FFH PBEM3?

[Maksim]

Illyria, a relatively obscure geographical region, has a pleasant ring to it.

[Mardoc]

Well, since we can't use a trademarked name , I'd be happy to go with Illyria

[Mr. Yellow]

Illyria sounds pretty nice, can go with that as well.

[Mr. Yellow]

Ok, since apparently there's some doubts to answering gameplay related questions in the spoiler threads.....i will ask them here instead!

I'm, a bit confused about Enchanted blade vs Rust as well as how Mithril is affected to it (earlier change log showed they were immune to rust).

So,
1: Does Rust (Enthropy I) destroy mithril weapons?
2: Does Enchanted Blade prevent Rust form destroying the weapon (in addition to the rust promotion)?

[Mardoc]

I don't think we ever voted on this - are we banning Gibbon's Impersonate Leader ability? My vote is for a ban.

Here's why:

I'd prefer to.
It seems to me that the ability, if it does work, is a guaranteed '1 player kill'.
eg Me and Archduke get together to kill off an evil vampire player, let's call him 'WorthKillingBob'.
I use GG, and procede to throw all that player's units lemming-like over a cliff, while Archduke walks 1 commando (raiders) horseman into each of the undefended cities and removes them.

So shall we say that 'Impersonate Leader' is off the table?

[WarriorKnight]

I don't think we ever voted on this - are we banning Gibbon's Impersonate Leader ability? My vote is for a ban.

Agree with you, I'll vote for the ban too.

[Irgy]

I'm voting against the ban on principle of not banning things unless they've been demonstrated to be game breaking. Demonstrated meaning it's actually happened, and breaking meaning all of overpowered, has no counter and significantly affecting the way the whole game is played. I see banning as an absolute last resort.

Personally I think it sounds extremely good in theory, and definately potentially game changing, but neither demonstrated nor game breaking. Here's some arguments in its defence:

* "Actions which can be performed as the Leader of the Rival Civilization are limited". I'd have to check exactly what this means, but I can only assume it doesn't extend to deleting units.
* If you consider a 2vs2 situation (and frankly 2vs1 is already strongly to the advantage of the 2 isn't it?) then those turns of AI control could hurt the casting civ almost as much as the victim.
* You have to be in the rival city. Which in turn means you need to be at peace, and have open borders. It is therefore only usable in a vicious backstab. So when evaluating the power of it, you need to compare it to a scenario in which two players collude to viciously backstab another. It doesn't look so overpowered considering that.
* Another side effect of at peace and open borders is that it can be countered trivially - just don't open borders with someone who has Gibbon. Don't even build Gibbon if you don't want people to close their borders.

So, it has a trivial counter, and is only good in what turn out to be much narrower circumstances than PB's post would suggest. All in all not a candidate for banning, especailly not after the game has already started and plans have been made.

[Irgy]

By the way, in case people think I'm a little inconsistent, no I would indeed not have argued for banning a human Basium if I had used those same criteria. The consistency is that I prefer to stick to the defaults and designed settings unless there's a very good argument for change.

[WarriorKnight]

* "Actions which can be performed as the Leader of the Rival Civilization are limited". I'd have to check exactly what this means, but I can only assume it doesn't extend to deleting units.

Just checked, you can't delete units or conduct diplomacy with anyone (in MP, it just means you can't make any deals) although you can still declare on people.

* If you consider a 2vs2 situation (and frankly 2vs1 is already strongly to the advantage of the 2 isn't it?) then those turns of AI control could hurt the casting civ almost as much as the victim.

Depends on what state the 2v2 is in, if one player has no chance and wants to boost his ally, Impersonate leader can do an effective job at crippling one opponent.

* You have to be in the rival city. Which in turn means you need to be at peace, and have open borders. It is therefore only usable in a vicious backstab. So when evaluating the power of it, you need to compare it to a scenario in which two players collude to viciously backstab another. It doesn't look so overpowered considering that.

Gibbon can explore rival territory, which means that open borders isn't needed. Add mobility and haste (from another spellcaster), and while difficult if played correctly it's not impossible to reach one rival city.

* Another side effect of at peace and open borders is that it can be countered trivially - just don't open borders with someone who has Gibbon. Don't even build Gibbon if you don't want people to close their borders.

See above.

So, it has a trivial counter, and is only good in what turn out to be much narrower circumstances than PB's post would suggest. All in all not a candidate for banning, especailly not after the game has already started and plans have been made.

My concern is that it could be a vicious 'screw you' plan. If you don't have a chance of winning, then you don't have much to lose by having an AI control the civ. And it's very easy to wreck an empire if you have an ally willing to help you out (which there will be), just move all of their units away from their cities while said ally razes them.

While Impersonate leader does have it's downsides, a player who doesn't have a chance to win can effectively ignore them to gain the advantage of crippling any one player. Are there any other strategies that can cripple someone like this just by using one spell? I agree that's it's rather difficult to reach a rival city, but it's not impossible to do.

[Irgy]

Just checked, you can't delete units or conduct diplomacy with anyone (in MP, it just means you can't make any deals) although you can still declare on people.

Good to know. Of course I realise you can still suicide them (though it takes some setting up) or more importantly step them outside of cities.

Gibbon can explore rival territory, which means that open borders isn't needed. Add mobility and haste (from another spellcaster), and while difficult if played correctly it's not impossible to reach one rival city.

Ok, so the counter isn't as trivial as I thought, which is actually a good thing because he became as useless in MP as Loki otherwise.

You can still counter it though using two simple, if somewhat more costly methods:
1. Declaring war, which effectively completely prevents him entering your city - other than by capturing it of course which doesn't help him use the ability.
2. Making an agreement for them not to use it on you if you don't declare war. You can argue how binding these agreements are but you have to agree there's a cost in this and future games to breaking an agreement, and that balances out the power of it.

So it's not trivially countered, but it can still be countered.

Depends on what state the 2v2 is in, if one player has no chance and wants to boost his ally, Impersonate leader can do an effective job at crippling one opponent.

...

My concern is that it could be a vicious 'screw you' plan. If you don't have a chance of winning, then you don't have much to lose by having an AI control the civ. And it's very easy to wreck an empire if you have an ally willing to help you out (which there will be), just move all of their units away from their cities while said ally razes them.

While Impersonate leader does have it's downsides, a player who doesn't have a chance to win can effectively ignore them to gain the advantage of crippling any one player. Are there any other strategies that can cripple someone like this just by using one spell? I agree that's it's rather difficult to reach a rival city, but it's not impossible to do.

A lot of this sounds like exactly how it's intended though.

I'd say snowfall was one spell that did a pretty good job of crippling Bob in RBFFH2PBEM1. Not as crippling as this maybe but it did the job more than well enough. The spell "Peace" is also similar in the amount of disruption it could cause to the game in general, although it certainly won't cripple anyone. Impersonate Leader is still probably the most disruptive spell in the game, but it at least has rivals in that regard. But that's a side issue really.

Reaching a rival city before they declare on you is difficult, but far from impossible I agree.

On the whole, not needing open borders does kill some of my arguments, but there's still a counter by way of declaring war, which you can do as soon as you see the message that he's been built. The scenario you describe sounds situationally powerful rather than game breaking, which is exactly how it should be. Plus you seem to be assuming he could be used while at war in an openly 2v2 (or similar) situation, which he can't.

So I'm still voting against a ban.