So since Dom 3 is being discussed

[Avoraciopoctules]

It looks like there's a tier 2 version of the unit I posted about above. These require Conjuration 5, Death 3, and 2 death gems each. You summon them in batches of around half a dozen.

Also, in the same game, I got my first horror attack. The Hunter of Heroes ate my prophet. That is a lot of attacks.

[name_here]

How did you manage to get attacked by a doom horror as your FIRST horror attack?

[Avoraciopoctules]

By the same sort of twist of fate that got my capital attacked by Bogus around turn 9 of my 4th game in demo Dominions 3. That was annoying. I had bought luck scales in the hopes of getting heroes, and, well, I suppose I did. The dark knight's fear aura routed most of my soldiers and the adventurers were apparently enough to break down my walls. I quit after that, but I wish I still had the save file. It would be interesting to try and salvage the situation now. It might still be winnable, since there was only one AI and it was set to either Medium or Easy.

[Orca]

My top 3 choices are:

Pythium
Bandar Log
Man

Weird that there's no overlap so far.

The Isle of Thrones map looks cool.

[Avoraciopoctules]

I know I'm trying to avoid picking stuff other people are interested in. I hope to play Dominions sort of like I do Smash Bros, playing comfortably as any faction so I can go with stuff other people would enjoy playing against.

On that note, since we don't have any conflicts yet, the factions I would be most interested in playing against (picked out of the 3 other groups of 3) would be:

1. Jotunheim
2. Shinuyama
3. Bandar Log (or Man if you have a personally interesting strategy. I often find Man a little boring to play. I haven't looked at most of the Nature stuff available to your witches, but I hear there's some kind of useful charm spell and area effect fatigue removal at least.)

If I end up playing Mictlan, I am going to try to go with some kind of rainbow mage and getting the site frequency cranked up as high as acceptable. I won't have an awesome bless to use rushing other players, so I'll try to send them moderately nice magical gear in the hopes of keeping them from attacking me early on. Should be interesting to see how it compares to the Mictlan strategies I've seen elsewhere. I'm considering keeping some records on my turns so other people can see the game, maybe posted in sblocks every couple of turns. Not entirely sure about that until I get a feel for how much schoolwork shifting from semesters to quarters has gotten me.

----

Also, Isle of Thrones is designed for 2-4 players. If we get any more, we might need something a bit bigger.

[name_here]

I'd say people should try saving screenshots that seem interesting, and then try assembling them into a semi-coherent record of the game after it's over.

[shau]

I am curious as to why Frank hates the Conceptual Balance mod so much, since it seems to be fairly well accepted in the Dominions community.

I am also hoping he responds to this in the form of a funny and scathing rant.

[Username17]

I am curious as to why Frank hates the Conceptual Balance mod so much, since it seems to be fairly well accepted in the Dominions community.

I am also hoping he responds to this in the form of a funny and scathing rant.

CBM is entrenched in the Dominions forum community largely by dint of the CBM people driving everyone else away. Thus, while they are a minority over all, they achieve total dominance over that particular forum. You can see something similar with group think in virtually any forum. Hell, there are a number of people who assume that you are using Tome rules during D&D discussions here.

But that's not why CBM is bad. CBM is bad because the number one problem of the game is that it has an incredibly steep learning curve. Every strategy in the game is emergent, produced by the interactions of a thousand different functions in the game. Every expenditure is a trade off with a hundred other choices, every choice is a branching affair that approaches the limits of what the human mind can even approximate. So when you make a change, you are making a lot of changes. Yes, Hama Dryads kind of suck ass, but if you make them better you're changing the relative utility of searching for nature sites, of spending nature gems on Vine Ogres, of saving up nature gems for Tarrasques, of investing research into Conjuration, of outfitting thugs in nature related gear like Rings of Regeneration, of having very powerful nature mages who would get a good return on Lamias, and so on. One change alters the utility function for many actions throughout the game. So if you make any change, you'd have to have a fucking good reason for it. Because the cost of changing anything is very large, the payoffs have to be very large as well.

Meanwhile, Quantum Mechanic is just an obsessive compulsive fiddler. His reasons for meddling with the numbers of this thing or that thing are more often than not that he simply can't stop himself from doing it. True story: his mod increased the resource multiplier of Productivity/Sloth scales. When the basic game got a patch that increased those modifiers, he changed his mod so that the gold multiplier was slightly higher. Because values he decided were sufficient for the Productivity/Sloth scales when they were a "mod" had to be changed as soon as they were "normal". In short, it is not about adding value, it's about adding changes. And for a game whose manual is several hundred pages written by an actual brain surgeon that is fucking hard to learn - change for the sake of change is fucking terrible.

Now let's get something straight: the actual Dominions programmers don't care all that much about balance. Yes, they nerfed the original overpowered Hinnom Province Defense, and bully for them. But they did write it in the first place. While you can win with MA Ulm or EA Maverni or even LA Pythium, those are very difficult tasks because a goodly number of factions are overpowered and/or suck monkey nuts. And it bears repeating that Kristoff seriously thinks that's OK. So I could totally see a mod that went in and smoothed some of that shit out. A mod that fixed some of the glaring weaknesses of MA Ulm for example, or even a more controversial mod that made Niefel Jarls cost more. That would make sense. But QM doesn't do any of that. In fact, he's not even interested in balance issues between factions. His self-proclaimed goal is that he wants to make all options for each faction be so good that he personally uses all of them. But that doesn't even make any god damn sense, because of the literally 865 spells in the game (before counting national summons of mod nations), the majority are situational. You're never going to script Arcane Bolt unless your enemy is cheesing you off with otherwise invulnerable golems or something. You aren't going to summon up a pile of Spirits unless you have a Cavalry charge you need to blunt. And so on. And the same is true of troops. Yes, Wolf Tribe Warriors blow, but if you're going to be casting Iron Bane and Strength of Giants anyway, they are actually pretty hard core. If my opponents have a lot of knights or giants, some neutral barbarians are a decent counter, but if they came in with a bunch of naked dudes with greatswords I would rather go with Lion Tribe Warriors (javelins and spears).

So the basic goal is not simply orthogonal to any worthwhile goal of making mods of the Dominions 3 game - it's actually detrimental. Seriously, the point of his fucking mod is to reduce the amount of skill required to play the game (by making all your options "the same") while the actual methodology is to take literally everything you know about how the game works and make it wrong. But even if you thought that was a good idea, he still goes about it in an incredibly shitty way. All he does is give essentially random boosts to stuff he doesn't use. He tripled the number of Bone Fiends you get from a casting at no increase in cost - which since they were already extremely competitive for a fucking Level 1 Blood Summoning makes them seriously competitive with shit like "competing for Heliophagi" that costs dozens of times as much and requires researching to level 8. For reasons unknown and completely unexplainable, he gives phat boosts to many options that are in fact already good. Some that are merely situationally useful, and others that are just plain good, that QM doesn't use just because he happens to not use them. No one has ever come up with a coherent explanation for why he thought that the Master Fucking Lich needed to cost less, for example.

Basically his mod is a perfect storm of making bad changes for bad reasons using bad methodology and having bad documentation. I have no doubt that there are people who are bad at the game who like it on exactly those grounds - that by nut kicking peoples' ability to know what the fuck is going on, it does level the playing field a bit. Except, it doesn't even do that, because interspersed with all the bullshit fiddling there are land mines of phenomenal cosmic power to be had. We're talking about shit like getting dozens of shade beasts or squads of bog beasts for a single casting sort of thing. Where you can literally overrun the world with fucking level 4 conjurations just by picking the ones where QM boosted them beyond the point of being merely inconvenient for experienced players, beyond the point of being merely overpowered, and straight into "Seriously guy, what the fucking hell were you thinking? Were you thinking? Is this a fucking typo? You fiddle with so many numbers I can't even tell any more."

Fundamentally, there are changes you could make that wouldn't hurt peoples' understanding of the game much. Adding extra national summons or giving boosts to genuinely shit pretenders that people really don't use, for example. It's not a problem if you make Vampire Queens a fuck tonne cheaper, because Vampire Queens suck ass and don't get used. But also because a Vampire Queen being passably useful doesn't change your Blue Dragon Bless Rush build at all. You don't have to play differently at all if you could have taken a Vampire Queen instead without feeling like a jackass. Further, there are changes you could make that would improve the game. Making shit factions like Ulm or Arcocephale in the middle era more competitive, for example. You could address Ulm's tragic army deficiency by making them a catapult unit that peppered the battlefield with large numbers of long range sling stones that would bounce off of Ulm Armor, or giving them access to some ability to make late game high end ritualists in Earth, Astral, and Fire.

But he doesn't do any of those things. Instead he makes Dark Vines cheaper. And then Jotunheim and Pangaea touch themselves.

-Username17

[Akula]

Why does he hate SC pretenders so much though?

And I guess I'm in unless we get more players.

My nation preferences:

Abbysia
Vanheim
Ry'leh

I also think that including the worthy heros mod might not be hugely objectionable. Most heros in the base game aren't worth the time, I like having heros that can kinda matter to my nation.

As far as setting go, I agree with everything Frank posted last page. With the caveat that I want commander renaming enabled.

[Avoraciopoctules]

We now have 5 players, too many for Isle of Thrones. There is also some overlap in nation preferences. The second map I linked is slightly bigger, has water provinces, and is not specifically designed for 2-4 players in symmetrical positions.

EDIT: also, I set starting provinces to 3 in the hopes that it would make the first few turns more interesting. I can change this back to default if others would prefer.

[Akula]

1 starting province please. More warps the value of scales.

[Username17]

Why does he hate SC pretenders so much though?

QM hates SC pretenders because he only ever does two strategies. One is to get into a large multiplayer game and mad castle. The other is to play a one day blitz game. But the important thing is that the only meaningful playtesting he does on this shit is with the blitz games. And basically you can do whatever you want to the Master Druid (fuck, in his opus it is actually cheaper to buy an Earth Bless on one of those fuckers than on a Cyclops), you'd still rather have an early thug in a 4 player small map game that is going to be over by turn 25. So because no amount of boosting the pretenders who aren't focused on Blitz Play makes people want to use anything but the pretenders geared to Blitz Play during Blitz Play, he determines that the Blitz-focused pretenders are overpowered.

Basically it's exactly the same method of guess and check that leads him to believe that he needs to make Growth better / Death worse.

Between the selection bias and the very short sighted development cycle and wild overreaction of every fiddling number change, it all follows a rather depressing and stupidly predictable path. By CBM 1.8 he'll figure out that the high level summons have been totally left in the dust by all the improvements he made to the lower level summons. And then he'll respond, not by repealing his own bullshit, but by giving even more bonuses to the higher level stuff. By CBM 1.9, he'll note that actual heavy infantry are so ridiculously outclassed by 1 gem Bog Beasts and Scorpion Beasts that he'll improve basic weapons like Broadswords and Falchions (like he already did with the Pike). And so on.

The thing to understand is that the group he plays with (and the end game diversity guy plays with) is so bizarrely insular in its way that their group think is so strong that the changes it pushes aren't really about anything any more. The whole point of the changes is that supposedly everyone fights exclusively with Tartarians in every game that isn't over in the first 2 years. Seriously, that's their actual complaint. But you can totally fight Tartarians with Gargoyles or Legions of Wights or something backed up with some regular casters. Tartarians are very good, but there are already other options to use in the late game that work. A Legion of Wights backed up with Weapons of Sharpness and Fog Warriors will fucking tear a Tartarian pack apart. But they don't do those things, because the groupthink is very strong.

---

As for Name Changing, I got nothing against it.

Edit: Starting Provinces is always 1. That's not even a discussion.

-Username17

[Avoraciopoctules]

Fine, starting provinces are now 1. I suppose there's something to be said for the early turns going by quickly as easily as for making them mildly more tactically engaging.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Is it too late to get in?

Preferences:

• Marignon
• Ashdod
• Vanheim

[Avoraciopoctules]

Six players now. A new map is probably requisite.

http://dom3.servegame.com/wiki/Realm_of_Many_Tomatoes
http://dom3.servegame.com/wiki/Streamlands

------

How do we want to generate nations? I could just roll 1d3 for everyone and reroll wherever there's a conflict.

[Zinegata]

I wouldn't recommend a Pretender SC anyway. They aid in early game expansion, but that's it. And lots of nations don't really have expansion issues anyway - such as Midgard with its Skinshifters.

I think that ultimately, Rainbow Pretenders are the way to go. Magic is simply too vital in this game. Have the Rainbow Pretenders site-search/research in the early game, forge items once you get a decent Construction score to pump up their magic skills even more, and then finally nuke the world in the end game with global enchants

[Kaelik]

Any way to see Neighbors on those maps? I like streamlands, but with two possible Ryleg players, it may or may not screw them on that map, depending on how the neighbors work.

EDIT: FYI, not that I'm playing, just saying.

[Akula]

Load it in the map editor? Or open a game on it and turn on the show neighbors filter? That's how I do it.

[Zinegata]

I assume Kaelik is asking if there is any map that shows the neighbors outside of the game (because if I recall right he uninstalled his copy).

You're not allowing two people to have the same nation tho, right?

[Orca]

The streamlands map doesn't seem to be uploaded to the linked location. It is at http://nikita.tnnet.fi/~elmokki/ though.

I'm fine with either map and with picking nations via a d3.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Selections:
Player 1: Choice II
Player 2: Choice I
Player 3: Choice II
Player 4: Choice III
Player 5: Choice II
Player 6: Choice III

[angelfromanotherpin]

I'm not sure who's who... can you put up a list by player name and nation, please?

[Kaelik]

Av... that's dumb.

Like, really dumb.

You are playing in the game, you are not impartial, and posting a screen shot of some dice on a sheet of paper doesn't mean anything, because you could have just put them there.

Either people trust you, in which case don't waste time with that stupid picture, or they don't trust you, in which case suck my right nut, and at least use something that is verifiably random, IE invisible castle, because even though you can cheat it, it at least takes some effort.

[Avoraciopoctules]

I'll look back in the thread and match names to slots.

Selections:
Frank - Player 1: Choice II - Pangaea
Av - Player 2: Choice I - Arcoscephale
namehere - Player 3: Choice II - R'lyeh
Orca - Player 4: Choice III - Man
Akula - Player 5: Choice II - Vanheim
angelfromanotherpin - Player 6: Choice III - Vanheim

Preference Conflict Detected!
I may need to roll twice more. Or you resolve this some other way before I dig out the d6s and sketchy laptop camera again.
------

Final Map: http://dom3.servegame.com/wiki/Realm_of_Many_Tomatoes

[angelfromanotherpin]

I think the best way is just to roll us both again until there's no conflict.