Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

That's pretty much what I was thinking about.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Hopefully we hear the conclusion from QM. If it is a bug then I'll love the new CBM but if it is a feature new version just killed my game :D

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

A nerf was intentional, but not as drastic as it turned out (I forgot just how sucky it was unmodded). Next version it will probably go back as it was for LA, and +10 gems +1n/d needed for other eras.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Now that sounds just about perfect.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Has anyone noticed how quantum_mechani is a genius?

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

I have a suggestion about buffs. Not a balance thing, but something that could improve battle scripting. Reduce range on some buff spells, so caster will cast them on the squad that you intended the spell for and therefore put the caster close by.

Example: I had an army with two groups of centaurs that I placed on flanks with attack rear and a bunch of archers in the middle. I had two pans intended to cast haste on the two centaur groups. But, since haste has a range of ten and there were much more archers, pans chose to buff them, which is completely illogical. If the range for the spell had been five or less, I could have positioned them to cast on centaurs.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

That might be a good idea! Not sure how it would play out but certainly worth trying.

On the other hand there are many situation where I love the AOE buffs having some range. Like Earth mages casting weapons of sharpness on my frontline after their script has run out etc...

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Yeah, lack of range in AoE buffs leads to annoying situations.

Like needing to risk your caster to archer fire to buff your front-line forces.

Frankly, that just means you needed to place your casters farther back so only the centaurs were in range. Surely there was *someplace* on the field where the caster was only in range of the centaurs. (Otherwise, place units differently?)

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

No, there wasn't and I did not want to place them differently, why should I? Exposing casters to archer fire is a risk I am willing to take in order to get the needed buffs going.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

I think it could be nice and thematic if you needed to risk putting mages in danger near your troops to buff them.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

In order to compensate for the loss of blood stones, would it be appropriate to lower the cost of Mechanical Men, perhaps to 10 gems per cast? It's always been sorta balanced around having well-nigh infinite earth gems, which frankly is no longer true.

I've also been thinking about Ulm, and I wanted to throw out an idea for your consideration. Maybe up just Guardians' MR? They're already the elite anti-blessed troops...and their commander is MR 10(unlike the other non-caster Ulm commanders, Spy notwithstanding). If nothing else, a change just to MR 10 or 11 will make their squad less likely to be targeted.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Agree with guardians mr buff.

I like the sound of boosting mechanical men and clockwork horrors, but I think they have their place still currently.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

QM: Can you do somthing about ghost wolves? Costs ridiculous fatigue for the effect.... and is ai cast far too often.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

It gets cast when the mage is out of range to cast anything else, they definitely prefer lightning bolt or other directly offensive spells when in range.

And considering spamming them is a really good anti-thug measure, it probably is appropriately fatigue-costed.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Is it possible to create new buff spells based on existing ones? If so, then one solution to the problems of long range causing unintended units to be targetted is to have standard and short range versions of certain buff spells. As that way the short range one could be used in scripts to aid targetting, and the long range ones could still be used by the AI when scripts run out.

Of course if buff spells can't be copied, then this post can just be ignored :)

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

This should be completely possible. Actually I like that more than the idea I was going to suggest.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

No. Just no.

Not that it's a bad idea, it would just have unseen consequenses. Writing a new spell for each buff with range would make CBM eat many precious golden spell slots, limiting the amount that other mods can add.

Since CBM is basically the new vanilla, all mods basically have to be compactible with it, so there really isn't any workaround. Please, don't take my precious spell-slots! I need them!

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

I agree with burnsaber, we need those slots for other mods. I also don´t like the idea of having multiple spells doing almost the same thing, it would disturb my sense of immersion.

I think the idea of reduced range is worth testing though, but don´t put in CBM until tested in a separate mod.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

What about giving "defensive" buffs, and the ones that really need to go on specific things have low range, but "offensive" buffs keep the range they have?

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

I never meant for all buff spells to have short range. This is something that will have to be decided on a spell by spell basis. It should be done only in cases where such reduction in range increases the spell's performance and outweighs the negative effect of a shorter range.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

A small conversation with few people on IRC led me to post my(/our) ideas here. We were talking about giving a new earth booster (perhaps to not make MA Ulm complitely useless again, and such), and what came up was that since Pebble Skin suit has it's own problems (giving regen and str boost in addition to earth magic), the ideal candidate would be to turn Tome of Gaia into non-unique item, perhaps with paths of e4n2/e3n2 or something along those lines. Nature already has moonvine bracer as a misc booster which isn't very hard to get. This change would of course translate into basically giving a new free misc booster for pangaea of pretty much any era in addition to giving an access for it to ma Ulm, which again would have to work towards it (Like the case with bloodstones were for those nations, with perhaps the exception of la pan).

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

I like the idea of using the pebbleskin suit. I think it's a nice one.

The trouble with the tome of gaia is that it creates a strong link between nature and earth, and is rather better for some nations (e.g. Pan) than others (e.g. Ulm).

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

I find it rather odd why people just don't go behind Pebble Skin Suit. If you are seriously concerned that it would be the next best SC gear or something, just make cost it E4 (or E5 if you really want be concervative). That way you can climb up to the high level earth spells like in the blood stone years, but it will just cost you so much as to prevent spam. I mean seriuosly, how many Air Helmets have forged in a single game? How many would you have forged if it was cursed?

The str boost is neglible (+2! big difference!), regeneration is pretty useful I admit, but really not big of a deal since it's not really a SC item. The stoneskin will often just hinder you with the -50cr penalty associated with it and it will stay even if you cast invulnerability/iron skin. Getting turned into a troll might be awesome, if you are human mage, not much so if you are a tartarian.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

I´m also behind the pebble skin suit rather than tome of gaia.

But honestly I don´t think Ulm or any other strong earth nation is weakened by the loss of a second earth booster.

I think of it this way: With no gem gens the only way to "generate gems" is to use dvarwen hammers. This favours earth nations, a lot. And without a second earth booster it will be even harder for non earth nations to forge enough hammers, increasing this advantage.

For Ulm this is even more significant with their innate forge bonus, Ulm is now the undisputed master of gem saving in a world where gems just became a lot more valuable.

It will be a little harder to cast the high end earth spells, but weren´t those a little too easy to cast before anyway?

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Fantomen: No, they weren't too easy to cast before.

Weapons of sharpness and army of X needs to be able to be cast by national mages lategame to retain usefulness. Otherwise they are too deep in the research tree for any real return. (And not just one national mage somewhere - but capable of fielding one with each army)

Petrify is totally useless if you can't spam it. Earth attack also isn't very good without being able to put national mages on it.

So either a new earth booster is needed, or the path requirements of these spells need to come down 1 each (minimum). Arguably, petrify was too hard to cast even with blood stone.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Yep. The pebbleskin suit just seems to be the least disruptive of the available options. Its drawbacks are numerous enough that I don't think you'll see them exactly mass produced, but they will be used whenever people really need that extra Earth level. I mean, Armor of Twisted Thorns is pretty awesome too, but nobody spams those.

Really, the best part about the Pebble Skin Suit is that it gives just enough protection to justify a round-one Rain of Stones from a guy wearing it and no other equipment(especially if you have the 35 hp from turning into a troll).

But really, the Pebble Skin Suit is just fine as a replacement for an earth booster. Non-blood nations will really have to think hard about whether or not they feel justified getting blood on their pretender or spending the resources to use scouts to bootstrap into blood for the thing. Don't underestimate either of those costs. There's no need to make it artificially expensive. Even keeping it E1B3 will not make these things common as flies, except perhaps on MA Abysia.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Weapons of sharpness and army of gold is just E4. So any e2 mage gets there easily. I guess petrify, army of lead and earth attack could be lowered to e4 if there´s no new booster.

I still maintain that the removal of gemgens, including bloodstones, is a relative boost to strong earth nations.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Why does nobody mention the boots of antaues? They seem like the least disruptive option to me. Just some regen and reinvigoration on top of +1 earth.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

I am convinced that Boots of Antaeus are the best option for replacing blood stones. Here are two possible solutions, but paths and gem costs should be discussed. I prefer the second, but think that gem costs should be higher due to reinvig and regen effects which make it a good SC/thug equipment item.

1) Same paths and cost as boots
2) With blood stone's paths and cost

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Nice, but I don't understand how making it a perfect caster/SC item would be inherently superior. People would put that Stone of Antaeus on commanders that didn't even have earth magic. And it basically means that nature is no longer necessary to get regen on your SCs.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Just some regeneration and reinvigoration? Possibly the two best SC survival abilities? On misc slot?

The idea of the Pebble Skin Suit is that it has drawbacks and is in general an intresting item. If the options are Tome of Gaia/Boots of Antaneus/Pebble Skin Suit, the suit will have smallest effect and is hardest to abuse. Remember that getting turned into a troll isn't that awesome in all cases, not even for humans. Your mr gets reduced, you lose all other innate abilities (like the innate forgebonus for Ulm or FR and heat for Abysia). You become a bigger target with that additional hp, allowing the opponent to pinpoint your casters with spells (try incinerate with that -50% FR) or "attack largest" commands. Also remember that when you are a troll with the suit, you have base -50% in both FR and CR in all battles.

And even if the Troll transformation gets somehow abused (although I'm not seeing it), we can just edit the "Troll" unit to have -1 magicskill in all paths.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

See, i'd say ToG has the smallest effect because the existence of *yet another* way to boost N in a misc slot has almost no effect on the game, since only an oracle/blood fountain has enough misc slots to use them all. (moonvine, RoS, RoW current - and for oracle/fountain there's no hand slot so still no ability to exceed current maximum boost across all chasses). And for single boosting of N you still go to the thistle mace because its cheaper. ie, it has little effect on common needs for an N booster (doesn't change 1 boost level choice or max possible boost).

At which point the only real reason to forge it will be for the earth booster.

Keep in mind that 'drawbacks' are not something we should be actively seeking out - Earth has *1* non-unique booster without bloodstones (2 if you count the staff of the elements, which is remarkably hard to forge without earth boosters!), compared to at least 2 such boosters for every other path of magic. This is a shortcoming that should be rectified.

So arguably the ToG adds less value than the bloodstone did (both have E, +1e/trn vs. +1N), and doesn't really change the metagame situation substantially for N boosters. Sure, its different paths than bloodstone, but that's not the most important part. (People can and will trade for items, the important part is that a second *non-cursed* non-unique earth booster exist)

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

I know, but I just don't like the trollification and cursed effects. It's fine on national mages, but what about earth kings or tartarians. Do you think it would be such a superb item with E4B4 or E4N3 paths?

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

I'm of the opinion that the best thing to do is to change the tome of gaea into an exact replica of the bloodstone (same graphic, same costs, same paths, same RL). The nature boosting part of it can make up for the loss of the gem genning.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

And making the second booster cost 30+ gems would kind miss the point completely (why not just forge elemental staves then?). The idea is to allow the nations that were hit hardest by the Blood Stone nerf (Ulm and Agartha) access to a secondary earth booster. How in the heck can they forge E4N3 item? Getting into blood 2 for stones is easy, just send scouts to hunt and empower. Not so much for nature.

Anyways, this argument is quite moot, since Squirreloid has a good point about the N boosting of ToG being a bit rebundant. It would likely have the least effect on the game and can be inexpensive enough on N to be somewhat forgeable by Ulm and Agartha.

I'm still for Pebble Skin Suit, thought. It's such an intresting and intriguing item and I just simply love it. Forged it everytime I've been able to do so.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

My solution was to change agartha and ulm.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Well I thought the point was to get those E5 spells like earth attacks and earth kings. If that is the use for the booster then it needn't be cheap.

I agree with Chris here. Some nations are hit more badly then others by the lack of blood stones. The same goes for clams and fetishes. The idea should be to change those nations in some way to compensate for it, not add an item forgeable by everyone to do it.

I don't like the tome idea as it lets you get +3 nature too easily. Now everyone can do mother oak and gift of health etc.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Well, certainly you can't give +1e just to all ulm mages. Nor Agartha.

Here. Have some rambling about the tome, nature and blood magic.
Currently from what I've gathered, the best way to get your bloodstone economy going on ulm would've been to take a forge lord with blood or something similar - now it would only change to force the forge lord take some nature instead of blood. For agartha I've always just hunted with indep scouts for the slaves, though I don't see why they couldn't have done something similar with blood access -pretender. Do also keep in mind that if you are taking nature on your pretender(+n4), your sacred units will get regen, boosting your sacreds usability a lot (priest smiths for ulm, ancient ones/lords/oracles etc for agartha). It would be an indirect boost. Combined with the fact that you'll be having earth on your pretender also - that's reinvig (and perhaps prot if you go all the way to 9 or 10). Again that synergies with your sacreds well. No-one will force you to take such a pretender though.

Now with blood - You'll still need earth (e1b3 is the suit in vanilla, can't remember if CBM modifies the values), You don't really need to invest to anything else than b3 on your pretender with e1, and the path isn't very useful for you for the rest of the game than simply few pebble skin suits just to replace the bloodstone economy it awarded before - the paths would effectively go to waste. Having b4 would grant a point or two of strength - while not useless, it's far from regen5 or whatever you'd be having with nature. In late game nature also awards you with GoRing wished sc's/summoned tartarians, which agartha nor (ma) ulm have no national access to. Granted - they neither do have high death mages (exception being la agartha and la ulm) or high-astral casters. MA Ulm could probably suit their SC need with Iron Angels, should they have the earth income. It's not the best chassis around, but it isn't too shabby either.

So. Should the pebble skin suit be made non-unique, it'd "hurt" the nations in comparison to the tome of gaia. Being cursed and turning the user into troll (not a very bad thing for ma ulm though), it'd see little use. Tome of Gaia is not cursed - it'd see probably more use, though the point to consider is if we would want another cheap earth booster, or something a bit more rare than the ubiquitious earth boots. Tome would also basically force them to have a pretender designed for it (whereas the suit doesn't explictly need it, but it very much hastens the process of making them), but it complements to their sacred units and/or mages. It also opens up the possibility of getting into race to gift of nature's bounty / oak / gift of health. For example, Nature's bounty is in enchantment, which I believe ma Agartha likes, and I don't see it as too bad a path for ulm either, with earth well in the end, and fire fend in the way.

Just points to consider. /ramble off

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Well, if the point is that nations that could make bloodstone should still be able to access an earth booster, why not change the bloodstone into E1B1 : +1E. constr 4.
Simply remove the gemgen part and make it cheaper. It would cost the equivalent of 10 gems, same as the +1E boots.
done.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Gemgen part can't be removed. That's why everyone is talking about the unique earth boosters. Making one of them non-unique is the only way to get a new earth booster.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Hm... What about making empowerment in Earth cheaper for those that need bloodstones? I know you can't mod the cost of empowerment, but how about this?

Take MA Ulm for example. Create a national spell for them at Construction 6 called "Empower Smith". Using the same idea from a Dragon's or Skratti's mage/monster forms, this spell would permanently change the caster into a new "Empowered Smith" unit with the stat-line of a Master Smith, but the new unit would have #magicboost 3 1 and one less Misc. Item slot, thus giving the smith a boost in Earth Magic for roughly the cost of a second Earth booster, the downside of course being you can't pass this around like a normal booster. This of course couldn't be cast twice, because you'd be changing into the exact same unit number, so trying to boost a second time would have no effect.

A few downsides I can see from here would be this spell would be completely pointless to be cast by anyone with a better physical statline than a Smith, such as Earth Kings and the like. Other mages however can only dream of the Smith's statline and, if they meet the path requirements, would be able to cast the spell. This wouldn't be that bad if the mages only had paths that they could pass off as being from a Master Smith, but when your enemy starts seeing Empowered Smiths with N2 or some other path that Smiths don't get as randoms that he might get suspicious. These however, are unavoidable drawbacks of this method.

As for Agartha, just take the above and replace "Ulm" with "Agartha" and "Smith" with "Oracle" or "Golem Crafter" The same Spell could be used to empower Oracles of both EA and MA Agartha I believe, though we would need a separate one for Golem Crafters, Ktonian Necromancers and Tomb Oracles... Though I hate to take away Burnsaber's precious Spell Slots, it wouldn't need very many to do this if it's just a few nations that really need them.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

You can't mod transformation spells cleanly.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Possible or not it would be a bad solution IMO. Too complicated and cluttering, and only adressing specific nations.

I´d prefer a new earth booster with funny side effects to that, but as I stated before I don´t think it is needed from a balance PoV.

Can you copy the effect of another item into a new modded item? I mean: is it possible to duplicate the earth boots into a misc item? I suppose not since this discussion looks the way it does, I just thought about it...

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

I think that would be possible, yes. However, I'm also pretty sure that doing so wouldn't help because you'd be wearing two items giving the same ability... so it would be like wearing two pairs of earth boots, just one of them happens to be hanging around your neck.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Worth trying isn´t it?

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Hardly any nation ever needs blood stones to forge dwarven hammers.
Either you get to earth-2. Then you can forge dwarven hammers with earth boots. Or you don't. Then you can't make bloodstones.
Theoretically if you get to earth-1 you can trade for earth boots, make a bloodstone and forge dwarven hammers. In my experience people are asking for dwarven hammers directly if they don't want the bloodstones for gem genning.
The uses that I got out of the booster part of bloodstones was really only to reach high level earth spells or have some more in need. For that reason I'm against a cursed replacement booster.

Gems are not more valuable through scareness, since they are not a market commodity (you usually don't compete with other people buying gems for money).
With 40 gems Ulm's forge bonus saves theoretically 10. With 80 20.
Compare this with Niefel where are Jarl saves you ~ 25 (assuming that it is roughly on par with a Bane Lord + ring of regen + boots of the messenger) while costing 500gp, it is clear that forge bonus is better the higher the gem to gold ratio is.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

I´m not talking of the possibility to forge hammers, I´m talking of the opportunity to make enough hammers. Most nations will get their cruical one or two hammers, but how many can match the rumbling gemsaving engine of ulm or agartha?

If you expect to have fewer gems (with no gemgens) the relative advantage of using those gems effectively will increase. This is true even if you´re only looking at the closed economy of individual nations. And they do increase in value with scarceness. The example of Niefel Jarl is good because it illustrates how different ways to save gems now become more important. The relative advantage of recruitable SCs is increased now, as is the value of gems and the advantage of hammers.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

I don't agree hammers are more valuable now. They save a proportional amount so unless you have too many gems to conceivably spend in a turn or too few gems to do anything, their value doesn't change based on gem quantity.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

I noticed in an SP game that MA Oceania has a Mermage (1416) without magic as a PD leader instead of a Turtle Chief, at least on land. That wasn't intentional, was it?

Looking through the code, I can't see how that happened, but I'm not much of a modder.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Is there any reason in particular that the Caelum Eagle King multihero gets Air 5 instead of 4?

I just had one who also got the air random (2.5 % chance) - 6 Air seems like overkill on a hero, even for Caelum.