Conceptual Balance Mod v1.92

[llamabeast]

Don't worry, the ettin bug is probably the most reported bug ever. I've already fixed it in the early draft of CBM 1.93.

While I'm mentioning 1.93, a sneak preview: LA Pythium will be gaining a nice line of serpent-themed spells. Mainly for reasons of fun and theme rather than balance. I was working on them over Easter and have completed the sprites and the hard bits of the code (the spells include a few new mechanics such as a "Serpent Form" spell the priests can use to turn into giant snakes). I also went through all this thread and the dom3mods thread and compiled all the bugs and suggestions. There are lots and lots!

[Olive]

Amazing. Gotta try LA Pyth again when 1.93 is out.

[Makinus]

Is there any way to add a lower research level Transformation spell (maybe as a national spell) without breaking balance? I find it a very fun spell that is used only for reducing upkeep of nature mages in late-game (when upkeep is nearly irrelevant)...

It would be fun to have a version that shows up early in the research tree and could be used to field some combat mages with the better animal forms...

[WraithLord]

Wow. 1.93 draft sounds most promising. I too am looking fwd to playing LA Pyth.

Did you make up your mind what to do w/ MA Ulm?

Do you think giving MA Pyth some more Byzantium flavor is advisable?

Re. the Adonim discussion. It was my impression that IW specifically wanted the Nephilim nations to be ubber. It makes sense thematically and theme is pivotal to dominions (and makes it fun too). So I personally am ok w/ some small nerfs but I would find it not thematic to make them mediocre.
(For the record I never played any of them in MP and not much interested neither so I'm not emotionally biased. )

If I were to make a balance suggestion I'd say that better target availability rather than quality.
I mean that (for example) instead of making Adonim weaker make them harder to recruit. This can be done in various ways: like up their gcost, up their resource cost, do both or apply some more creative mechanism (like make them units and force GoR to make use of them).
The end result should be player can field small amount of OP Adonim.
In dominions lots of counters exist to small number of OP units.
IMO The balance breakage problem happens when OP things hit critical mass.

[Makinus]

Would this one be too unbalanced?

#newspell
#copyspell "Transformation"
#name "Astral Transformation"
#descr "The jungle shamans discovered a spell where mages could change their physical forms to an animal form that mirrors their inner soul. The spell has its risks, including the possible death of the mage and, even if sucessfull, not even the mage casting the spell can really know if their soul is powerfull as a Lion or as weak as a Ant."
#path 0 4
#pathlevel 0 2
#path 1 6
#pathlevel 1 1
#school 1
#researchlevel 3
#fatiguecost 400
#end

[earcaraxe]

my opinion is that the statement "asdod is unplayable" is obviously false.

I wanted to clear that up if we are arguing about "unplayable" or "not strong enough".

Someone already expressed something like some peoples panchant for confusing "unplayable" with "unplayable by the previously working methods". In ashdods case (one of) the previously working method was stomping the opponent by nearly irresistable brute force (something like niefel jarls can do even now against some nations/builds).

I was the witness of what i consider the event that inspired ghouls original post about the topic. This is how i saw it: in the early game he was conquering indies with adons using a super-bless E10W6F6N4, then when the indies got eaten up, he got in war with shinuyama, using his expansion army of 6 or 7 adons. After the intial defeat, shinuyama assembled a huge army, with lots of O-bakemonos (among lots of other things, goblins, dai bakemonos) and managed to beat the adon platoon, suffering great casualties in the process. the O-bakemonos were key in that as they did hit hard enough.

i dont see any problem making an expectable strategy defeatable, in fact i much prefer it. (so i wont ban these kind of nations from my games)

[Shangrila00]

Originally Posted by earcaraxe

I wanted to clear that up if we are arguing about "unplayable" or "not strong enough".

Actually only Ghoul was arguing either unplayable, or not strong enough, and he really didn't say much beyond that. Executor was (and still is?) arguing that Ashdod is impossible to balance with Adonim because it was and still is massively OP, and I was arguing against that. There was also a side argument on whether or not some of the nerfs against Ashdod were justified, with the understanding that no, the nerfs don't make Ashdod weak, but neither would the lack of them make Ashdod OP, and so CBM didn't really have any business making those changes for thematic reasons.

Edit: somewhat lost in the shuffle was how Seren can be made useable. Which is related as Anakite armor being the worst heavy armor in the game is one reason nobody would recruit them, as cheap as they are.

[rdonj]

Dude, shangrila, for as much as you claim executor was making personal attacks it is hard not to read a large amount of hostility from you in what you're directing at him. You are making this excessively personal. Can we back this up a couple of steps?

[Valerius]

Originally Posted by Shangrila00

There was also a side argument on whether or not some of the nerfs against Ashdod were justified, with the understanding that no, the nerfs don't make Ashdod weak, but neither would the lack of them make Ashdod OP, and so CBM didn't really have any business making those changes for thematic reasons.

I'll agree with the first part, that the nerfs don't make them weak - but not with the second. Ashdod was originally nerfed because it was viewed as OP. I understand you may not view it that way but the fact is it was commonly banned from games. And it's most certainly CBM's business to address that since I view CBM as being MP focused (at least with regards to balance decisions). Really, the question is do you want the nation to be playable or banned half the time?

As for the nerfs, they mostly had to do with gold cost. I'd agree some of those are now too high, in particular the Talmai Elder at 600 gold. I'd also agree with Executor's comment that it wouldn't be out of line to reduce the cost of zamzummite's.

But none of the changes were unthematic, unless you consider the theme to be "IW created an OP nation deliberately." But in that case I'd say balance trumps "theme" - at least in a MP setting.

[ghoul31]

Ashdod is the only nation that can't get 0 enc sacreds. So nations with 0 enc sacreds can just slaughter them in the early game

I am the only one here who has actually played ashdod in 1.92, so I'm the only one that can comment on it.


Why don't some of you actually play them before you keep spouting nonsense?

but of course none of you will, and will just keep spouting nonsense with no real experience to back you up.