Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

All hail rodnj, the prince of new balance. May the nerfs be with you :)

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

seems like a lot of players are complaining about the OPness of Ashdod and to a lesser extent Hinnom and Gath. perhaps the next CBM update(whenever that will be) could address some of the issues which make the Hinnom line nations so OP in MP?

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Couldn't we nominate someone else to continue with the balance mod, such as Sombre.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

To a fairly great degree, those issues have been addressed--fairly massive price increases for their recruitable thug chassis(most notably so you can't purchase an Adon 1st turn) takes away some of their early momentum. Also the inclusion of the Hero's Blade gives an excellent counter to low numbers of elite giants.

How many MP games have even been played with Ashdod since 1.6 came out?

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6 PROPOSITIONS for CBM 1.7
 

I have now completed reading the over 50 pages in this topic
an I really think somebody should make a new topic with the
title PROPOSITIONS FOR CBM 1.7 - the propositions should
be voted for, polled, and neatly listed up so somebody could
actually put all these ideas into practise rather than just
thinking and talking about it.

So this is my sincere and optimistic invitation for anybody
reading this to do this. Go forth, fellow Pretenders and may
your sharp minds strike true:heart:!
:bug::bug::bug::bug::bug::lightning::cheese:

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

lol nice first post. As for propostions, generally QM uses the feedback on his previous CBM thread (this one) when making the next CBM. However, its going to be a month or two before we get a new one, what with his current busyness.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

those counters you mentioned seem rather irrelevant Imho as they clearly don't address the issues fully.

and this is precisely the problem, in too many MA and even single age games Ashdod is just banned, almost as much as LA Ermor/R'lyeh...

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6 PROPOSITIONS for CBM 1.7
 

While there's something to be said for forging ahead with 1.7, I'd hesitate to ever put balance changes up for a vote. People complain about a lot of things and think certain changes might be cool, but it's up to the mod creator to keep the mod focused on its objectives. CBM was never meant to be much of a nation balance mod, and look here we are discussing nation balance changes for the majority of the last 50 pages.

Just because they're not being played doesn't mean they should be nerfed further. The current balance changes need to be tested before determining if they're insufficient. Besides, there's nothing overpowered about Hinnom and Gath, especially compared to their eras and to the other giant nations. Gath might even be considered weak.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6 PROPOSITIONS for CBM 1.7
 

I think that, as of CBM 1.6, this is pretty patently false. Most of its changes make no sense outside of a general game balance perspective. The Ashdod nerfs already mentioned, for example, are very clearly about balancing Ashdod vs. other nations.

So regardless of what it started as in its infancy, its very clearly about nation balance now.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Well, to be truthful its basically about what QM wants it to be. Its true though that it has steadily edged in the direction of balance.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

I don't think hero's blade does anything to counter Adonim. Last time I looked at a giant (admitedly a Hinnom one), I just decided that hero's blade wasn't worth it because I had noone who had a chance of surviving one blow from the giant, so he wouldn't ever hit him. Humans have a hard time against such giants. The gold increase reduces the number of adonim, but just look at a zamzummite, and you'll realise adonim are not the only issue with Ashdod. First time I met zamzummites, I thought they were capital only because they are so good. Nope.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Actually most of the Hinnom/Ashdod rebalances make sense on an individual unit/spell level, not just on the nation balance plane.

Dawn Guard (or Dawg Guard as I like to call them) for example, were eclipsing everything else, while having too strong a starting army messed with the utility of awake pretenders and bless expansion.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

With high defense and mirror image, you might not get hit, and if he's using a brand you should ensure you've got 100% immunity to that element. Mistform will protect against a single hit, and luck helps.

The glamour horsemen are good candidates. If your nation has W2 mages, you should buff with Quickness,

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

It isn't just humans who benefit from a hero's blade while fighting adonim. There are at least a few things smaller than an adon that I can think of that should be able to survive a round or two with an adon, though admittedly they are not always super accessible. The glamour nations stick out as a group that should find it quite reasonable to use hero blades to chop down giants. Provided they can actually get the swords to do it.

Edit: Ninja'd by VFB, whose post was just better.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

You also don't necessarily need to survive a hit - you can try and make sure you hit first via flight, quickness, high AP thug etc. With high strength and a hero blade, you shouldn't need to hit more than once.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Ok, that's bull, and I'm pretty sure you know it. No giant nation is ever going to take an awake pretender unless its units are unplayably bad.

More generally, not every nation is or should be tempted by sacreds and/or awake pretenders, and its ridiculous to think its even possible to achieve such a state.

Further, that QM chose to make certain options more expensive rather than make the alternatives cheaper is indicative of what he thought of the nation vs. nation balance created by those choices.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

I don't follow your logic. If one choice in a recruitable lineup is flat out superior to the others, qm has on numerous occasions hiked the price on the standout, or reduced its overall upside. See jomonese longbows. Unless you think he was trying to balance the awesome power of Jomon?

Obviously changes to Hinnom, Vanheim and Mictlan considered nation balance. But they were also about making the nation more varied within itself, in terms of strategic choices. If you have a sick, sick starting army compared with every other nation, it messes with nation balance, it's aesthetically weird and it also limits competitive strat choices.

Re: Giant nations and awake pretenders - There's also nothing inherent in giant nations that would make an awake pretender ridiculous. The reason it might be a bad choice is incidental to the characteristics of giants (recruitable thug commanders, high hp units, high str units, large size). It comes down to other attributes like having great expansion units, having units which thrive on a huge bless or not needing a rainbow to sitesearch early. Taking an awake pretender with Fomoria or Gath seems like a legit choice to me.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Well, I don't understand that particular example at all. Samurai archers weren't very good before they were inexplicably nerfed by QM, and are totally unplayable now. I can't imagine anyone actually hiring them even in vanilla.

So if that example is supposed to support your point, it failed pretty badly.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Before the nerf they were considered the only good thing about Jomon. I don't really agree, but that's why they were nerfed. This was also quite a ways back when Jomon was even weaker.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

And regarding other comments: Yes, sure. If you can avoid being hit, don't you think the adon can, too? One in three will cast luck to begin with. Others will wear 2 bracers of protection for +4 defense, etc. If you can build a hero's blade, what kind of + defense gear do you think they can build (should mention their forge bonus mages here)? That weapon isn't a worthwhile counter in my opinion, because when the adonim are an issue (from turn 2), most nations have absolutely nothing to put in front. Last time I tested a CBM1.6 Ashdod vs. Mictlan, Ashdod just walked over Mictlan. Vanheim might be able to kit a van with a hero's blade, but I can't see any other MA nation that could do something (well, maybe Eriu actually).
I'd rather nerf adonim into a (level 0?) summon with a cost such that they can't get out before a few turns than hope that hero's blades will make a difference against them.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Er, what?

My point was qm does downgrade units with the goal of within nation unit balance. Which he did in the case of Jomonese Longbows. Whether or not you agree with that change is immaterial. It just goes to show fault in the logic that 'downgrade to unit = qm nation balancing not unit balancing'.

Again, if you want to talk about CBM /should/ be doing, that's a different issue to what CBM (and thus qm) /has/ been doing. Some changes have been made with nation balance in mind, but CBM is not moving towards more towards attempts at nation balance. At least not during the released version. The vast majority of the changes are still about spell/unit/resource choices.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Personally, I would like to see the Lord of Rebirth available for TNN and Eriu. It would provide a nice alternate chassis for the E9N? type builds with adding enough death to have a late game. And I think it's quite thematic.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Sad though I am about it, Sombre is right--as per the stated goal of CBM, changes are mostly for the purpose of giving nations multiple strategies. Jomon longbows were nerfed because at the time it was the only thing Jomon players even got, turning them into a rather boring one-trick pony. Now at least Jomon has a lot of options that are fairly equivalent in effectiveness, even if it is a weaker nation overall.

Similarly, Ashdod is in reality quite one-sided with cheap Adons. They're simply so good there's no reason to do anything else. It also helped balance Ashdod compared to other nations, but it came from in-nation balance.

Unfortunately, this is why something like Ichtycentaurs getting a hoof attack will never happen--because those are already their best troops, and buffing them further would make Oceania a one-trick pony(haha). Trident Knights, however, might get the extra attack(and even maybe one flavor of ichtysatyr to give a Reveler analogue).

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Its only unit balancing if it actually looks even remotely like balancing units. It doesn't, it made their worst unit even worse still, which is mostly inexplicable. Which does nothing to demonstrate any particular balancing agenda, since it has no (positive) effect on balance, nation or unit.

Further, as the change happened many iterations ago, its hardly relevant to my claim that *CBM 1.6* is more about between-nation balancing. I will happily stipulate earlier CBMs were entirely about unit balancing if you insist, regardless of the factual value of that statement (although it is plausibly true, I don't care to review them all), because its irrelevant to my claim. So the only relevant examples come from CBM 1.6.

--------

So, looking at the CBM 1.6 changes:
-obviously most of the item and spell changes are not nation changes, and therefore not relevant one way or the other. Despite this, there are some examples of nation balancing even here.
--Naiad warriors cost reduction, despite being a spell change, is specifically called out as a nation balance change.
--Burnsaber's UWGIM item changes are very clearly nation balance changes, as they were done specifically to make it easier to traverse the land-sea divide by nations that had a hard time doing so. Burnsaber is quite explicit about this in the UWGIM thread.
--The umbral change is clearly an attempt to make Agartha more competitive again.

-Specific national changes:
--MA Agartha's change log does nothing to increase play of lesser used options, and is more about adding new options and increasing the capabilities of old options to make them more competitive. (ie, the old options that were improved were already the ones people were playing with. The new options obviously don't balance units within the existing nation).
--EA Agartha's cheaper oracles do nothing towards unit balance, as you would buy an oracle per turn every turn as soon as you could before the reduction. Thus, it is clearly a between-nation balance change.
--Similarly the change to Pans, Panic Apostles, Capricorns, et al.
--Similarly the other MA Oceania changes.
--Androphag archers price was increased because of the bug, ie, because they were too effective *against other nations* for their cost. Clearly a nation balance change.
--EA Atlantis changes are all about making it more competitive. Same for changes in price/effectiveness for Marveni and Man top tier mages, and the same for Kailasa as well.
--Giant SC cost increases are certainly because they were too effective against other nations, not because of internal nation dynamics (you will always recruit your best cap-only every turn if the option is available, so its not like increasing their cost causes you to consider buying something else if you can afford them).

Now, the rest of the changes are arguable either way, but by and large improved units belong to *weaker* nations, suggesting that between-nation balance was a motivating concern. If unit balance within a nation was the only concern, you'd see a more even distribution of improved units across nations regardless of power. If you really want I can do the statistics on it, but I guarantee the effect is highly significant.

So, to conclude, to pretend CBM 1.6 is not heavily invested in nation balance would suggest you haven't actually reviewed the changelog.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Are there any good reasons to _not_ increase the gem cost of Tartarian Gate? Because I fail to understand why this was not done a long time ago. It would be very nice to have some diversity in the endgame (which is the most boring part of a game as it is, in my opinion).

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, tarts are really good at 12d and 15n for the GoR. And I'd really like to see GoR at 5n so you can use it a little more frivolously without shooting yourself in the foot.

On the other hand, increasing their gem cost isn't going to do much to change the ideal endgame, because there are no options that compete with tarts in terms of performance. So all you do is raise the bar to be able to play the endgame, making Well of Misery even more essential to winning, etc...

Basically, tarts need a non-unique alternative that is competitively good in terms of performance. Preferably one that involves one of N,W,F to summon. This would make balancing tarts much easier, and diversify end-game strategies.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Tartarians are so cool that increasing the cost would be a coolness factor reduction.

QM is totally into coolness factor. It's really not hard to comprehend the changes in CBM if you use the coolness ration. For example, Jomon archers are uncool so they get nerfed. Androphag archers, while cool, are bugged so get nerfed.

Devala are cool so they get buffed. Armless dom spreading prophets for pearls are way cool.

Kydnides are cool so get cost reduction.

Dragon master is super coolio so gets cost reduction.

I don't know why you guys spend so much time debating QM's motivation. It's simple. It's the cool factor.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

I am all for SC diversity, especially for the said paths. Unfortunately, there seem to be no suitable candidates for this role. Nature has some top-level summon which is never ever used. I think it is a dragon of some kind, so it is probably hopeless, since it does not have enough item slots to be a SC.

It would be interesting to see how a game would go if Tartarians were banned.

EDIT: Oh, and what actually is "Abomination"? I do not have Dominions here on the netbook with me, but I recall there is a high-level SW summon named like this.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Abominations are decent army killers, bad SCs. They are summoned as a unit, have only misc slots, and several life drain attacks plus gaze of death.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Note that astral pearl income reduction has the side effect of reducing wished-for SC chassis units in play.

A list of SC units, aside from pretenders:

1) Tartarians, various flavors
2) Angels (wishable for all or summonable for some) - Chayot, Seraph, Grigori are definite SC, some others are high end thug/low end SC (iron, vengeance, fallen angels)
3) Giant nationals - Hinnom, Ashdod, Niefel, and to a lesser degree Fomoria, Gath, Yomi, possibly some more
4) Rudra, Mandaha, and Davana for Indian themed nations
5) Elemental royalty
6) Unique demons/devils
7) Golems
8) Wraith Lords
9) Tarrasque (nature dragon summon)
10) Iron dragon (earth construction summon)
11) Abomination (SW summon)
12) Eater of the Dead (SD summon)

Now, I've probably missed some, and obviously not all of these are of equivalent value - some of these are more borderline for "SC-ness", but it seems to me that reducing the ubiquity of Tartarians in the end-game would mean leveling the opportunity costs and/or effectiveness of some of these options relative to Tartarians.

This is a hard problem in that many of these are restricted to particular nations or require otherwise less useful paths to summon (vs. general utility of high Death), while any nation may use Tarts, and a high Death caster is always valuable. Also, if Tarts were overnerfed or eliminated entirely, it would cause a large shift in nation to nation balance- nations with easier access to the "unlimited" chassis options above would be effectively boosted (this is probably bad for e.g. Ashdod.)

I think that the main issue is that the game is designed for a smaller endgame (and probably smaller fields of players in general) than seems to be currently typical on these forums. If you have e.g. 3-4 nations left, the fact that the uniques are "used up" is less of an issue.

To that end, something that limited the number of Tartarians, or, taken the other way, removed limits on e.g. unique elementals, would be a way to see more variety. Not sure you could do the former, but the latter would probably be doable.

Wasn't someone (llamabeast??) working on an elemental thug/sc mod?

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

I have no idea if this is possible, but what if Shattered Soul increased over time (eventually reaching 100%)? So the utility of each Tart declines, until you have to retire them and summon another one. That would nerf them a bit without making them weaker when usable.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Making elemental royalty non-unique may be good for overall balance, but it is horribly unthematic.

Actually, it would be really nice to see more national SC summons. I would like to see Chayots, Rudras, Dai Oni, Lords of Civilization, Seraphs, Fallen Angels etc. Who mentioned the coolness factor?

And instead, in every single game so far all I saw were Tartarians, Elementals (mostly Air Queens), and various blood summons. Before the clam nerf there was a chance to see some rare Seraph in action, but no more, it seems.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

The longbow was nerfed in resources. That's why the samurai archers were indirectly nerfed. Also the standard samurais are worse than the samurai archers.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

That depends on what you think the theme is.

The platonic element conception (ie, that originally used by D+D in 1st and 2nd edition, originated with Plato) envisions the elements in reality being produced by or tied to elemental planes that are infinite in extent and purely composed of that element. An infinite plane would have infinitely many royals on it if it had any royals, so... where's the problem?

Since the term 'elemental' is tied up with the platonic concept of element anyway, the fact that the game uses elementals suggests its implicitly accepting the platonic concept, and thus the elemental royalty being unique is actually unthematic.

I'm not saying making them non-unique is necessarily the way to go, I'm just saying there aren't really major thematic problems with doing so.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

yeah but the dominion's elemental royalty have personalities (or at least stories) to an extent, meaning they aren't really the pure, unanimous and anonymous platonic type element. Based on it perhaps, but then also ground through the fantasy-machine.

not that I don't support them being non-unique, there could be infinite elemental personalities floating around on the elemental planes (it would be odd that there are only three or so personality-types of each element, but I digress), and the type summoned is just picked randomly.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

What if we created four new spells, that summon a lesser form of the elemental royalty. (Call them elemental elite, or something like that.) These would be non-unique, and would give another option other then Tartarians.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Like Stavis said, there are already lots of other (admittedly mostly-weaker) options, plus some that he didn't mention, like Gargoyles and Trolls.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

It would be nice if you could just summon the Troll kings for a lower price, instead of paying out the nose for a bunch of high upkeep troops.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Making Tartarians unique is what I would like to see. But that is likely not possible.

What if they were given an expensive gold cost, so you cannot maintain as many?

It makes sense for them to be expensive.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

there's plenty of fodder for alternative SCs if we wanted to introduce new creatures, but that's sort of outside the scope of CBM as currently envisioned.

(For example, Hetaconcheires. In mythology there are only three of them, but there's no reason there need to only be three of them. Sounds like an earth summons. Admittedly, I'm not sure how to do them justice without making them overpowered since even the gods feared them - and 100 attacks is rather a lot).

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

100 attacks would still only clear out one square.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Yes, but at that point you might as well call them the SC Slayer-3000 since they'll kill absolutely anything in that square!

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

I think It's pretty clear that all (LA) Jomon samurais/soldiers should be made a bit better/cheaper instead of making the Jomon archer worse (in order to achieve that archers arent over-used).

I think even minor and simple changes to their stats, prices or resource costs would end the whole fuss over Jomon being not at par with the other nations.
I hold a similar opinion about Gath, Oceania and a few other nations which a number of people consider under/overpowered.

And the Jomon archer should have at least the same precision than other samurais. Archers with worse aiming than soldiers is just plain wrong.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Jomon's problems are not caused by bad troop selection. In fact, they have excellent infantry (Aka-Oni samurai). The problem is far more complex and no tweaks to the samurai will ever solve it.

That said, I fully agree the generic samurai and samurai archers should have more reasonable stats.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

A larger problem for Jomon is the inexcusable lack of shields in a Xbow heavy era.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

They have a whole boatload of problems, not one big one.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

I wouldn't characterize it like that: because what? it's too complex to describe or hold in the mind? this is a controlled and unbiased game world here, not art or zen.

for most issues in dominions, the line between high-powered and good and complete garbage is stuff like one extra pick of Astral on some mage or two less encumbrance on some unit.

I'm confident Jomon could be brought on par with other nations with some polishing.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

I think he was just saying that even with good samurai, Jomon would be poor. For instance, perhaps they need better magic.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

llamabeast:

How is your late game summons mod? :) It'd be nice to be able to use it in some games, even if it's not 100% finished.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

The funny part is, Jomon even has good magic. It's just underwater and super-expensive(Ryujin are for the record absurdly expensive for what they are). And their normal mages are mapmove 1, which frankly doesn't even make sense.

Jomon has all the tools it needs, it just isn't at the right place at the right time.

For instance, they get the ability to bootstrap Death from nothing. Unfortunately you need a swamp, a lucky double random, and Conj-6 Const-6 before you can do anything worthwhile with it(I guess you could spring for a Robe of Water or something, but that's even more in the Water-gem hole). Nushi would be awesome at Conj-4 with 2 death instead of 1(to immediately start summoning Shura).

Similarly, Jomon's national dragon summon is awesome in concept but absolutely terrible in practice. One misc slot, lowish protection(especially in LA), poor magic, and low native offensive skills make these things just plain useless. Now, that could easily be changed to give them some more offensive flexibility.

Jomon as is has a lot of issues, but they also have many ways of tweaking those issues. Their recruitable mages should probably retain the same magic(though Ryujin and Monks of the Fivefold Path need at least price decreases), and their magic paths can be boosted up with summons.