[Torgon]

@13lackGu4rd

But why does it matter that one's a thug and ones a SC. Lets make it more abstract.

I have strategy A that i'm attempting to win with. It requires a certain amount of resource X and a certain amount of resource Y to be effective.
You have strategy B that you are attempting to win with. It also requires a certain amount of resource X and a certain amount of resource Y to be effective.

Resource X and Y can be anything you want them to be (Gems, gold, production turns, mage turns, widgets, etc. the example can also extend to three, four, any number of resources).

Okay, now something happens and suddenly resource X is much rarer (in the dominions example this is gems as a result of the removal of hammers). Who is better off and more likely to win? From the information already presented it is impossible to know. What you need to know is relative intensities of use of each of the resources in each strategy. And whether either one of those strategies was constrained by resource X and at what times those constraints occurred. If both strategies employed roughly equal ratios of resource X to resource Y then they are both going to be impacted equally. They're both less effective by whatever the decrease in X was. However, if the ratio in each strategy was different, or one strategy was constrained on X and the other wasn't, or one strategy was constrained by X early and the other by X late, then the change in the availability of X will have a more dramatic impact on one strategy than the other. However you need this information in order to make that determination.

Up until now the only arguments for each side that I've seen essentially boil down to: 1)Strategy A has to use more of resource x now 2)Because of this strategy A is less effective.

Of course strategy A is less effective. All of the strategies are less effective including strategy B. You just tightened a constraint on everyone. Tightening a constraint always leads to a lower optimal solution. What I have yet to see is a good argument for why the tightening of this constraint has a disparate impact on one strategy than on another. Why is the new optimal point for strategy A lower than the new optimal point for strategy B? They're both lower. The question is which one was lowered by a larger amount.

If gems were the constraining factor on the number of thugs you could crank out, then yes the removal of hammers would be a huge problem. If the constraining factor was production turns then not so much. Same thing with SC's, if constraining factor was production turns then increase in gem cost really doesn't matter. If the constraining factor was gems then it matters a great deal. If your were at times constrained by gem cost for for one, and at other times by gold, and at other times by production turns, then when that constraint from gems occurred is hugely important. If the constraint was early game before you have a lot of hammers, removal of hammers is immaterial. If it was after then removal becomes very important. I guess I just have yet to see an argument that really dives down into what ways gems were really constraining the optimal strategy and at what times. I've got limited experience with multi-player dominions as I stated before, so I have no good idea where those constraints were and how tight they were. Any analysis of the impact on strategy of a scarcer resource has to make those kind of arguments in order to be sound. That's essentially what I'm asking for.