Broken Nations

[Cainehill]

Truper said:

Nonsense. In Dom2 there were 17 playable nations. Of these, 13 had themes, to a total of 23 themes, making for a grand total of 40 different nations. Dom 3 has 49 playable nations. In addition, given the changes to the random magic system, and the lesser powers of indy mages, the nations of Dom3 actually play differently throughout the game, rather than rapidly becoming quite similar to each other. Furthermore, how adding a scad of new spells, summonables and magic items to the game results in less variety is mysterious.

Dom3 has at most 21 nations that can be chosen to play in any one game, unless someone mods or does a special map file. Dom2, there were 17 nations, with only some having _special_ themes, giving as you say, a total of 40 nations that could be chosen in _any one_ game.

One benefit of those special themes was that when you were playing against, say, Pangaea, you didn't know right away which of three very different Pangaea's it might be. (Instead, we have global enchantments to recreate a few of the themes, which has its own serious drawbacks and flaws.)

Even without those special themes : a number of the themes available to _ANY_ nation made significant changes to how that nation might play. For instance, the way any nation with sacred troops might go underwater with their sacreds via Water Cult. Or try to specialize in constructed units with Golem Cult.

Other themes simply gave minor tweaks that made subtle differences while helping to keep from wasting more than 25 points in pretender design. Since we no longer have castle choice (which used to give 20 point increments), _and_ we no longer have themes.... And a lot of us had commented on our desire to see some themes for Machaka, or to be able to combine non-special themes (Water Cult, Golem Cult, etc) with special themes.

Instead, we lost themes. We even lost Last of the Tuatha, and Machaka (which many people enjoyed, and were waiting patiently for a special theme or two for) is _ONLY PLAYABLE NOW IN ONE ERA_!!!!

As far as adding scads of other things - _please_ don't put "scads of new ... magic items" in one sentence? We certainly didn't get scads of new magic items.

Instead, we got aging. Feh.

[Cainehill]

mivayan said:

Flaming arrows doesn't do much against vans in dom3. Which may or may not be relevant.

Flaming arrows isn't at all the same thing as the F9 bless.