Insane Trait combos

[Grey Fox]

What have been your best, weirdest, funniest trait switches with Perpentach?

In my current game, a game where I've played for a culture win all game I've had the following switches so far:

• Kept the original traits for a long time, over 150 turns I think. So Charismatic, Arcane, Creative
• Then when I started building granaries and smokehouses all over (just after I took over all of the Clan of Embers and Kuriotates mostly by sneaking around with Loki taking over newly captured cities from my allies), it switched to Spiritual, Expansive, Arcane.
• After a while, like another 100 turns, probably less, it switched to Spiritual, Industrious, Arcane just as I was about to build Wonders on a massive scale.
• EDIT:And now they changed again at turn 357 to Charismatic, Financial and Raiders. (Financial made me able to increase culture slider 10%, and Chm and raiders has its obvious advantages military wise)

The traits have been pretty much perfect for this game!

 

[Grey Fox]

And whoever it was that came up with the idea for the mimic I love you!

Sorry for the spam!

 

[thewyrm]

This is why Perp is my favorite. I always change my goals and build queues based on my current traits.

 

[Lade]

Spiritual/Creative/aggresive is awesome

Free border exspansion for any newly conquered cities. Spiritual is just useful because its there

Organized/Financial can give you alot of gold as well

Insane can work with you, or against if depending on how lucky you are

 

[SwampCow]

Yeah I have to say they are becoming my fave civ. The designers outdid themselves on Balph civ.

 

[Fafnir13]

Now if we could just reign in the terror that is Keelyn with an army of mages, we might be able to call this civ done.

 

[Squirrelloid]

Because there aren't other inherent problems, like Mimics being far too good (seriously, the ability to poach any upgrades leads to crazy-town if you try)? Or the inherent happiness advantage the Balseraph have because they can make slave cages?

Just about everything unique to the Balseraphs is currently overpowered with no concommittant advantages for most other races to balance the scales. Either just about every other race needs an overhaul, or the Balseraphs need nerfing back into reasonableness. (And balancing mimics at present is impossible - they've got too much potential).

 

[WarKirby]

Them having 3 traits seems a bit overpowered, even if they are switching constantly, since as far as I'm aware, none of the possible traits have any downsides, only advantages. And most other civs only have 2 traits.

Maybe just two randomly switching would be better.

 

[Grey Fox]

Nah, 3 is fine. The downside is you might be stuck with a bad combo of traits for half the game. 2 would be too few I think.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

Some civs get 3 traits anyway. I tend to think that more leaders should have 3 traits, and that Perpentach should have 4 random ones that switch more often. I'd also like Insane to make the AI's opinion of other leaders change for no good reason.

 

[Grey Fox]

Yeah but you always want more of everything, don't you?

 

[Blakmane]

nothing wrong with the balphs. There's something a little broken with the summoner trait, however.

Balphs are successful because most of their tactics are easy to understand for the AI. That's no reason to nerf them.

 

[slowcar]

in my opinion the balseraph are fine. i only dislike puppets, both from a power and a micromanagement point of view.
keelyns summoning adepts/mages/archmages are three times stronger compared to other leaders, that is too much. i also think the AI does not handle the puppet stuff well - and all the possible puppets costing each round can seriously hinder the AI.

for all the other stuff, even domination-druids, i love the balseraph. they really have the unique feel i would like to have for each and every civ, together with a few others but they are the most beautiful developed one.
it is just plain fun playing them, whatever you are doing. satifies the powergamer in me when i can keep some crazy mutated freaks and upgrade them to my special troopers.

 

[WarKirby]

Nah, 3 is fine. The downside is you might be stuck with a bad combo of traits for half the game. 2 would be too few I think.

But what is a bad combo of traits? ALL traits are advantages. There are no bad ones. Just slightly less good.

Edit: Maybe except agnostic. Is it possible to get that through insane ?

 

[Grey Fox]

Like getting Expansive when you just adopted Guardian of Nature and already built granaries in every city and there are no more places to settle.
Or getting Spiritual when you have the civics you want and don't intend to switch any time soon. With no religions yet, and then switching from Spiritual once you have Temples and disciples ready.
Etc, there are probably more similar examples. Basically you can get annoying switches.

Or not getting the good trait combos. Some traits work better together, like Raiders, Aggressive and Charismatic. Or Arcane and Charismatic, or Expansive, Industrious, Charismatic, etc.

 

[someone67]

The combination charismatic, expansice and creative seems to be good for
domination victory.

for all the other stuff, even domination-druids, i love the balseraph

Sorry, but domination-druids have moved to Cevedes.

 

[Verily]

But what is a bad combo of traits? ALL traits are advantages. There are no bad ones. Just slightly less good.

Edit: Maybe except agnostic. Is it possible to get that through insane ?

No, you can only get traits that you could also get through Adaptive. Which are the traits in the original BtS plus Arcane and Summoner. (Of course, Agnostic is now a Civilization trait for the Grigori and Illians rather than a Leader trait anyway.)

Anyway, I tend to agree. There is no "bad" trait. Some combinations are overpowered (the obvious Philosophical/Industrious, extreme militancy such as Aggresive/Raiders/Charismatic, etc.), but no combination of three traits is weaker than any combination of two traits.

 

[Ringtailed]

But what is a bad combo of traits? ALL traits are advantages. There are no bad ones. Just slightly less good.

A bad combo of traits is one that doesn't complement the strategy you are using.

For example, let's say my three traits are arcane/summoner/charismatic. So I think to myself, "Wow! It's mage time, baby!" And I rush to KoTE and build mage guilds in preparation for my amazing, overpowered adepts that are going to turn into summoners almost right out of the box. Just then, my traits change to Expansive/Industrious/Spiritual. Whoops, there went the mages. Sure I can still build them but they'll be just average. On the other hand if I had been, for example, Tebryn Arbandi instead with just Arcane/Summoner I'd be better off at this particular moment. I'd still have three traits to his two, yeah, but all three of mine are 100% worthless to my mage domination plan.

This is why I feel that Insane is balanced: it is difficult to plan ahead when your traits might change at any moment.

 

[Monkeyfinger]

but no combination of three traits is weaker than any combination of two traits.

Nah. The traits aren't balanced with each other and they're not supposed to be. Leaders with especially good unique abilities are supposed to be saddled with the gimp traits, and vice versa.

While none of the traits available to insane are nerfs, some are clearly worse than others. For instance, a philosophical + industrious + arcane combo would leave perpentach better off than if he had no traits at all, but the total benefit he'd gain would be less than what he'd get from any ONE of the following traits: Aggressive, Raider, Financial, Spiritual, Creative. All 5 of those traits are better than phi/ind/arc put together. Now granted, I picked the absolute bottom-barrel chaff from the eligible traits to make my point, but it still stands. Replace one of those traits with a middling one (say arcane out, defender in) and you still have something that can be beaten by a combo of two average/good traits, since one of them is better than phi + ind and the other is at least as good as defender. Replace one of the crap traits with a top one, or two of them with average ones, and you have a combo that's hard to beat, but still possible (I.E a god pair like Agg/Fin is better than Agg/Ind/Phi which is merely very good.)

Some combinations are overpowered (the obvious Philosophical/Industrious

In unmodded Civ4 that's true, but...

With nerfed forges and a much smaller number of good wonders to chase, industrious is way worse, with less specialist slots from buildings and no equivalent of BtS's caste system until the end of the tech tree, philosophical is a ton harder to take advantage of, and with no good, cheap early wonders providing 2 GPP, the ridiculous early synergy of the 2 traits is up in smoke.

 

[Grey Fox]

If you read my example in the first post, industrious helped me a lot speed up my culture win as I was building practically every wonder that gave culture. Philosophical would have helped me enormously but I never got it (for more bards).