Conceptual Balance Mod 0.9

[Nerfix]

As for Red Dragon, I can sum it up with two words: Solar Disc.

As for Blade Wind costing gems, Graeme summed up well. What makes you think that having it cost earth gems you must earn and micromanage is less drastic than making it less powerful?

Research nerfs are worse because it eliminates a spell that required a 4+ Air mage to be used more than once, max twice per battle until a high level of research.

EDIT: I also pretty much echo Graeme. Why not just start with porting CB for Dom 2?

[quantum_mechani]

Nerfix said:
As for Red Dragon, I can sum it up with two words: Solar Disc.

The solar disk is quite awful for expanding, you would need at very minimum protection buffs. Those extra provinces you pick up from expanding from turn 2 forward are very important.

As for Blade Wind costing gems, Graeme summed up well. What makes you think that having it cost earth gems you must earn and micromanage is less drastic than making it less powerful?

Well, it's quite obvious why it's less drastic than cutting it's number of effects in half, that directly cuts it's effectivness in half where as this just makes it trickier to use. Given that I'd be just as happy with either nerf, I'm inclined to switch it next version.

Research nerfs are worse because it eliminates a spell that required a 4+ Air mage to be used more than once, max twice per battle until a high level of research.

Thunder strike is an extremly useful spell at _any_ stage of the game. Even ff it were level 9 research I think it would probably still be used on occation.

EDIT: I also pretty much echo Graeme. Why not just start with porting CB for Dom 2?

Very many things have changed since dom2. Many of the most powerful options in the game were nerfed, so the buffs to other options would be overkill.

[PDF]

Well, there's many good things, I mean things that many/most players wanted to change because over/under powered/priced , be it Hellheim nerfing or most pretender changes. Still Titaness' 25 RP bonus is so high I thought it was a typo ! .

Yet there are *many other* things that aren't "balanced", but just changed because the author wanted to change it : the remote searches at level 3 research/ path 3 totally changes the way searches could be done, but don't change the game balance at all !
Some other changes - BW nerfing and many Evo nerfs also are hard to justify as "balance changes", I didn't ever see anyone claiming BW was unbalanced...
Now for example Ulm that always was weak now looks utterly crap, with smiths unable to cast Gnome Lore without E.Boots, requiring a gem for Earthpower, and paying gems for BW !!
So they won't even have an earth gem pile to cast their FotA later in the game, poor ones...

Eventually I don't think I'll use this mod, but I still think that what we need is a simple mod rebalancing the most blatant balance issues, agreed on by at least a good part of the community, without taking this as an opportunity to make the game fit the mod author's wishes as how it should play.

QM, don't take this too harshly or as an attack on you, I recognize the effort, it's just that this mod doesn't fit my vision of a "balance mod".

[Nerfix]

This thread is good reading:

http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...b=5&o=&fpart=1

[Nerfix]

Vine arrow appears to be massively bugged. It has a gigantic AOE, yet it doesn't seem to be that effetive against singular enemies... o____o

I can even provide a savegame to show this.

EDIT: Okay, I'm not sure if this anymore related to just Vine Arrow, but something is most definedly wrong in this game with Machaka...I, uh, I think I need to show it.

[quantum_mechani]

Nerfix said:
Vine arrow appears to be massively bugged. It has a gigantic AOE, yet it doesn't seem to be that effetive against singular enemies... o____o

I can even provide a savegame to show this.

EDIT: Okay, I'm not sure if this anymore related to just Vine Arrow, but something is most definedly wrong in this game with Machaka...I, uh, I think I need to show it.

Your save game needs a mod called sns3. In any case, I didn't mod vine arrow.

I have of course read the conceptual balance discussion thread.

[quantum_mechani]

PDF said:
Still Titaness' 25 RP bonus is so high I thought it was a typo !

I think you will be hard pressed to find her overpowered with the that, a lesser bonus would have meant nothing because there would be no incentive to keep her around researching.

Yet there are *many other* things that aren't "balanced", but just changed because the author wanted to change it : the remote searches at level 3 research/ path 3 totally changes the way searches could be done, but don't change the game balance at all !

On the contrary, they change game diversity a great deal. People tend to forget, what balance really is allowing for the for the most diverse number of options to be viable. By the time reach the late game (level 9 research in a school or two), you most likely have very good access to all paths, and so near all spells. What this means, is that late game, everyone is playing with the same deck, so fewer options have niches. Every game, the same handful of spells rule the final phase. If each nation has a different selection of paths, it makes each game more unique, and more options can get their time in the sun. Without magic being limited more by nation, in makes carving niches for all the options many times harder.

Some other changes - BW nerfing and many Evo nerfs also are hard to justify as "balance changes", I didn't ever see anyone claiming BW was unbalanced...

You may not have- in the mp games I have played, it is the most frequently abused and complained about battlefield spell, after skelly spam.

Now for example Ulm that always was weak now looks utterly crap,

I agree, that was an unintentional side effect, and I'm going to work towards easing it in later versions.

As for the other evocation 'nerfs', look carefully, more spells were boosted than nerfed. Again, the effort here is to improve diversity, it is much easier to meet halfway than try to buff up every spell to the level of the best ones.

[Graeme Dice]

quantum_mechani said:
You may not have- in the mp games I have played, it is the most frequently abused and complained about battlefield spell, after skelly spam.

If people are complaining about bladewind and raise skeletons, then they, quite frankly, need to learn to play better. Bladewind is absolutely useless against heavy infantry, while skeletons are absolutely necessary to the balance of death magic nations.

As for the other evocation 'nerfs', look carefully, more spells were boosted than nerfed. Again, the effort here is to improve diversity, it is much easier to meet halfway than try to buff up every spell to the level of the best ones.

The thing is that the spells that were nerfed weren't even that good. Thunderstrike for example, kills six people per mage per normal combat unless you have an air 4 mage, are carrying around 20 gems worth of a staff of storms so that you can cast storm power, or have a communicant horde with all the attendant vulnerabilities. Bladewind gets cast twice at most (Summon earth power and bladewind in drain 3 costs about 134 fatigue for a master smith), and might kill ten to twenty people per mage. And that's if the opposing force is a typical AI army of 200-400 unarmoured troops.

I think, that in all the games of Dom2 I played, that the total number of spells I cast on the battlefield that required gems comes to a total of less than 50. Battlefield spells that require gems are not fun, they are a chore. I cast summon lesser air elemental twice with Caelum before I realized it was useless. Water elemental summons were cast a total of about 10 to 15 times in two different games as Atlantis. Summon sharks got cast once. Four vapors was cast once. I used wrathful skies about a dozen times. Rigor mortis got cast twice. Darkness was about six times. Soul drain was a single time, as was firestorm. Hellfire had a half dozen casts, but that's because demonbred are mobile enough to shuttle their own slaves. Rush of strength got cast once, as did the similar spell for demons. Summon imp had a bunch of casts from blood mages defending their hunting provinces, but that's about all. The micromanagement required to shuffle gems around just isn't worth the relatively minor effects most of those spells have. Then there's the fact that site searching spells must remain the most effective way to search for magic until such time that Illwinter decides to add automatic searching with mages.

[DominionsFan]

I think that we all have to thank to qm, that he spent countless hours to make this CB mod. Right now I haven't tried it yet, but after I've read the changelog, there are some things what I like, and there are some things what I don't. For example: why was it needed to nerf the order scale? I don't understand it still. Make the sacred units more expensive, instead of nerfing the order scale. We cannot recruit countless number of troops anyways, since we won't have so many resources to do it...however we can use up the remaining gold to build forts for example.
Its a good thing that the growth from the growth scale incresaed, however maybe [to compensate to order scale nerf] we should get more income from the growth scale now?
People won't take death scale so often in blitz games at least.

[Nerfix]

I again echo Graeme. I apreciate qm's effort but I think he went into a very wrong direction with the mod.

The mod needed for the savegame is the streamers and standards one, so it shouldn't affect the game mechanics...but I did realize that on both occasions I was facing javeling armed infantry. I'll have to see more of what could have caused that weird combat behaviour.