Tweet
I realize it's too early to tell for most of them, but "Expansionist" seems like a lame ability to me. It's two effects (better goodies and an extra scout to start) seem either too easy to counter or unbalancing.
The extra scout is a pretty lame bonus when compared to others. An extra scout equals a few turns of added production at one city and a few turns of added exploration. Almost all the other effects give a game lasting bonus which will eventually outstrip that production bonus (eg. the religious nations will get way more bonus production after they've built religious buildings in a few cities). And though the few extra turns of exploration does give a head start on finding huts, in my experience who finds the most huts is far more dependant on being lucky with the random placement of the huts than on having a few turns of extra searching.
As for better goodies, that sounds great but it just magnifies the already troubling wild card of the goody huts. Randomness sucks in a strategy game when it gives a positive boost to one of the players. Why? Because it is unfair - it rewards luck over skill. Negative hits are better (though not perfect), because if one player takes a negative hit, all the other players are still uneffected, so they continue to balance each other. Luck isn't really being rewarded over skill in that case because everybody but one person benefits from the event, skill or no skill. So while, it is unfair to the unlucky person, it isn't unfair to everybody else.
If goody huts had an equal balance of good and bad things in them all of this would even out but there is a reason we don't call them chaos huts: they contain a disproportionate amount of good stuff. The Expansionist civ ability makes this even more skewed and thus rewards luck over skill even more.
Which really sucks in a strategy game.
IMHO, of course.
What do you think?
The extra scout is a pretty lame bonus when compared to others. An extra scout equals a few turns of added production at one city and a few turns of added exploration. Almost all the other effects give a game lasting bonus which will eventually outstrip that production bonus (eg. the religious nations will get way more bonus production after they've built religious buildings in a few cities). And though the few extra turns of exploration does give a head start on finding huts, in my experience who finds the most huts is far more dependant on being lucky with the random placement of the huts than on having a few turns of extra searching.
As for better goodies, that sounds great but it just magnifies the already troubling wild card of the goody huts. Randomness sucks in a strategy game when it gives a positive boost to one of the players. Why? Because it is unfair - it rewards luck over skill. Negative hits are better (though not perfect), because if one player takes a negative hit, all the other players are still uneffected, so they continue to balance each other. Luck isn't really being rewarded over skill in that case because everybody but one person benefits from the event, skill or no skill. So while, it is unfair to the unlucky person, it isn't unfair to everybody else.
If goody huts had an equal balance of good and bad things in them all of this would even out but there is a reason we don't call them chaos huts: they contain a disproportionate amount of good stuff. The Expansionist civ ability makes this even more skewed and thus rewards luck over skill even more.
Which really sucks in a strategy game.
IMHO, of course.
What do you think?
Comment