Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Re:Sombre
Possibly a separate issue: Should the lifedrain used by illithid troops be #bonus to avoid them losing it when they lose an arm? This doesn't have the same balance implications as the commanders, as they cannot be equipped with items.

(Yes, I realize differentiating the two requires specifying a new lifedrain weapon that is #bonus rather than just making the existing one #bonus).

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Note that Illithid Lords and Illithid Soldiers do *not* have the Life Drain weapon. So perhaps, despite our DnD fueled preconceived notions, they suck out your life with their hands vs. tentacle beards? Note that life drain doesn't align terribly well to the concept of sucking out a brain anyway...perhaps it's totally unrelated.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Would it be possible for future versions of CBM to have two d/ls? One with gemgen and one without for those idiots among us, like myself, who has no idea how to mod?

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

I believe that goes against the idea behind CBM.

It seems that the goal is to create a balanced game and improve gameplay, not specifically create a mod that people will like.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

I agree with Rysan, it shouldn't be an official version, but just for you, here you go;) (didn't test it but it should be ok)

And I suggest you try out Dom3 modding, it's nowhere near as hard as it might sound:)

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

A minor bug: Divine Lightning(weapon number 754) should be magical but it doesn't have #magic tag.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

I am preparing for a new MP game as Jomon, and I ran a few quick SP games with them to test my strategies. So, I would like to talk about Jomon a bit.

The point is: am I the only person who thinks that Jomon seems specifically designed to induce frustration?

*)Jomon infantry have no shields - ok, fine, completely thematic. But why is their armor so horribly heavy? I do not see any reason for this to be so extreme.

*)Some of their infantry have 9 hp instead of default human 10. Why? If it is thematic, why there is no mention of this in the flavor text(Ulm units have it mentioned)? Is it for balance reasons? No need to worry, really, they suck anyway due to heavy armor and lack of shields.

*)They have great death summons (Ghost General and Dai Oni), but absolutely no death access. Worse, Dai Oni is a F/D summon, costs a huge number of death gems (which you will not have), and needs it armor replaced.

*)Kenzoku is a cool new summon: sacred, ethereal, awe - realy nice. He is quite cheap, and your mages can actually summon him(big improvement for Jomon). But guess what? His goddamn armor ruins everything. An earth bless could fix him, but Jomon does not really benefit from earth bless.

*)Why? Because your mages are not sacred. Also, they have movement 1, and a path selection that is so depressing that I do not even want to speak about it. No boosters for you.

*)Jomon has impressive underwater recruitables, especially Ryujin. But how do you get underwater without using a SC amphibious pretender? Each time I tried to use water breathing items, it was already late.

So. You have a weak starting army, and your units cost a ton of resources, so you may want to take Production to have a decent expansion speed. But your mages are not sacred, so they have huge upkeep, so you want Order. So, no way to save points by taking a "less troops/more mages and summons" path.
You have great, cheap thugs - Kenzoku and Ghost General. Too bad that you have no way to use them as a basis for your strategy: Ghost General needs death, Kenzoku needs an earth bless(or an armor replacement, after which he will no longer be cheap), and a priest to bless him because he cannot self-bless.
You have good archers, but you can wait for a long, long time to have a 2F or 2A mage.

Basically, Jomon has a lot of interesting options, but most of them are either unpractical or mutually exclusive and not good enough by themselves.

Is it possible to do anything about it?

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Festin - In our mp game together what I did is I took an awake celestial general with 4 air, 3 earth and 2 death. I didn't use him as an awake SC, but I used his freespawn as arrow catchers to help me expand. And used him to site search a bunch of provinces near my capitol. This was enough to get me a death income, and I was able to get enough death gems to summon mages and spam dark knowledge out a bit. You may not have seen them but I have a number of shura down fighting gath+midgard. This pretender also gives you easy access to both dwarven hammers and air boosters, which you would also ordinarily have a little trouble with. It's not too hard to fit decent scales on this pretender so long as you don't go overboard on the dominion. This pretender won't let you summon Dai Oni of course, but by the time you should be contemplating them, you should have a fairly solid fire income. If you have to empower, fire is probably one of the less painful gem types to do so with.

Getting underwater is a bit painful, and I plain couldn't do it. Your best bet? I don't know, probably to trade someone something for an underwater province.

The heaviness of samurai armor is also a bit of a pain. 7 encumbrance on a unit that doesn't have a shield or black plate is pretty bad. Luckily combats with them don't tend to last very long, as usually either you'll be shot full of arrows or the very high attack skill of the samurai will make mincemeat out of the enemy. They could probably stand to lose one encumbrance on the heavy and normal samurai armors, but certainly no more than that. While we are on the subject of armor though, have you tried using boots of the messenger on your kenzoku? 2 net encumbrance isn't really that bad, and should probably suffice for light raiding.

The low HP thing is from vanilla. I'm pretty sure it's supposed to reflect that japanese are shorter than european humans. So the average joe gets lower health.


Am I the only player in dominions who thinks jomon's archers are terrible? They take more resources than anything other than your cavalry, have worse stats than anything else you can recruit, and they bring longbows into the era of super heavy infantry with tower shields. Chances are, if these guys are firing into the enemy and you have soldiers engaged in melee with them, your units are going to take far more casualties than the enemy as they can actually be damaged by the arrows. If you're just using nothing but samurai archers it's a little better, but they are still nowhere near as good as your other units in melee and cost more resources. I cannot imagine them being a better buy than your melee troops without both wind guide and flaming arrows. I would still probably just buy indy archers though.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Celestrial General is quite nice, but it still has some weak points:
*)No earth bless for thugs. Boots of messenger will do the job of course, but, as I see it, the whole point of Kenzoku and Ghost General is their low cost, and this means minimal equipment (something like Demon Whip/Vine Shield, I think). In thier current state, Jomon cannot rely on thugs in midgame, because they will not have enough of them.
*)Need to empower to summon Dai Oni.
*)He does not help to get underwater.
*)He is quite expensive. With their non-sacred mages, Jomon likes good scales.

I think I would try to do something with Ghost King, which really shows how messed-up Jomon is. Who actually uses Ghost King apart from Jomon?

Low HP thing seems a bit illogical: why are Tien Chi soldiers 10 HP then?

I think Aka-Oni Samurai are far better then other Jomon units, including archers. But archers could be very nice, hypothetically, if Jomon had reliable 2F and 2A.

Some suggestions:
1)Reduce samurai armor weight. Come on, it is ridiculous, really. Jomon infantry is not overpowered in any way, since there is an obvious counter for them.
2)In CBM, Jomon can summon Kappa commanders early on. Nice, but a bit pointless, because they are too weak to be used as thugs and have nobody to lead. Give Jomon a low-level Conjuration spell that summons several regular Kappas, or change an existing spell so that it summops a Kappa Chief and 10 regular Kappas(more expensive, of course).
3)I do not know what can be done with their mages and path access. Probably somebody more experienced can suggest something without ruining the balance.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Well, I managed o3/p3 on him with decent dominion. You just need to take 3 negative scales.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

You keep harping on their non-sacred mages but they have a perfectly functional sacred researcher. Granted he's not doing anything in a fight, but your combat mages are actually pretty cheap because they're not sacred, while you can fill out your labs with really cost-effective guys.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Not to mention that the W or N random monks become absolute monsters when placed into a communion. 0 enc, 0 gem reinvigoration and POTS are nothing to sneer at.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Hey, don't rip on the ghost king. he is a very good expander/rainbow

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

I've used GK with plenty of nations, often UW ones! He's a great expander early on against non-archers non-mages - which means UW you can guarantee a province/trn so long as you avoid the hydromancers (they're the ones with sea trolls and a kraken). Land nations need to be a little more careful (or give him air magic!).

Jomon:
1) Samurai armor's huge encumbrance is irrelevant. If they acquire more than 20-30 fatigue, you're doing something wrong. Namely, not killing the enemy fast enough. You have 6 damage katanas as the *low* end of your weapon options. At the high end you have 10 damage glaives. Since all the units you will ever buy have str 11, that's 17-21 damage per guy. That's enough to really matter against even elite infantry. Throw on some strength of giants and its your own fault if you start fatiguing out.
2) Earth bless can make a lot of sense as Jomon - specifically for your summoned thugs. But it also benefits your sacreds - the yamabushi are well worth using *even without a bless*. Don't overlook the H2/H1 thug that comes even earlier than the other one - he can self bless and has only slightly worse stats. (Also, only requires E gems iirc, instead of precious astral).
3) Jomon's magic is good. No seriously, you have access to everything but D natively, and you have a summon that has D magic (i forget which offhand - its the swamp one). Who cares if they're not sacred - they're dirt cheap for how good they are. 4 total paths for 160g and recruit anywhere is pretty nice - it comes out to around 11g upkeep, which is less than 2g/RP in upkeep - its not winning any efficiency awards, but its certainly not notably bad either.

And since you can (and should) buy a lot of them, you'll have the path combinations you want, and access to boosters in most paths. The only boosters you won't have reliable access to are air and fire, and for the most part you won't care. Heck, you have the coveted E+S in combination, so you can make coins to S-boost. IIRC, you can get to RoWs without needing your pretender involved.

Site search aggressively (you'll be able to use auspex, augury, apsu, arcane probing, gnome lore, and haruspex trivially) to get good gem income.

Map move 1 a problem? Use your air income to make boots of flying.

4) Samurai archers suck. No seriously, don't buy them. Go-hatamoto, aka-oni, ashigaru, and yamabushi are about the only troops you should ever buy.

5) The monks are just amazing, but not for research. They're less efficient researchers than your other mages (no seriously, they've got half as many RPs for more than half the cost, meaning they cost more upkeep/RP than the mages do). What the monks excel at is being handed a master matrix, and leading line-backer communions in which they get to use awesome spells (W+N monks), or casting AoE air shield (A monks) on your shield-less troops. The F and E monks are acceptable researchers, and the cost of getting the really awesome monks.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Thanks for some good suggestions (I did not really notice yamabushi, for example), but, in my opinion, the main points still remain.

Sorry, but Jomon magic is simply not good. Sure, there are nations in LA with worse mages, but not too many. Tien Chi magic is good. Marignon magic is good. Jomon magic is not. I have played 2 MP games with them (and several SP), and the most vivid memory is a huge crowd of W1N1, A1N1 and E1W1 Onmyoji hired in a vain hope to get an F2.

I did not mean that earth bless is completely useless for Jomon. But here the in-built frustration factor of Jomon manifests again: you need earth bless for thugs BUT your mages are not sacred and you have a reliable access to earth. So, it's a kind of a lose/lose situation. Typical.

Moving around those huge monk-powered communions which are supposed to be a trump card of Jomon using boots of flying does not really look like a solution.

Nushi does have D1, but she is Conj-5, needs W2 and can only be summoned in swamps. Well...

Why ashigaru? I did not really find any use for them. You start with 10, and they do a good job as archer decoys, but I never saw a reason to buy one.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Hmm. At first glance, yamabushi don't really seem to be a real improvement over go-hatamoto without a bless. Care to elaborate on their usefulness, squirrel?

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

I rather agree on the mage frustration part, as you can't plan on anything, apart on a giant map where you'll be able to pump enougth of them so as to be 'almost' sure to have the paths you need. Even in SP I had problems with those damn randoms.

But the troops seemed to me rather good, ok you have no shields, but you'll crush any recruitable troops in melee, thanks to awesome attack skill and good damage output. And your cavalry is here to flank ennemy archers. Heck, the attack skill of your troops is so high you can even hope to reliably damage water blessed sacred troops ! The only real threat is crossbows/ fire arrowed archers, as basic archers will have great pain damaging your troops.
Think the other way around : who will I send to the frontline to hold those god damn samurais that won't end sliced up in two rounds ?

As I'm a SP player, I won't praise the jomon specific summons (AI can't react properly to thugs) but they seem to me efficient enougth to be worth using. Those plus the ones you get as an heritage of earlier time gives you a enormous lot of tools to use.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

rdonj: Yamabushi have (1) higher attack than go-hatamoto, (2) damage 10 weapon vs, damage 8 weapon (21 vs. 19 damage before drn), and (3) map-move 2. You're also likely to have some sort of bless unless you played for pure scales, most of which are going to be at least plausibly useful. Finally, they require relatively few resources compared to their gold cost, unlike most of your troops, so they're easy to 'mass' - I usually take good dominion as Jomon to push my likely great scales so i'm buying 7+ of them every turn.

Ok, first of all: castle aggressively. If you have less than 3 castles at the end of year 1, you're probably doing something wrong. If you hire mages at all your castles every turn, and continue castling aggressively, you should get most variations you need.

Second: both of your mages are useful. The Onmyoji only really come into their own later on - i'd focus on the other earlier. He'll get you easy access to haruspex and gnome lore, and you'll probably pull an augur and auspex before too long. As your anti-rush strategy should involve alteration research, these are the mages you want to shut down a rush anyway because the early earth magic in alteration is killer. (Suggested research: alt2 -> thaum2 -> evo2 -> conj3+ OR alt4 OR constr++. This gets you all the site searching spells as well as the necessary rush counters before the end of year 1.)

First, your god doesn't *need* to do anything for you except provide good scales. So grabbing a major e-bless really doesn't involve any opportunity cost except your scales are worse than they would otherwise be. So who cares if your mages aren't sacred? That means you don't need to waste effort trying to bless them all either, and since your priestly options kind of suck, sacred mages would be even more aggravating.

Monk-powered communions are *a* tool in the jomonese toolbox, not the only tool. You have summonable thugs capable of raiding, you have good battle magic especially in earth and astral, and you have solid troops. You even have mages capable of casting Wind Guide and Flaming Arrows (F2 + Phoenix Power + 3f gems - so keep an eye out for good indie archers). The communions should come out for big fights only, and as your Onmyoji can all teleport with a cap, they are easy to mass when necessary, and are your go-to mages for communions because they can slave themselves up on their own.

Since your major early research goals are in alteration, conjuration, and construction (following acquisition of site searching spells), conj 5 is not that inconvenient. Also, swamp forts are cheap, so you have good reason to want a swamp anyway. And you'll have W2 by the time you have conj 5. IIRC, she also has decent water magic, so you can use her to break into Streams from Hades with some boosters for D3 access. Conj 5 is plenty early enough for death access.

Ashigaru have a length 5 weapon, and you'll have a pile of N2 mages. Panic + repel sounds like a tasty combination. Also, cheap chaffe is always potentially useful, especially when your cheap chaffe is better armed and armored than most of the independents at a similar resource cost, and the independents are much harder to mass. Deploy them against average morale foot soldiers or cavalry, provide some mage support (re:Panic, but also LoS, Wooden Warriors, etc..), and the lowly ashigaru might surprise you. With sufficient panic-spam, even elite soldiers are vulnerable.

Note that the yamabushi's glaive is length 4, so still good for repelling a wide variety of targets - they could easily be mixed into blocks of ashigaru for some punch.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

The tread is actually about CBM, so I will try to be brief, so that we can concentrate on discussing possible mod suggestions
This does not really solve the problem. Sure, if I hire a huge number of mages, eventually I will get all the needed combinations - and end up with scores of nearly-useless high-upkeep mages.

IMO, Jomon absolutely needs death on their pretender. Without death, they will miss one of the best thugs in the whole game, and their late game will be completely unimpressive. Nushi is _not_ an option for death access, because it is difficult to summon, and, far more importantly, comes far too late. Ghost General is Conj 4, and as Jomon I would want to mass summon them ASAP. Not to mention the amount of death gems Jomon will have available using this approach. Forget Dai Oni, I am not sure Jomon will even have enough for some generic late game summons.
Sure, Jomon has all these options. In addition, it has good national SCs, powerful amphibious troops, great flying shapeshifting water mages, etc, etc. Too bad most of these options are best described as "hypothetical". I mentioned communions because this is one of the precious few things Jomon can _reliably_ access.

So, to keep this constructive :)
Jomon as it is, in my opinion, is flawed in several ways. It has access to very, very intersting things that can make this nation unique, competitive and just fun to play. But Jomon practically cannot use most of them. I would accept the mage-frustration thing by itself without any problems - lots of nations have problems with their mages, and they should compensate for it somehow, it is part of a game. But in Jomon's case it is a part of a greater picture. Heavy armor, bad randoms, no death, weak starting army, no underwater access, etc - all these things combine in a way that cripples the nation and ruins its great potential. Remove a few of these, and then players will be able to either compensate for the nation weaknesses, or accept them and boost the strong sides instead. This is the usual approach with most nations.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

....

I'm not about to go through all the possible path combinations to tell you what they're useful for. Suffice it to say that most of them are good for something, and you do need researchers after all, so even the few 'bad' combinations aren't actually useless. There are lots of great spells available at X2 for most paths, and quite a few at X1Y1 or X2Y1. Once you get some boosters you can cast 80-90% of the spells in the game. Most nations *cannot* say that.

...

No. In fact, Death is among the *last* things I would want on my pretender. Nushi -> Kolkythiad -> Lich -> Tarts gets you all the death you could ever possibly want, and the early steps don't even require d gems!

Conj 5 being late is hilarious, considering most pretender achieved D-access is acquired at conj 5 or 6 (lamia queens, streams from hades)

Ok, first of all, ghost general (like dai oni) is a yomi/shin summon that you are *lucky* to still have access to.

Second, you have your own perfectly good thug summons at conj 2 and 4 that don't require death.

Third, you will never have the d gems that early to mass ghost generals. You might get one, maybe 2. You'd be better off saving those d gems for something you actually need.

If your pretender is awake so you can get d-income that early, your scales aren't good enough. Jomon lives or dies by its scales. Then you consider sites in LA are often fairly rare, and you're really wasting your pretenders time if all he's doing is site searching and casting thug summons.

When i said summonable thugs i meant the e/s ones that are actually Jomon's, not the shin/yomi summons that jomon happens to have access to.

Jomon does not have national SCs really - it has access to shinuyama's SC summons (which is, in turn, a yomi recruitable). Its lucky to even have that as an option. Not being able to predictably use it should not be interpreted as a Jomon disadvantage - they only have access to it because Shinuyama has it. It was never intended to be cast by them.

... the starting army can expand just fine with some recruits - it is by no means especially weak.

They have everything but death, and all you need is a swamp to bootstrap up death in a real way. You won't need death magic until the endgame, so...

Kappa provide UW access. Also Naiad warriors, which you can easily summon, or happening across merfolk/shambler towns.

Basically, stop whining about things that Jomon doesn't do well when it was never intended to do those things well. Look at what Jomon actually does well instead - there's quite a lot. Not having easy access to death magic isn't exactly the end of the world - plenty of good nations don't have access to it, and Jomon can bootstrap into it *without* using precious pretender points!

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Oh, of course Jomon has its strong points. It even won a game once(according to HoF)!

I do not think it is a most productive use of time - trying to convince everyone that Jomon mages are perfectly nice, when they are obviously not.

I do not think it is very reasonable to explain that Jomon is unable to use most of its national summons because it was not supposed to have them at all. Meh.

And I would so like to listen about the way you managed to enter water with Kappas.

But I guess it would be considered as more "whining", so I will stop here.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

...
-recruitable mages with E+S is nice.
-Recruitable mages that cover 6/8 paths, where one of the excluded paths is blood (and thus easy to access if you really want it) is nice.
-Recruitable mages capable of remotely searching all 6 of those paths is nice.
-Access to a summons which grants sufficient access to bootstrap the 7th non-blood path is nice.
-Access to E1 + 2 chances at E randoms is nice (early game alteration to counter rushes).
-Access to E2+ with boot slots to permit hammer forging is nice.

Jomon's mages cover so many bases for which many nations have to use their pretender, its hard to consider them 'bad'.

Try comparing their mages to other LA nations. There are a few LA nations with powerful mages (Patala, Rlyeh, and Bogarus spring to mind), but most of those are capital only, and Rlyeh has other issues (hard to find the gold to buy mages). The only LA nation with better recruit-anywhere mages that I can think of is C'tis, and their mages don't cover their holes very well (they need an E+S pretender to forge hammers, coins, RoS/W, etc...). Well, and Rlyeh, who has other issues, and can't wear boots, and thus can't forge hammers without a pretender.

If you can't come up with good things to do with Jomon's mages, you really aren't trying hard enough.

That you have access to them at all is an advantage regardless of how hard it is to use them. But demanding the nation have good access to them when they aren't intended for them is ridiculous. Shinuyama similarly has access to some summons (eg, Dai Tengu) it would really like to use but can't, because they are intended for Yomi or Jomon.

Not that anyone would summon Dai Oni over Tarts given the difference in gem cost.

There is *one* water nation in LA, and it is often banned (for stupid reasons) or has expansion issues. I leave acquiring a water province as an exercise to the reader.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Math error not in my favor. I'm halving the wrong thing in this analysis. Monks are more cost-efficient than your other mages.

That said, the other mages are (generally) more use efficient (you'll want some monks, but won't need them in quantity), and most certainly more *time-efficient* for research. Getting there first is generally better than getting there cheapest.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

They aren't that different from Arcoscephale's mystics, so they really aren't that bad.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

You almost convinced me that I was missing something, so I decided to check the situation with other races: surely, Jomon's situation is not unique? So, here are the results:

There are 21 nations in the Late Age, and only 2(two) of them do not have death or blood (or both) on their recruitable mages. One of them is Jomon, the other one is Patala.

I admit that I have never really played as Patala (monkey troops are not my thing), but the only guide I found in Strategy Index suggests picking a pretender with death and blood. And Patala has _very_ powerful sacred mages and national Astral end-game summons like Rudra. It must have suffered greatly after clam nerf, so I assume that death on pretender is even more important now.

Well, that's it. If you still insist that Jomon is one single nation in whole LA that can do just fine without death or blood on their mages or their pretender, then so be it, I admit that I was wrong.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

The problem of Yomons diversity is that it's so random.
Sure, Yomon makes one of the best sitesearchers in the game, but one of the worst combatants and booster forgers imo.
Sure there are other very random mages but the nations that have them have either someone else to base their strategy on or they are enchantresses (which pretty much means that your sitesearching advantage is an illusion as some power nation will luck into them).
Yomon has only these. So, you start the game at turn 1 and start researching into conj3 and evo5 for GfH and Falling Fires. Let's say you have it with 25 mages. The chance that you have not a single mage able to cast these spells on his own is ~ 20% for each (the chance that you can get there with a communion is ~ 98% - I did ignore that the chances are not independent for the spells, i.e. if you have no GfH caster you have a better chance to but this shouldn't make a too big difference I think). Now maybe these values look not so bad but in comparison with other nations who can get their spells without communions always and ever, or with a very high probability (the chance that Tien Chi has 4 or more Rain of Stones casters in 20 Ancestor Smiths to kill a lot your communions is ~ 80%). Now, you also have the bad mapmove which means you either teleport around a lot or don't have the mages that can cast the spells that you went for where you need them.
In any case I've yet to see a game where Yomon does more than defend it's territory, so a boost certainly wouldn't hurt. I disagree about giving them d or b though.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Festin: there are things to do besides d or b. And breaking into b is easy if you really want to do it. Why are you so obsessed with these two? You get death eventually, enough to bootstrap up to tarts (which is why everyone wants death), so its not like you're lacking that.

Jomon has pretty good astral, which is enough to base a strategy around.

I completely disagree with Illuminated One and don't know why you'd try for Falling Fires at all. GfH is good, but not enough to make racing down Evo right away worthwhile.

Here's the actually good spells you want early on:

Conj:
F: (2) Bind Scorpion Beast, (3) Summon Phoenix Power
A: (5) Dai Tengu
W: (5) Contact Nushi, Naiad Warriors, Naiad, Kaijin? (haven't tried, looks plausibly useful)
E: (2) Summon Ujigami, (3) Summon Earth Power
N: (0) Contact Jigami, (3) Awaken Sleeper, (4) Summon Bog Beast
S: (4) Summon Kenzuoko,

Alt:
F: (2) Blindness
A: (1) Aim, (4) Windguide
W: (2) Numbness, Personal Quickness (use with eagle eyes/aim and a bow)
E: (2) Earth Might, Armor of Achilles, Earth Meld, (3) Curse of Stones, (4) Destruction
S: (3) Body Ethereal
N: (1) Eagle Eyes, (3) Protection, Mossbody, (4) Swarm, (5) Wooden Warriors

Evo: Slime, Rusting Mist, lightning bolt, vine arrow, magma bolt, acid bolt, sleep cloud

Ench: Gift of Flight, Str of Giants, Dragon Master (combo with frost or fire drakes, or wyverns)

Thaum: Farstrike, Curse, Bonds of Fire, Panic, Paralyze

Much of that is even available without boosters. Note i've listed through Conj 5, Alt 5, Evo 3, Ench 3, Thaum 3. Overall recommendation on early research targets was Conj 5+, Alt 4+, Evo 2, Thaum 2, and Constr ++, which gets you most of that.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Ok, so I must be wrong. Jomon is a strong nation not underpowered in any way, and has a solid chance of victory in any MP game. Being an only nation without death or blood access does not really matter. Path selection on its mages is ok. Access to most of its national summons is not really needed. Underwater expansion is easy. Armor weight is irrelevant. 9 HP infantry is thematic. Pretender selection leaves nothing to be desired. Initial army is adequate. Important midgame spells are easily accessable. Endgame summons are fine. Is short, completely no need for boost of any sort.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Agreed, so let's move on.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

I didn't say you should try to get those spells early (if you want to know it I'd go down thau and alt first), it was merely an example how Yomon struggles to get them. I have an error in there and the chance is even lower.
You have a ~ 2% chance that when you want to use lightning bolt that you get a guy who can cast lightning bolt. Same for most other spells. So quite simply you need 50 Yomon mages on average if you want to spam lightning bolt from one of them (yeah, communions, but you can't have a large communions running around everywhere and fatigue can be quite ugly if you are casting spells that your slaves don't have the paths for, have fun calculating the fatigue with everyone different). Basically it's not you deciding which spells you use but the drn.
It's not a question of theoretical availability it's a question of mass. Sure you can go through your mages and look at what you have picked up, but this is a) tedious and b) subpar in most situations (farstrike is defeated by missing, shield, armor, same for magma bolts, bow + quickness only works half of the time and don't think of using crossbows, etc).
Now consider Bogarus who can have lightning bolt from every mage they recruit if they choose so, or nether bolt or magma bolts or via smallish communions a lot of good spells like magma erruption, gifts from heaven, shadow blast, astral fires, dust to dust, leech, etc. Same versatility but a better control.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

You know, its not that Squirreloid's wrong, but I think its obvious that as Jomon you have to work a lot harder than other nations to get similar progress. An interesting boost might be giving them linked randoms. I don't see why only Atlantis and Hinnom/Ashdod/Gath should be the only ones who get it?

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Amusingly enough, Jomon has a caster which gets linked randoms. You know, their flying badass battlecasters that can turn into dragons.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Jomon could probably still use some love even after the patch, but their mages, which uninspiring, are functional. S2 provides a useful mage, regardless of other paths. The master shugenja are a bit more of a gamble, but you don't need tons of them.

Jomon's problem is that they combine a lot of individual uninspiring elements and come up with something uninspiring on the whole, that then gets ganged or rushed to death. One of the other problems they have is that they don't have any low-resource troops, which constrains their early options in terms of production scale and/or pretender selection, and a good, diverse pretender would go a long way to smoothing out their wacky randoms. Maybe looking at adding a new troop (similar to the o-bakemono in design, high gold, low resource, functional for expansion and then never bought again) would help smooth things out for them instead of messing with their magic?

Regardless, settling on one aspect of jomon and blaming all its ills on one factor doesn't seem like the way to go.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

i dislike the idea of giving them a low-resource unit. Making Jomon playable with Sloth-3 is unappealing - especially since sloth scales are already a no-brainer for so many other nations.

Given that Jomon needs almost nothing out of its pretender anyway except for scales, I'm not sure I see the advantage to a low resource troop for their game play. They don't need an SC. They don't need a bless. They don't need any specific magic (being able to bootstrap up to tarts via a summons they have access to nationally is plenty good enough for D access. So the only path they're missing is blood, and putting that on your pretender is not an especially great way to bootstrap blood). Considering virtually every other nation is far more constrained on which pretender it chooses than Jomon is, it hardly seems like making their pretender choice a little more flexible is going to improve them much.

(Reasonable minimal scales for Jomon are Pr3 Mg1, hardly an onerous burden even for an awake SC or RB, and much less of a straightjacket than minimal scales for a number of nations.

It is possible to play without Pr3 if you want to focus on sacreds for expansion, since they (yamabushi) only require 15r/ea, but then you need a decent bless, a plan on what you're doing in mid-game probably involving summoned units, and you still probably don't want to take sloth scales. But it can be done).

I'd rather see CBM take steps to make Order and Sloth less of no-brainers in general than find a way to let Jomon take Sloth 3 just like everyone else.
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Trumanator and I discussed linking the master shugenja's randoms. In the longterm this is probably advantageous. In the short term it makes it harder to plan early research for defensive playing (since the perception that Jomon is weak will probably lead to your needing to defend a rush). E1N1 + 200% linked FAWEN (+10%...) would give you 5 possible distinct X2 paths, many of which don't share the same school of research for early rush defense (although Alt is a reasonable choice, being good for E3, and having reasonable uses for A2, N3, and W2; but thaum and evo start looking reasonably good as well).

On the other hand E1N1 + 200% FAWEN unlinked leads to a lot of E2 and N2 mages, making it much easier to predict what your likely useful paths are for early game magic given a limited number of commander buys.

As commander buys increase, guaranteed X2+ on every mage will be superior.

---------

If we really feel the need to improve Jomon, here's where I'd start:

(1) Improve the stats of the sacreds a little bit. Ok, not so much the Yamabushi, who is perfectly playable as is. But the sohei is shameful. He should have at least equal stats to the aka-oni, or possibly be diversified in some way so he's functionally different. (12 att 14 def? Higher strength?)

(2) Make Sohei not capital only. This would give Jomon an interesting option because choosing to play for a blessing would actually be more reasonable. (And Sohei aren't so overpoweringly better than Jomon's normal troops as to make playing for a blessing an obvious choice).

(3) Further diversify the unit list to make some choices actually useful. In particular:

-O-ban are useless given the existence of Go-Hatamoto, especially given their current price point and resource cost. Not sure how to fix without altering all the units - possibly make base stats at least the equal of the Go-Hatamoto so the difference between the katana and the no-dashi actually translates into a real difference in performance rather than strict dominance of the Go-Hatamoto.
-Samurai with a katana are similarly useless given the existence of the aka-oni, who is vastly superior with move 2, or the Go-Hatamoto in terms of stats and price point, being insufficiently cheap to be a reasonable alternative. See #4 below with some recommendations on changes to the samurai chassis in general.

(4) Consistency and sanity issues (most of this won't necessarily help with balance, but some of it might and a lot of it is strange):
-Of the basic samurai, the non-archer ones have precision 11 but the archer has precision 10. WTF? Recommend increase archer to 11 for consistency.
-Similarly, the archer samurai costs 2 extra gold. As resources are supposed to reflect gear, and the only difference is the gear, this should be fixed. (Recommend gold cost of 10 for the archer samurai to be equal to the others).
-Samurai are elite troops, even if they are most of Jomon's line-up. Recommend improving attack and defense by 1 each on all 3 basic samurai units (which might help make them reasonable alternatives to the superior go-hatamoto and aka-oni given their cheaper prices). Also recommend improving morale by 1 (to 12).
-A katana requires 3 more resources than a naginata and 1 more than a no-dashi. I have no idea why this is true. Recommend giving katana a reasonable resource cost. (Should be less than a no-dashi at the very least).
-A long bow requires 5 resources. This also seems rather excessive since that's 2/3 or so the resource cost of the armor... Given a longbow is a large stick with a string on it, this is rather ridiculous (i jest, but its not that far from the mark - there's a reason *peasants* in England used them - they were cheap and easy to acquire). Given the Japanese 'longbow' has its own name (Daikyu), a new weapon definition to restrict any changes to Jomon is certainly plausible. (Its also technically not a longbow since its a composite and asymmetrical).
-Ashigaru are levied troops and should be dirt cheap to field in large numbers, recommend slashing gold cost to something like 4. Resources are going to be more limiting than gold anyway, and the challenge should be *feeding* them, not paying them.
-The Hatamoto has one lower att/def than the mounted Gokenin and the Daimyo, who bracket it in the mounted commander choices in terms of quantity. Fix this. (recommend improving Hatamoto's stats to equal the others).

It bears noting that the Daikyu is asymmetrical *because* its intended to be capable of being fired from horseback. Similarly, the katana was originally designed as a cavalry sword (its curved blade and length are indicative of a one-handed mounted weapon). One might have expected a slightly more diverse cavalry selection given the historical uses of the weapons involved.

(5) 5FP Monk improvement: replace the F and E monk signs with something that's actually useful, or give those signs enough range that you can actually script them. Currently they're so close range that getting the monk to even *cast* them is next to impossible.

Recommend replacing them with small AoE buff spells to emphasize monks as a supporting element for armies.

(6) Delimit some of the national summons a little bit. Most relevantly, swamps are sufficiently uncommon that the Nushi is a tad hard to cast. Since many provinces likely have small swamps in them anyway (ie, there's a scale issue), possibly just give them the Naiad disadvantage of losing hp if they leave their home province? (note that the Naiad also thematically has a terrain requirement, ie water, but that isn't specifically enforced by the game).

The others may be ok, since mountains and forests are sufficiently common to not be unreasonable, although it certainly wouldn't hurt to reduce the penalties for moving off favored/home terrain or restrictions on location of conjuring.

Hmm... this is already longer than i originally intended.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Half the problem is simply that other players expect Jomon to be weak. Having excellent sitesearching also makes you a tempting target.

I agree though with Ashigaru being more spammable and some of the more 'normal' troops getting higher stats. Also Sohei becoming recruit anywhere would be fun to try out.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Exactly. But it's not like they are not flexible - far from it. Rather, all these options sort of fail to combine into a coherent strategy.

I agree with Squirrelloid about the low-resource unit - it will only add another non-matching element to the whole mess.

Linked randoms look like a good idea.

Improving Sohei and making it recruitable anywhere can cause Jomon to become another generic bless nation, which is not very interesting. I would leave sacreds as they are, or slightly improve Sohei.

4 gp for Ashigaru is far too cheap. Weakest generic militia costs 5 gp, and Ashigaru are far superior in every way (morale 10, nice length 5 spear, decent armor for light infantry).

Other suggestions look good. I still think that 9 HP on ashigaru and samurai should be removed.

And it would be nice if Kappa spell provided some regular Kappas in addition to commander, so that it could be used to enter water. Currently, the spell is useless.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

I doubt you'd find them overpowering at 4gp. As such, its not far too cheap, its just a national advantage.

There's no point comparing to other nations or indies - a nation is balanced as a set of units against other nations as sets of units. Individual units most certainly do not have to be balanced against other units (Go cry about it with LA Ulm's Black Templars if you must).

Independents especially are notably worse than national units in almost all cases, and when a national unit is merely as good as an independent unit, it sucks. (You can cry with Eriu about their milesians, who are only very marginally better than independents, and suck).

Eh, who cares? 9 vs. 10 hp is pretty negligible. And most of the units anyone uses at present don't have 9hp - go-hatamoto, aka-oni, and yamabushi have 11hp.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Kappas bleed awesome from their eyeballs. And they rip your guts out through your anus. What more could you want! What do they cost anyway, 2W?! This monkey PD discussion should be moved to its own Jomon thread.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Well, it's not like it is important - currently, nobody uses generic samurai anyway. It is just annoying and illogical.

And it does not matter how much Kappas cost. Even if they were 1W, they would still suck in their current state.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

I think the resource cost of a katana is a thematic thing. Making a katana is a lot of work, and requires very special skills and materials due to the way they're made. That said, I thought the no-dashi was basically an oversized katana. I'm having trouble finding non-game references to no-dashi on the internet so it's hard to say for sure. But from the look I would have expected them to be made the same way. I would say there's a good argument for them requiring more resources than a katana.

Making sohei not cap-only wouldn't be bad. There aren't really that many LA bless nations, and I think jomon would make a lot of sense thematically as a bless nation. I'm not sure that they need this, but I wouldn't object to it either.

4gp ashigaru is just wrong though, that would be less even than mictlan. They could maybe be justified in dropping a little, but they are pretty good for chaff, making them much less expensive would almost be too good.

I'm also not sure I like the idea of giving them linked randoms. They are one of a very few nations in the game that can have mages with such diverse paths. Sure, they can be really annoying and make site searching frustrating, but they also give you access to path combinations that are very rare, plus with communions you can power the onmyoji up sufficiently in their side paths to be fairly useful. Now, MAYBE if just the master shugenja had their paths linked that would be fine because you wouldn't really be losing out on anything. But that smacks of being too convenient and useful. And you couldn't link paths on onmyoji but not master shugenja or no one would ever buy them. I would almost rather just make Jomon's mages all less expensive. Say 120 gold for the mages and 70 for a monk.

It would be nice if there was ever a reason to recruit normal samurai units and o-ban.

I think kappa summoning would be fine if you could just summon more of them at a time. One is almost useless. 5 might get you somewhere.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

katanas do not require special materials. Its hard and soft steel, which is effected by how much carbon is in the steel, which is purely a result of differences in the processing of iron into steel. So it requires an understanding of metallurgy (its LA, we have that). But all it requires is iron, flux, and heat - nothing rare or unusual.

A katana can be time consuming. But not every single one is a 1000h piece of artwork. You simply couldn't produce them in militarily useful quantities at that rate. I realize we're romanticizing Japan, but most katanas are going to have to be made cheaply enough to make something approaching mass production feasible.

A no-dashi is just a 'big katana', however, which is why i think the katana costs too many resources.

Ashigaru at their current price are rather unusual to buy because they cost almost as much gold as a samurai. That's kind of ridiculous. So the price is definitely too high relative to Jomon's other options - 1.5 ashigaru or 1 aki-oni is a no-brainer choice most of the time. And Jomon's other options are the only thing that matters. Who cares what Mictlan pays? I refer you to Black Templars, who are vastly overpriced for what they do. Cost of units is a within-nation balance thing, and only the whole has to balance against another nation.

(Further, the 9 resource cost is the limiting factor in production, slashing the gold cost mostly reduces the upkeep - which is completely justified because historically the only 'pay' they would have gotten was food. I'd propose a 1 gold cost, but that probably is a little crazy).

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

The 9 hp thing isn't so much a balance thing as just a dumb "feature". That gives samurai less HPs than indy militia, which is just stupid.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Yes they do :P http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamahagane

I could maybe see 6 gp ashigaru, but much lower just won't happen. And yeah, resources will always be the limiting factor with jomon's high resource to gold ratio units, but 4gp militia just doesn't exist.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

That it doesn't currently exist is no reason for it not to exist.

On Tamahagane: yes, the japanese had to get their steel from iron sands because that was how it was readily available. So they developed a special process for extracting it. It sounds similar in complexity to many pre-15th century steel-making processes, and thus not overly 'special'. The only reason its hard to get today is because modern steel-making techniques are more efficient and guarantee a more uniform quality, so the demand for steel made the old-fashion way is mostly for sword-making enthusiasts - its continuing use is an anachronism.

Only "damascus steel" might qualify as a special material, and even then i'm dubious.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Now, I don't know whether I quite agree with the necessity of a low-resource expansion recruit, but its implementation would work out just about perfectly. Just give them a Gladiator-esque Ronin unit. Since Jomon was never gold-limited anyways, it would give them a kickstart for early expansion. It'd also help a bunch vs. rushes.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

I went and looked at a few other methods of steelmaking on wikipedia, and Tamahagane has the dubious honor of being by far the least efficient steel to make, both in terms of labor required and materials required per ton. Excessively complex? Maybe not. But I think resources is basically a measure of labor and materials required.

That it doesn't currently exist is an argument QM will use to not make it exist ;)

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

How many ashigaru do you think Jomon should be able to maintain relative to 'samurai' (by which i mean aka-oni, since that's the functionally useful one). I'd say at least 10:1, which is a hard point to reach when the aka-oni costs <20 gold.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

If we're going purely on theme, sure, that would make sense. But then no nation really works that way, and it would significantly alter the way the game works if they did. You could maybe make it work, but I imagine it would be difficult.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

I do think that with the recent changes to underwater accessibility in CBM 1.6, a revisitation of the kappa summon is in order. At this point it's easier to(if you want to rush the water) prophetise your assassin and turn 5 forge an amulet of breathing(which you actually have the native gem capabilities for and is Const-0!), then have him assassinate through a few water provinces. Or just go to Const-2, make a Manual of Water Breathing and send some Go-Hatamoto to pillage the water(they are great at it, by the way). Total investment: 5 gems.

In comparison Summon Kappa is a rotten deal. Frankly, with the mage turns required to get a usable number of kappas, you could have researched up to Const-2 and gotten underwater troops that don't melt when they meet Triton Troopers. I'd rather just have 3 or 4 or 5 normal kappas per summon.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Instead of linked randoms why not make the master shugenya for example 2e1n + 100%fawen and somewhat more expensive. Or even make that a copy, so the player can choose if he wants to recruit the new or the old one(s) (i.e. you could theoretically have 5 versions, giving the player the decision over his magic).
This could produce quite powerful combinations reliably while you still need to balance them against the cheaper s2 + 200%fawen mages.