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[Radsoc]

I used to have the habit of playing a little bit of Dom4 MP about every other day for over a year, some of the deepest sessions of any game strategy wise, but haven't gotten around to trying Dom5 very much yet. Any thoughts on the current state of Dom5 vs Dom4?

[Kagus]

-snip-

Kangasharkman up in the corner there is looking particularly bitey today... And I love how those crab nobles (crabnobs?) turned out.

[E. Albright]

Any thoughts on the current state of Dom5 vs Dom4?

Well, there's... 8 or so new nations versus Dom4 at this point, some of which have fairly significant new mechanics involved. Jotun nations finally got their graphics and stats reworked too. It's pretty much the same old incremental grinding along - new modding and new nations periodically dropping, and it's been long enough that there's plenty on offer. But then I never needed sold on it, so my opinion is somewhat untrustworthy... ;p

(The biggest differences are still the Day-0 ones: simultaneous turns, recruitment points in addition to resources and gold, winter...)

[MCreeper]

Still not enough players for another game there?

[Cruxador]

I'm starting another AAR/Let's play blog

https://cruxador.wordpress.com/2020/05/10/skeleton-war/

This one... Well, the end of the link there should give a bit of an intro.

[E. Albright]

I've had half a mind to try to organize an MP not wholly unlike what your setup is, though my idea was a gaggle of imperial-themed NationGen nations of various races fighting coop against an OP AI Ermor. For that to happen I'd need to finish imperial humans properly and probably add imperial themes to a couple more additional races (like lizards), though.

[Cruxador]

I've had half a mind to try to organize an MP not wholly unlike what your setup is, though my idea was a gaggle of imperial-themed NationGen nations of various races fighting coop against an OP AI Ermor. For that to happen I'd need to finish imperial humans properly and probably add imperial themes to a couple more additional races (like lizards), though.

I think it would be pretty difficult to make an AI Ermor challenging. Skeleton War already negates Ermor's substantial advantage that you can likely grow early while everyone else fights more profitable wars. You can get rid of a lot of the early game weakness by giving the cap site some ridiculous number of free gems I guess, but that doesn't sound fun to fight. Honestly, playing against AI is kind of boring to begin with in terms of tactics and strategies employed, and playing against Ermor can feel like pulling teeth. Playing against AI Ermor seems like a bad combination.

[RexMundi]

Recently been getting back into gaming and dom5. I didn't see a thread organizing a game atm, last I saw was 504. Interest check for a game of dominions enhanced mod? Or nationgen? Thanks for the nationgen work btw E.

[MCreeper]

At the risk of fucking up big time, because it would be my sixth game - yes for enhanced.

[Cruxador]

My other game is slowing down a lot, so I'll register some tentative interest for a nationgen game.

[E. Albright]

I shouldn't, but as long as I'm not admining I'd do something NG (I'm willing to help set the game up, but I don't want to run it). No interest in DE, though.

We should have another patch out this weekend or next week fixing the bugs from the last one. It might also have modernized Atlantians (we found some 6-8yo bugs that necessitate some adjustments) and/or Enkidu.

[Cruxador]

By the way is it still possible to get D2 icthyid assassins? Because that happened once in a natinogen MP, and that was the most OP thing I ever saw out of nationgen. Granted, the admin should have cut that from the pool, but still.

Has there been much consideration of balance in general, or primarily focused on expansion of content?

[E. Albright]

Assassins can't get magic paths. However, #assassin can crop up on mages. That's always been a thing, and no provisions are made to exclude paths that are most readily exploitable owing to cheesy battle summons - it would be bizarre to do so when skelispam amulets are still a thing in vanilla. I suppose I could make assassin-mages be cap-only, but it would be rather odd to eliminate them entirely given the vanilla examples of mage-assassins.

Overall, my main focus has been on content. The other active contributor's main focus has been on data integrity, which has been hugely beneficial - though we have talked about functionality enhancement (e.g., UW nations). Balance is a moving target in NG - some effort is put in to curb the worst abuses and I try to make additions reasonable, but if people are playing "bring your own seed" NG it's largely futile - given time and CPU cycles, players mining for cheese will find it. The best balance for NG as it now exists is ensuring randomness to force most nations to have both good and bad points. Outright balancing nations would for starters require a very clear notion of what is and is not balanced, as well as a dedicated post-generation module that went through completed nations and enforced those standards.

[Micro102]

I tried nationgen once. Made like, 20 races and picked the ones that looked unique/good and tried a game. It was boring. Just felt like everything was watered down as nothing will ever be as specialized as a hand-made nation.

[E. Albright]

Overall, you hit the crux of where NG (or any procedural content) falls short: the tradeoff between cohesion and variety is the key one, and finding a balance can be hard. I've tried over the last several years to shift the balance in the direction of cohesion, but it's hard to produce a large number of procedural nations because at a certain point increasing cohesion requires increasing semantic depth. In this context, that goes from a mechanical problem (producing varied units) to a natural language processing problem (articulating sufficient coherent thematic and semantic relationships between the units and the nation), and that's a rather harder one.

It may be more cohesive than it was when you tried it (depending on how long it had been), but it's fair to say that it would be worthwhile for us to work on national cohesion at a greater depth than mechanical and visual thematic cohesion, even if it's meaningfully difficult to expand in that direction.