Early Age Civs

[Sombre]

I think a category for 'Content Quantity' or something similar would make sense - add up the total number of national recruitable units, commanders, summons and spells each nation has. Some starting players want to pick a nation with less/more national stuff to play with. Different people have different reactions to seeing Bandar Log's Conjuration and Blood research trees.

[MaxWilson]

While you're at it, have the contributors rank themselves on a scale of 1-5 for experience. I'd mark myself 2, "pretty raw."

The forum "rankings" don't correlate well with skill at the game, nor does the amount of trivia you know about unit stats and bugs. Unfortunately.

-Max

[JimMorrison]

Well that's why I am avoiding a ranking system that puts one nation above the other, and rather just an evaluation of the nation, and how you feel it plays.

In the same sense as Olympic scoring, it will average out well.


Sombre- On the other hand, it might also show that most people's ratings will show a strong correlation between number of unique units, and their Ease of Play.

[Endoperez]

For a five-tier system, I suggest "weak, normal, good" with possibility of in-betweens. Example:

MA ULM, FORGES OF ULM

Early Game Strength: normal
Infantry of Ulm crushes independents, but mages/pretender are needed to stop rushes.

Mid Game Strength: weak
Magma evocations, Troll Kings, Black Lord thugs. Perhaps a Forge of the Ancients for a turn or two.

Late Game Strength: weak/normal
With Earth Boots, Earth Power and a third boost (few smiths innately, Blood Stones, empowerment,elemental staves) MA Ulm can Petrify, cast Army of X spells, Earthquake, Magma Eruption and has few casters for Rain of Stones. Mechanical Men, Enlivened Statues, Iron Dragons, Golems and Iron Angels are everywhere.

Ease of Learning (SP): normal
Ulmish troops are cheap and you'll have abundant gold. This means that you'll have to build more labs, forts, and temples (in that order) until you can spend everything you have. Recruit mages everywhere, and learn to use independent units (prot 15 heavy infantry, archers, mages). Rely on your 10gp infantry, at least early on. Use Black Knights and Black Lords as shock force. Recruit an army of arbalests before something impervious to melee appears.

Overall Ease of Use (MP): weak
To succeed, you need diplomacy and long-term strategy. To survive, you need to counter middle-game enemies with just Black Lord thugs and magma spells. You have to choose between middle/late game effectiveness (rainbow) and early/middle survivability (combat pretender). And you should start a blood economy for the Blood Stones. At least your PD is decent and all your smiths can use the same script.






I'd like to see something like this. Of course, first we have to define Early Game, Mid Game, Late Game, what "learning a nation" means and what Overall Ease of Use means.

I don't know what the early, middle and late game actually mean, but my educated guess divides them up like this:

Early: You fight against independents and perhaps national armies. There might be combat pretenders or recruitable thugs with few items or buffs.
Middle: You fight national armies and summoned units with powerful spells or thugs. First good thug/SC chassises are summoned and perhaps equipped.
Late: Thugs are everywhere. SCs are common. Uniques have been summoned, Tartarians are massed, armies of mages fight each other. Immunities are common. Teleportation is important.

For lategame, what's the baseline? Perhaps
strong astral and death: good
strong astral or death: normal/good
no astral or death: normal at best

That's the impression I have from reading the strategy threads.



Overall ease of use would need some guideline like this:

Good mages everywhere: +
recruitables for early expansion: +
good researchers: +
can innately forge important boosters: +
your mages are good in battle, whatever their randoms: +
... and a single script works for all of them: +

bloodhunting: -
needs blood sacrifice: -
reanimating priests: -
malign dominion, freespawn or pop-eating: -
weak PD: -
must sitesearch manually with several different mages: -

[JimMorrison]

Very very good input Endo, I very much agree with most of what you have suggested. Obviously, I won't be looking for quite so much detail, as the actual chart will be just that, a chart. Anyone can feel free to go into as much length and detail on any nation they wish, in their post, but ultimately the ratings are not meant to be a strategy guide, that's where someone would go after they narrow down their choice of nation through the statistics provided.


Regarding a 1-5 (or 1-3 as in Endo's last post), vs a 1-10, I think that the scale of 10 works better within the concept of averaging. Even going 1-10, I may feel compelled to add a decimal, but with 1-5 I would surely add a decimal place. Ultimately this just makes the number larger, I would be asking people to rate on 1-5, but then would extrapolate that to actually a rating between 10-50. One thing that I think is important, is that the chart is easy to visually scan for the particular facets that one is looking for in a new nation to play, so I really do think that a 1-10 scale will work better than a 10-50 scale, and also better than a table filled with text, especially if that table could end up with ratings like "weak/average", which might tend to make it wrap to the next line on these forums.

[Edratman]

JiMMorrison, your plan sounds very good and I like your thinking about numerical rating.

[Endoperez]

I think it's much easier for the REVIEWER to review on simple terms. It's up to the maker of the chart to make a good chart out of that.

"Very weak, weak, average, good, very good" would be better than the weak/average I used above. If I make a new thread where people can post their opinions of nations with this five-point scale, I think it could really catch on. I'll wait until you decide how, exactly, you would do the scoring.


Here's what I suggest. Just exploit the fact that 0 out of 10 is NEVER given. Even the worst games or movies will get 30 out of 100 or 2.5 out of ten or half a star out of 5. Five scores is still enough to calculate averages - 3 votes for strong and two for very strong gives nice 8.8 result.

Code:

---

Very weak  |  2

Weak       |  4

Average    |  6

Strong     |  8

Very strong|  10

---

This way, the lowest score any nation is likely to get in any single score would be slightly under 4. Ease of Use of 2.7 or whatever for Early Mictlan would be suitably bad. If it actually had a score of 0.8 or something, it would turn people off instead of just warning them. "Worse than Descent to the Undermountain? I'm not going to touch that!" etc.


Also, if we get a good discussion rolling AND we get the short summaries about the nation, it'll be a great addition to the StrategyWiki. We'll take the averages out of the chart, and add the comments about the various stages of game, and we have a short strategy guide and review.

[Zeldor]

But you would want to accept opinions only from people that played said nation or against in MP game till end-game.

[JimMorrison]

Well the caveat would be that I would prefer ratings from people who could at least rate say half the nations in one or more particular ages. This is to show a breadth of experience that enables one to reflect more adequately upon their experiences, rather than only being familiar with 3 nations, and rating them only relative to eachother (then it becomes another shallow "rankings" exercise).

As far the MP rating, I would definately prefer players who had at least completed 3-4 full games. Obviously it is best if some of those games they survived to the end, and even better if they've even won 1 or 2 of them.

There would obviously need to be some sort of oversight, using the pseudo-Olympic model, anyone whose scores deviate significantly across the board from everyone else, would likely be disregarded. Not to say that people can't disagree, but if someone seems to "disagree" with everyone else on everything, they are likely insane or just like to cause trouble.


I suppose Endo, you make a fairly good case for taking the numbers away from the submitters, to give them a clearer sense of what they are stating. Ultimately, the more contributors we get, the less accurate their rating needs to be in order to get an average that IS accurate. Though I think if I do so, I will use the designations of "Sad, Weak, Capable, Strong, Glorious". I don't know, maybe it's my sense of creativity that just prefers numbers for such things, words are so arbitrary, numbers always say what they mean.