I experimented with the CBM Phoenix a bit in preparation for a game, and the buffs it has gotten don’t really make it into a great expander. It needs several tries to wipe out most provinces, performing far worse in such a role than other starting SCs. And you’re trading off a lot of stuff by choosing the Phoenix. No hand slots means limited forging. No endgame astral. Not the best paths for a bless. It’s limited use even with CBM, but at least worth considering.
It’s really easy for this sort of comparison to become based on anecdotes. Sure in that particular instance the phoenix gave you a hard time. But that’s late in the game (alt 7 researched) and in enemy dominion and an otherwise specific set of circumstances that aren’t necessarily common or reproducible. The player using him gave up a lot and perhaps if he’d had a different pretender you’d have been dead long before getting that deep into the game. It can’t really be cited as proof that the Phoenix is fine in vanilla. It’s also the case that it’s much easier to think that something is good or perhaps too good because its effect is obvious - like a Phoenix smacking you turn after turn. Other pretenders win the game quietly and without such fireworks.
Hmmm… I am not sure I entirely agree with your Wyrm vs. PoD. I think both are underpriced. For starters, in a 1 on 1 fight, the Wyrm would wipe the floor of the PoD, for whatever thats worth. More importantly, the PoD does have a handful of key vulnerabilities, most obviously a low HP total and a no real defense to missiles. Yet, when it comes to balancing the Wyrm, I am more interested in how it stacks up to the other Monster Pretenders, such as the Manticore, Dragons, the Great Bulls, etc.
A 1 on 1 fight on turn 5 is perhaps easily won by the Wyrm, not so much on turn 20 or beyond when the PoD is equipped. Either way not the best basis for comparison. I agree with you though that the Wyrm is quite a bit better than the other monsters. The PoD isn’t so much a monster because it has full slots, better to compare with the titans.
I’m in agreement with most of your post by the way. I just think CBM goes a long way towards fixing those balance issues.
The current Dominions crowd is a fairly chipper and conversational one. If anyone ever has any questions about Dominions and the appeal of this bizarre little title, ask away!
Neifelheim, surely you did not expect to claim a province only one turn from my Capital? You presume too much, we of Sauromatia are not looking for a fight but we will defend what is rightfully ours.
A turn every other day or so. Turns start off taking 5-10 minutes and get longer as the game progresses and you have more to do. Most games are decided in 3 months or so, but we’ve had games that lasted a year. During the end game, it’s pretty easy to spend an hour or more on each turn.
When you’ve got 10 players or so, It’s likely that somebody will not have the time “right now” to take the turn because of vacations or hectic work schedules. Often the player who knows they won’t be able to play for a week or two will set up a substitute to take over for them while they are gone. Sometimes a game will shut down for a week or two if they feel they can’t get a sub.
Even when you are not taking turns, expect to spend time on the game fiddling with ideas, setting up test games to demonstrate your schemes and, of course, using on line diplomacy (E-mails/PM’s/Woofing in thread) to subdue pretenders to your throne.
I believe most of the recent games I’ve been in, I’ve spend more time focusing on selecting a nation or building a pretender than I have the actual games.
To my knowledge there are 5 games going on right now. Diamondback and Tribal are part of an ongoing tournament. Foss has a lot of players on a smallish map and is in the middle of the land grab about turn 8. Esposito started like Foss but is on turn 50 or so, with the field thinned quite a bit and a couple of nations duking it out in the end game. Newbies and Sharks, which should probably just be called sharks now, is on turn 36 or so and has several land nations trying to attack an underwater powerhouse.
Since it is summer time, you might look for players who want a substitute for a couple of turns or for someone to just take their place in the game. That way you would get to fool around with a half built nation and see where the original owners plans either worked or failed.
Hmm. I don’t have my Dom3 client here (I’m at work), but judging from a quick look at the score tables none of our movements has been processed, i.e. mass stall.
Rolling back the turn is recommended against by Llamaserver – I suggest we ignore the computational mishap and get in our new turns as quickly as possible.
Our orders for turn 8 have not been processed at all. We’re seeing an unchanged score table. This sort of thing has happened before - llamaserver going down that is. Doesn’t usually result in stales in my experience, just a delay to the game.
As for the “reverse engineering” point totals, I was a math major. I tend to think that if somebody can get the numbers right, everything else will fall into place. Instead of looking at an underused Pretender and saying how can I spike its power so players will use it, you plug in the numbers and know that if players still aren’t using it, its their problem not the Pretenders. Also, developing such an algorithm makes it easy to assess what new, user made Pretenders should cost. Or, though it would be a big of work on the front end, one could set up a game where every player could have a truly customized Pretender.
The problem is, what is mathematically balanced is not really the same as what is fun. If two pretenders do almost the same thing, but one has +3 defense and +3 point cost, no one is that excited. To have interesting game play, options need to be significantly different from one another. As you say, different strokes for differnt folks- but I suspect most people would rather pretenders that encourage really different play styles instead of merely technically balanced.
Ironically CB is criticized for the opposite reason by the Dominions community on something awful, too many small price tweaks not enough big changes to make boring options more fun.
