Quote:
MaxWilson said:
...There are many, many wholly random factors in the game, e.g. whether Ritual A will be cast before Ritual B, whether army X will attack province P before army Y (and thus which will be the defender if/when they do fight), which and how many nations you'll go up against in the Arena Death Match...
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1. How often do multiple rituals get cast in the same turn, that actually affect eachother?
2. You are introducing a third party into this equation, and also working from an inknowable quantity, "will my opponent move to that province this turn?".
3. No one cares about the Death Match.
In all seriousness though, if turn resolution could be worked out with ordinary movement taking place according to predetermined attacker/defender initiative as it is, but casters were interspersed, such that 1 defender casts a spell, 1 attacker casts a spell, 1 defender, and so on, then at least you could say that the change is being made in name of balance. Else, if it will be randomly decided which side gets the "defender" initiative advantage to casting, then at the very least this should have Luck scales used as a modifier.
And finally if a game actually ends up in a deadlock, I fail to see how you can blame that on game mechanics that ARE known throughout the play of the game, and will have obvious effects that you can expect. If you face a nuclear power and you continue to spend decades building nuclear weapons in the vain hope that you'll end up with enough that your opponent either capitulates, or you finally feel confident committing to deployment, then you will probably be waiting for a very long time. Does it take extra game time to broaden research, collect gems, and deploy other alternatives? Of course it does, but the argument that the income is so huge and the turns just take longer and longer only says to me that you need to adjust your map settings to compensate for playstyle - that's why they're there. If you play on too large a map with too fast research (even 200+ with normal research and people will simply hit "end game" fairly early), then you can complain that there is no way to get a clear advantage, but the reality is that if you had arranged the game so that it would take more time and effort for both sides to have equal access to all things, then you would have arrived at a situation where hard choices would have to be made in order to gain anything as powerful as Master Enslave.
I am becoming more and more convinced that MP games would remain more competitive with harder research, and threads such as this, with arguments such as these, only make me more sure that forcing hard choices on spell selection will lead to more complicated player interactions, and games that are less dependent on the Astral-Death-Blood paradigm of "what is powerful enough to win the game".