Countering Master Enslave...

[MaxWilson]

On the one hand, I like the concept that the defender has a tactical advantage (even though the attacker has a strategic advantage). On the other hand, it does seem that the defender advantage in late game is too strong; arguably free chaff from PD is sufficient tactical advantage to be thematic. On balance I support the notion of randomizing which side goes first. It would be a HUGE change in the game--do you think we have any chance at all of getting this in a patch? It would probably have to be an option like "Events: Common/Rare" or "Site Frequency: 40/45/50". "Initiative: Classic/Randomized."

-Max

[Xietor]

There are ways to counter master enslave. But since i am about to do it in a mp game, I am not offering up free advice. Suffice to say there are counters.

[thejeff]

It would be a dramatic change, breaking all sorts of strategies. I'd love to see it though.

Actual what I'd really like would be simultaneous, random ordered turns. Units (or at least squads?) from both sides act in a random order.
Far more like the chaos of a real battle. No polite standing around, taking turns being killed.

[MaxWilson]

I wonder if Xietor is talking about pre-emptive attacks, like teleporting in a mage squad set to Retreat? (Apparently the attacking army is considered "big enough to use gems" if at least one mage is attacking.) And of course you can always fall back on artillery spells and/or SCs with high MR. I still find the idea of randomizing turn order compelling.

On truly simultaneous, randomly-ordered turns: I would like that a lot too, on thematic grounds. It would probably need to be done on a per-squad basis because of the way the battlefield AI works.

-Max

[JimMorrison]

I would tend to have to disagree with this, on principle.

The art of warfare, is to work with known quantities - be they positive or negative for your cause - and engineer a situation that is likely to result in victory for your cause.

If 2 armies are unwilling to engage - a scenario that has historical precedence - then other tactics such as stealthy/flying raiding, and assassination, need to be implemented to either force an unfavorable maneuver by your enemy, or erode their position of strength so that your assault has the weight of success already in your favor.


Introducing any wholly random element takes this away, it says that no matter how well you plan and organize your decisive strike, you may be throwing everything away - not because you failed to accurately predict your opponent's behavior, but because you could not rely on a known quantity.

The great leaders of history, often were credited as achieving astounding victories through the taking of "great risks". I would argue wholeheartedly against this assertion. It is a simple fact that a mind that weighs everything in abstract possibilities will see a situation from that perspective, where the reality is that the highly ordered and focused mind of that great leader, took every possible factor into consideration, and as if the battle were a giant chessboard, predicted the reactions of his opponent to each of his moves, thereby engineering a dramatic victory over a numerically stronger opponent.


Thus, rather than requesting that your opponent be divested of a known quantity, it would better suit a commander to better plan for the implementation of that tactic. Know thine enemy. As many battles are lost because someone pursued a tactic that wasn't able to compete with their opponent's tactic, as were won because someone learnt what tactic their opponent was developing, and specifically arranged to render that tactic less effective, ineffective, or detrimental.

[DonCorazon]

Jim,
Have you been in the situation where you don�t want to attack the other guy because you know he can enslave you?
It sounds very strategic and Sun Tzu-like in theory to have to rely on other tactics like raiding, remote damage spells, or assassination but my experience is that, by the late game, a powerful nation has so much gem income and resources that resolution of the standoff will not be found easily with these types of maneuvers. Instead you get a boring cold war with neither nation willing to cede the huge tactical advantage of going first. (check out Twan�s thread a while back for an example of the magnitude of defeat simply from going 2nd � I saw the same thing happen in Alexandria). So you get increasingly long turns as the micromanagement of the endgame bogs down. My preference would be to fight and get the game over with and anything that helps encourage that would be welcome.

[MaxWilson]

JimMorrison said:
Introducing any wholly random element takes this away, it says that no matter how well you plan and organize your decisive strike, you may be throwing everything away - not because you failed to accurately predict your opponent's behavior, but because you could not rely on a known quantity.

That's kind of an odd attitude to hear coming from somebody who plays a probabilistic wargame, as opposed to (for example) Diplomacy or Go. 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. By your own argument, these random factors are known quantities and the essence of strategy is to anticipate both your opponent and the unknowable random complications and devise a (probable) counter to each.

You can certainly make the case that the current initiative system is fine as is. I wouldn't dispute that. You could make the defender advantage even stronger than it is and it will still be a playable game, in the same sense that Diplomacy is a playable game (one which offers options to both sides, none of which options dominates all the others). I would like a more random initiative system because in the endgame the defender is so strong--in a way uncorrelated with reality--as to seem unthematic. I love the game as it is, but I happen to think thejeff's suggestion would be really awesome and thematic if it were implemented, and it would probably make the MP players happier in the endgame at the same time. It's not likely to happen unless JK also thinks it would be awesome, so I'll just hope he reads this thread and agrees.

-Max

[Coldshard]

MaxWilson said:
What do you mean by "too late to matter"? Are you talking about defender advantage, i.e. Master Enslave on round 1 before the attacker can cast any counterspells? That issue is not unique to Master Enslave.

It is not unique to master enslave, that is true, but the defender advantage is pretty big.. and is magnified the later in the game that it gets.

This is just repeating what others have said in this thread though I just wanted to reiterate it again as it is such an important point.

On a side note though, I am currently thinking that mitigation and countering are different. Countering would be stopping something while it is occuring or putting something in place that stops the effect entirely.. They do share some things in common but comes down to degree.. giving all of your troops poison resist 100% effectively counters foul vapors while giving them all 50% (or giving half of them 100%) mitigates the damage. I hope that I am explaining that well enough to get my point across!

[MaxWilson]

I think we've come to agreement on Master Enslave and the defender advantage. You are using the notion of "countermeasure" in a nonstandard way (e.g. ECM in the real world emphatically does NOT preclude the possibility of ECCM, nor is it guaranteed to be 100% effective), but it would probably be off-topic for me to pursue the point.

Hmmm, actually maybe that was my fault for saying "counter" for short, since "counter" actually doesn't have a recognized meaning except "a wooden object that you put things on." Countermeasure = "an opposing, offsetting, or retaliatory measure."

-Max

[JimMorrison]

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...

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".