BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Explicit author .

From the beginning, it was clear that the strategy for beating Hellfire would be to either (a)Kill her in two rounds or (b)Kill in three rounds after surviving two hits.  Pumping muscle only was the best way to accomplish either, as unlike the other stats it allows one to make a strong attack several turns in a row.

(And it looks like the rules for passing the mantle have been removed from the Ruleset at some point.  Looks like I’m stuck actually running a dynasty.)

From the fifth paragraph of rule 1.9 “Victory and Ascension”:

“(That Breeder may pass this role to another Breeder at this point, if he wishes.)”

Next time I get a dynasty I’m picking something that might last abit longer lol

Darknight:I’m considering running a ‘what if’ dynasty that does Dragons again, but with a different flavor and fighting style and possibly using the ‘league’ victory condition I had imposed.

eh, i got close to the month min lol

Congratulations and well played.

Good to see a dynasty ended by a skillful in-game win. I’d be up for a similar dynasty with a fresh theme.

Congrats, Bucky.

Looking back, I think we can take two lessons from this Dynasty:

1: The more numbers a single proposal contains, the less likely anyone is going to read it all.

Moves, Items, and Training all were majorly unbalanced. Dragon Claw does the same average damage as Dragon Flame right out of the box. I don’t think anyone here actually could keep track of every single side effect of Training without needing to check the rules, which may be why Weight Training’s daily +3 muscles slipped through. Let’s not even get started on items.

2: Daily increases suck.

Most Dynasties end up with at least one rule where you increase your shinies or your nose length or walrus’ weight or whatever as a daily action. Cookies here were weekly, which is better, but unless you trained every day you wouldn’t have a chance against someone who did, i.e. Bucky or I. This may be a major cause of most Dynastic-end apathy. There’s only a few players in every Dynasty that care enough to post something in the GNDT every day, and everyone else may as well idle.

As for the future, I have two ideas:

A. This Dynasty, but better. Theme it with warring barbarian clans, and distribute the players among five. Instead of training, you’d spar with members of your own clan and get experience to spend on increased stats. Once you feel you’re strong enough, you can go over to kill other clan’s members. We could even add rules for large-scale battles. When there’s only one clan left alive, that clan’s leader wins. Of course, there’s going to be plenty of scheming over who the final leader will be…

2: Romance of the Three Dynasties. This was what the next Dynasty was going to be if I won, and I’d still be willing to take the mantle for it. A procedural Dynasty based on three warring sub-dynasties. Each would have its own Emperor and ruleset that only applies to its members. There’d also be territories of some sort, and if you get conquered by another Dynasty, you become one of their members. Better hope that their ruleset recognizes that expensive Genetic-Dino-Ballistics facility that you bought a turn ago…

I like the sound of idea 2, Rodney.

@Rodney: I think it says quite a bit that I do know pretty much every training and attack effect off the top of my head.  The Weight Training isn’t even the worst offender; a Red doing Aerobics gains Flame at the same rate while also building Muscle, and a Black doing Power Training has over 1.5 times the total stat growth of a normal training session. 

I personally blame the shallow combat mechanics for the degenerate training strategies.  An inherent flaw in the system is that there’s always a clear ‘best move’; you can get away with pumping only Muscle or Wings if you restrict yourself to only Muscle- or Wing-based attacks.

@Bucky: You did end up the being the one who won the Dynasty, so yeah. Quite a bit said.

Honestly, broken and unbalanced rules are the fault of the voters. It’s easy to just skim a proposal to see if it looks cool, and press FOR if it does, but then we end up with a broken, unbalanced, ruleset. You can’t count on other players to read and think about it for you, because if they /do/ read it and it’s beneficial to them, they aren’t going to go tell you that.

If we’re going with a Dynasty like this next, let’s see if we can add moves that make over-specialization weak: i.e. a judo throw move that does more damage to enemies with more muscle. And/or, in a team based Dynasty, we could encourage team diversity: i.e. one player might be Swordy McSwordface, another heals him, another attempts to steal the other team’s weapons, stuff like that.

@Rodney:  What I have in mind is using a double-blind attack system.  A fight will have a third-party “referee” and each party sends the referee their move.  Each move will have one other move that nullifies it completely a la Rock-Paper-Scissors.  So if you only pump you Rock stat, you’ll end up getting Papered to death by a balanced build.

This has passed.  Would some Admin please mark it to reflect this?