[elmokki]

I haven't read this thread in a while and now I read it as a whole.

The critique about the weapon changes is that it doesn't really do anything meaningfully beneficial to the game unless you happen to get gratification out of percieved weapon realism. Weapon balance when comparing weapons between each other matters in situations where you choose a weapon for a troop and don't touch anything else. Now the thing here is that in dominions those choices aren't available for many nations and often when they are it's not a ceteris paribus situation.

When you blanket change weapons without looking at units themselves you open Pandora's box: there's no telling how exactly it changes nation balance without going through a lot of stuff. For example Marverni has currently rather viable situation dependant choice between Ambibate and Carnute noble warriors. First wields a broad sword and second an axe. Buffing axe might shift people's focus towards carnute nobles enough to monopolize them more.

Simply said, Dominions is a game where you should compare balance between nations, not balance between units or weapons. Sure, MA Arcoscephale Hoplite (11g, 30res) is considerably less desireable than MA Ulm Black Plate Infantry (11g, 36res), but then again what magic does Ulm have available and what magic does Arcoscephale have available? Same goes for weapons. Sure, a mace is generally not considered worth it compared to a sword of any kind, but usually mace is added to an unit to make it worse so that the nation as a whole hits the level of balance it's wanted to hit.

What I'm saying is that you have in my opinion totally wrong design philosophy. A philosophy which would suit more for a game like Mount & Blade or a clone version of Dom3 where you actually design your units by yourself.

Now, those japanese weapons are only used by Jomon/Yomi/Shinuyama and their summons and I consider balancing those nations by slightly modifying weapon stats viable, but you'd still have to be careful since as far as I know Yomi and Shinuyama aren't as underpowered as Jomon. The direction of the balance should consider balance between nations and not balance between weapons though: weakening japanese stuff just makes a bad nation worse.

EDIT: I also agree that 2h weapons should actually be fairly powerful in terms of damage, possibly even slightly more powerful than they are in any mod that touches them that I've seen.