Province Bonus to Magic School?
 

This is the first time I've seen a site like this:

"Alteration Bonus: 20"

What does that mean? I tried searching here and in the manual, dom3 DB (dave perkins): no hits. Thnx in advance.

Re: Province Bonus to Magic School?
 

It means that any mage casting an Alteration ritual in that province will save 20% of their gems. So, if e.g. that mage is casting Wish he'll only use 80 pearls instead of 100.
Which breaks the game quite thoroughly, I might add.

There are similar sites for most other schools of magic, and each of them makes their owner significantly more powerful. They really are the jackpot of sites.

Not sure if the bonus also applies to combat spells that use gems (such as, say, Curse of Stones for Alteration) cast in the province.

Re: Province Bonus to Magic School?
 

It means that ritual spells from Alteraton school will cost 20% less if you cast them in this province, not sure how rounding works here (ie if Manifest Vitriol costs 1 or 2 there). Also, Alt site is one of the most powerful long-term due to Wish for gems mechanic.
Ninja'd..

Re: Province Bonus to Magic School?
 

Shoot - hopefully none of the peeps in my MP game come here and see this thread :)

Um... yeah - this was for a single player game... yeah, that's it.

Re: Province Bonus to Magic School?
 

Game breaking? Maybe with clams...

Re: Province Bonus to Magic School?
 

It's 20 free S gems per Wish. You can cast it every turn once you have starting 100. After 5 turns (more with empowerment) you can use second caster so now you have 40S/turn. Of course we assume that you don't spend the gems for other tasks etc, so the numbers are a bit different in reality, but still it's the only bonus site that really seems broken in clamless world (blood 60% is very very powerful, but not "broken" in this sense). With clams it's actually less broken, I think.

Re: Province Bonus to Magic School?
 

Who the hell has 100 S per turn for wish without clams? If you have that kind of gem income you've already won, 20 bonus gems wont pose that much of a difference, consider it a global in a way.
Even if you're wishing for gems you need the initial 80 and 55 for every other turn. In standard games that's still about 2 turns gem income at least, if it's a bigger game, the advantage is not so big, if you're alchemising, well theoretically you're just using fire gems (probably) for wishing, but in no way in a game breaking advantage either way.
I fail to see your points?

Re: Province Bonus to Magic School?
 

No. Once you rack up 80 pearls, you can wish for gems, alchemize and have 100 pearls. Put 20 aside (or don't alchemize them), use the other 80 to wish again. If you have another Wish caster, in 4 turns of wishing you can start him wishing for gems as well.
The limitation is how many Wish casters you can create. Assuming you don't have native S4+ casters, you have to Wish for an S4, Forge RoS, Skullcap and Coin and empower twice. That's 80S+40S+10S+10S+10E + whatever it takes to empower from 4 to 6 and another 80 pearls to start him wishing.
Then it's 40 gems/turn. Which means you can ramp up the next wisher in half the time...

If you think that's too expensive, it's still a free wish every 4 turns.

Re: Province Bonus to Magic School?
 

Expensive? No, but, even so if you're saving *all of your S gems for wishing exclusively, bear in mind that you will most likely use them for item forging, teleporting, MH etc... is in no way actually game breaking, unless you consider gem wishing the sole ability of the alt 20 site. I'm not sure if you get me. My point is, you will still be casting wish with or without alt 20, and getting 75 free gems (which in it self can turn around the game) while the alt 20 just gives you 20 extra S gems when used which is *not game breaking as you most likely wont be wishing every turn, so it will be rather an additional 10-15 S gems added on average.

Does what I said make sense at all? It's rather late here...

Re: Province Bonus to Magic School?
 

Maybe I'm missing your point or you're missing mine.

Not all your gems. Just the wished gems. You've still got all your other income. Though if I wasn't pressed I'd invest as much as I could into another wish caster.

Why wouldn't you be wishing every turn? Once you've invested the 80 gems once, wishing for gems is free. Obviously you'll want to wish for other things, so that will cut into it. But if you have this site, you should be wishing every turn.

And trying to put another Wisher together. If you can do that, you've got 40 gems a turn. Which makes the next one easier.

It's a very expensive, high return gem generator. The problem with gem generators is that if you feed them back into themselves they grow exponentially.
Why invest in clams? Isn't there forging/summoning/battle magic you could be doing with those gems?

By my calculation it's 390 pearls for a 20 pearl return. Summoning, empowering & equipping a S9 caster. Less if you've got recruitable S4+ mages. That's roughly 20/1. That's the same as clams without hammers, so probably not a huge deal in a game with clams.

Re: Province Bonus to Magic School?
 

How is it free after the initial wish? You get the 20S from the site and 25S from the wish, you still need 55S gems for a continued wish the next turn and I consider a regular game to have let's say 20S gems income on average.

If you save all gems from forging/casting you still lack gems to cast a gem wsh. While it may cost 80 to cast in theory you need the full 100 and keep the 20 as a deposit. :) (I think)
If you're alchemizing gems (which you're probably fire cause they're worthless), it makes for an even more expensive gem gen with less initial profit (but I guess all gem gens have opportunistic cost so ok), which given, undoubtedly will more than compensate you after a dozen or so turn...

But my point is, it takes a while to really kick it off and make some pearls since you won't be making the full 20S per turn from the start, or you will at the expense of losing other gem types to alchemising.
As the game progress you might be casting it multiple times per turns and getting more out of the site as you go, also adding another wisher faster and faster every time for more profit and so on...

So I'm just saying, you can't really consider that game breaking cause it takes a lot of time and risk getting to the point where you gain a substantial amount that will affect the game in such a manner.

Re: Province Bonus to Magic School?
 

No. It's a discount. 80 gems to cast.
If you wish for gems, you get 25 of each gem type. In theory, you alchemize them all to pearls. 25*6 = 150/2 = 75 + 25 pearls = 100 pearls for which you paid 80. You take 80 of those and cast it again, leaving 20 to spend or invest.
In practice, you'll alchemize more of some type and less of others and/or use some of your S income, all depending on what you need for other uses.

Would it make more sense to think of wishing for gems as giving you 100 pearls? Except better, because you don't have to alchemize them back to pearls. Since you can, you can get 100 pearls by spending 80. Or 80 pearls and 40 other gems.

It's not "I cast wish at this site to get a whole bunch of gems and free wishes." It's "I cast wish at this site and get enough gems for another wish and a bunch extra."

The only real problem is that Wish comes along fairly late in the game and you might not have enough time to get a good return on your investment in building wish casters.

Re: Province Bonus to Magic School?
 

I wasn't sure bout the discount.
However if you're using it like that, give 80S and get 100S in return, you'll still be losing gems until more wishers stack up due to alchemising right?
So it's either 80S for 100S? or 80S for 150 all + 25S? Which I guess in principle would add up the same as you're giving/getting S gems on every turn, and you get all types 1 in 2 or 3 turns, but with the exception that 80S for 100S will grow and give you a much bigger S income over time and eventually bring more gems.
But that still isn't game breaking.

Re: Province Bonus to Magic School?
 

Executor, I think you are missing the point here. The 20% discount means the following:

1) You need a mage who can wish and 80 pearls collected.

2) Once you have that base investment, there is no more investment into the wish.

3) Because you Wish for gems and get 80 pearls (aka enough to cast next Wish) + either 20 pearls or 40 other gems, for free. Every single turn per each mage.

The base investment in case you have no astral mages is same as for clams if you have no natural clam forgers without hammers. That means after 20 turns you have already generated enough to break even to take into account all the empowerement and forging the boosters. On the other hand, if you have even a S1 mage, you break even earlier; if you have a S3 mage (like many nations do) you break even after 9 turns. If you have even higher astral (like if you took astral on your pretender, then you will have quite a bit more because it is suicidal to take low astral on pretender) then you break even even earlier.

The site *is* game breaking.

Re: Province Bonus to Magic School?
 

What Jarkko says. Moreover, this is all stuff that remains firmly under the table : no one is wiser that you're breaking the bank, because wished gems/gold do not show up on the graphs. Which means that you can get very, very powerful while appearing to be non-threatening. The exact location of the site also remains a secret because unlike blood/conj sites it isn't spawning an ungodly amount of units every turn.

Also bear in mind that the longer your Wish machine remains active, the more powerful it becomes. It's a self-improving feedback system. Which cannot be said of other similar sites : conjuration, construction and blood reduction sites let you do more with less, but it's a linear function based on how many gems you're taking in. Discount wishing is exponential.

Re: Province Bonus to Magic School?
 

You are just wrong, and you *cannot convince me that it is game breaking, simply because it's not.

First of all Kobal2, I am very aware it grow bigger every turn, second there are a dozen blood nations that can pull to 300 slaves a turn and that either doesn't show up on the score graphs, however you know they're blood hunting, same would go about wishing, people would notice it, well sensible people anyway.

Now, I'd say the winning contenders are clear from turn 30-40 onwards, which means you'd keep an eye on those nations, at least I do. So if you get a nation that has a variety of SC's, summons, etc...and has about the same gem income as you, put a finger on your head and ask what's wrong with the picture?

Further more, you most likely won't be getting wish before turn 50, there's the race for the uniques, the battle spells you'll need first, GE, probably tartarians and than the rest. So by the time you get all you need, wish, a caster, and by the time it repays it self and starts making a *worthy profit the game will most likely already be decided. It can only get you so far, give you a boost, but it is not game breaking.

Re: Province Bonus to Magic School?
 

It's game breaking from game mechanical point of view, of course if you play with vet players other factors play more significant role than any site or other single advantage for one of the sides. But from game mechanical point of view Alt site+Wish is similar to gemgens which are considered broken by most vet players here.

Re: Province Bonus to Magic School?
 

Excuse me, as a total newb stumbling across this thread, if it bothers (some people at least) so much, can you not make a change to the game to prevent this happening? I mean, can you change soemthing in a file to disable it?

Re: Province Bonus to Magic School?
 

Well, this particular thing yes.

You could either remove wish or raise it's cost.
Or you could remove the site.
You can't, as far as I know, change what you can wish for or how many gems you get.

The debate comes in when we try to convince other people that those changes are a good idea, so they'll play in a game with them.

Re: Province Bonus to Magic School?
 

Gotta disagree with you Executor, in very few turns you can be making a silly amount of gems and noone will be any the wiser. Given that, you'd have to be quite careless to advertise that you'd grown powerful. If it was me, and I wanted to win, I would carry on as if nothing had happened, build a fort on the site, and just quietly get my machine up and going. For a long time I would only spend the gems on training up new Wish casters. I'd fill the fort with units to make it hard to siege, and then it wouldn't matter whether I lost the rest of the game. After a while I'd be making a few hundred S gems a turn in profit and could just win whenever I wanted. None of the other players could do anything about it.

Basically, given that I'd reached the ability to cast wish and had a chance to put a fort on the site and fill it with units, I can't imagine how I could fail to win. Would be quite shoddy to lose that game in my opinion.

Re: Province Bonus to Magic School?
 

It's all relative. I agree 100% with what Dimaz said.
And this is me speaking from personal experience. I've had games with enc 50% bonuses that I didn't win. I've had games where my enemies had those bonuses and I still manages to kill them. Same goes for any other bonus site.

Sure it can be game breaking, but any number of factors can lead a nation to an awesome position, and nothing guaranties you're gonna win.

Now regarding your statement, as that is what I myself would do, I'd know that there's something going on it that fort.

Usually if someones has a fort with a lot of domes, patrolling and various troops (and it's not the capital), it's more than just another fort. So from that point of view experienced players would probably notice it.

Bonus sites just add a little flavor to the game, as a good player will make an advantage out of countless possibilities, and that's what I love about Dominions, so removing them part by part is kinda like cutting into the Dom soul.

Re: Province Bonus to Magic School?
 

Probably chuck me down for a +1 to this.

A lot of players want balance to the game in all shapes and forms, so that all players have equal chances of winning at the start of a game based on skill. And not wanting random factors to play a major deciding role in the outcome.

I understand why players would want that, but that's personally not for me. I like the randomness. I like the imbalance. Heck I love the imbalance to this game. I'd hate to see balanced nations and boring sites that do nothing but give gems. I'd likely stop playing this game instanstly if it ever went in that direction. If I wanted a balanced game where all players start out on a perfectly equal setting, then I'm sure there's any number of RTS's out there that fit the bill.

But Dominions for me is about sometimes playing games on the very edge of complete imbalance, and seeing if you can overcome incredible odds when your enemy seems to have all the trump cards. So as long as there is nothing broken in the game, or no stupidly powerful/weak nations, then I'm personally very happy with whatever imblance exists, as it makes this game stand out from everything else that has ever existed in the crowd.


Edit: I do think some of the uber bonus sites are probably a bit broken though. As 50-60% discounts can get a bit silly. I like imbalance, but not stuff that is probably broken.

Re: Province Bonus to Magic School?
 

If I could wave a magic wand, I'd change Wish so that one caster could only ever Wish once.

I agree in principle, but anything with the potential for unlimited exponential expansion really is game breaking in pretty much any game context.

Re: Province Bonus to Magic School?
 

Ahh, I didn't think of that, coz I only do SP :doh: