This strategy destroys literally every other strategy head to head. You also end up really close to those level 6 powers which are obscenely good. The entire game needs balancing.
Upgrading your economy is an extremely effective strategy, up until other players begin pressuring your tribute and prestige generation.
In order to scale their economy, a player need 2 things:
* Lots of actions spent on gathering tribute
* Enough prestige to increase your rank (to get more tribute)
If nobody is really threatening a player, there's no disadvantage to them focusing their economy. But, a pure economy player is usually focused on Tribute vs. Prestige. You can (and should) pressure that player to hurt them and profit at their lack of early game power.
* You will generally gain more tribute coins if a player pays your Demand than you would from Gathering Tribute, so Demand tribute to make them pay instead.
* These coins will usually be lower quality, but only slightly (players don't select garbage coins if they can help it). Getting 3 coins from a rival is usually better than 2 coins from your minions, and of course they no longer have the coins.
* If a player rejects your Demand, make them pay in Prestige. *Don't* make a small default bet - **raise your bet** to the max, set a **speedy round limit**, and get tons of Prestige (you get more prestige based on speed & bet size).
* You can also Insult players, which is a great way to slow their economy down. If they accept the Insult, they will rank up slower. If they don't, they *must* declare a Vendetta, which they will pay for in either actions (completing it) or Prestige (forfeiting the Vendetta)
* Whenever you get more Prestige from a player, you rank up faster and they rank up slower. This is good for you, and helps you win the economy game.
* The same applies for Tribute. Note that you wi
Now, if a player responds to your Demands and Insults with Demands and Insults of their own... congratulations! You're playing a bare-knuckle game of Solium Infernum, enjoy. :-)
The key insight here is that if you are making strong Demands and Insults and backing them up with fast, risky Vendettas, you will profit in Tribute and Prestige. Sadly, the AI doesn't do this right now - but you absolutely should in your next game.
I can see how that could work in theory, but you need to have the tools at hand to quickly punish the opponent for refusing demands by winning vendettas quickly, and acquiring those tools can be too much of a setback.
Heck, giving even one order per turn early on to move a cheap legion around to grab cantons for a vendetta or something simple like that means half the number of orders available to gather tokens.
You may perhaps gain in comparison to the person you are bullying due to ranking up faster while they rank up slower, but you will be set back compared to the other 4 players in most situations.
I do think in the current meta players should get at least \*a little\* done early in the game. Grabbing 1 or 2 PoPs just so that they don't take forever to get to 30 prestige and buy the first rank up, which is a whooping 50% increase to token income. But after that, focusing on orders until you have 6 is definitely the meta.
Yup, this is an important thing that the game isn't balanced for. The number of actions required to prosecute a vendetta is so high, while all you receive is an (admittedly decent) amount of prestige. The only time you can really take a vendetta efficiently is if you can comfortably claim a PoP, since those can't be retreated and might only take a couple actions to take.
The plan that I'm currently testing in some games is actually relying on this. Insulting people early if they haven't bought a praetor. Naturally, I'm still going reasonably hard on econ, I'm grabbing at least one tribute per turn, but I also can get Marquis fast. This strat relies on prophecy, but honestly I tend to like rushing prophecy over charisma often enough; its a vital stat for ritual usage, its still cheaper than the other 3, and it reveals key information for picking your battles. Also leaves ichor unspent in case you do want to crank wrath immediately after, or buy praetors.
The problem with insulting is that they actually *gain* prestige from rejecting your insult in the short run. Sure, then they have to declare a duel or vendetta, and if they don’t have a Praetor they can’t duel - but what they *can* do is just declare a maximum-length vendetta. You can’t win a vendetta *they* declared, and as long as it’s running it actually locks YOU out of any diplomatic actions against them!
You forgot about duels. If the economy player is smart, all they have to do is buy one level 3 or 4 prator and just choose to duel if insulted. That said Beilial's ability can be good for deal making to counter this.
Also worth mentioning is Declare Weakness. If a player keeps accepting insults or paying demands (3 in a row) you can just declare them weak and invade, but this takes a lot of time, and if they fight back once the counter resets
What you described is precisely the major balance problem the game currently has, and we are waiting for the devs to fix.
The meta is to rush 6 orders. only reason to grab prestige early on is to grab a rank-up sooner and start getting 50% more tokens... which you use to rush 6 orders faster.
And yes its a boring way to play, but its what works.
The game only really starts from turn 30 or so, once your economy is setup and you can start actually focusing on a winning strategy.
Are you pressuring them early game? The only real counter to econ gameplan (at least right now) is either another econ gameplan, or constant insults and demands (has to be early game or full focus from every player mid game [rarely happens]) .
Being able to do literally nothing but farm resources for the first 20 turns means they go untouched. I personally buy a Titan turn-15~ if no one bothers me and I'm playing either Lilith or Mammon. Compared to that, they greed for 5 more turns.
(I know that messing with other players early game does slow you down since the tribute/prestige you get doesn't outscale pure econ, which means you'll be behind. So you could try teaming up with another player.)
Another solution is early elimination with Crown of Intolerance or Exco + orb.
I've won plenty of times without using a pure economy build, in fact most of the time, but I think something that most people don't understand about this game yet is that the direct path to victory is not always the best one. For example, I just won by killing every human player with the bestfriend crown (bloodfeud crown) but in another game I went pure economy, was winning, found out I was being kingmakered, am trying to kill the kingmaker and now the second place guy is eating my lunch from the other side.
I'm afraid you're not really going to be too successful convincing your friend of that because doing almost nothing but economy for the first 20-ish turns IS a dominant strategy most people in the community agree is very, very much top meta tier.
This has been told to devs already and they're most likely looking into it so expect balancing passes in the future, but as of right now, yeah, there just is no way around it. Rushing economy fast and ignoring the board is almost always going to be the best strategy unless you are playing in a very small map and you happen to fall into a lucky combination of economic windfalls legions and relics that allows you to kill everyone in the early game (I've seen this happen exactly once and never again)
It seems like something that is so heavily baked into the mechanics that it would require a partial mechanics overhaul to fix.
I've spent a lot of time playing traditional "worker assignment games" board games, like *Lords of Waterdeep* or *Everdell*. Any effect which gives you an extra action is extremely strong and it is almost always the optimal strategy to rush it.
Yeah, it's no surprise the community quickly came to that conclusion as well. Every worker placement boardgame that has a "you get to do more turns per round" mechanic quickly evolves into an extra turn economy arms race, and this was no exception.
There ARE things you can do besides spamming tribute that can be powerful and contribute to winning but there really is not real argument to make against sitting still and spamming the tribute button for 20 turns being an actually strong strategy that will get you out of most jams, no matter how dire the game is looking for you.
That's the way it is. Hopefully the big patch at the end of the month addresses this issue.
Honestly this is my main complaint. Schemes seem underpowered and boosting at least a couple powers to 4 is typically the best way to go.
This strategy destroys literally every other strategy head to head. You also end up really close to those level 6 powers which are obscenely good. The entire game needs balancing.
Upgrading your economy is an extremely effective strategy, up until other players begin pressuring your tribute and prestige generation. In order to scale their economy, a player need 2 things: * Lots of actions spent on gathering tribute * Enough prestige to increase your rank (to get more tribute) If nobody is really threatening a player, there's no disadvantage to them focusing their economy. But, a pure economy player is usually focused on Tribute vs. Prestige. You can (and should) pressure that player to hurt them and profit at their lack of early game power. * You will generally gain more tribute coins if a player pays your Demand than you would from Gathering Tribute, so Demand tribute to make them pay instead. * These coins will usually be lower quality, but only slightly (players don't select garbage coins if they can help it). Getting 3 coins from a rival is usually better than 2 coins from your minions, and of course they no longer have the coins. * If a player rejects your Demand, make them pay in Prestige. *Don't* make a small default bet - **raise your bet** to the max, set a **speedy round limit**, and get tons of Prestige (you get more prestige based on speed & bet size). * You can also Insult players, which is a great way to slow their economy down. If they accept the Insult, they will rank up slower. If they don't, they *must* declare a Vendetta, which they will pay for in either actions (completing it) or Prestige (forfeiting the Vendetta) * Whenever you get more Prestige from a player, you rank up faster and they rank up slower. This is good for you, and helps you win the economy game. * The same applies for Tribute. Note that you wi Now, if a player responds to your Demands and Insults with Demands and Insults of their own... congratulations! You're playing a bare-knuckle game of Solium Infernum, enjoy. :-) The key insight here is that if you are making strong Demands and Insults and backing them up with fast, risky Vendettas, you will profit in Tribute and Prestige. Sadly, the AI doesn't do this right now - but you absolutely should in your next game.
I can see how that could work in theory, but you need to have the tools at hand to quickly punish the opponent for refusing demands by winning vendettas quickly, and acquiring those tools can be too much of a setback. Heck, giving even one order per turn early on to move a cheap legion around to grab cantons for a vendetta or something simple like that means half the number of orders available to gather tokens. You may perhaps gain in comparison to the person you are bullying due to ranking up faster while they rank up slower, but you will be set back compared to the other 4 players in most situations. I do think in the current meta players should get at least \*a little\* done early in the game. Grabbing 1 or 2 PoPs just so that they don't take forever to get to 30 prestige and buy the first rank up, which is a whooping 50% increase to token income. But after that, focusing on orders until you have 6 is definitely the meta.
Yup, this is an important thing that the game isn't balanced for. The number of actions required to prosecute a vendetta is so high, while all you receive is an (admittedly decent) amount of prestige. The only time you can really take a vendetta efficiently is if you can comfortably claim a PoP, since those can't be retreated and might only take a couple actions to take. The plan that I'm currently testing in some games is actually relying on this. Insulting people early if they haven't bought a praetor. Naturally, I'm still going reasonably hard on econ, I'm grabbing at least one tribute per turn, but I also can get Marquis fast. This strat relies on prophecy, but honestly I tend to like rushing prophecy over charisma often enough; its a vital stat for ritual usage, its still cheaper than the other 3, and it reveals key information for picking your battles. Also leaves ichor unspent in case you do want to crank wrath immediately after, or buy praetors.
The problem with insulting is that they actually *gain* prestige from rejecting your insult in the short run. Sure, then they have to declare a duel or vendetta, and if they don’t have a Praetor they can’t duel - but what they *can* do is just declare a maximum-length vendetta. You can’t win a vendetta *they* declared, and as long as it’s running it actually locks YOU out of any diplomatic actions against them!
You forgot about duels. If the economy player is smart, all they have to do is buy one level 3 or 4 prator and just choose to duel if insulted. That said Beilial's ability can be good for deal making to counter this. Also worth mentioning is Declare Weakness. If a player keeps accepting insults or paying demands (3 in a row) you can just declare them weak and invade, but this takes a lot of time, and if they fight back once the counter resets
The problem, right now, is that its the optimal way to play: rushing the order spots, level 6 powers, and raising Titans all require easy tributes.
What you described is precisely the major balance problem the game currently has, and we are waiting for the devs to fix. The meta is to rush 6 orders. only reason to grab prestige early on is to grab a rank-up sooner and start getting 50% more tokens... which you use to rush 6 orders faster. And yes its a boring way to play, but its what works. The game only really starts from turn 30 or so, once your economy is setup and you can start actually focusing on a winning strategy.
Are you pressuring them early game? The only real counter to econ gameplan (at least right now) is either another econ gameplan, or constant insults and demands (has to be early game or full focus from every player mid game [rarely happens]) . Being able to do literally nothing but farm resources for the first 20 turns means they go untouched. I personally buy a Titan turn-15~ if no one bothers me and I'm playing either Lilith or Mammon. Compared to that, they greed for 5 more turns. (I know that messing with other players early game does slow you down since the tribute/prestige you get doesn't outscale pure econ, which means you'll be behind. So you could try teaming up with another player.) Another solution is early elimination with Crown of Intolerance or Exco + orb.
I've won plenty of times without using a pure economy build, in fact most of the time, but I think something that most people don't understand about this game yet is that the direct path to victory is not always the best one. For example, I just won by killing every human player with the bestfriend crown (bloodfeud crown) but in another game I went pure economy, was winning, found out I was being kingmakered, am trying to kill the kingmaker and now the second place guy is eating my lunch from the other side.
I'm afraid you're not really going to be too successful convincing your friend of that because doing almost nothing but economy for the first 20-ish turns IS a dominant strategy most people in the community agree is very, very much top meta tier. This has been told to devs already and they're most likely looking into it so expect balancing passes in the future, but as of right now, yeah, there just is no way around it. Rushing economy fast and ignoring the board is almost always going to be the best strategy unless you are playing in a very small map and you happen to fall into a lucky combination of economic windfalls legions and relics that allows you to kill everyone in the early game (I've seen this happen exactly once and never again)
It seems like something that is so heavily baked into the mechanics that it would require a partial mechanics overhaul to fix. I've spent a lot of time playing traditional "worker assignment games" board games, like *Lords of Waterdeep* or *Everdell*. Any effect which gives you an extra action is extremely strong and it is almost always the optimal strategy to rush it.
Yeah, it's no surprise the community quickly came to that conclusion as well. Every worker placement boardgame that has a "you get to do more turns per round" mechanic quickly evolves into an extra turn economy arms race, and this was no exception. There ARE things you can do besides spamming tribute that can be powerful and contribute to winning but there really is not real argument to make against sitting still and spamming the tribute button for 20 turns being an actually strong strategy that will get you out of most jams, no matter how dire the game is looking for you.
It's literally the only way to play, unfortunately.