Re: Conceptual Balance Mod v1.9
 

The new MA Man Woodsman are nice! You put then at the front with Fire Closest orders and they will fire their bows until the enemy closes and then use their axes... They are also useful as bodyguards for bards that will have a better survivability if discovered in enemy territory during their unrest missions...

Edit: they are also very useful as screens for longbows with the Fire Closest orders and put in front of your longbows... assign Fire Archer orders to the longbows and you will be nearly unbeatable in archer duels as the enemy archers will normally target the woodsmens instead of the longbows and the woodsmen shields give them a better surivability against archers than Man longbowmen.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod v1.9
 

I'm skimming through CB1.91.dm and noticed a tiny typo for the Lord of Agartha.

#newmonster 2917 -- Forge Lord from the Seal
#name "Lord of Agartha"
#spr1 "./CBM_Sprites/lord_of_agartha_1.tga"
#spr2 "./CBM_Sprites/lord_of_agartha_2.tga"
#descr "In the time of the Sunderer, the Lord of Agartha dwelled deep beneath the earth and was a being of great power. But the might of the Sunderer was reater still, and slowly his power crumbled.

Should be "was greater still,".

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod v1.9
 

Llama, I haven't had a chance to look over all the changes yet but want to say thank you for the forge bonuses for the glamour nations and for restoring blood as an option for Van. I think this release really helps keep some of the traditional strategies for these nations viable.

And the other changes for these nations are also fun. The price reduction on Vanherse is great - I will actually recruit these as research mages as they are now only 10 more gold than the indie mages I typically use to fuel Van's research. Price reductions on the troops are helpful and the low upkeep on the fay boars is interesting.

Also, making bean sidhe recruit everywhere is a big help to Eriu. And in my opinion makes them more fun to play. As much as I like the thugging aspect of the game, it's nice to have some other options. Really like this change.

I also like the changes to problematic blood spells like vampire lords. What do people think about the price/mechanics of onaqui? I'm not much of a fan of freespawn units (especially good units as opposed to chaff) and onaqui can generate huge numbers of beast bats. But, I've never actually fought a Mictlan player that was using them. Any experiences with this?

Regarding spell requirements (and my grudge against skratti ;)) what about making claws of koyktos, and maybe infernal prison as well, have a B4 F/W1 requirement? It just doesn't seem like these spells should be so easily castable by a recruit everywhere unit.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod v1.9
 

Thanks Valerius, interesting comments.

By the way I have just realised I omitted two new spells from the changelog : "Return from Valhalla" for EA Van, and "Return from Hel" for EA Helheim.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod v1.9
 

Very nice; that definitely falls into the fun category! I'm already looking forward to bringing back a magma eruption or rain of stones casting dwarf as a vanadrott. :)

I like this idea of copying and modifying spells to make national versions of them. Return from Valhalla/Hel is certainly a nice example but even something like the more straightforward Quickening Song is useful as it lets those A1N1 Sidhe Champions cast a spell that would normally be beyond their abilities. National spells/summons help differentiate nations and make the game more interesting.

Speaking of fun things, making tarrasques commanders falls in that category. This seems to be a growing category: non-humanoid monsters that have some nice built-in abilities but limited slots. The most successful examples that come to mind are EDM's shishis and zmeys. It's an interesting change and hopefully tarrasques will find a place in that group.

The Treelord changes are also good and I think they're worth summoning (maybe one research level lower, though?). And the kithaironic lion change is interesting as well; mixing some of those into a formation could be useful.

About the changes to scales, I think it's good that Order/Sloth is no longer a default combination. Tough to say if the spread between order and production should be two or three points. I lean towards the current two point spread, though. I think with a three point spread I'd still go with Order/Sloth. Two point spread I'm not sure... It's also nice how Growth is differentiated - less income upfront but paying off a lot later on.

I've only started to look over the magic items but so far it looks good. One thing that I think is helpful is the increase in protection on some of the lighter armors. For instance, increasing the protection on shambler skin hauberk means that if the commander has mid-range armor built-in he's no longer ending up with lower protection by using this item than if he used one of his misc slots for a water breathing item and kept his built-in armor.

I also like the 15 gem pricing of more powerful items like wraith crowns, robes of invulnerability and bone armor.


So far I've looked over the glamour nations and Man. A couple of things that I think are worth keeping an eye on to see how they play out are:

* Man's Hex spell. Nature has gotten some (welcome) strength on the battlefield recently with improved MR resists spells but this one could be particularly nasty. It's instakill on a failed MR roll just like polymorph but it only has half the fatigue and if it's AI friendly and gets spammed even after the script runs out it could be brutal.

* Vanjarls at 240 gold. I'm certainly not complaining about the boosts to Van but it occurs to me that with dwarves having a forge bonus to help with thugging and half of Vanjarls having B2 a cost of 260 gold or even the original 280 gold might be reasonable. I never thought it was feasible to give two blood boosters to a B1 Vanjarl for a late game cloud trapezing life for a life caster. But one blood booster? That's feasible. I don't think the change to Vanjarls is OP (especially not in EA) but 240 gold may be too cheap a price, all things considered.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod v1.9
 

Excellent work. Thanks. The PDF is also great. One small suggestion I'd make for next version is to indicate unique items in some way such as using an underline font.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod v1.9
 

Thanks!

Unique items are the purple ones (all Const. 8 items are unique).

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod v1.9
 

Haha thanks. I don't know what I was thinking. For some reason in my mind I thought as Const. 8 items and unique items as separate. Nevermind. :)

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod v1.9
 

Thanks, Llamabeast!!

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod v1.9
 

I've tried out the new EA R'lyeh, only having given it a cursory look earlier, and two minor things struck me right away:

The Polypal Queen pretender appears to only spawn Polypal Spawn, unlike the recruitable Polypal Mothers, that also spawn the occasional sacred Gibodai at high levels of dominion (#domsummon20 1522 in CBM1.91).

The Polypal Queen, the reason and the fate of the Aboleth race, seems an exceptionally poor choice of those available to EA R'lyeh. Amongst the immobile pretenders she competes with the Monolith (dom4, S1N1, pathcost 40) and the Void Lurker (dom2, S3, pathcost 15) with her own (dom2, W1S1, pathcost 25). She's worse for blessings, worse for magic, and her sole unique benefit is a stream of Polypal Spawn that is equaled in magnitude by two recruitable Polypal Mothers at low dominion and in quality by one at high dominion.

She'd really benefit from spawning a few Gibodai (and perhaps even the occasional rare mind lord?) as well as the Polypal Spawns or from having better magic or something. Immobile pretenders tend to need something special that isn't easy to cover elsewhere to make them worthwhile using, and she's severely lacking in that respect, being easily replaced in her unique ability by a few cheap recruitable commanders.

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A quick look at Vanheim and Helheim reveals that the Allfather pretender is *gone* in all ages. Surely, that can't be right? [this is 1.91]