Re: CBM 1.7 released
 

You can't mod either the magic boost attribute or the gem-gen attribute. That means that you only had the Boots of Antaeus, Pebble Skin Suit, or Tome of Gaia to choose from as existing earth boosters; QM chose the boots, presumably because its accompanying non-moddable side-effects (the re-invigoration/regeneration) were easiest to address.

Otherwise you'd have either had trollification + stoneskin (in the case of the armor) or +1 nature magic too (for the tome.) Personally, I'd have gone for the armor, but that's because I find the mechanic amusing :-)

If he only had *NINJAS* working for him, they could slip into Illwinter's offices and insert the necessary code mods...alas.

Re: CBM 1.7 released
 

Thanks! I suspected the first restriction but was ignorant of the second. I guess that in those circumstances it really does make sense to destroy one of my favourite artefacts (sob!) in favour of a generic path booster if it has been determined that a second generic earth booster is essential.

(I am tempted to argue that it isn't and wasn't because in the MP games I participate in only few earth magic nations ended up with blood stones anyhow, so blood stones were almost solely used for their gem generation capabilities by the few nations that could make them, but that is almost certainly a result of the smaller scale of the games I play in)

Re: CBM 1.7 released
 

Dimaz, I like your suggestion re. making house rules to deal with gem gens instead of removing them.

I think same can be made for SDRs and hammers, so for example all my future games will have a 20 pieces cap per nation rule.

So, If you, or someone else could volunteer to make a CBM 1.7 version w/o these changes (gem gens, hammers + SDR) it will indeed be the version I'd be using when hosting games. I think if CBM had a technical way to enforce this it would have, but for MP games (with house rules) we can trust the players to adhere to the rules.

makes sense?

Re: CBM 1.7 released
 

Yesterday when I was going to sleep I was thinking about how to deal with gemgens (if I had the code access) in some more or less balanced and flavored way. So these ideas can be considered as produced by half-asleep mind, but still...
Clams - they are supposed to concentrate astral magic from environment and solidify it as pearls, so they can be connected with the amount of magic gained from other sources (showed in the graphs). Something like Nexus, but connected to one nation. So you can get maximum of your pearl income + 1/2 of other gems income divided by some coefficient (4?), and if you have more clams they have no environment magic to grow the pearls, so they will either stop working at all or give you pearl with 10% probability. So for example with income of 20 gems of each kind (140 total on the graphs), you'll have max 20 clams working - big number, but not insane. As I understand another problem with clams was that they lead to turtling for nations that can forge them efficiently - and when your clam income becomes connected with "real" income, it becomes less of a problem.
Bloodstones - they seem to be connected with "earth blood" and the earth that constantly bleeds becomes dead sooner or later. So concentrating large amounts of them can reduce resources and/or supplies for the nation. Like, every BS subtracts 5 resources from each province of the owner. This way the ability to build units and later even mages becomes reverse proportional to the number of stones, so sooner or later you'll have to stop producing them (this will also give more importance to production scale). The only exception that I see is LA Ermor but he has problems with blood slaves so probably it won't give him big advantage.
Fetishes - they can start spreading desease when there are many of them collected in one place. So for example if you have more than 5 fetishes in the province they start to act as bane venom charm. This will increase MM however so probably there are more elegant solutions.
WL, I will join such a game if I'll still play Dom3 at the time (currently I'm a bit tired of it so maybe I'll take a break after my games are ended).

Re: CBM 1.7 released
 

Don't forget that another problem with gem gens in general was it led to the bad playing mechanic of being able to conquer all of your opponents lands, but in doing so only managing to cut his gem income by a tiny percentage.

And this, combined with the huge defender advantage of having 1st combat action a player gets during fort storms (especially with several wish casters on hand for master enslave spam), led to many situations where actually capturing your opponents provinces didn't get you anywhere near defeating your opponent, regardless of how many provinces he had. And any sort of gem income advantage you had over your foe didn't matter much when storming, since you could have double your enemies gem income, but easily lose 10x the gem investment when trying to storm forts.

I am no lover of the changes CBM 1.7 has made, but gem gens in general were bad for large scale games, and so did have to go IMO (although I guess probably not much of a problem for small scale games. But I've never played small scale games so I wouldn't know). Even game rules, that for example, allow one clam per turn # would mean raid-immune gem income of 175 every other turn from wishing alone by turn 50. (and good players would easily be able to safeguard their gem gens from assassinations spells, remote damage attacks, Armageddon's etc. So relying on them to deprive your enemy of the gem gen income is not a real option in games involving proper players).

I know I will never play another game with gem gens again (although this is just my own personal preference of course)

Re: CBM 1.7 released
 

Calahan, your points are true when gem gens are unlimited. Limiting them by house rules to 10-20 makes them just flavor and extra boost, nothing more. It's the same as with LaD, why castrate it in CBM if we can have a gentlemen agreement not to abuse it?

I'm not a modder myself but I like that solution. If enough players would like that we could have games set that way.

Re: CBM 1.7 released
 

As someone who had over 400 clams in a single game, and pretty much concentrated every game on them until they were removed I have to say I agree with Calahan, one player could have much worse stats in the score graphs and still be the far superior nation.
However limiting them to say 20 max per game for example shouldn't have much of an impact. There are various magic site discounts that act in the same way, while they don't give you gems per say, you do sort of 'gain' gems when using them. A fine line is to be made here, I neither agree that gem gens should have been removed completely or let to stay, same applies to both hammers and SDR. Eliminating any one of them will just lead to new problems that will need balancing, eg. cost of items, thug usage, blood supremacy of certain nations...
So rather than eliminating them all completely a compromise should be made.
As for monitoring their usage, that is rather simple, once victory is achieved a player will submit random mid-late game turns as to confirm there was no cheating, and/or trowing away of items near the end.

Re: CBM 1.7 released
 

Sure, but why deal with it? Removing gem gens, hammers etc makes nations more unique. And it's what we want. Tartarians should be removed too and national troops boosted. I really want to see nations being still same nations even in late game. Not some homogenous mass that specialises in S and D. And uses all E to make more and more hammers or gear for tartarians.

Of course this requires more solid changes in nation balance, as you will have to rely more on what you get, especially mages that won't be so easily boosted. CBM without same changes may be made if someone desires, but here we should just accept those changes and see how to make the game more balance with those changes included. So item/ritual prices/levels and national changes.

We all know QM does not like unthematic changes, so the room is really in:
- prices
- stats
- randoms [% chance]
- national summons [also: prices, stats, randoms]
- cost of forts/temples/labs
- pretenders [but really, are there any weak national ones still?]

Re: CBM 1.7 released
 

Ok, here is a fast list of items and pricing.


Items that could be 1 path lower and so much cheaper:
The Summit
The Jade Mask
Amon Hotep
Wraith Crown
Robe of Invulnerability
Bone Armor
Stymphalan Wings
Wall Shaker
Stone Idol [make it S1E2?]

Items that could use stat boosts:
Wand of Wild Fire
Summer Sword [?]
Rod of the Phoenix
Shadow Brand
The Tartarian Chains
Woundflame
Ice Pebble Staff
Staff of Elemental Mastery [someone would have to be desperate to get it as booster]
Wraith Sword
Standard of the Damned
Tempest [?]
Sun Slayer should autocast Darkness
Lucky Coin, Shield of the Accursed, Lantern Shield were already rarely used, now they are even less useful
Flame Helmet [remove exhaustion?]
Spirit Helmet - nice item, but at 15A rather too expensive, you can get Shishi for that...
Jade Armor - situational and expensive now
Aseftik's and Monolith - quite often nor forged at all even now, but at 15E they may be too cheap, so some boost maybe?

Not sure about other x4 items - no hammer means they are all 8 gems more expensive... and some of them were overpriced at 17 too.

BTW, maybe you should remove Sickle too?

Re: CBM 1.7 released
 

Well, they do give that extra boost if you need it for a ritual spell and the two different versions do have some nice side effects when used in combat, though admittedly one is usually better off using a 1H of choice plus a shield or going dual shields.

For forging, they have until now been mostly useless except for the 4-armed pretenders, but if dwarven hammers are going the way of the dodo wielding a 2H while forging is no longer going to be major drawback.

They are damn expensive and I certainly don't relish the thought of forging one without a dwarven hammer but if you can forge them they are still a better investment than empowering for many mages.

Burn your eyes. Must everything with a strong unique effect be killed off to satisfy your cravings for mediocrity? :D