How would you patch this game?

[HotNifeThruButr]

Simple, if you were allowed to make a new patch, what would it be like? I would make the following:

-Fix Atlantian Scout description. I know it says "no description available" for the R'lyehan kind, so I'd change that to the standard slave description.

-Raise Royal Guard and Centaur Warrior cost by 7 gold a man

-Fix the bugged Lord of Fertility and Mother Earth (her name escapes me at the moment, you know, the fat tree that tramples people) site, and fix the LoF's graphics.

- Make Crystal and Garnet amazons appear more often

- Make number of events dependant on the number of provinces you own

- This might sound crazy, but I would make all javelins armor piercing, and have -2 damage

- tack 5 more water gems onto the cost for calms

- change Centaur Cataphract hp to 17, after all, they've abandoned the savagery that gave them power

-Jotun Woodsmen are now 40 gold a man, like Jotun Hirdmen

-Jotun Hirdmen have +1 morale

That's everything I want to change about this game that I can think of right now. Do any of you have any ideas?

[Zapmeister]

The first thing I would do is gather a heap of data about which pretenders, spells, items and troops are used by players all the time, and which ones are never used.

Then I'd enhance or nerf as necessary to create greater diversity in the usage of these game elements.

[Burkhard]

I'd add an icon for the astrology skill.

[Anglachel]

Originally posted by Zapmeister:
The first thing I would do is gather a heap of data about which pretenders, spells, items and troops are used by players all the time, and which ones are never used.

Then I'd enhance or nerf as necessary to create greater diversity in the usage of these game elements.

I thought about this for a while and it seems like this would tend to homogenize the game rather than diversify. Think about it, take all the elements, cut down what you percieve as powerful and lift up what you percieve as weak. What is the end result? Things are all the same. Does this seem like a situation that would be diverse?

I understand you stress diversity of "usage" but what exactly is it in your experience that has lead you to the conclusion that there is a lack of diversity of usage and have you compared notes with a variety of other players on this to find commonality? I just don't understand why you would want to have the above course followed in the pursuit of "diversity".

Honestly curious.

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Anglachel:
I thought about this for a while and it seems like this would tend to homogenize the game rather than diversify. Think about it, take all the elements, cut down what you percieve as powerful and lift up what you percieve as weak. What is the end result? Things are all the same. Does this seem like a situation that would be diverse?

It's rather ironic that homogeneity is the ultimate result of trying to forcibly promote diversity. I'm sure there's a moral in this somewhere. As the saying goes, "You are unique, just like everyone else."

I understand you stress diversity of "usage" but what exactly is it in your experience that has lead you to the conclusion that there is a lack of diversity of usage and have you compared notes with a variety of other players on this to find commonality? I just don't understand why you would want to have the above course followed in the pursuit of "diversity".

Some of the more shrill elements of the populace would have you believe that anything which catches on as popular, I.E., "Flavor-of-the Week", is automatically overpowered, and as such, they scream for a nerf. This is generally around the time our flavor of the week becomes "whine du jour". They neglect the fact that people are sheep, and will follow whoever currently appears to be the leader. The approach Zap here would advocate trades the flavor-of-the-week for "All Options Suck". Sure, this is certainly balanced, but "Everything is equally useless" is not a very entertaining form of play! What's the point in trying to think of anything new to combine, when everything either is, or will be, made equally useless?

However, he does nonetheless have a point that certain things are basically never used. Many of these things fall into non-use because of either their cost relative to other things that serve the same role, or simply because they don't fill any niche that isn't already filled better or more cheaply by something else. Others go undiscovered until they explode into the whine-du-jour: The Vampire Queen, believe it or not, was once unpopular and viewed as a weak chassis commonly ignored in favor of beefier ones. Obviously, this thinking has been greatly revised since then. So perhaps these "useless" options are simply diamonds in the rough, waiting to be discovered (and whined about). Then again, maybe they're just worthless rocks.

This is can be seen as either good or bad. On one hand, they're clearly "useless", so to speak, and nobody uses them. As such, they're a waste of space. On the other hand, the existence of useless options does give the game a bit of flavor: If everything was equally useful(or useless), then a blind baboon could play the game, which doesn't tend to lend it much depth. The fact that there are traps and pitfalls to be avoided makes things interesting. Besides, it's humorously sadistic in many ways: On one hand, a grossly inferior option serves as a sadistic trap for the unwary. On the other hand, the same option serves as an avenue to humiliate one's opponents by beating them with it. If everything was equally valid, where would the fun be?

[Zapmeister]

Originally posted by Anglachel:
I understand you stress diversity of "usage" but what exactly is it in your experience that has lead you to the conclusion that there is a lack of diversity of usage and have you compared notes with a variety of other players on this to find commonality? I just don't understand why you would want to have the above course followed in the pursuit of "diversity".

Honestly curious.

The original question was how would *I* patch the game, if the choice was up to me. To answer this personal question, I drew on my personal experience of only employing a small subset of the available game elements myself, with very little reference to what other people do.

That said, in my only post-2.12 game, I find myself almost surrounded by Vampire Queens, an event which I think speaks for itself.

If you nerf/enhance to address balance issues, you don't make everything the same. They are still different in the way they act - some items produce gems, some enhance attack factor, some give supply etc. There's plenty of diversity there that is lost if the items are not used. If items are so weak that they are rarely or never used, then they may as well not be in the game, and to my mind that's a problem worth fixing.

I know Norfleet goes on about how this line of argument is "whining" and whatnot, but really it's about expanding the tactical options available to players, not simply about labelling things as overpowered or underpowered.

It's about making a great game better, and the principle (seeking balance) was not invented by me, but has been around for a lot longer than this particular great game. Honestly, I'm surprised it draws so much negative comment.