Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

[quote=Soyweiser;785233]I didn't lose either wolf or take any afflictions in taking 10+ indie provinces. My point is that they still work quite well. I disagree with this mod "killing the skratti as a thug". It's still an excellent thug. If one want's to go nuts, one can always get an appropriate blessing and kit them out with shrouds among other stuff.

Still it's a werewolf. It should claw and bite, and now it does. With str 25, it is more than enough.

Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

Happery,

Welcome to the community! It's always wonderful to see that Dominions is still attracting new players. If you have any questions at all, please do not hesitate to ask!

Sometimes navigating around a new community that you have absolutely no experience with can be a real pain; so if you need any help at all let us know!

Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

Thanks for the welcome! Been mainly hanging out over on the Dom3mods forums, but was been lurking over here for a bit, just know the people over there more and all that.

Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

The name made sense to me Happerry, but I may as well just change it to Adept's mod. I put in everything I felt needed fixing or tweaking, so it's not a focused "balance" mod in the sense that some here seem to understand the term. It's not meant to buff weak nations and boost strong ones as such. It does change balance in many things, but it seems the name clashes with some expectations.

I'll change it when I find time to tweak the banner.

Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

50? Ow right, 30 in CBM. I tend to use CBM. (I lie. I use CBM, always. Except when I test stuff for the wiki).

Of course, you also use a fire mage to cast bonds of fire on the skrattir. Causing damage, and making him lose a turn.

I don't agree with you on the movement. It is good, but flying really wins for a lot more reasons. Flying is way better. Attacking from a few provinces away is not comparable to movement the Skrattir has.

And 250 gold for a w2b2 1?wbnd mage isn't great actually. Horrible upkeep. Not super paths. (sure B gives options as a communion, but you need a few of them then). It is actually a bit overpriced then. The nature and death randoms have little use.

But why remove the slots? Why not just increase the cost to 300 gold?

Why remove the mid game options of gearing up the skrattir and say they are still very useful in wolf form by giving early game evidence that will never occur. (at the moment you have luck as a spell, and spare s1 hags, there will not be any indies left. Unless you play against horrible newbies, or gargantuan maps). Killing 10+ indy provinces doesn't mean that much. Try the same against mage supported heavy cav.

Heck try raiding with your skrattir + hag support. The hag will only be there every other turn, or it will get killed by archery or attack rear troops. So you cannot even rely on having eth+luck against players. And if you really piss somebody off with the eth/luck. 2 seeking arrows means you do not have a hag anymore. (And if you are in all out war, taking out a relatively rare s1 hag is a nice bonus, they are the most useful hag variants).

Try to use the skrattir without hag support. It will not work. Give them a vine shield, and it will work again. That isn't cheesy, it is just basic thug usage. And skrattir are one of the best thugs around. (Perhaps shishi are better :)).

Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

[quote=Soyweiser;785246][quote=Adept;785238]In that sentence you can see the reason why I wanted them more giant werewolf, and less super thug. You think they are fine as they are, I think they are over the top and overshadow the actual giant troops.

You don't agree. I don't feel the need to convince you. Experiences are based on multiplayer games and research into the precice mechanics. Try them out if you're interested, if not just let it be.

Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

My only question is why you asked for feedback. I've read the entire thread and what i see is you criticizing everyone who tries to give you any feedback that isnt praise. If you want feedback, dont tear people apart when they give it.

Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

Adept,

The main thing to remember is that these people wouldn't be so passionate about critiquing your mod unless they intended to use it as a substitute for CBM.

Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

[quote=Adept;785248][quote=Soyweiser;785246]I'd just like to note that I'm playing in Multiplayer as the Jotuns right now, and that wolfnerf would be enough to make me flat out not use them as werewolves because they'd be pretty much useless. By the time I got them ready to be worth hitting independents there wouldn't be any left, and they'd be overpriced fodder verses any player who ran into them. At least as falling frost spammers they'd be able to break even gold wise with their cost.

Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

I'm happy that you do not feel the need to convince me how reducing the power of unit X improves the power of unit Y.

And did you just tell me to test out more mechanics? While you didn't even think that it might be a bit overpowered to have fear on 20 gold units?

And I played around with skrattir to know that without handslots their usage will be severely limited. So much that any usage of them in this form against non pd is a waste. No need to test that in MP. As I have never really fielded skrattir without weapons in MP.

I think magic on pretenders is to strong. So my next mod has removed that. Don't say anything bad about it! Research the precise mechanics in MP first!

Ps: one thing that must be said, kudos for modding all the different weapons everywhere. What a horrible task to do. And it doesn't even matter that much ingame. I would have given up, the time cost vs the effect would be way to small for me :D.

Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

You guys are so ****ing anal.

Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

Ah, I guess that makes sense. :) Sorry, I react quite poorly to poinlessly confrontational stuff.

For what it's worth I'm starting to see that putting the word balance in the name really did confuse people.

I was thinking about different things than balance between nations.

Adept's tweak Mod? Adept's consistensy mod?

The point was to fix things that have annoyed me and my friends over the years.

The biggest change in gameplay is getting rid of non-site gem production and forging discounts. What discounts remain (from special units and pretenders) will be non stackable, and hence not an issue.

I find the gem economy to be a very interesting and important part of Dominions, and the stackable fraction based (percentage) discounts as a disruption. I could write a long essey on the game theory of this, but I bet it would quickly move to TL:DR territory ;)

So basically if you want to try what the game is like with those things removed, try the mod. If that doesn't interest you, you probably won't enjoy it.

I'm eager to hear from those who do choose to try it, and I'll report on what my own Dominions group things about it after our next game.

Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

I was still testing that. It was an attempt to get some personality into Jomon. The point about why it was unbalancing was well made (I would have noticed it too, I had just forgotten that fear auras stack), so I removed it. It was exactly the sort of feedback I was looking for.

Well of course you wouldn't as they previously only had 2 natural attacks. Using them without gear would have been folly of the worst sort. With their built in quickness giving them _any_ two weapons raises their attacks from 4 to 6.

Yes, it's the reason it took months >.<

Like many things in the mod, it's partly an aesthetic change. Still, I think you'll find it makes all those glaive and poleaxe armed troops a somewhat better deal. Polearms should stand up well to cavalry, and they really are better at it now.

I rather like the naginata armed samurai, but that may be just me being stubborn ^.^

Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

Doesn't CBM already fix the whole 'gem economy' problem by removing generators? I do like the ideas of long weapons being more effective against mounted troops, but I was sort of under the impression that they already had an innate bonus against them. Like I thought that I read "all pikemen get a bonus against mounted units" but that may have been from a different game. Maybe I just got that idea because cavalry tend to have short weapons and therefore longer weapons like spears and pikes are more effective at repelling their attacks.

Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

Chill to some Strawberry Alarm Clock

Always good to see people tweaking games the way they see fit. Personally I'd like to see a buff to Phantasmal Wolves.

Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

Pikes don't have any hidden perks in Dominions. Their advantage over cavalry is their long reach, which means they get repel checks vs. everybody. Unfortunately at least the top level cavalry (knights, royal guard...) have such high morale that they press their attacks anyway, just taking the occasional 1 point hit from the repel check.

Glaives had very high damage (10), but -1 to both attack and defence. This mod brings the damage down to a still respectable 8 and makes them attack 0, defence +1 weapons in handiness.

Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

Making glaives and other two handed weapons do less damage is not necessarily a good thing. It's already very hard to get troops that do enough damage to beat the highest protection recruitable units. For example a 20 protection heavy cavalry with a shield is nearly impervious to a glaive troop. It can only be defeated by bizarre DRN rolls and criticals from fatigue. If these are fatigue neutral sacreds with 20+ protection, it will take a LOT of glaive wielders to kill one. Two handed weapons barely did enough damage in dominions as it was. I have a very hard time imagining using them in your mod unless I absolutely had nothing else worth recruiting.

Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

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.

Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

I like consistency elmokki. I seriously doubt anything will be thrown to disarray with this. I will really _like_ it if axe armed troops are actually worth something now. Same goes for the poleaxe armed troops of Ulm.

As for overall balance I can comment on that much better after the next (few) multiplayer games.

I still don't know if I should change the name of the mod, or if I do, what should I call it. Damnations.

Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

Btw elmokki, I don't quite understand your example. Are you saying you think things are better so that axes are useless and Marverni only stick to sword armed troops?

Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

No, he's saying the troops are balanced now. Swords may be better than axes, but the axe troops are cheaper or have better stats to make up for it.

Make axes better and now you have cheap troops with better weapons, or better troops with better weapons.

Actually with Carnutes, they have berserk, IIRC, which makes them good even with poorer weapons. With better axes, they're probably too good.

Making a change to a weapon across the board means you're changing the balance of every unit that uses that weapon and you really should look at each one individually, in the context of the nation and see whether it's still ok or whether it should have it's stats or cost tweaked to make up for the change.

Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

Currently (CBM 1.92) Marverni has two very viable choices since the axe wielding unit is different in other ways (berserker 3, more hp, less att/def). By buffing the axe you'll risk making Marverni only want to use the axe wielders.

That's the first example that I got to my mind really and you should not open a game with Marverni and look at the units. What I mean is that when you change balance of weapons by comparing only weapons themselves you risk changing balance in ways you can't anticipate without looking at every nation's unit selections.

I consider the werewolf nerf horribly stupid. The spell and forging changes I like. Those are at least things changing actual percieved balance problems. Weapon changes on the other hand - unless you get gratification from playing with percievedly more realistic weapons - are just a big box of surprises. It's hard to say what the weapon changes even achieve. You'll mostly see the same kind of units in the field since nations don't really have alternatives. In some rare cases you might've achieved more variety, but in general what you did is give random buffs/nerfs around to nations. Awesome balancing!

Simply said: the balance in this game is primarily balance between nations. Weapon changes in general are a blanket changes which buff/nerf relative powers of nations fairly randomly. That's not balance, that's just err... pointless tweaking?

If you want to give players options regarding weapons, you'll want to start editing sprites to give nations more options with their troops. The weapon changes would be more understandable if all nations had the ability to actually choose between the weapons, which they generally don't (Marverni does not, the berserking on Carnute Noble Warrior is the differentiating factor)

Oh, also, generally nerfing Jomon is something I would not put under mod with "balance" on title either, or do you really think Jomon as a nation is more in line with other nations in terms of power now, in which case I guess you can call it balance.

Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

I guess I should put the head slots back for werewolves in the name of consistency. If a dragon has a head slot, I suppose a werewolf should keep his. Still gonna leave them with 2x claws instead of hands.

Re checking the pricing I did on Jomon. It fits the pattern of the pricing (most of these are from Late Age).

at/df mor gold
defender 11/12 13 15
t-guard 11/11 12 13
sweihand 11/11 12 14
man-at-arms 11/11 12 14
entrance guard 11/12 14 18
Iceclad 11/10 12 15 (prec 11)
Iron Crow 12/11 12 15
Raven Guard 13/11 13 17
hirdman 11/11 11 12
vanara swordsm 11/11 10(+1) 13
Ice Warrior 11/10 12 13
Ice Guard 12/11 13 16
Meteorite guard 11/10 12 13
milite 9/9 8 8
Limitane Prim 10/10 11 12 (guard)
Hastatus 10/10 11 12
principe 11/11 12 15
Emerald Guard 13/12 14 25

---

Ashigaru 9/9 10 9
samurai 10/11 11 11
O-ban 11/11 12 14
Go-hatamoto 12/11 13 17
Aka-Oni 12/12 14 20

Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

Unit costs in Dominions (vanilla anyway) are based on the training level of the troops. Their resource cost comes from the gear. This is logical and consistent, and has been so since the original Dominions with very little change.

http://illwinter.com/dom2/modinstructions.html

Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

The original values for Axes and such are bizarrely bad. The units haven't been built to compensate this with balance in mind. Kristoffer has talked about his creative process, and it definitely isn't to balance everything like that.

The original axe:
Damage 7 one point higher than a broadsword
Range 1 shorter reach, with all the problems that gives
Attack -1 hard to land a blow
Defence -1 Not only does it not give a defence bonus, it hinders you

Where as I compared it with a sword so it does a bit more damage (8 to the broadswords 6), has no special bonus or penalty for fighting and still has the harsh but fitting shortness of range.

It's hardly a miracle weapon. Actually it's still pretty bad in comparison to a sword except it can help you get through heavy armour... which btw was the point why knights quite often used axes as armour got better (and later warhammers).

Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

What I don't understand is why people are so up in arms about this mod if they have no intention of using it when I think it became clear pretty early on that most people aren't particularly interested in it. Adept set about to make a mod that fixed problems he saw with Dominions, namely that weapons weren't accurately in line with their historical use. He also didn't think that werewolves should have hand slots because, traditionally (as in popular media and not necessarily in your backyard), you don't see werewolves fighting with shields or weapons. And finally, he had what I would personally consider a slightly strange obsession with nerfing Jomon, which is the game's version of feudal Japan, because he also wanted to make them more historically accurate. Does the lay population overrate the effectiveness and awesomeness of Japanese samurai? Maybe...but they have a cool name, wear awesome-looking armor, and thrust swords into their own stomach when they dishonor themselves, so I'm okay with people thinking they are bad asses. In fact, the addition of fear to those units was, in a way, the ultimate "eff you" towards Jomon/samurai warriors, because they're generating fear even though they've been weakened to the point where it would be ridiculous to fear them. His mod wasn't made with nation-wide balance in mind but was designed so that "historic" conflicts could be recreated in the game.

Some of his ideas are pretty good, in my opinion. Sometimes I think it would be cool for weapons to have slightly more niche uses, as opposed to basically different points on a sliding scale of attributes (damage vs. length vs. attack and defense bonuses/penalties). However, these are more necessary for balancing the game as a whole, which most people prefer. Adept's mod seems effective for what it was supposed to accomplish, but it's simply not for everyone, or possibly even most players of Dominions. I respect him for sharing it and I think people should be a little less critical/harsh; if you don't want to use the mod, then don't.

Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

So a giant with lesser training is cheaper than a normal human with more training?

Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

Well, it should be obvious that "training level" excludes giants, troglodytes, mounted units, units with glamor, elephants, sacred units, hydras, minotaurs, mammoths, shamblers, and demons. It's implicit!

Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

You forgot hobbitses!

Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

There is only one problem with this mod - it's name. It isn't balance mod, it is "realistic" mod or something similar.

Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

But knights don't use axes in dominions, they use broadswords.

Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

No, bigger units have a higher baseline cost. Are you just trolling here?

Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

Thanks. I have to agree. I meant a slightly different thing with the name than let's say the CBM use of the word. I was also debating the name of the mod with myself until the very end of making the banner.

I'll fix that today and post that. Sorry about the confusion. I feel the not-quite-well-thought-out name caused much needless drama.

I guess "realism mod" in all it's pretentiousness will give people the right idea?

And thanks for the support :)

Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

[quote=rdonj;785548]This is true, but the weapons are the basis of nation mods as well. This makes it more fun, at least for me, to create nations with more varied weaponry.

I'm going to want to make a late age (and early age) version of the Independent Kingdom mod for instance, and now that you mention it, axe armed heavy cavalry sounds like something I should try ;) ...not to mention anti-heavy-armour troops using hammers.

The Sonnenkinder mercs are quite interesting under this mod. Their effectiveness is mostly unchanged, but the anti armour weapons can come handy occasionally.

Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

There we go. Name shortened to Adept's Mod to avoid confusion. v 1.10 should be definite now, unless somebody finds and reports a bug.

If somebody can tell mow how to change the name of the thread, I'll fix it there as well.

Re: Adept's Balance Mod 1.00 ready
 

First press edit, in the edit window there is a button named "go advanced" next to the save button, press that and you can edit the title of teh thread.

Re: Adept's Mod (weapon, magic and monster changes)
 

Thanks :)

Re: Adept's Mod (weapon, magic and monster changes)
 

Hmm, I think I missed out something obvious when doing this.

Currently I think that the price of hiring militia should be dropped from 7 to 5 gold. That way it would actually be worth it sometimes to get militia instead of properly trained infantry. Currently militia is just practically never worth the purchase and the upkeep.

Re: Adept's Mod (weapon, magic and monster changes)
 

i've longed for the pivotal moment when militia rush would become a viable strategy

Re: Adept's Mod (weapon, magic and monster changes)
 

Do i smell sarcasm or is it just the pair of socks im wearing ?

Re: Adept's Mod (weapon, magic and monster changes)
 

no, i am completely serious, reducing the price of militia(one of the most unfairly underutilized umits in the game) by 2 gold is a massive change that will shake the metagame to its core. maybe this daring mod will even go so far as to increase their strength stat by a single point to represent militia being mostly conscripts from rural areas. who knows, or dares to dream?

Re: Adept's Mod (weapon, magic and monster changes)
 

Did he ruin your favorite mod? sadface :(

Re: Adept's Mod (weapon, magic and monster changes)
 

on the contrary, this mod is my favorite, now and forever

Re: Adept's Mod (weapon, magic and monster changes)
 

Then I vote to rename this mod to "Admiral Aorta's favourite balance mod". To be clear its purely a rebalancing mod rather than a content mod.

Re: Adept's Mod (weapon, magic and monster changes)
 

that's fine with me, i would be honoured to give my name to such a wondrous mod

Re: Adept's Mod (weapon, magic and monster changes)
 

The non-apparent use is that militia become very gold-effective at patrolling and sieging (defense, offense).

CBM made the same change and the CBM world didn't implode.

Re: Adept's Mod (weapon, magic and monster changes)
 

You really think 7 -> 5 gold change would massively change the metagame? I was gonna go with 7 -> 6, but it seems like needless pussy footing.

I'll set it at 5 (and the little Markata at 4) for the latest multiplayer match with my local Dominions group. I guess I'll have funny stories to tell if it means things get out of hand.

Re: Adept's Mod (weapon, magic and monster changes)
 

A little addition. I feel the metagame, when it comes to militia probably needs to be changed. I've never met anybody willing to buy militia, except in truly bizarre one-off circumstances. You pay full food cost for the "soldiers" with weapon skills and morale 8. Mostly they are more a liability than an asset.

Re: Adept's Mod (weapon, magic and monster changes)
 

Making Militia NNE could help.

Re: Adept's Mod (weapon, magic and monster changes)
 

Nne?