Re: Conceptual Balance Mod v1.92
 

Potential difficulty - would you intend to have to put them out into each individual province, or to allow them to hide in forts? In the former case, it would mean huge networks of scouts running around your lands every turn delivering gems to labs, or building a laboratory in as many of your provinces as possible to avoid having to run the scout network.

Alternatively, you get a similar situation to gem gens where you can hide all of your gem producers in one or two forts and keep your extra gem income from being raidable, and still relatively difficult to assassinate (but at least a lot more possible than it would be in a gemgen environment). It would be pretty hard to police either way as well, due to scout reporting inaccuracy, especially inside of forts. You could let players police each other, or just play with trustworthy people, but it does seem like a lot of work either way.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod v1.92
 

Uh... I guess you could fill the map with labs using map commands to avoid the scout network.

The producers couldn't move and would be distributed one per province, so they could easily be killed by raiding.

You raise some good points. Maybe not such a great idea! But still I think it might be interesting.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod v1.92
 

I think your idea sounds really interesting, but definitely some balance issues. In addition to what rdonj said, I also wonder if it wouldn't give an extra advantage to blood. Because your gem-gen summons would only produce 1/gem per turn, but many magic sites produce 2 or more, players in this game would have overall lower gem income than normal, even though they have higher than normal income in certain paths. Blood income wouldn't be affected, though, so it would be proportionately higher than gem income in your game.

Or at least that's what I think :confused:. Does that make sense?

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod v1.92
 

It does make sense, *although* actually it turns out that blood hunting income is related to site frequency (clever Illwinter!). So actually probably blood nations would do unusually badly if the site frequency was set very low. That could be compensated for by making a blood slave-generating special commander as well.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod v1.92
 

Wow, I had no idea that blood income was affected by site frequency. I had always thought that population and unrest were the only determinants. I tried briefly to test it, and sure enough blood hunting success does seem to be higher at higher site frequency, but I couldn't really be sure. But I'll take your word for it. However, you can still get slaves with magic sites set to zero, so the ratio doesnt correlate perfectly. Anyway, good to know!

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod v1.92
 

You actually can still get magic sites with magic site settings at 0, too IIRC from when we did Overlords. They're just quite a lot more rare, so your cap income matters a lot more. And you really can't remote search at those settings, it's manual or you're just throwing gems away.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod v1.92
 

I know.

Bottom line is that I wish there was something equivalent to the specters in paths other than death. Somewhat high research level but not too far out of the way, expensive for what he is as just as chassis, but provides a limited amount of magic diversity. If you really want to get into another path you'll need more than just him, but if you really need some rings of lighting, or some AMAs, or frost brands, or crystal shields, etc. You have some way of pulling it off without getting lucky on indi mages. It will cost you a lot, the results will be random, buy you at least have a shot at getting what you need.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod v1.92
 

I think this is because some terrain types count as having a higher magic setting than the one you chose for the game. Notably wastes and swamps will get + 20. Forests and mountains are thought to get +10 and farmland is though to get -20. Dont think this affect bloodhunting but you never know.

Anyway, does anyone know at what magic setting bloodhunting is considered to be neutral? This is important in order to calculate return rates from bloodhunting bloodsummons and such.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod v1.92
 

While it is certainly true the different ages get different amount of blood slaves. I was never able to determine how much the site settings influenced blood hunting.

So while there are effects, how much it is effected is not known. (Setting the settings to 75% does not increase the amount of blood slaves by a huge amount, and iirc it also doesn't increase the chance of finding slaves, but I might be wrong there).

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod v1.92
 

also altering the finding chance for blood slaves doesnt alter the slave income the same way as gem income, since it is dependent on other factors, number of "huntable" provinces being a prominent one. for instance if the frequency setting changes only the number of slaves a hunter gets a turn, one can just send more hunters to that province to achieve the same income as with a different frequency setting.