Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

Cost of items is directly related to their path level. So you can't have SDRs at b2 and 15 slaves. If you want them to be 15 slaves, then they have to be b3 items. It's not possible to do otherwise. And I should probably point out that either way, it makes SDRs much more useful for the already strong blood nations than for everyone else... so why are we bothering to bring them back in again?

Also noobliss, you're seriously overreacting.

And Jarkko, if you are responsible for the banning of TheConway... I would get banned for saying what I think of you, and you're the one who'd deserve it.

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

With the removal of SDRs making blood a less viable option for Vanheim, what about replacing the Vanjarl's B1 with the Vanadrott's 100% AEDB pick? Or if not a random pick then just something more useful than B1 currently is. This would be a boost to Vanheim but the glamour nations, particularly Van, did take several hits in 1.7 so it doesn't strike me as OP.

Edit: maybe a 50% pick would be better, 100% might be too much.

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

I have yet to see a winner who turtled. Or an good player who turtles, for that matter. Or perhaps we have different definitions of turtling.

Gemgens, maybe. Hammers - no, they dont. Its not hard to make or trade for a pair of hammers and use them, and they only multiply the amount of gems you get from your land.

And the runaway leader problem is still there, in case you didnt notice. Whoever has more land gets more gems and gold, provided he also site-searches and had half-decent scales, of course. Is there anything wrong with it?

And you cannot always boost everything to the point of usefulness, some stuff is just overpowered. Or, something that is used always. If you use a hammer for all your forgings, you could just as well remove the hammer, and reduce all the forging costs.[/quote]

You can. Llama's diversity mod did it, in my opinion - now every path has some nasties to summon. Except death, of course - with tarts not GoReasonable anymore. Oh, I forgot to add - thats another reason I'll stick to 1.6 from now on.
If something is good and everyone uses it, it doesnt mean it has to be banned, for hell's sake. Asinjas, Shishi etc are also good and gonna be used - will QM ban them too? I think not. Perhaps because these summons are straightforward and dont require as much effort?
Same with hammer. Yes, you use it for all your forgings. But its not hard to do so, it just requires some effort.

Not every nation has Jaguars - thats right.
Not every nation has high Astral - true, but you need at least one high astral caster in the endgame.
Blood is not something every nation can do easily - that was always so, but why make it even harder while leaving major blood nations relatively untouched? Oh, some additional gold expenses. The horror.
Its easy to dismiss something just by saying 'you are overreacting'.

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

I have no power to ban anybody on this forum.

Perhaps he was banned for breaking the rules? Point 10 spesifically.
http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/misc.php?do=cfrules

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

its funny that you say that. try playing with more vets. qm or juffos are both very very good players who are guilty of being turtles. (although qm is by far the more notorios one) trust me, turtling, especially with gemgens was the way to go.

yeah. cause you are

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

The real problem is when several players have hundreds of gemgens at the end so the game just stucks without a clear winner or Armageddon fest starts. What you describe is the viable way to win in the game with gemgens. I have to remind that this game has been played WITH gemgens for most of it's existence and still was fun to play. However I agree that removing them in the form they used to be was for the good.
Really? I followed this recipe once and lost, how can it be? It has something to do with gemgen removal probably.
So if you lead in gems gold etc you should be able to create less of them or what? I'm intrigued.
Blood is powerful, and blood sac is powerful, but please show me a game won by blood sac alone or as the main part of the winner's strategy.
Sorry I don't have time to comment the rest now..

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

there are at least a couple games won with blood sac being the main strategy, which was where many people learned how broken it is with jade knives. see the Inversions game on Dom3Mods for example.

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

I tend to have a very similar opinion to yours generally Dimaz, but, I do think you might be underestimating blood sacrifice.

Personally I love how the jade knives operate and wouldn't have excluded them, but on smaller maps for 10 or under players they could have been just brutal, and once a dom rush starts it's nearly impossible to stop it. I myself have been in two games that were won by a dom rush, one with Mictlan by myself, and the other by Archaeolept by Hinnom, and both victories took only half a dozen turns.

Still I have no problem with such victories as I consider it a very legit way to win and not a very often one, and I personally consider it to be the most respected way to win, as this *is a game of dominions. :)

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

I'd just like to make one comment. Most of the Vets I know (with exception of QM ;) ) are absolutely not turtlers, they are aggressive as hell and will jump at any opportunity or sign of weakness to crush and subjugate other nations.

Tarts are overnerfed and now death nations are stuck with way overpriced, afflicted & shattered souled (meaning 25% offline) equivalent of EDM SCs (Ember lord etc).

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

I have played with vets, thank you very much. So far, they expand fast and conquer their neighbours as soon as they can.

Does QM even play anything other than blitzes? Turtling on a small map once you've conquered a good parcel of land - maybe that's a sound tactics, for a while. Turtling on a huge map while others keep expanding? Thats suicide.

Yeah. Cause you say so.

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

You don't have to have the power to do the banning if you influenced a moderator into doing said banning, which in my opinion is what happened. And not being able to call you out on the levels of villainy you seem to have descended to without getting banned is a real shame. It's pathetic how often people on this forum manipulate the forum rules for their own ends instead of dealing with each other like human beings. And as long as you don't outright say what you think and mean, you're safe, but if you can taunt the other person into calling you out, you can then report them and "win" by getting them banned. What a load of crap.

On topic: Yay, CBM 1.8! Thank you QM for your continued efforts in making the game more fun, interesting, and balanced. Boo naysayers.

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

Thanks, I keep forgetting that.

Adding something is not the same as boosting an existing something to be more powerful. We where talking about specific item boosts and nerfs here. You are trying to make it about different magical paths. And the endgame diversity. Two totally different issues.

Edit: also there is a big problem with game development that you are never ever allowed to nerf something, or take something away, or a lot of players start to cry. This makes it very hard to undo game design mistakes. (Which currently, gemgens are. (It could be fixed if the gems showed up in the graphs, and if it was easier to take out the gemgens (Lets say, immobile slotless units)).

It isn't only that it is so good that everybody uses it. It is because it is so good that you always get a guaranteed quick return on investment. A tactic that is only counter able by adopting the tactic yourself. See Hammers, Clams etc.

I noticed, the removal of certain items just makes it less pronounced. And it makes it easier for other nations to catch up.

And Asinjas, Shishi don't generate new gems etc (which is what a forge bonus actually is, a way to "generate" gems by using less of them). You need to put them in harms way, attack the enemy, get his lands. For them to be useful. (Sure they gen RP, but everything does, and there are cheaper ways of getting RP).

The controversial item removals all made it easier to reach the point where you couldn't do anything about a runaway leader anymore. Once the jadeknife dompush started rolling, it could only be stopped by ganging up on the player. Once you had enough hammers for all your mages you would just get a defacto 25%+ gem bonus each turn. Which all made nations with easier earth, or w3n1 access to strong.

Sure there are still spells, and sites which do this in the game. (A alteration 20% site can also create this situation, just as casting certain globals, or even certain nations are build for it (LA Ermor for example)). But you can at least see a lot of these coming, you can dispel the global, take the site, etc etc. They are counterable.

(And I would never advocate for creating penalties for the leader, as that would create neverending games. These kind of games should have runaway leaders, but not runaway leader problems).

Why are we even having this discussion then? Ow nevermind. This is already taking up way to much time.

But feel free to create your own custom CBM mod. Remove the item cost boosts, put the hammers, SDR, and knives back in. I'm sure there are still a lot of players willing to play your games.

You do realize that additional gold expenses are a big deal right? A blood nation already has a lot of expenses, upkeep gold, using mage turns to get slaves. So you have less mages for combat duty, RP etc. Some additional gold cost can be really painful then.

Gold, gems, mageturns (and thus fortturns) are the main resources of this game. They matter. And gold and mageturns matter even more for a blood nation. (you have one additional research path, and less researchers).

You know what I mean. Stop trying to misrepresent my point.

Inclusion of gemgens, hammers, and sdrs makes it easier to increase a small lead into a big lead. After your basic needs are met (upkeep, expansion, some defense and research) you can pour the rest of the resources into these three classes of items, to quick increase your lead. With hammers a 2 e site was more valuable than a 2 d site. because after 10 turns the 2e would not be 20 e, but a permanent reduction in forging costs.

Sure you should still be able to use a small lead to create a bigger lead. But it should be more about the armies clashing, conquering territories, casting extremely powerful spells, etc.

Not using your labs to forge equip to forge more equipment. Not all games should be won in the forge.

Sure, there is even a guide for it:
http://z7.invisionfree.com/Dom3mods/...?showtopic=120
http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=45850

And I said it wasn't counterable. As preaching doesn't really work that well. And a indy priest with a JK generates 6 temple checks.

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

You'll have to excuse that I can't remember the names of the games, but several games have been won quite suddenly in this way. When it happens it's a bit of a game ruiner - it only takes a few turns, the players closest to the blood saccing nation can be wiped out before they can take any real action, and so in effect it's virtually uncounterable.

The reason for this is the bug whereby each slave sacrificed generates two temple checks. So an H3 priest with a jade knife can sacrifice 5 slaves for a total of 11 temple checks (including the one from the temple). With a dom10 nation that's 11 candles per turn per temple - quite extreme. Removing the jade knife reduces this to 7 candles/turn/temple. So, it's still a very powerful strategy and you shouldn't feel that it's been nerfed to oblivion.

Edit: I forgot that there is an issue whereby preaching doesn't help much. I think it's to do with turn order - perhaps the preaching happens first, and can then be overruled by the blood sac. That would make sense - say you have loads of H3 priests in your capital, your last remaining dominion stronghold. They all preach and raise your dominion to 10 (for the sake of argument - actually preaching can't raise dominion that high). Then 20 black candles from blood sac appear and you're left on -10 dominion and lose the game.

I think the SDR thing is very complex and I'm not sure how I feel about it. I think probably I would be in favour of restoring the SDR and increasing the costs of all blood spells by say 50%. I could easily automatically write a mod to do this if people thought ut was a good idea. However this solution only addresses the balance part of the issue, and not the micromanagement issue. I have never played a blood nation into mid game, so I don't know how annoying SDRs are.

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

I've been in games where Pangaea just domkills an entire map and there's nothing any of the further away nations can do about it at all. In the proper hands it was disgustingly powerful.

Unfortunately just increasing the cost of blood spells runs into problems because you can't alter the cost of blood items.

I think a lot of the Tartarian kneejerking is forgetting the fact that you'll still get commander Tartarians about 1/5 of the time. They haven't disappeared--they're just more expensive in mageturns and gems. That being said, Shattered Soul can probably go back down to 10% and their HP nerf can be reverted and they'd still be fine.

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

Tarts are over nerfed.
Please consider a few numbers:
* It takes 1 turn + 30 gems to summon 2 shishis that eat tarts alive.
* It takes 1 turn + 60 (i think) gems to summon 1 ember lord which properly equipped is at least on par with a tart.
* It takes (avg of) 5 (mage) turns and (avg of) 60 gems (assuming 12 base cost) to get one tart commander which is likely to be afflicted and is idle 25% of the time (or worse - razing your temple or such). So it's actually more gem expensive (since you get 25% less actions) and more vulnerable (strategically) since you can't be sure he'll march with the rest of the army but opt to do crazy stuff making it a sitting duck.
* All the nations can summon (parts of) EDM stuff, so all 7 paths but death have good thug<->SC chassis => Death centric nations are now at a disadvantage.

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

Well, once I owned north-western corner of Karan as dom9 Aby and sacced with 12 or so H3's with knives and still even my closest neighbors weren't domkilled. I don't know, maybe I didn't try hard enough, but it seems you can counter dompush if you're prepared for it by building enough temples/priests on the border. And when your efforts become obvious usually good players will try to gang on you. Maybe on smaller maps it can win a game, though.
Anyway, I think these cases are pretty rare and don't need special fix, as it's still part of the game as Executor said.

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

So, is it a good thing or a bad thing? What's wrong with the leader having more resources anyway? That's what being a leader is about.

Hammers dont generate gems. They increase your income by a percentile. If you have 10 hammers and only +4 fire gems/turn, you will only forge ONE fire brand. Any nation can have hammers; sure, you have to take earth on your pretender if you dont have it on your mages, but heck, that's a good reason NOT to take that freaking Dom10 pathelss Wyrm again. And even then, you could skip Earth on your pretender and just trade until you get some indies.

And making sure you cant do anything about a runaway leader anymore is a good thing? I have a feeling there's something wrong with this sentence.

You won't know when somebody finds a discount site and dispeling globals is a losing game.


You do realise that I'm speaking from my personal MP experience? I'm playing Abyssia in 1.7 right now, here - http://www.llamaserver.net/showScore...e=KingsofDrama

Does it look like I'm suffering from the lack of income? That's not some theorycraft, thats my own playtesting results - nations with B2 mages took a rather slight hit, not nearly as hard as these with B1 or no blood at all.

Edit:

Why? Because you dont like it? Just because dont want to spend time planning your strategy in a game with a steep learning curve, you'd like to keep it as simple as 'produce some troops, add mages, send them into combat'?

Gemgens could, indeed, create problems in huge games. Huge hidden income that cant be taken away from you. Hammers are nothing like that.


Hmmm let me guess... Do you also think one shouldnt have to diversify into all magic paths, being able to win with just their starting 'Air 4, water 2, astral 1, death 1' picks on national mages? :)

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

Come on NooBliss, you're deliberately misrepresenting what Soy's saying. He's a smart guy making reasonable points even if you don't agree with him - it's not helpful to keep on building straw men of what you're claiming he's saying then beating them down.

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

You are right, that sentence is a bit wrong. Damn you typing skillz!
Change it into:
The controversial items, which where removed, all made it easier to reach the point where you couldn't do anything about a runaway leader anymore.

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

Or to put it more bluntly NooBliss, it's not worth debating with you. Not because your position is superior, but because your arguments are not much grounded in reality. And I don't think I really need to point out that most of the people arguing for these things to be removed have been around for much longer than you and played many more games than you have.

I think blood is the only thing that no one is completely happy with just yet. There are a number of solutions that could be gone for here, and none of them seems logically to include SDRs being returned. The only reason these items cause such a fuss is because people have been used to being spoiled by them.

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

Oh you are so polite Rdonj. :) Weren't you the one complaining that TheConway was banned? I bet he was just as polite as you are. And, of course, calling somebody a fool is an even stronger argument than 'you're overreacting'. :) Keep it up.

Actually, I genuinely misunderstood him. Now it's clearer, even though I do disagree with his conclusions. I can see how clams can be an equalizer instead of extending the lead. But oh well, to hell with gemgens, they are gone for good now. We were discussing hammers. And I still dont see a single valid point why they should be removed. Let's see:

Everyone uses them - that's not a big deal. They arent hard to come by or tedious to use.
They are gemgens - just not true. They improve your honest, land-based income by a fixed percentile, and only for the purposes of forging.
They worsen the runaway leader problem - no, they dont because everyone can use them. Furthermore, some nations like Mictlan just dont have many uses for hammers early in the game, while others may need hammers to 'chase the runaway Mictlan'. Or, for example, if our runaway leader went for a dom10 pathless Wyrm for an extra punch and his national mages cant forge hammers, these who can forge hammers will have an edge while catching up.
Etc etc.
So the only reason I can see is 'hammers complicate the game and everyone ends up using them anyway'.
I am really curious - how do hammers break the game?

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

Well, to get back to some of the stuff earlier in the thread, where someone asked about an edited version is anyone interested in a Piecemeal Edition of this CBM?

I did a Piecemeal CBM 1.6 and it would not be such a chore to split the 1.8 up to various components that can then be mixed and matched (including versions of items with gemgens enabled normally and one where they are artifact level).

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

Well, I tend to post exactly as politely as the person I'm responding to, so take that as you will. Actually, you remind me of another poster on this forum who left a while back. Hmm.

Anyway it looks like you're being more reasonable now so I'll leave it at that.

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

Not right now at least--there are some major bugs that need to be dealt with first. Also a fair amount of 1.81 is rebalancing items in an environment where there are no hammers, so it's very unclear what parts would be appropriate to separate out.

So it seems like the Tartarian change is simply a matter of degree--and it appears that further testing in MP is the only way to tell if C'tis for example is truly "too weak" lategame because of the more or less doubling in cost of Tartarians. They're normally what, 10 death 15 nature, two mage turns? Now they're ~50 death(10 gems per cast), ~5 mage turns, but you get 4 non-commander meatshields/false targets too. If it's simply that Tarts are inferior to some of the EDM summons...that's fairly easily fixable.

Similarly, I haven't really heard a convincing argument about SDRs other than that Vanheim(and maybe Jotunheim) got the short end of the stick. I think all the other nations were either not affected too badly(it slowed their momentum, but the removal of hammers and gem gens slowed everyone else's too so it's relatively unnoticed) or were already so powerful that a slowdown of their blood production was welcome. So maybe Van's commanders need to be cheaper to compensate...again some more multiplayer games with Vanheim need to happen to see how bad the damage is, especially since they can summon Asynjyas instead of *needing* to go Blood for endgame.

In my view it isn't so much that hammers are a gemgen or not, it's simply that they restrict player choices. Everyone has to obtain access to hammers or be at a rather large disadvantage. This tended to restrict options, especially pretender choice. CBM is about creating flexibility of strategy. People tended not to take Dom-10 Wyrms because they knew they would be screwed over by not having hammers(and it's still not the best idea in the world for most nations, but it's more viable). Yes, the change reduces complexity, but most of that complexity is in the form of micromanagement. There's enough micromanagement and ability to optimize still in the game that I'm not aching for more. I feel no need to spend 5 more minutes every turn juggling around which mages have hammers--I already have to do that with boosters, and I'd rather be able to spend my time scripting my armies or setting up a raiding squad.

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

For me it would be a bless. It is a pain in the butt for me to go through the one big text file to try to understand what all have been changed. I still used the CBM piecemal version when comparing stuff in CBM1.7, just tried to find the correct line in CBM1.7 and compare how things had been changed. Of course 1.8 came now with a changelog, but it seems to me not all things are in the log, so a piecemal version would be very good.

Note, I don't think I would *use* the piecemal editition to cherrypick pieces of CBM 1.8. It would just be much easier to check out things :)

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

Jarkko, what also helps is a good text editor which can compare files. (using linux ? type "man diff" ;) ).

That makes it a lot easier to compare changes in files. And it also is a invaluable tool to be able to use outside of mod editing.

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

A quick google search yields winmerge for windows. Diff is a life saver.

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

Sure, but if I want to chek out just what happened to a given pretender chassis, it is much faster to open up the piecemal edition and check the text there. Besides, vi was good enough 20 years ago, and it's good enough still ;)

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

By my brilliant logics or my shining personality? :D:D:D

Well I didnt even speak to you, so your attack was rather... unexpected. But if you tell me were exactly I was impolite, I will try to do better in the future. Or dont, if you cant. Lets just be mutually ashamed.

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

NooBliss, drama trails you like a frayed cloak in the wind.

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

NOOOOO! Use Emacs. :).

(But we are getting offtopic).

I was wondering, 10 dgems for tarts, or less, if they get a cost reduction. Would you ever use Bane Lords? (apart from being available earlier in the game).

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

Actually, when playing Van, A gems are one of the gem types I least want to spend on summons since I need them to fuel cloud trapeze. I think a non-A nation that happens to end up with a good A income will be more inclined to summon (and benefit from) Asynjas.

But I agree that the best thing is to play a cycle of games and see what happens. If it turns out some nations were particularly hurt by the changes then adjustments can be made in the next release. And they can be tailored to the nations that need a boost, in the same way some of the weaker nations received a boost with this release. So if the changes to tarts are fine in general but C'tis is overly impacted, perhaps they will receive a national summon/spell to boost them.

Also ... tarts spent a long time at the top. If this release overly nerfs them for a period of time I can't say it will bother me. Especially because unlike with tarts the EDM summons are open to anyone and not contingent on requirements such as having the Chalice/GoH in order to take full advantage of them.

On a different note, I have taken a quick look at the changes to TNN/Eriu. The standouts are of course Song of Power and Mists of Hidden Paths. I like these spells and think they fit thematically - powerful but dangerous to the wielder as well as the intended target. It will be very interesting to see how these play out. I'm always up for a high risk, high reward option but we'll have to see if the chance of the reward is high enough or if it mainly ends up being high risk. :p

Also of note is Tuatha and Ri receiving Awe +0. That's a very nice bonus since glamoured thugs are all about layered defenses. It also means there's increased potential to get these out quick enough to help in expansion. The Golden Lance used by Tuatha, Ri and Eriu's (but not TNNs) Sidhe Lords now have the False Fetters effect - nice but I'd still be inclined to forge them gear as I don't like the idea of an E mage hitting them with destruction/iron bane after I've sent them out raiding. Another plus is reducing the base encumbrance on troops/commanders by a point. Anyway, nice to see these nations get some help.

Well you could give them herald lances and have them kill tarts. ;) But yeah, they are available a lot earlier and are more of a mid-game summon but the fact they have full slots is a big plus and I think you'll still see them.

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

I meant to reply to this before - these are things you can't do. Please check what can be done before criticising people for not doing them.

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

I will no longer deny that removing gemgens was a good idea. And yes. As long as blood sacing remains buggy, removing the jade knife is also a good idea. But hammers and SDR's are not gemgens. They are force multipliers and the game is balanced around using them. They don't create gems. They merely multiply your initial income.

The Hammer make it so that the value of gems used to forge items increase by approximately 40% If you assume that you spend 50% of your gems on gear and have a gem income of 50 gems/turn. Then having an infinit number of hammers will at most increase your gem income by 50*0.40/2 = 10 gems/turn minus the one time cost of the hammers. Because unlike normal gemgens that have a linear or slightly exponential pay curves, hammers have a reverse exponential curve that panes out towards 20% of gem income.

Think of it! The first hammer will pay for itself almost imedietly! The second also. But how often do you forge ten items in a turn? Sometimes sure, but even a rich nation will only do so on occasion, so it might take 15-20 turns for the tenth hammer to pay for itself. And thats not considering that you could build something else for the earth gems that helps you better.


And now to my personal observations. I am in the same game as NooBliss and from my observations, the absens of hammer have made thugs really rare. I have scouts in most parts of the world, but by turn 45 i have only seen 3 nations use thugs at all. Me, NooBliss and Bandar Log. I can afford it because I have the best gem income and can afford to be wasteful. NooBliss can afford it because much of his gear is made from bloodslaves and those are both plentiful and often did not benefit from hammer-discounts anyhow. The lesson here is that the game was balanced around hammer costs and without hammers people will spend the gems on other things.

And even I mostly use naked thugs like Shishis that does not loose out by not wearing things.


As for SDR's, they are, as already stated, more important for weak blood mages than the strong ones. I think a B1 mage gets a 100% boost from a rod, while a B3 gets a 20%. This is because B1-B2 mages are not guaranteed to find slaves and the rods increases both the chance to find slave and their numbers. These are guesstimates, but I believe them to be true. Guess whom its removal will hurt the most? It might be a bit annoying to make/assign them. But they will usually stay with the mage till he dies so its a one time thing. I don't see micromanagement as a reason to remove them. The unbalance created by their removal is a worse thing than the micro IMHO.

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

My small tests and experience seems to imply that a SDR counts as an additional B level for both the find chance and the amount of slaves you get. Mine are also guesstimates. But they all increase the power of your bloodhunting. And even if they provide one additional slave each turn on a b3+ mage, that is still free slaves after turn 5. (Not totally true of course, as you waste one turn creating the SDR). This increases micro as you never ever send out a hunter without a SDR.

But as I said before, I'm not totally convinced SDR removal is a good idea. (Boosting some nations with a douse bonus for example just moves the issue around a bit (disregarding the additional mage turns and the used misc slot).

Ps: you get forge bonuses on blood items, just not the contracts, the black heart, the other blood heart, and probably one other item.

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

I've held my tongue before I had a change to experience CBM 1.7 myself to criticize it. I hope something constructive will come of this.

So far from experience I'd have to say that CBM 1.7 has been a disaster regarding item prices, which ultimately led to several other problems.

Like Corinthian said, and quite contrary to what people expected as I remember some talks how it would actually increase the effectiveness of thugs, it led to a severe decrease in thug numbers.

Even the cheapest thugs become expensive without hammers.
And given that they are supposed to be expendable unlike SCs they shouldn't require much investment.

High level item forging became unbearable. Often you have to rely on a booster to forge other boosters and so on. And those boosters are quite often necessary to get a global spell, cast battle spells, to summon stuff and such.
For example forging a ring of wizardry to get a ring of sorcery to cast GONB for example is bloody awful, 110 gems just for the rings, etc.

Also, the race for the artifacts kinda got well much less important.
Even if you manage to hit construction 8 first it doesn't matter as you certainly won't have enough gems to make proper boosters and than the important stuff you need/want, even with very high site frequency which coshes more problems that it solves.

The thing about rushing to const 8 was that you had to sacrifice a lot to get there first. If you rush construction and get attacked in the meantime there's a good chance you won't ever make it there as you'll be dead since you wasted research on construction rather than summons and battle spells to defend or attack.

And even if you hit construction 8 first, ok, you managed to get a few good artifacts before you blew all your gems away, so now what?

Many of you feel that by simply increasing the site frequency it wouldn't pose much of a problem after all.
Wrong, by doing so you'd probably create much more micro and complicate things as I doubt anyone is crazy enough not to have some kind of a rainbow pretender with such common magic sites, so every nation would have to radically change their approach, strategy.

This is all based from experience on a CB 1.7 game mentioned above.

Now, as for CB 1.8 a lot of items got their prices lowed, paths dropped etc as to compensate for the loss of the hammers. I have no idea how this will actually impact the game until I try it out but I'm sure that this will be the first of several item balancings we'll see as a reprocation of the hammer loss.

The fact remains that even with lowered prices many items will still become unusable I feel. Bows will be the first to go probably, certain cross path items too. There are some items that just weren't worth using without hammers and having their prices dropped from 5 > 3, 10 > 6 etc.

I'm not saying that the loss of hammers will prove to be a bad thing in the end, having to think and plan in advance in how to get E3 with every nation you play is not very accommodating, and personally I love some changes on certain items as even with hammers things like stone idols or those big eartly trample wings were almost unexciting,
I'm just saying that it will need a lot of work and trials and error before it's all well sorted out as so far their removal has caused more problems than good.

Until than, I'll probably stick more to hammer games. Hammer time!

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

Excuse me. Vim is *the* best editor. It also easily handles diffs :)

To topic, Tarts should cost more, say 20D gems but remove all nerfs except non-gored (and if possible can't heal afflictions).
To the "crazy" trait lovers a compensation can be made to lower the craze frequency to say 5%.

Edit: re. hammers. Players got used to them and so could afford "wasteful" thug/SC builds using tons of gems via hammers.
In CBM 1.8 world some tough choices would be required re. equipment for thugs. However, I think thugs would still be valid. I know, I'd deploy them happily, they'd just be leaner and more tailor made for the job.
Much like tarts, this has a lot to do with Psychology and "fashion". The natural first psych. response to no hammers is to think "Fuxk that. I'm not wasting gems on these stupid thugs". I think this will change a bit with 1.8 and over time thugs and SCs would be more common again (but probably not as in a hammer world).
Tarts were public enemy #1 b/c everyone loved them. This is doesn't mean that they should be nerfed to oblivions. The reason being thematic rather than pure balance.

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

While the idea itself is good, give it some thought: you will spend 100 death gems and 5 mageturns to summon 4 meat shields and one commander (or not, if you're unlucky).
And that commander is likely to be a feeble-minded, armless, uncurable Monstra.

Or is there something I dont understand?

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

You could also get a 5S3B monster or some such. You never know :)

The 20D gems was just an idea. Anything between 15-20 would work IMO.

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

Just ran three quick tests, summoning 10 tartarians every time.

First test: a mute Tartarian spirit (E2D1) with one arm and a never-healing wound, 3 feebleminded tartarian spirits. Very, very lucky to have 4 commander tartarians, but only one of them is half-decent.
Second test: Two feebleminded cyclopes, one of them without an arm.
Third test: One crippled, feeble-minded, one-armed female titan, one unblemished A2E3 titan.

In other words: 30 mage-turns, a heapload of death gems. One top-notch SC, one adequate SC, lots of cripples.
I am not sure what to think about it.

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

And then if you have the chalice of GoH, you would read that as 8 SC's and 22 damn great meatshields. Sure, you can't plan your strategy on getting either of those, but as death nation I would make it *very* high priority to get either, because they have such massive synergy with tarts.

I agree with Wraithlord that the tart-nerfs (except the not-GoRable, not being able the best thing done to tarts IMO :) ) should be rolled back. The insanity for tarts is thematic, but it should be lower chance. The price should be slightly higher, 15-20D sounds to me too as a good price.

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

There was something about Chalice and GoH not healing Tartarians.

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

Wow, you could also have had 10 liches for the same amount of gems. Who can probably beat your rag tag army of 30 dead gods...

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

There was? Could you please point me where to look, as I seem to have missed that?

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

I still maintain the fundamental problem with Tartarians is the afflictions. More specifically, that at most two nations can heal the afflictions.

If you price them for those nations, then they're too expensive for everyone else. If you price them for everyone else, those two get hordes of cheap SCs. Removing the afflictions would be the best solution, but I don't think that's possible.

I actually think the GoR change makes it worse. Previously boosting the cost of GoR allowed you to change the cost of only the useful tarts. Whoever had GoR or the Chalice could heal them all and GoR as many as they could afford, but other nations could summon them, but only GoR the non-feebleminded ones, lowering their cost per useful tart.

Now the cost is the same, but without Chalice/GoH you get roughly a quarter as many useful ones.

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

Well, I was answering to WL's idea of non-healable, non-GoRable unnerfed tarts. :)

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

Good points! Maybe make the chalice a level 6 item but increase the price by *lots*? The tarts could then be balanced around the idea that they will be eventually healed.

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

That would also remove disease as a problem everywhere. Reduce the use of rain of toads disease demon, C'tis dominion, and others. And it would make it easier to tart spam. (As you would need 2 research levels less).

You would fix hole by digging a new one.

I think by reducing the shattered soul 25 to 10 a lot of issues would be solved. And that is moddable.

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

Or simply remove the Chalice. It has other uses, but overwhelmingly it's for tarts.
Edit: As Soyweiser says, disease (and old age) would be much less of a problem.

GoH isn't as much of a problem, since it's visible and easier to get rid of.

Then you could balance around them not being healed.

Either approach could work. I'm a little weirded out by the idea of non-unique Chalice, but mechanically it should work.


Reducing Shattered Soul doesn't change the fundamental problem as I see it. Anymore than changing the cost does. The problem is that Tarts are overwhelmingly better for whoever can heal them than for those who can't. The loss of GoR makes it worse.

Re: CBM 1.8 released
 

Rain of toads is an early/mid game spell, which you do to destroy income (the disease is a slightly benefical side effect). Disease demon doesn't properly work. MA C'tis (together with EA C'tis) is one of the nations hit most hard by tarts being useless now, so if they could spam tarts, so much better for them. With the exception of making tarts spammable, all the other things can already now be fixed with Fairie Queens; in effect making the chalice non-unique would just affect tarts and other undeads compared to the situation now.

But you are right. Fixing by making chalice non-unique would dig up new, even more horrible problems. Then again, I really meant making the price of the chalice *lots* (maybe I should have typed that as *LOTS* to make it more apparent what I meant) more expensive. Like something you would whimper if you had to craft even one, even if your neighbour payed half of the price.

EDIT: thejeff's comment about old age is a valid one. Then again, old age can be circumvented already now.