 am

So, who's actually in?

DrPraetor · Post by **DrPraetor** » Thu May 03, 2012 12:01 pm

K - that's an interesting suggestion, but that'd require me to make close judgement calls about which powers were and were not good enough to put where, and furthermore it would tend to make these draft nations even more one-dimensional than they already are.

K · Post by K » Thu May 03, 2012 12:13 pm

Mmmm, true. Maybe just adding additional picks off the other lists to the special power list would work? That way the non-reanimating nation would at least get some extra build-anywhere commanders or something.

DrPraetor · Post by **DrPraetor** » Thu May 03, 2012 1:05 pm

Well, that's option 11 and 12.

To me, the real question is this - how much gp is reanimating priests worth, in the first year? I can try and use that to balance all the other advantages.

(Options 1-3) J&K seem to think that reanimation is worth about 15gp/priest level. Assuming you recruit about 24 priest levels in the first year, that means each advantage should be worth about 360g - let's call it 400g, which is a nice round number.
(Option 4) Income bonuses should be worth about 30gp/month. +10 admin in the capital is worth 15gp/month (give or take), so the home-province income advantage should probably be +15gp and also +10 admin.
(Option 5) The reduced temple cost is probably going to be worth 200gp in the first year, at least - and then we give #sacrificedom on top of that, okay.
(Option 6) We do want two #sacrificedom nations. Any suggestions about what else would be legitimate to pair with #sacrificedom?
(Option 7) This is a tough one to price out. Assuming 1 gp = 3 resources, in terms of their real value to the player. Your capital makes an extra 15gp per turn, it wants an extra 45 rp per turn? That's +50%, not +25%, but seems like way too much. Of course your increased admin also pulls in extra, and it's hard to price the value of +10 admin on the non-capital forts you build. I'll leave it alone for now.
(Option 8) This one is too powerful. Lose the Great City in your capital, and you get: a half priced lab in the first year is worth a 250 gp savings, and then you pay 200 less for your first fort. Still a bit too generous, let's make that #labcost 300 and then it works out.
(Option 9) So, the "extra troops" advantage should get you double starting army, or +400gp worth of stuff. We'll leave the PD modifier at +50% since double PD is a bit too crazy.
(Option 10) Well, fire gems are worth 15gp each to alchemize. So 2 gems / month seems fair. This is a 4X game and that's not a starter advantage, though (even if you take fire gems and alchemize them, it's not going to multiply with other advantages e.g. scales) so I think the 10% discount site stays in. Remember that it cannot be construction.
(Option 11 and 12) These are the hardest to "price out", but with more than 10 options, no-one is forced to take them who'd rather have the cash.
(Options 13 and 14) First, I'm leaving these at +2/-2 since that's actually better than +3/-3. +3/-3 is harder to reach, so if your preference is nominally +2/-2 you take +3/-3 as your dominion anyway and get overall slightly more income! You could have had +1/-1 anyway and been in the same situation, so effectively you get two free scales. These could be productivity, which would be ~24 resources (=8gp?) and +4% income (~12gp) is 20gp/month which is only worth about 240 gp in the first year. Perhaps temperature scales could be combined with an addtional troop selection or something?

So, outstanding problems remain with Option 6 (which needs some other bonus - I'm going to test #incunrest -1 and see how that works), and Options 13 & 14 (which aren't competitive with the other advantages, it seems to me.)

Suggestions / arguments that I'm over/undervalueing reanimating priests, or anything else on that list?

K · Post by K » Thu May 03, 2012 1:59 pm

I feel like any pure money bonus needs to be bigger. Since a decent-sized province is like 100 gold, any bonus should be at least as good as one extra province.

Korwin · Post by **Korwin** » Thu May 03, 2012 2:04 pm

Mister_Sinister wrote:So, who's actually in?

Me

K · Post by K » Thu May 03, 2012 2:19 pm

And me.

Tador · Post by **Tador** » Thu May 03, 2012 2:30 pm

i would like to be in when you will let me in ^^

DrPraetor · Post by **DrPraetor** » Thu May 03, 2012 2:56 pm

K wrote:I feel like any pure money bonus needs to be bigger. Since a decent-sized province is like 100 gold, any bonus should be at least as good as one extra province.

Fair enough. I'm being too stingy with the moolah.

I think that x2 size of starting army (equiv to 400gp plus some number of resources on day 1) and Reanimating Priests are roughly balanced against one another. The big army gives you a fast start while the reanimating priests gives you a fearsome mid-game, so they're not strictly comparable you have to make certain assumptions. This is a judgement call but I'm starting from there.

So, what interest rate do you expect to accrue on that 400gp worth of face-stomping? That's not quite enough to conquer you an extra province every turn, but it's probably enough to get you 3 more provinces than you'd otherwise have by the end of the first year. An average province makes, what 50gp and 20 resources (10 itself and 10 out of an adjacent fort)?

So if you get an extra province on turns 4 and 8, then by turn 12 you'll get an extra 600gp from that. So the overall advantage is worth about 1000gp in the first year? How is that for a round number? Not quite the 100gp/turn that K was advocating, but close (and with scales it'd be bigger, since those multiply).

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu May 03, 2012 5:21 pm

I think the only way to handle the value of different powers is with the free market. Give people points to spend, and let them bid in secret for different powers and different draft orders. Whoever bids the most for a power gets it. The draft orders in each round go in the order of points bid for them.

So if you want a power enough, you pay for it. If you're the only person who bid on something, and you bid 3 points, good for you. If something is very popular, presumably many people will bid on it.

You could even put in some outright drawbacks and whoever bids the least gets it.

-Username17

DrPraetor · Post by **DrPraetor** » Thu May 03, 2012 7:19 pm

Frank may be right - but it'd take a lot of draft rounds to really get the effects I want. Also, while nominally fair, people who screwed up could be royally screwed. Whoever bids 400 to get Reanimating Priests, well, he's got Reanimating Priests. Whoever bids 350 pts - well, he may have no-one to blame but himself, but he's going to end up with a lousy nation and the game isn't going to be much fun. Merely being fair doesn't cut it - you have to make sure that no-one is screwed over before the game even starts, or they won't want to play.

I think the goal of these drafts should not be to make the draft as interesting as possible, as a game in and of itself. You want to set up the draft so that you get interesting/well balanced nations to play. And by that standard, I think Capitalism will be epic fail.

koz · Post by **koz** » Thu May 03, 2012 9:49 pm

I might wanna give this a go, but I'll see whether it hits the magic number. If you're one short, consider me in.

Winnah · Post by **Winnah** » Fri May 04, 2012 3:02 am

You can use the #clearrec command on an existing nation slot, to remove normal recruitables.

That could be used to create an amphibious nation, by overwriting Atlantis or Jomon. That way you would get your underwater forts and recruitables with fewer hassles.

Messy though, as you would still have to clear national spells and heroes. Atlantis would probably be easiest to modify this way, as it has fewer National Spells than Jomon.

I bring it up only because I have heard about people having difficulties modding this kind of national advantage.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri May 04, 2012 3:19 am

Winnah wrote:You can use the #clearrec command on an existing nation slot, to remove normal recruitables.

That could be used to create an amphibious nation, by overwriting Atlantis or Jomon. That way you would get your underwater forts and recruitables with fewer hassles.

Messy though, as you would still have to clear national spells and heroes. Atlantis would probably be easiest to modify this way, as it has fewer National Spells than Jomon.

I bring it up only because I have heard about people having difficulties modding this kind of national advantage.

Yeah, but MA Oceania is even easier to mod. They don't have shit. Changing the era is trivial.

-Username17

K · Post by K » Fri May 04, 2012 8:56 pm

The mod guide has a command for underwater province defense. Not sure it's necessary to mod a nation.

That being said, modding Neifleheim to get the giant reanimation or Bandar Log to get monkey reanimation would be awesome.

DrPraetor · Post by **DrPraetor** » Fri May 04, 2012 9:05 pm

K wrote:The mod guide has a command for underwater province defense. Not sure it's necessary to mod a nation.

Wait, what? Where?

That being said, modding Neifleheim to get the giant reanimation or Bandar Log to get monkey reanimation would be awesome.

That is explicitly stated to be "hard coded".

--DrP