refuting common wisdom on scales everybody knows

[Xietor]

Order 3 does not block the effects of luck indefinitely.

It depends on how much you need the luck in the early game. In time, even with 3 order, you get 3 lucky events a turn.
The better your expansion, the sooner you hit the max lucky events even with order 3.

Order 3 does block the luck effects in the early game, but luck3 does double the chance of a worthy hero every turn starting on turn 1, and if you happen to be playing with worthy heroes that can be worth something.

In alpaca that was the only mod used, and i Luckily got the harpy queen and access to air magic on turn 3 or 4. And likely in year 2 i was getting a steady diet of diverse gems
that Pangaea normally does not get. Before my 1st war was over, I had 3 of the worthy heroes.

[Baalz]

Well, let me lay out an example to illustrate my point. I'll stick with C'tis since I started with Sauromancers...

MA C'tis is a nation many people would immediately take order/sloth with as they've got several good low resource troops. Expanding with groups something like 15 city guards and 30 slave warriors at a cost of 510 gold + 190 resources. Compare to production/turmoil expanding with something like 20 swamp guards (17 protection + falchion) for 260 gold + 420 resources. The swamp guards are going to take significantly less attrition against most indies as well. Who has better cash flow?

I think maybe the sticking point here is that you guys are arguing: "ok, so production can be a good idea, but you'd be much better in these situations going with production AND order!". Ok, again, I've got to say there's the opportunity cost, what are you giving up? Sure, it's best to take order, production, an awake pretender, a positive magic scale and the kitchen sink as well. Do you take the extra gold from order at the expense of losing some magic diversity? At the cost of slowing down your initial expansion and putting yourself more at risk of a rush? At the cost of slowing down your research? Suck the points our of luck, of course - though I think I've made a point that that's not a no-brainer. There is a cost, and IMO its not always better to take order.

[Ballbarian]

A very thought provoking topic Baalz.

Gandalf Parker said:
One of the things I love about this game is that even in years of debate, no absolute winning strategy has been agreed on.

I would be quite surprised if this was the case for any game of significant complexity.

I wish there were more games of significant complexity, but I can think of very few compared to the number of 'tank rush' style rts's that have been on the market over the years.

[dirtywick]

quantum_mechani said:

I'm not sure we disagree here - turmoil without luck is a bad move. But my argument is that turmoil, even with luck, is still a suboptimal choice.

I was saying that taking turmoil only frees up points for luck.

However, I don't think it's a suboptimal choice if you can use diverse gems effectively or you just don't need a lot of gold. For example, in EA Ulm's most expensive mage is 220 gold and that's cap only and they've got no cavalry or otherwise expensive units. Arco, Oceania, Lanka, and R'lyeh are in the same boat to a lesser degree, barring a few expensive cap only units or whatever.

Then, you've got Caelum that has mammoths and Seraphs to pay for, Sauromatia which is almost all cav, hydras, and expensive mages, Agartha has very few cheap units, and Hinnom is just ridiculously gold dependant for any of it's units.

Then some are in between.

Some nations just don't need gold as badly as others, so you have some wiggle room in the scales.

[quantum_mechani]

Baalz said:


I think maybe the sticking point here is that you guys are arguing: "ok, so production can be a good idea, but you'd be much better in these situations going with production AND order!". Ok, again, I've got to say there's the opportunity cost, what are you giving up? Sure, it's best to take order, production, an awake pretender, a positive magic scale and the kitchen sink as well. Do you take the extra gold from order at the expense of losing some magic diversity? At the cost of slowing down your initial expansion and putting yourself more at risk of a rush? At the cost of slowing down your research? Suck the points our of luck, of course - though I think I've made a point that that's not a no-brainer. There is a cost, and IMO its not always better to take order.

That is indeed the sticking point - I have never argued that there are not uses for prod. As I said before, there is a degree of diminishing returns as you spend point on expanding faster, just based on logistics (not to mention being spread thin). What this means, is that you generally do not need to mine order while more or less optimizing your expansion. And unlike factors like expanding pretender + bless, order does not add but multiply your gold advantage.

There is no denying by putting points in order you are not putting points elsewhere, and many of these other spending options are by their nature difficult to quantify in value. Given that, I can only say that in order's indispensability is based on it's universal applicability. Magic scale, blesses, prod scale, etc are not generally critical components all at the same time. And even if they were, you don't have enough gold to make the best use of them... unless perhaps you have order.

[quantum_mechani]

dirtywick said:

I was saying that taking turmoil only frees up points for luck.

However, I don't think it's a suboptimal choice if you can use diverse gems effectively or you just don't need a lot of gold. For example, in EA Ulm's most expensive mage is 220 gold and that's cap only and they've got no cavalry or otherwise expensive units. Arco, Oceania, Lanka, and R'lyeh are in the same boat to a lesser degree, barring a few expensive cap only units or whatever.

Then, you've got Caelum that has mammoths and Seraphs to pay for, Sauromatia which is almost all cav, hydras, and expensive mages, Agartha has very few cheap units, and Hinnom is just ridiculously gold dependant for any of it's units.

Then some are in between.

Some nations just don't need gold as badly as others, so you have some wiggle room in the scales.

In general, I find people tend to overstate the difficulty of getting magic diversity- it takes some significant bad luck (of the none scale sort) and magic restricted nation to lock you in for the most part. This is especially true in most MP games where trading is an option.

It's certainly true some nations demand gold even more than others- but that doesn't mean that it's not extremely valuable for any nation.

Ballbarian: I've seen some very imbalanced games, but almost by nature that usually means that more than one option was left super-powered.

[Dragar]

One point missed so far in favour of Production scales is that by targetting high resource troops you are also lowering your upkeep. A strategy focused on low gold/high resource troops (as long as your nation has the appropriate units) will result in a substantially lower upkeep cost per turn.

[JimMorrison]

Dragar said:
One point missed so far in favour of Production scales is that by targetting high resource troops you are also lowering your upkeep. A strategy focused on low gold/high resource troops (as long as your nation has the appropriate units) will result in a substantially lower upkeep cost per turn.

And to simplify the equation, take a quick look at O3/S3.

You are gaining 115% of the normal gold, and receiving 55% of normal resources.

Shifting 1 scale to O2/S2, puts you at 110% of normal gold, and 70% of normal resources. You just traded 4.35% of your net gold income, for a 27.2% increase in resources. Yes, you may argue that you would always steal those points from somewhere else if you don't want Sloth 3 in a particular game. My argument is, if EVERYTHING else balanced out exactly how you wanted it to, with most nations you would still be better off making that choice, as very few nations actually prosper militarily under S3, unless you have an awake PoD, and even then you may expand fine at first, but you are always going to be handicapped in that way.

Really, it comes down to strategy, and any strategy must be well thought out to be successful. Saying that O3 is 100% necessary, is akin to saying that S9 on your pretender is "absolutely necessary". There is no such thing, there are just some strategic elements that are easier to use, and some that are more versatile, there are NONE that are universally irreplaceable.

<3

[quantum_mechani]

JimMorrison said:
There is no such thing, there are just some strategic elements that are easier to use, and some that are more versatile, there are NONE that are universally irreplaceable.

I agree with this, in principle (and there are even rare situations I'd advocate turmoil... mainly LA Ermor). However, keep in mind that you offer your own universal statement- would you say the same if order were, say, 15% per tick?

[JimMorrison]

The only universality that I offer is that there is no universality. But just as I might say nothing is forever, you could reasonably argue that everything is forever.

And of course taking the scales out of their relative balance will skew things. But the fact is that all factors taken into account, the scales are "generally" well balanced, in that there are strategic avenues to exploit the relative bonuses gained.

Take for example, if in a particular scenario, you were given perfect temp scale, and you were allowed +3 on ALL scales except for 1, that MUST be at -3. I can guarantee you 90% of the people who read these boards would put 3 Sloth with impunity. But strategically speaking, any of the scales would provide viable strats for one nation or another, depending on what is planned. Arbitrarily changing the value of one scale does not change the answer to the question, it changes the question to - "why am I still playing this horribly imbalanced game?".

Fortunately, our wonderfully thoughtful and intelligent game devs saw fit to not make any one scale stand out sufficiently to make it absolutely necessary to a viable game strat - and that is why most of us are here now.