[JimMorrison]

quantum_mechani said:

I've never said you can't play a perfectly successful game with even the most unlikely and unsynergetic pretender design, but, just as if the scale were 15% a tick, there are good choices and worse ones. In any case, I don't think of imbalance as a disease that strikes certain games, more like a spectrum that every game lies somewhere along. Perfect balance is as unattainable as a perfect geometric figure, but it can almost always be improved on. In fact, in a game as complex as dominions, it would be rather shocking if some options didn't turn out much better than others, no matter how careful the developers.

But it's not "much better", that's the argument here. Yes, some nations are absolutely gold dependent, but most are not to a great extreme. You can't use 15% gold on Order scales as an argument, because that's not the way the game works. Obviously, gold is easier for most people to use to full effect, and has the bonus of accruing even when you do not use it, where the other scales are somewhat more conditional, and require more active exploitation as part of the strategy.

Even more valid than an argument of whether skewing the balance would change the relative value of the scale, is the argument that sometimes you will start in very lean territory. The age-old argument between Order and Luck always seems to necessarily assume a certain abundance of wealth. If that base value were reduced significantly, such as starting in a position where all of your easy expansion is into mountains and wastes, then the Luck scale becomes proportionately more relevant, and Order becomes somewhat marginalized.

The difference between the two arguments, is that sometimes you DO start surrounded by mountains and wastes, but yet no matter how many pretenders I create, I never get 15% income per tick of Order.