The Gaming Den

That is where a lot of LPs of Dom 3 appear.

Avoraciopoctules wrote:

K wrote:On a personal note, I actually would like to know what the other semi-serious Dominions communities are. I haven't played Dominions on anything other than the shrapnel forums and this one, so it's news to me that there are other options.

I think this forum community splintered off from the shrapnel boards for some reason.

http://z7.invisionfree.com/Dom3mods/ind ... 6da9be&c=1

Nice. That must be the one that Sombre created when he was driven out by all the harassment (I think it was Sombre... the details are super hazy at this point). I recognize a lot of the names though.

Whatever. I left that scene two or three years ago. I'm surprised they still have a hard-on for me.

Stalker loyalty is almost touching. In a bad-touch kind of way, I guess.

LPs?

"Let's Play"

You know, where someone keeps a record of playing a game, possibly with commentary and all

Maxus wrote:"Let's Play"

You know, where someone keeps a record of playing a game, possibly with commentary and all

Aaaa, thanks. Never heard that term before.

You can find a lot of them on Youtube, if you want to check it out.

You can find a bunch of decent-to-good Let's Plays here: http://lparchive.org/

Here are 2 Dominions 3 LPs:
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showth ... id=3302467
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showth ... genumber=1

Maxus wrote:You can find a lot of them on Youtube, if you want to check it out.

Danger Will Robinson! Abort! Abort!

Seriously, many youtube LPs are garbage. I blame a lack of harsh critics, and laziness.

Youtube LPs can be so bad that some Something Awful LPers have devoted a substantial amount of time to mocking them. Retsupurae.

http://www.youtube.com/user/retsupurae
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Retsupurae
http://www.youtube.com/user/ChipCheezumSA

Ahhh. Forgive my ignorance. I've watched a couple of random ones but apart from that, I have other ways to let the Internet suck up some of my time.

Have you watched any Retsupuraes? Some can be pretty amusing. Others can be tedious, of course, but there's definitely a decent number of videos I considered well done.

I feel that ElectricalBeast's Mario LP ended up producing the most memorable retsupuraes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbvZeOnH ... re=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayeMqizulX0

Since we're, oddly, on the topic of Let's Plays and Retsupuraes suddenly I'll make a couple of suggestions.

First of all Deceased Crab is quite good, imo(as well as a couple dozen thousand others) at least, and used to be ridiculously prolific, coming out with new episodes every single day.

Secondly, http://chipandironicus.com/index.html, Chip Cheezum, especially when accompanied by General Ironicus, is quite simply the best LPer out there as far as I'm concerned. I also think his, and Ironicus', retsupuraes, link already provided by Avoraciopoctules, are superior.

And here is another good archive for, exclusively Something Awful, IIRC, let's plays.

Oh, goodness, while I'm being off-topic I would be unforgivably remiss if I were to fail to bring up the dulcet tones of Research Indicates. So I'll do that.

Yeah, Sombre's board is decent enough. I find it completely useless because of the CBM one-true-wayism over there. CBM is less than worthless, and the circle jerking they do to it makes that board worthless to me.

But hey, at least it doesn't have the Shrapnel board cyber-stalkers.

-Username17

Is there an Dom3 forum without CBM Hype?

Out of curiosity... why, exactly, is CBM bad?

It's mostly arbitrary changes that doesn't actually fix balance issues.

Don't ask Trollman to elaborate any further, as it will just turn into a really, really long rant that boils down to that sentence.

Perhaps so, but it's a rant I'd be interested in reading. Why else would I have asked? It should be obvious that that comment was designed to provoke such a rant... and, given that my existing ideas of Dom3 balance mostly come from lurking it's official forum (also full of CBM hype), I'd very much like to see an alternative perspective.

Short version: CBM is designed by and for people who don't realize that "use" and "abuse" are different words.

For example, in a recent thread they talked about how someone had won a game by "abusing" Carrion Woods, a Pangaea-only spell that kills your population and spawns massive numbers of Manikins. I was really curious to find out what clever abuse this player had come up with. It turned out that he "abused" a spell whose only function is to create vast hordes of chaff at the cost of your economy... by attacking his enemies by vast hordes of chaff.

And that's the problem. I mean, the spell was arguably overpowered because CBM had made it much easier to cast, and so he was able to use it for a very early rush strategy. But there's a difference between a spell that is too strong, and a spell that is being "abused."

Fundamentally, the CBM crew don't seem to understand what balance *means*. They nerf things because those things are "good" or "veryone uses them." Not because they are "unbeatable." Not because they "create unfun gameplay." But just because they are "good enough that everyone wants them."

But a strategy game doesn't want or need everyone unit and item to be equally common. If you're Playing Caelum, Eagle Kings, it really is okay that you spend most of your gold building eagle kings. That's the whole idea. Similarly, some nations are supposed to be clam nations. Clams don't have to be "balanced" with other items on their research tier--they don't directly compete with thug gear or path boosters. Hammers, Clams, Rods, and Stones are the "economy" of Dominions. You might just as well say

"Nerf gold. Everyone seems to want it."

There's actually a long rant from Frank on CBM that came out around the time they made Dwarven Hammer and Dousing Rod unique-only (ala artifacts).

I just can't seem to find the damn thing because it's in the 40+ page Dom3 thread in MPSIMs.

I'm dismissive of the ranting because, frankly, I don't think you can really balance Dominions due to its huge complexity. CBM's fault is claiming that it's balanced despite being just a set of arbitrary changes (like the aforementioned making Dwarven Hammers unique), so they should really stop the damn hype. Heck, I recall Frank even prefacing the rant with "The game is actually more about the metagame".

So going into excruciating detail about how wrong the CBM designers are just strikes me as pointless repetitions of "I don't like your design preferences!".

You either like their design choices... or you don't. And they're delusional about the definition of balance. That's it.

Part 1, scroll down to Frank's first post.

Part 2, same.

Endovior wrote:Out of curiosity... why, exactly, is CBM bad?

Short answer: CBM makes literally thousands of changes. The game has an extremely high learning curve, and the interaction between things is very complex. After thousands of changes, it is impossible to predict what the overall effect on game balance would be. But it is very easy to predict that it would make learning the game even harder.

Slightly longer answer:the maker of CBM isn't even trying to improve the overall balance of the game. There is no attempt to identify weak positions and buff them or to identify strong nations and nerf them. That's not even a goal. The "point" is to improve "stuff" such that strategies that Quantum Mechanic thinks should be used more often by countries they are available to in the kinds of games he plays are better and that the strategies he thinks should be used less often are worse. That's it. All of the thousands of fiddly changes and the "vision" is that "stuff some guy on the internet likes should be better".

Now, for a few things on the list, I even kind of agree. I would like it if I used more light cavalry than I do now. But that's not a balance question. Indeed, if all indie troops were worth using, the game would become incredibly non-strategic. In many other situations, using particular troops or strategies is in fact incredibly powerful, but used infrequently because the thing in question is rather obscure or is itself a counter to something that doesn't come up that often. Giving very large bonuses to these things to make them viable outside their context just anally rapes whatever they were a counter for and makes strategizing extremely boring and stupid. CBM makes level 2 unit summons over powered. Can you imagine how fucking pointless research climbing is at that point?

-Username17

Good response, including the linked posts; thank you.

Before the point of the 'removal of gem-gens', CBM kinda seemed like a good thing, since the most visible effects of it (say, making obscure shitty pretenders more viable) seemed okay. Concrete examples of why it isn't so help put things in perspective.

Korwin wrote:Is there an Dom3 forum without CBM Hype?

Something awful.

Oh, if anyone goes to the Shrapnel forum you should avoid criticizing CBM. For the purpose of attracting cyber-stalking from the regulars, it's like posting bikini pics of yourself.

Hahahaha
You people really don't get the point of CBM do you?

Orion, I don't think you even realize what 'abuse' means for that matter and what you said is just retarded.

"CBM makes level 2 unit summons over powered. Can you imagine how fucking pointless research climbing is at that point? "

Ahm, FT, are you fucking mad?
So good, once you hit conjuration 2 you might as well stop as you've already won it seems, unfortunately, the rest of us, mere mortals, must continue the research race in order to win.

It doesn't make them overpower it makes them (read slowly) u-s-a-b-l-e. The point of CBM is to open new strategies and options besides what used to be the typical end game for -every-single-game, clam-fart factories.

Fuck Frank, I thought what you said about globals earlier was stupid but your opinion about CBM confirms my doubts.

Oh, btw, your reasoning about BoT is remarkable.
Something that has a negative effect on the entire world is not a NAP breach?
So, for example, if, I don't know, some crazy fanatics managed to make some device that emits radiation across the entire world (which would eventually kill them and everyone else) nobody would consider that a hostile act? They would probably get back to their usual routines?

In fact Frank, you are so ridiculous and laughable that I'm going to stop typing in the middle of my sent...