June 20th, 2008, 04:48 AM
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Lieutenant General
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Join Date: Dec 2003
Location: Alaska
Posts: 2,968
Thanks: 24
Thanked 221 Times in 46 Posts
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Re: refuting common wisdom on scales everybody kno
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JimMorrison said:
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quantum_mechani said:
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JimMorrison said:
Fortunately, our wonderfully thoughtful and intelligent game devs saw fit to not make any one scale stand out sufficiently to make it absolutely necessary to a viable game strat - and that is why most of us are here now. 
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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.
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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. 
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I think you misunderstand- it would be silly to argue order is needed because it's 15% per tick, when it obviously is not. The entire 15% thing was just to put aside the 'everything is balanced, by default' line of argument. Not that I'm saying you were arguing that, but I have seen it implied a lot in these kind of discussions in the past.
Anyway, while it is true taking order does not take much strategic finesse (as opposed to other ways you could use points), the key thing is that it the gold fuels most of the more advanced options that do take careful strategic deployment. And I find when starting in gold poor territory, the extra gold from the capital that order provides becomes all the more crucial. Perhaps luck could provide more, but it takes quite a few luck events early to keep up the momentum with turmoil as order. But you are right that is an age-old discussion that has been beaten to death.
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