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[Mindmaker]

High Dom is always a treat if you have the spare points, especially since the current meta has everybody take a high one.
High scales benefit from high dom, since they spread faster (or at all, since other players will be spreading dom too).

Took a heat scale since my worst enemies in this game will be cold oriented.

[tompliss]

On the other hand, if your cold-oriented neighbours are Atlantis, it may favor them :
They're all amphibious and can attack through a river, while your heat scale prevents it from freezing.

[Shadowlord]

Or Agartha. (Although I'm unfamiliar with LA Agartha, maybe they don't have all the amphibious units?)

(Apparently only their summons are amphibious.)

[E. Albright]

Without considering summons, the concerns for river-crossers in the LA are Atlantis, R'lyeh, Lemuria, Ragha, Caelam, and to a much lesser degree, Mictlan and Jomon.

[chaoticag]

Well, in this case, he already knows the worst nations he'll be up against would be cold nations. Presumably, that means he'd know the nations he's going to fight.

[Delta Foxtrot]

Dom8 may be a bit high (expensive, but no awe). I don't know whether you want to recruit your sacred troops, but dom 6-7 may not be a bad option (even if it depends on your potential neighbours), and will get you some more points for scales.
Same thing about the temp scale (neighbors and stuff).

Saving on dominion to get better scales can be a bit backwards, since without good dominion you won't spread those scales in the first place. It's a fine balance to be sure, but treating dominion as nothing but sacred-troops-per-turn-stat might not be the best way to go about it, if I'm reading you correctly.

I don't know how well (or badly) minor misfortune and drain combine, but I would generally advice at least misfortune-1 if you take order-3. Anecdotal as it is, I've never had a devastating event with O3M1 setup. But seeing how you're Man and can take freebie drain, you might not need the points (or want to risk misfortune & drain).

[Frumple]

Ehh, burning domain to get better scales isn't the worst of ideas if those scales are providing enough extra gold to allow you to build enough temples to artificially raise your domain. High starting dominion is, well, an early game issue, at least so far as I understand it. S'meant to keep you from getting domkilled before you can get temples out, or give you enough early sacred production you can expand. God awe if you're really pushing it, but that seems less prevalent.

Personally, I'd be recommending high (over 5-7) starting dominion if and only if you expect early game issues or a later inability to keep your temples intact. Otherwise, put those points into scales and build temples. Then you get better scales and high dom and delicious dominion push and more places to recruit priests or whatever. As opposed to just high dom and less delicious dominion push.

[E. Albright]

I don't know how well (or badly) minor misfortune and drain combine, but I would generally advice at least misfortune-1 if you take order-3. Anecdotal as it is, I've never had a devastating event with O3M1 setup. But seeing how you're Man and can take freebie drain, you might not need the points (or want to risk misfortune & drain).

I don't think Mis-1 is by itself going to get you the worst Drain events. In fact, IIRC, the worst Drain events require Drain 3. However, I'd be very wary of assertions that taking Order means you should take Mis. Higher Order makes Mis less painful, and thus makes it more viable to take, but there are some pretty nice Order events (most notably, free forts) that you'll rarely see if you rotely combine the two.

[Frumple]

Gwerble. Gemless games on larger maps... don't work so well. Once the AI gets going and you start getting fights that regularly include 30+ troll kings or whatev', turns... start taking a while. A fight with sixty or seventy casters in it, most of them probably spamming summoning spells... each battle turn has been taking upwards a full minute. And the fights happily go 60+ turns.

Part of me half wants to start an MP game of it, just so llamaserver can process the turns instead of me

Humans on all ends would just get ridiculous, though, at least if they're all intent on the obvious abuses. Especially once you start getting access to casters that can summon themselves, heh. Armies made up of literally hundreds of commanders, almost all of them casters, on each side, werble. Assuming it can get that high, anyway.

Still. Fun to watch an entire battlefield not-so-slowly filled up with insects. Or elementals. Or undead. Like. Not metaphorically, either. Bugs scragging everywhere. S'great. Just painfully slow.

[Karlito]

Gemless... as in, no spell costs gems to cast? Combat spells and rituals? What about constructions?

[Frumple]

It's further back in the thread. Mostly combat spells and non-combat rituals. Doing items too would have been too much effort Also a few versions back, so some of the new stuff isn't free but eh, it was a half-arsed effort to begin with.

Though, more accurately, no spells cost fatigue to cast, which is part of what makes the combat ridiculous. Dunno if the mod functionality has decoupled fatigue from gem cost since I made the mod, but it wasn't when I did. So I just set most everything's fatigue to 1 and called it a day.

... but yes, no spells cost gems to cast. Mostly. Items still cost gems, to the extent that matters when you're no longer burning gems on rituals and combat magic and can blanket the entire map with akashic knowledge. And summon geometrically growing amounts of sea/troll kings. Well... gold's an issue, with those, but eh.

[E. Albright]

Obviously, you need geometrically growing amounts of Worms That Walk. So they can Creeping Doom and have their freespawn bugs, and are immortal, and only die 1/4 of the time when you finally do kill them...

It seems like free items wouldn't be that bad. Debug Mod already does #selectitem on every item, so just do a mass find-and-replace to set costs to nothing - or if you can't, to level 1. Although at that point, gems have been reduced to nothing but alchemy...

[Frumple]

And empowerment! Fatigue/gem cost fortunately isn't pegged to caster level, so you can at least add some control there.

And I guess they'd still have that combat use where you burn excess? Can't that increase power or somethin'? Been a while since I checked the mechanics on that.

But yeah, doing that mass change is... it's annoying. And somewhat fiddly. And more effort than it was worth, at least for me. If someone else wants to crib down debug mod or somethin', I'd be cool with it. Be nice if you could decouple gem cost and forging paths, though.

[Delta Foxtrot]

I'm not sure I want to play three games at once, so I'll keep this here instead of making a new game thread over at PWYB just yet.

Would there any interest in a nationgen game in late '14/early '15? I'm not sure how many players here are into that sort of thing, so I'd be fine with just 4, but 6-8 would be nice. Not too big. I've never played one myself, but it sounds like an amusing proposition. If there's interest I'd be up for it sooner but it'd have to be suitably casual so I don't have to play it at the expense of the "serious" games I have on the background.

So yeah, just throwing this out there.

[tompliss]

What do you mean, a nationgen game ?
Using the "modmod" nationgen to generate 4 nations and have them assigned randomly to 4 players ?

I've tested nationgen a bit, a few months ago, and the nations didn't seem always balanced...