Counters that should be in the game to help balance out Pop Kill and Underwater nation banning. Ideas?

[Tanaka]

Growth 4 should terraform wastelands back to life (first plains then to forests)

Heat 4 should terraform (dry up) water provinces to wastelands. (Turns to beach/desert)

Any other ideas?

[Sombre]

Does growth not convert wastelands eventually?

[freek_o_nature]

Originally posted by Sombre:

Does growth not convert wastelands eventually?

Nyet: Growth makes plains into forests or farms (with Order) and farms into forests (and seas into kelp forests!), Death makes forests and farms into plains and plains into wastelands (manual p. 87). There's no coming back from wastelands, unfortunately. Plus, nothing seems to work much on highlands or mountains either way (though it makes sense as to why).

EDIT: TERRAFORMING RULES AND NEEDS TO BE EXPANDED (a little)

[Ddraig Lleuad]

Popkill hardly needs balancing, to be honest. Popkill nations aren't actually strong, they're just annoying to fight - quite a lot of the time it's their relative weakness that lets them survive as long as they do. If they were strong, people would gang up on them on the basis that, hey it sucks but ya gotta do it. But as is, they can play the, "sure, you can kill me, but you can kill me later too, and the rewards for doing it now will suck while your other enemies fight more rewarding wars." card.

[Tanaka]

Originally posted by Sombre:

Does growth not convert wastelands eventually?

It does not.

[Bumc]

Honestly in context of Dominions it makes sense that the god wars will cause some permanent damage to the planet.

That being said, a spell or an event that could transform wasteland back into something inhabitable would be welcome.

[Tanaka]

Originally posted by Bumc:

Honestly in context of Dominions it makes sense that the god wars will cause some permanent damage to the planet.

That being said, a spell or an event that could transform wasteland back into something inhabitable would be welcome.

Spell terraforming would be too quick and easy unless it was late stage. I really like the way scales slowly change terrain as you conquer back and forth. I also like the way it is a part of pretender choice.

[ExasperatedCultist]

Provinces becoming wastelands is not a major factor in the game design problems with popkill nations, nor would heat 3 nations slowly shrinking the sea every summer fix underwater.

[Emphyrio]

Originally posted by Bumc:

Honestly in context of Dominions it makes sense that the god wars will cause some permanent damage to the planet.

honestly wish that the damage in general was more severe and permanent, other than popkill dominion which is very rapid compared to everything else.

[Bumc]

Originally posted by Emphyrio:

Originally posted by Bumc:

Honestly in context of Dominions it makes sense that the god wars will cause some permanent damage to the planet.

honestly wish that the damage in general was more severe and permanent, other than popkill dominion which is very rapid compared to everything else.

You can lean even farther into this, similar to how CoE does it.
Have ash fields and shadow forests instead of wastelands for popkill transformations, have permafrost cover extreme cold territories and lava lakes run inside extremely hot caves.

Then you can have those sometimes come with new gem sites and watch players quickly turn their planets into uninhabitable mess.

[Selgeron]

I am very disappointed that water nations can spend 100 W gems to sink a province into the water, but fire nations can't spend 100 F gems to boil a water province into a wasteland.

[Draken]

To be fair, boiling a water province into a wasteland doesn't make much sense unless you are talking about a lake. Else you would have to boild away all of the ocean. And even then that lake has somewhere water flows in, which doesn't stop just because you boil away the existing water.

Even boiling away a lake would require a lot of heat.

Raising the land out of a not deep ocean province makes more sense.

And as usual, it's a lot more difficult to destroy than to create. If you have a desert, it's a lot harder to turn that back into fertile soil. The other way around is very easy. Just look up desertification. So it makes sense that it's currently a one way street.

It also matches with Illwinters design philosophy that things get worse, but rarely better.

[freek_o_nature]

Originally posted by Tanaka:

Spell terraforming would be too quick and easy unless it was late stage. I really like the way scales slowly change terrain as you conquer back and forth. I also like the way it is a part of pretender choice.

Big agree: having Dominion scales slowly alter the face of the world is just a super neat immersion thing that adds a lot of awesome flavour, in my opinion. At the moment, I have only two wishes: one, that the system was a little more broad and encompassed a bit more option, e.g., maybe Turmoil/Order for earthquakes and seismic events that can do things with highlands and mountains, or Productivity/Sloth creating transitions between farmlands and forests in terms of people working the land or not; and two, that there were no dead ends like wastelands currently are, because:

Originally posted by Draken:

[...]Illwinters design philosophy that things get worse, but rarely better.

I appreciate this, and I've accepted that a reliable and meaningful way of restoring population to a dead province is unlikely to ever appear in the game, but making wastelands a total dead end just feels like insult to injury. Wastes should be able to slowly change into something else, too, even if they can't go back the way they came: maybe a plains with Death scales becomes a wasteland and can't go back to being a forest with Growth, but maybe it could become a highland with Turmoil through crazy geological upheaval, or maybe even a mountain with Turmoil and Magic; I imagine a big enough earthquake in a world deeply suffused with magic would be a pretty spectacular event!

[powerfinder]

Some thoughts:
- A water/nature ritual that transforms the desert into plains. In the real world, desertification is reversible (although it's difficult), so powerful magic may well be capable of it. Maybe not in 1 month, but in 3-6?
- A fire ritual that drains dominion-induced swamps (if dominion of C'tis is expelled). Again, maybe not immediately, but in 3-6 months?
- An ability or ritual that allows you to pay money to peasants in an overpopulated province so that they move to a neighboring sparsely populated area. I don't know if this difficult to do with modding.

Of course, it is possible to come up with as many cool terraforming spells as you want, but regarding the problem of deserts and wetlands, these are the simplest ideas that come to mind.

[Tanaka]

Originally posted by ExasperatedCultist:

Provinces becoming wastelands is not a major factor in the game design problems with popkill nations, nor would heat 3 nations slowly shrinking the sea every summer fix underwater.

If that is not a major factor in why pop kill nations get banned could you expand further what is? Or if water nations being protected from invasion by being underwater is not a major factor why water nations are banned then what is?

[freek_o_nature]

Originally posted by Tanaka:

If that is not a major factor in why pop kill nations get banned could you expand further what is?

All the taxpayers being dead? '^_^

Originally posted by powerfinder:

- An ability or ritual that allows you to pay money to peasants in an overpopulated province so that they move to a neighboring sparsely populated area. I don't know if this difficult to do with modding.

Actually, this would be kinda neat, and might make a good Construction spell, since there aren't many that aren't Earth and aren't summons. Fire might be a good path for that, since it's tied to both money (alchemy) and passion; a fire ritual that allows you to trade a bunch of gold and/or gems in order to move population from the caster's province into a targetted province, even if it's restricted to a neighbouring province, would be pretty cool! Spirit of adventure! Manifest destiny! Besides, if they'll move into the Horror-filled Nexus because their farm was overrun with trees, I'm sure they can be convinced to move to a wasteland in exchange for a big pile of gold.