Fantasy World - Balncing the Tribes

[EdwardTKing]

I enjoy the Fantasy World (Deity, Large Map, as Mermen); but the game is uneven. The Stygians or the Goblins always come out top
(90% and 10%) of the time; while others like the Elves never get anywhere.

I may change rules.txt; increase cost of Stygians units or decrease cost of Elves and perhaps Human units; or what about making Elve units invisible. Are invisible units invisible to the AIs too?

Any comments/ideas??

[The Mad Monk]

From my experiences in the SF game, yes, invisible units are invisible to the AI, too. However, invisible units within a city's zone are visible on the city screen, and may be attacked in any event if an enemy unit tries to enter the occupied square.

[a_bates]

In my fairly limited experience with the Midgard sc4enario the humans actually seem to do rather well. I don't think you would want to tweak them.

[tobyr]

You can strengthen the Buteo by improving the cloud map. The trick is to make the clouds larger, which results in more goody nests for the buteo, and more chances to build additional cities. If anyone is interested, I will post sample changes (I do not have them here at the moment.)

For me, the uneven abilities of the tribes means that you have a series of challenges as you get better. HOwever if you want the tribes to play better against each other, there's certainly a problem.

The elves occasionally do extremely well; I think they need a really good location to enable them to build a few really productive cities. I played one game where the elves got dragons before I did, and it was very exciting.

- toby


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toby robison
criticalpaths@mindspring.com

[tobyr]

Some additional thoughts on balancing the tribes:

(1) The infidels never seem to advance much in the fantasy game, and I personally find them hard to play except when they can score a quick knockout of most of the other tribes. The infidels make a good AI opponent when you find yourself next to them and they continually harrass you, but they develop technologically very slowly. I think that relatively early in the tech tree, they should get two things:
(1-A): a whopping military unit that is more fearsome than the elephant
(1-B): a strong, fast-moving attacking ship, so they can really expand.

(2) The AI often tries a feeble OCC strategy with the elves, I do not know why. I think the elves need to be able to build a mobile unit at the start of the game, to make sure they can explore and start a few cities.

I've played and won with the elf tribe, and this tends to be very boring after a while. First you get a bunch of decent cities started (can be hairy to defend at first); then you build your stupendous guard units and the rest of the game is not very interesting. Perhaps the elves should be able to build fairies early in the game, so they could do heavy diplomacy.

(3) The humans have a hard time getting off map 0 for awhile. They should also have quick access to a fast, strong ship so that at least they could heavily colonize map 0.

(4) The buteos, at deity level, have a very hard time holding cities on map 0. Sometimes, an AI buteo tribe will establish a strong map 0 presence and be a fairly worthy opponent for a while. But playing buteo, you mostly have to hide in the clouds, and this can be boring. A good way to play buteo is to reveal the whole map (even though this is a cheat), and then try to hobble the other tribes by divebombing their settlers. At least this keeps yuo from feeling you are totally isolated on map 3.

On map 3, the buteo cannot trade. I've been playing with this problem by giving them their own trading unit that can exist only on maps 1 and 3. (The great eagle is modified to be able to carry the trade unit.) This makes the buteo more interesting and less isolated. (I added a direct jump from map 3 to 1 so that this trade unit does not at all get to map 0.)

Buteo can be made a more worthy AI opponent by enriching map 3 (larger clouds, more nests), and increasing even more the move units of their fliers.

(4) another way to balance the weaker tribes, for the player and not really for the AI, is to make some more interesting hero units that regenerate. (That is, the death of the hero unit schedules the creation of this unit again after a few turns.)

The hero units that come with the game are not very imaginative. It seems to me that an ideal hero unit should either exemplify the character of a tribe to an extreme, or complement it by being radically different. For example, if you give the elves a hero with great attacking powers, this complements the elves' defense but does not turn the elves into an attacking tribe. If you give the infidels a nasty attacker, you just make them even more what they normally are.


- toby


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toby robison
criticalpaths@mindspring.com