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[Frumple]

I'd kinda' like to keep going and see what sort of nuisance I can make of myself (got six astral mages this turn, and only lost three replaceable ones in the process!), but I'm not exactly heavily invested in continuing to play, either. I've honestly been half-arsing it roughly from the point Al rebuffed attempts to group up the south and jump the north. Probably earlier, really.

That said, that is three of the five remaining players* more or less calling it quits, sooo...

*Fairig? What fairig?

[E. Albright]

Slander! Slander, I tell you!

(I was going to suggest the same thing, actually. It really doesn't seem winnable by anyone but our esteemed front-runner, strictly judging by the goat entrails that I can actually see. Ofc, my opinion holds little weight. I've enjoyed making a nuisance of myself and basically staying alive wholly by virtue of a skewed cost-benefit ratio discouraging anyone from going to the bother of killing me off, but yeah, Fairig, what Fairig indeed...)

[E. Albright]

Barring outraged protests from Boksi, I'll axe the game tomorrow night. It was fun, albeit wildly imbalanced. As was pretty much expected, ofc.

I would as always appreciate balance feedback on NG, as it's quite the PITA to even roughly balance owing to its randomness, but one must try...

[AlStar]

My only thought would be that it seems like sacred giants - especially those with magic weapons and/or berserk need a major price spike and/or a reduction in numbers recruitable. It's currently far too easy to throw a nature bless on them and just wreck face.

The fact that the sacred giants in this game (beyond whatever handy extras they might've rolled) all also had the ability to sail, go underwater, plus 50% nightvision? Not cool.

If they were... I dunno? 150-200 gold each, or were limited to 1-2 recruit/turn? It might help us poor non-giants, anyway.

Just my opinion as one of the have-nots.

[E. Albright]

Comparing the basestats of Fomorians to most other giants, it really seems nuts for them to have a base cost of 60, but that's what it is because of the basegame. I'm going to push the base cost up to 90g as a starting measure (so a 50% increase, akin to full-blood Rephaim), and will continue to weigh the possibility of them getting mandatory-but-random "giant penalties" (voracious appetite, elemental vulnerabilities, popkill, unrest, etc.)

[EnigmaticHat]

Abeig felt... I don't know.  I came in with this whole list of advantages that I had, but as it turns out, air magic just doesn't do shit against sacred giants.  Even the dreaded Rain of Stones and Fog Warriors were merely ok.  Seeking Arrow only did anything because BFEL committed a classic newbie error (one commander per army).

I really hit my peak with my blazingly fast early expansion and research, everything else was just downhill from there.

Also, I expected to bring death magic to bear a long time ago, but as it turns out the specific mage I was recruiting couldn't random double death    That was my other, very similar mage type.

[Frumple]

Really, the weirdest thing to me about those sacred giants, in this game, was that... none of the sacred giant people really did anything with them (from what I could see, anyway). Boksi was the most aggressive sacred user I noticed, and they staled like 1/10th of their turns. Don't think ever really attacked anyone except Al, either. EA got jumped by pigeons, BFEL and Iwa just seemed to somehow die off while playing in the water or somethin', it was ruddy weird. I was seriously expecting giants to come stomping over the everything for probably the first thirty turns or so, but it never seemed to manifest.

Though re: Giants and costing, while it'd probably be (much) easier to bump their price/add penalties, what I'd probably like to see more is doing something to the little people. Make it so tiny folk in a world of sacred giants actually have something that can gold-for-gold match the blighters. Maybe do something really silly and have the generation process check (probably near the end of the process) for size>own!sacred and dole out a point or ten of giant killer for every size category they're lacking (maybe multiplied by the percentage of genned nations that have a giant sacred?), or something to similar effect. A post-gen check for % of genned nations that have sacred giants, and then adding more stuff to everyone else's sacreds based on how prevalent they are, that kind of thing. Think I said it somewhere else, it wasn't really the giants or the formorians, it was just how many people had the things that was the major problem -- didn't have that kind of meta balance the base game has, where a giant nation is more or less all alone.

[Il Palazzo]

I've only got to the state I'm in because I was left alone for long enough to research Enslave Mind, at which point all the scary giants in the world became a non-issue.

[E. Albright]

I got screwed by geography and economics. I expanded vigorously right up until I started getting rolled back, which is probably the main reason Frumple never felt threatened - I always had indies to beat up, so there was no need to get aggressive and risk having the top-tier giants my the north of me stomp all over my decidedly mid-tier giants. I suppose I could have conspired with Boksi to collectively steamroll Frumple, but the easy expansion made it feel unnecessary. The problem was that the expansion was into wastelands, mountains, and caves, and my income was anemic at best. Combine that with my cap-only sacreds that I simply had to build constantly or permanently miss out on production opportunities (frankly, while very nice troops, my giants were a trap), and I had very sluggish development of my crappy holdings. I was playing catch-up on research the whole game, and while I did have high plans to fix that with my massive ruby reserve, I never got the chance owing to AlStar's slightly-inferior-but-far-more-numerous-and-better-supported pigeons which descended on my barren wastes and desolate caves like a plague of locusts. The rest is of course a history of petty spite, vindictive pique, and conniving diplomacy...

[Il Palazzo]

Anyhow, thanks everybody for participating. It was crazy unbalanced, but fun. I almost feel like another one.
Almost.

[E. Albright]

Think I said it somewhere else, it wasn't really the giants or the formorians, it was just how many people had the things that was the major problem -- didn't have that kind of meta balance the base game has, where a giant nation is more or less all alone.

One problem with this was that at the time in EA, Fomorians were the second most likely race after generic humans - basechance 0.6 vs. 1 or 1.25, I wanna say, whereas other "major" races were 0.3-0.5, and minors were 0.1-0.2, They have since been reduced to a more reasonable 0.3/0.1/0.05 EA/MA/LA spread.

[EuchreJack]

I've only got to the state I'm in because I was left alone for long enough to research Enslave Mind, at which point all the scary giants in the world became a non-issue.

So they all underestimated you,
...they thought you were harmless
...and then you won.

I suddenly feel vindicated for vilifying you in all those Dom3 games we fought.  Yay!

[Boksi]

I'm a bit miffed that it's over like this, but to be honest my only plan at this point was 'alchemize all my gems into death gems and cast burden of time'. It was a gamble but I figured if I got it up and it didn't get dispelled immediately, it'd do a number on Palazzo's human mages and wouldn't be quite as devastating to my own mage corps.

[E. Albright]

Oh geez. You should have shared your plan with me - I'd've gladly thrown my 450 gem reserve (which only would have translated to 260 amethyst, but still) into such a gloriously petty and spiteful plan...

[EnigmaticHat]

*raises hand* I had 180 at one point.