Two new MODs from me

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Keir Maxwell:
Bless effects heaven - a man after my own tastes.

I love the bless effects, and I wish that spending 250 points on your pretender to get a skill of 9 from a starting point of 1 was worth as much to your race as spending 240 points on order 3 and growth 3.

The way I can see of doing this with the present mod tools is modding the pretenders to give them more-and-higher starting paths of magic while leaving their costs the same.

The basic costs for the pretenders seems about right, although I'd like to see the cyclops only cost 50-75 points.

Another approach would be to make all the scales weaker making the return from magic more appealling but I don't like this approach so much.

I don't like it as much easier.

[apoger]

>Sounds like order 3, growth 3, productivity 3, some sort of castle... and anything that's left on the god. With scales that strong I can't imagine taking any negatives or wasting points on a god.

Yes, however the problem I see now is players spending everything on their god instead of wasting points on scales.

These scales are similar to Dom1, as Keir suggested. I have never hidden that I don't like the Dom2 scales. The Dom1 scales worked just fine and weren't too extreme then, and as such really are too extreme now. Just different.

It's my feeling that this makes choices hard on the players. No easy picks like order-misfortune. No picking two 9s in magics at the cost of death-3 sloth-3 for that unimpressive 6% income hit.

My goal is not to spite gods. It's to make all choices viable and interesting. No matter what you choose, you aren't getting something else valuable, whether it's god magic or luck scale. That's what I want. Hard choices because everything is good.


Try the mod once it's available. I think you'll find it more balanced than you think. At the least, luck is now a useable scale.

[apoger]

>-30% Gold, -60% Supplies.
>AlexMod Scales
>-120% Gold?, -120% Supplies?

That's exactly the situation.
An abysian army in the arctic needs to bring food.

[Keir Maxwell]

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:
As long as part of your argument is grounded in reality, then realism always applies, or else you must simply change your argument to "There is no reason other than because I feel like it."

I'm very sympathetic to this argument but would put it a bit different. As a large part of the game is fantasy combined with the fact that our understanding of reality is only partial alot of the time we are not talking about realistic so much as plausible. You can come up with extremely different worlds to ours were things work very differently as long as there are plausible explanations for things. A Ring world is one example of this. The thing you should avoid is abandoning reaoson and just saying well this is like that because this is how I feel it should be. Godo fantasy is very believable and has an internal logic which strengthens all the elements.

I believe there is always a place for reason in determining what the realism of your fantasy enironment is. As fantasy environments are inspired by historical societies and their myths and legends it is history we draw much from - but also our understanding of geography, physics chemistry - of people, the world, and how it all works.

Cheers

Keir

[apoger]

>Scandanivia is either cold 1 or 2 (Vanheim/Jotunheim). It certainly doesn't produce 40% less output per piece of land than England.

A> Cold-1 would be 20% with my mod.

B> I'd say the Vikings would disagree with you on the farming versus raiding/migrating to England example.

Without modern technologies life in the cold pretty much sucked. Yes people lived in the cold, but not the massively productive ones. The great empires didn't rise from the desert either. There's a reason for this.

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by apoger:
Yes, however the problem I see now is players spending everything on their god instead of wasting points on scales.

I don't see this as a problem at all. The pretender is supposed to be powerful, not a mediocre mage that an average human can hope to surpass. I'd like to see archmages running around with at least four in every path so that they can actually have truly major effects.

It's my feeling that this makes choices hard on the players. No easy picks like order-misfortune. No picking two 9s in magics at the cost of death-3 sloth-3 for that unimpressive 6% income hit.

The picks are really easy. Either take an oracle with astral 3 and a massive economy, or a titan with air three and no gold boost. There's no way that points spent on a pretender can compete with that kind of economy.

My goal is not to spite gods. It's to make all choices viable and interesting. No matter what you choose, you aren't getting something else valuable, whether it's god magic or luck scale. That's what I want. Hard choices because everything is good.

Except of course, that they aren't hard choices, because there is no way for a rainbow mage to be worth the points you spent on him.

Try the mod once it's available. I think you'll find it more balanced than you think. At the least, luck is now a useable scale.

Sure it's balanced, but only because it removes the element of variability from race design, and reduces them to their national units and mages. It turns it from a game of fantasy combat where the pretender can have a major impact to one where your ability to crank out mundane troops is more important. That's a standard problem with most fantasy strategy games, and standard Dom2 avoids it fairly well.

[Keir Maxwell]

Originally posted by apoger:

It's my feeling that this makes choices hard on the players.
No picking two 9s in magics at the cost of death-3 sloth-3 for that unimpressive 6% income hit.

Oooph - brutal. Here am I saying that dual bless effects races were always somewhat borderline and have been slaughtered by the patch and you suggest it is that easy? I sure must be hopeless at this game.

Since Johan O. made it clear the whole misfortune free points were history I have spent alot less time on dual bless effect races and my races have generally got stronger (accept when I try blood). I can accept that one 9 is not too hard to get a strong race from since the patch but two 9's?

Methinks you overstate your point.

Like I said before - strong dominion scales is how Alex has always seemed to enjoy playing, many others do not feel this way. Thats fine. In fact its better than fine - it is down right cool as Alex has obviously been pretty dissapointed, and annoyed, by Dom2 and now he can recapture what he has lost. Kudos to Illwinter. Just goes to show even Swedes can overcome their paternalism. Now about those Militia . . .

cheers

Keir

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by apoger:
>Scandanivia is either cold 1 or 2 (Vanheim/Jotunheim). It certainly doesn't produce 40% less output per piece of land than England.

A> Cold-1 would be 20% with my mod.

Cold 2 (Norway?) isn't cold 1 though, is it.

B> I'd say the Vikings would disagree with you on the farming versus raiding/migrating to England example.

The Vikings didn't stop raiding even after they had settled in temperate areas like England.

Without modern technologies life in the cold pretty much sucked.

It doesn't though, it's really quite easy to keep yourself warm with a bit of basic knowledge and furs. Heck, ancient humans lived in Northern China long before they were likely to have fire.

Yes people lived in the cold, but not the massively productive ones. The great empires didn't rise from the desert either. There's a reason for this.

Ever heard of Egypt, the Indus river valley, or the empires in the Tigris-Euphrates river valley? Those aren't exactly temperate environments and they were the most powerful and wealthiest empires of their time.

[Keir Maxwell]

Originally posted by apoger:
The great empires didn't rise from the desert either. There's a reason for this.

Other than the Arabs, the Mongols and to many others to mention. I think your point is more that the most valuable areas of human civilisation in terms of productivity and gold were those closest to a human norm. Then you add in the ability to adapt within the range of say +1 to -1 (which IMO covers most areas of human settlement) allowing specific races to cope with those situations - Mictlan, Vanheim etc.

However I think %20 gold modifier per different scale is too much and its the one feature I noticed that really worried me in terms of how it will impact on the game. It is a huge change and will have many potential balence consequences and may prove disastrous for races starting to far from the norm.

I thought the current heat cold modifier was 5% not the 10% people seem to have been talking about - least thats what its says in the mod tools and the post from Illwinter I copied into a doc awhile back.

Cheers

Keir

[apoger]

>I'd like to see archmages running around with at least four in every path so that they can actually have truly major effects.

As would I.
I have always complained that the mage pretenders are weak.
This is on my list of things to mod.


>There's no way that points spent on a pretender can compete with that kind of economy.

That's an ignorant statement. Plenty of players with magic pretenders in Dom1 which had even more gold available than my mod, BTW.

Try the mod before making such blanket statements.

>Except of course, that they aren't hard choices, because there is no way for a rainbow mage to be worth the points you spent on him.

They aren't worthwhile now. But that's another fight.


>It doesn't though, it's really quite easy to keep yourself warm with a bit of basic knowledge and furs. Heck, ancient humans lived in Northern China long before they were likely to have fire.

Sure, many people settled in places with bad climates. However they spent their time surviving. Certainly more time surviving and less time producing taxable income than those living in more temperate lands.


>Ever heard of Egypt

The nile valley was hardly a harsh place.


This is a stupid argument and I'm not playing anymore. If you really want to believe that people are equally adept in all temperatures, you go right ahead. Don't like my mod? Fine. Don't use it. Nobody is twisting your arm. Play the game the way you want.