Baalz' guides

[Redeyes]

I think your Zen and the art of Thugging should be listed in your original post, Baalz.

[Baalz]

Ah, thanks I missed that one.

[Starshine_Monarch]

I'd love to see Gath get the Ballz treatment. I'm currently in love with Blood magic right now after reading your EA Mictlan guide over again and Gath is one of the several blood nations I've not stuck my toe in yet.

[Dragar]

Does anyone else feel that having these awesome guides written by top players like Baalz robs a bit of the joy of discovering how to play a nation oneself?

Of course, no-one forces us to read them, but it is near irresistible to do so. I really like to play a nation differently than I've seen/heard it played, and I'm quickly running out of ideas with the profusion of guides!

Please don't write an MA abysia guide anytime too soon, I don't want my new strategy savaged by a better one

[Lingchih]

No, Baalz' guides and other guides are very valuable to the game. With so many nations, and so many strategies to learn, it is invaluable to have guides like these to help you out.

In fact, I used one of Ballz's guides, his guide to communions, to hold him to a standoff in a recent war between us in an MP game.

[JimMorrison]

I don't think they're really limiting. Yes, as a newer player, you may think, "wow, I can't possibly do better than that", but that will be especially demoralizing if his strategy doesn't work out for you. Strategies are ultimately very personal things, and as you get more experienced, you will find that you rarely just emulate a full strategy as you read it here, but you take from it what works well for you, and you add things not mentioned, and you hopefully come up with something that works as well for your style as the posted strategy works for the poster.

Ultimately, much of the game comes down to improvisation and creativity within the moment anyways. The faster you learn more tricks, and more techniques, the better you will do in any particular game that you join.

[lch]

EA Ulm and Machaka down from my list on page 1, now I am eagerly awaiting EA Ermor, LA Arco, LA C'tis and LA Pangaea.

[Edi]

One thing I've always wondered about the guides:

What are the game settings they supposedly work on? Because they seem to assume independent strength 5, normal or easy research and a LOT of available gems. Having a standardized base setting defined for Baalz guides would be very useful for comparisons.

I've run the numbers on a few games I've played and in most of them, getting things done per these guides would not have been an option. Indies at 7, magic sites at 25-30 percent and hard research throws many, many things out the window or reorders probabilities and priorities to such a degree that only parts of the suggested strategies would work. Note that I mostly play SP or cooperative hotseat games, not standard MP.

For example, in a current game, my friend controls an entire corner of the map and soon around one quarter of the whole map. He has done all searches save fire and blood and he has a whopping 2 nature sites, one of which is Gateward Valley (no gems). He has had similar luck with death sites. No more than two or three and total income of both gem types is around 2-3 per turn.

Granted that that's unusual, but there you go. Makes for a whole different game and you need to throw a lot of things out the window and be really miserly with what you do.

[Baalz]

Sorry, my guides are all based on default settings, where noted (all the recent ones) using CBM. I'd also like to reiterate that I'd be a bit surprised and disappointed if people took what I wrote and tried to just apply it verbatim with no discovery of their own. People are always asking if its CBM or not, what the settings are, and pointing out that there's not enough points for the very specific thing I just laid out (because of a typo or an oversight on my part which doesn't really impact the idea). Thing is, each game (particularly MP!) is going to vary so much that a formulaic approach certainly won't work. I don't in any way attempt to give an exhaustive analysis of a nation and all the different ways it could be played with all the different settings in all the different scenarios you'll find yourself in. Obviously playing under hard research is going to impact some of the suggestions I make, sometimes it's just the luck of the draw and despite your best efforts you can't find the gems you need for what I suggest and instead have a pile of some other gem you'll have to decide how best to use. Sometimes, trying the same strategy you're going to blast through indies and pile up gold, sometimes you're going to be surrounded by heavy cavalry and dark vines and have a stunted growth, sometimes your capital is in high resource mountains, playing with indies at 9 will change stuff as well. Despite the fact that I often write from a perspective of "you'll do this then that" by necessity it's intended to really be suggesting fairly general patterns which are useful in different situations while illustrating some common situations through the usual span of a game. As is obvious from the response there are often dramatic different and effective angles on nations which didn't occur to me. Think of it, kind of like observing one specific game played by me with a running commentary of what thoughts were going through my head as I made my decisions - even I wouldn't be able to exactly duplicate that in another game.

[Edi]

Thanks for the prompt reply.

I didn't mean to suggest that your guides are The One & Only, Infallible Way of Doing Things. I have always treated them as suggestions (very good ones), but the writing style may sometimes give a little bit stronger impression of something than may be warranted by the specific circumstances.

The question about the default settings was just something that I figured suited this thread best of all, because all the guides are linked from here. And now everything can be compared to what the actual settings are on any given game. Such as the example of my own defaults, with indies 7 and magic sites reduced 1 or 2 steps from default most of the time.

Thanks again for all the effort you've put into the guides.