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I'd like to see everyone's opinions regarding the following changes.

Hammers, Dousing Rods, Gem Gens, Bonus 30%+ Sites

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The problem isnt +30% sites, It's wish. Wish is mostly behind the pearl problem too. have people really broken a game with fever fetishes?

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I think it's interesting to wonder what would have happened if the base game did not include hammers, and a mod added them.

I reckon people would think they were broken (massively OP item only available with E3 completely skews the game, forces everyone to get E3 and adds micro!!). But who knows?

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rabelais: I think the problem with fetishes is not so much that they break the game, but that they reward massive micromanagement. So that if you want to have a more fun game (less micro), you are at a quite large disadvantage. Of course some micro is a necessary and often fun part of dominions, but there is a limit.

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Yes Llama, but the problem isn't in the hammer bonuses, it's in the problem it makes once it's removed.
Items and some summons gem prices should be different.

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Is that a problem though ? True, FFs are much more micro than the other 3 gemgens (SDRs are gemgens, too). If you mind that, then don't play a nation/build/strat which hinges on fever fetishes. It's not like they are the ultimate weapon (that would be clams).

That being said, I don't think it's really balanced to have S, F, E and B gemgens yet no W, N, D, A ones. Either take 'em all out of give each path it's own gemgen, otherwise balance goes out the window. Doubly so in large games.

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Remove Hammers - No
Remove gem-gens - Yes
Remove 30%+ sites - Yes I think (not 100% certain on this yet though, as you do need a way to end games without them dragging on for 100's of turns. And an Uber discount site certainly offers a nation the chance to end the game)


Not sure on the SDR issue yet. IMO Blood needs to be looked at in real detail in order to balance it. No SDR's might be a solution, it might not. But I am very concerned how badly it affects borderline blood nations like Heim's, Pan, and the general 'getting into blood' scenario. So I'm very uncharacteristically sitting on the fence on this one for now. (and anyone who knows me knows how much I hate fence sitters)

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interesting. i look forward to seeing if the current trend continues. add the poll to the Dom3Mods site as well exec?

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Personally, I would be quite interested in knowing how much opposition to the hammer change is on principle, vs unaddressed balance repercussions.

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Didn't cross my mind, not an active member on that forum.
Lot of the players are active on both forums so results might not be all that accurate with double voting.

EDIT> That why I made the poll QM, it might give you guys a better insight.

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I think a lot of the votes are the balance reason. the SDR change hurts some nations a lot, but the hammer change utterly annihilates a few nations. unless they get massive boosts, i think there will be massive opposition to this. my vote for example was not based on principle bu balance

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Id rather not see anything removed. A tactic or a strategy is just that.
A balancing tweak has been, and I feel should continue to be, about how MUCH it gets used. Not the fact that it gets used.

Usually pretenders, units, equipment, etc have been tweaked to make them appear less or more in the game. Cant such items be made more expensive? Make it so that using the strategy takes more dedication and investment to get it, to the detriment of other factors (such as defense and research) so that opponents strategies have more of a chance against it.

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Actually, calling them 'removed' bugs me a bit. All things mentioned here (except the sites) have simply been made unique.

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I'm around 90% against the Hammer ban due to my opinion that it removes an entire area of strategy from the game (balance issues can likely be modded), while also punishing good players who are capable of thinking ahead, and rewarding stupid players who can't. (with regards what items they might want in a few turns time)

As without hammers you can just mass forge whatever you need the turn before you need them, without any forethought required at all to ensure you've forged what you need before hand at maximum efficiency. And I don't think I could ever support a change in a non-broken mechanic that dumbs the game down. (gem-gens in theory is a strategy, as you're investing gems for a long-term gain. But were simply broken in the form they were in)

And all the talk of no hammers cutting MM is BS IMO. Since at least for me, hammer time in late game only accounts for about 1% of the time spent on doing turns. In fact, as yet I haven't actually seen any creditable argument for removing hammers that I agree with.


I was writing a post for the CBM thread explaining in more detail this problem, but paused it when I realised I didn't have much interest for the changes CBM 1.7 made in general. So personally I will be sticking to 1.6 for quite some time, as 1.7 is a step backwards for the mod IMO, and goes against what I thought the aim of the mod was in making more strategies viable. (and not about removing MM from the game). As now all strategies involving non-essential items are almost all unviable IMO

(All just my opinion of course, and I think as long as the creator of the mod is happy with any changes, then that is really all that should matter)


Edit - Changed 99% to 90%, as I am concerned about balance issues as well, especially how non-earth uber nations now don't need awake/dormant pretender to stop wasting gems on forging without hammers. As I see no easy way to fix this.

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I don't think the major opposition is due to principle, otherwise SDRs and gem gens would also be more popular to stay. the way I see it there are 2 main balance repercussions though, the first is national balance, by giving nations with mainly earth magic another advantage over the blood and death powerhouses, who usually lack in earth magic for early mass hammer production. the second is item balance, as some items either become too expensive or redundant altogether by forging them without hammers. other items become even better, especially the cheap effective items such as the brands, basic shields like vine and eye, etc, by taking their more expensive alternatives out of reach for most nations, especially in mass quantity.

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I understand the irritation of unique being referred to as removed.
But on the other hand it might also be worth noting how many people do seem to consider unique=remove as far as the usefulness of these items.

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Couldn't hammers just be made more expensive, if they cost 50 gems or something then they would be a little rarer, so it would be difficult to get a large amount of them.

The investment in a hammer in the game repays itselfs after just a few turns, it just seems like a no brainer to make them, with a higher gem cost you might be forced to decide between short and long term gains. This could really go for all the items we are talking about here to be honest.

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Does unique mean just that they are lvl 8 or that there can be only one in existence? are the costs of the item affected?

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Both are true: level 8 makes the item unique.

Forge cost is independent of construction level.

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Just my take on hammers...

I voted to keep them. At the same time, if your Abysia, Sauro (for the most part) and a number of other nations you are pretty well screwed OR you have your pretender forging them when he could be doing a lot of things better suited.

I would say to make 3 kinds of hammers (just a number), if you were going to change anything and keep the (hammers). Have them in different pathes so that most if not ALL could forge 1 of the 3. You could make them different, say...you make the normal Hammer give Earth 5% more benifit. Hammer 2 might get Fire or death an additional 5% or some perk. And the same for hammer 3.

THAT would open up a lot of different pretender designs and not have the Earth nations get a HUGE jump.

(Me, I usually play Earth nations anyway, but I just thought that might be a neat idea. Of course, someone with some idea of what is going on (which does NOT include me), would have to make the choices, and then a mod etc etc. Sounds like a hell of a lot of work):eek:

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Without a balance change, all the changes except gemgens are just bad.
The 30%+ magic sites are ultra-strong, but then those which provide 5 gems are very good too and come in handy earlier.

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5 gems? the 30% magic sites essentially provide 20 gems/turn *at the least* if its a conj, const, or blood site, they can be worth 50+ gems/turn. they are on a totally different level than a measly 5 gems. and no amount of planning or pretender design can detrmine who gets them, so they can totally derail and unbalance a game

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I find it a bit odd that I've not seen anyone suggest that games be played at a higher site frequency now that hammers have been removed to increase the gem supply... since one of the complaints I've seen a lot is that it's a reduction in the amount of gems available.

Anyway, I voted that everything should be removed. The main reason hammers bother me is that I feel like I need to spend my entire earth income making them, or I'm losing the game. Any other expenditures of earth gems are suboptimal, until I have more hammers than I know what to do with. I also feel as though forging gear is the most important and almost always the best thing that you can do with your gems, since you're getting a discount on everything you make. As opposed to summoning or casting rituals, forging feels too efficient. And then, of course, if you get unlucky with earth site distribution you can be completely screwed over by having to pay more for gear than everyone else. Hammers basically just seem too important a part of everyone's strategy.

And I agree that there are some balance concerns created in 1.7 that need to be addressed before it's really ready for play. The changes made were vast and sweeping, and caused a lot of complex interactions with national power levels. Some of the complaints about it have seemed rather hyperbolic though.

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rdonj said exactly what I wanted to say but hadn't found time to put into sensible words.

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Soz GB but item modding is too limited to do what your asking.

@ everyone who wants to make suggestions: in future try reading the mod manual that is in your dom3 folder. Doing so makes for much more constructive discussion since those of us who _did_ read it don't have to be shooting down all sorts of impossible solutions. This is in no way an attack on anyone, simply a request.

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I voted to keep hammers and sites, I did not vote on the others as they are dependent upon one another. If you keep gem gens, you need to keep SDRs, and vice versa.

I think sites are necessary as they are an important part of the game. The game is inherently unbalanced. When you have as many nations as we do, any two or three nations are going to be unbalanced against one another, but are balanced overall. Where nations are unbalanced, it is up to the players to institute their own balance (Alliances, NAPs, etc.). We've all played games where we spanked one player so quickly, the other players said "we need to get him before he overwhelms us!" Next thing you know, you're out of the game due to a 5 on 1 dogpile. (This is also a reason why I have always been in favor of Machiavellian diplomacy as it allows you to do this, or change relations on a dime)

With regards to hammers, I agree with some of the previous posters, CBM is about giving us more options. I feel hammers do just that. They give us options of different items to produce. Otherwise, we just use the same fire/frost brand with boots of the messenger, etc. Its not like the major earth nations are huge threats in the MP environment (Agartha, Marverni, Ulm are not world beaters by any stretch). Hammers give the earth nations bargaining chips early in the game as well as a leg up that they need.

Regarding gem gens and SDRs, it really depends on game size. On a map with 75 provinces, they are not a huge deal (I would argue if you let someone craft a ton of them in a small game, you're not pressing him enough). However, on a large map, they can be a game breaker. Plus, I like the idea behind the gem gens, investing in your future. They just break things when used on a massive scale.

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Gem-gens bad......

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TheConway, I understand what you are saying, but I think YOU need to understand there are a LOT of us on here that don't know a thing about modding, know where to look for anything about modding, and actually don't care to mod. Re-read the part where it says "(which does NOT include me)in my post AND where it says "Sounds like a hell of a lot of work to me".

I made a couple of sugestions about hammers just in case someone who wanted to keep them in the game and thought it MIGHT be a good idea. Other than that I have no dog in this fight.

So PLEASE, when there is a discussion on here, unless it is YOUR thread and you have it labled 'Only qualified modders' or perhaps 'Only those that have read the modding book', do NOT feel free to lecture me on when to make a comment amonst my friends.

(sorry guys, must be getting cranky since I blew my knee out Thanksgiving playing football)

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+1

However, I'd keep dousing rods, as they level the blood playing field. Without them, nations that have B2 access outside capitol has a great advantage, not needing to spend 30 slaves to empower.

Mictlan is strangely not that much affected, they only have to rush Blood 6 (Tlahuelpuchi with B2 for 25 girls) instead of Const.

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While I'm for removing hammers, I'm not for removing it without at least a preliminary fix to the large shift in nation power (as in 1.7) to test. not sure whether I should vote for remove hammer or not given that distinction...

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This is precisely my point. I told you and others where you can find the mod manual, so you can educate yourselves. Its only about a 3 page pdf file, nothing that someone smart enough to play dominions can't handle. You don't need to be an experienced modder at all to read it and understand some basic concepts of what can and can't be done. I don't think its unfair at all to ask that people make use of an easily available resource that take minimal effort to understand and will infinitely improve their ability to make cogent suggestions.

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Yes. Late-game. Early/mid-game, getting a site that gives 5 times as much income as the next one is quite useful, unless you're saving all your gems and never using any before you reach the late game when a conj or blood site will indeed rock. I think all the proposed nerfs only apply to big, long games with many players. In a 4 player game, even a 40%bonus blood site may not tip the game because the game can be finished before you can make use of it.

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Is that really true? Because I know with dwarven hammers, I nearly always make brands unless I a) don't have the gems, or b) am looking for a more specialized weapon. Without hammers I'd be making less brands etc because you won't be able to afford the gems to craft them as easily and you'll actually have to consider using different gem types. And if all games started uner CBM 1.7 use higher gem frequency settings, you'll still have lots of gems to play with.

Agartha, Marverni and Ulm are hurt a bit by the lack of hammers, but that doesn't mean that they can't be compensated for it somehow. The most obvious method would be with a forge bonus, of course, but it doesn't have to be a forge bonus either (I'd much rather have a forge bonus as a bargaining chip than hammers, though!). But there are a lot of ways you can boost a nation if its been hit unfairly.


If nations who only have weak/expensive access to blood are given a dousing bonus, they'll have built in dousing rods and be much, much better than they are presently. Meanwhile strong blood nations can remain the same, which means relatively more expensive blood slaves. Which will bring blood nations closer together. You can't quite do that for a non-blood nation (I don't think dousing bonuses work on units that aren't blood mages already, or you could give a bonus to scouts), but I don't really have a problem with non-blood nations having to struggle to compete at it. It kind of bothers me that all nations are supposed to end up having all magic paths by the end of the game anyway.

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There were many talks about CBM 1.8 and nation balance on IRC. I think that QM should reveal some of it, to show what's going to happen.

I don't think 1.7 is the best mod - but I like removal of all items. It just needs many more national changes to make it work. And I'm disappointed that tartarians did not get removed.

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I voted yes to item removals (QM: making them unique is for all intents removing them for all but one nation - and even that nation would only have negligible gain from that).

I voted no to 30%+ sites. These sites perk up the game: you get one in 1:N (5<N<10 roughly) games and it's serves as an unexpected nice surprise that could always be waiting 'round the corner.

Hammers removal, rdonj has put it well. However a redress is in store as was suggested in the other thread in the other forum.

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I don't think I have ever seen a 30% site....I will sure be looking for one though!!

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TheConway

I am not going to get in a flame war with you or anyone else...

I don't really care what you think, who you think you are in the 'modding' community, or what you THINK you can contribute to the conversation, other than trying to make it yours. If I had known you were the Forum Police maybe I would have paid more attention to what you said.

As I said, I was just making an offhand suggestion that would give someone an idea IF they thought it was a good idea, AND they wanted to keep the hammers. I just play the game.

However, if you check my profile you will see that my comment about friends was why I was on here in the first place. To say hi to them and see what they were up to, as time and RL sometimes gets in the way.

So there is no need to for us to have any other conversation or for you to comment to ME in any way as I don't know you ...or care to.

Let it go

Sorry EX, didn't mean to get this started or to hijack your thread. I won't respond to this guy again. And for what it is worth, I think that is the best poll of things for this game I have seen in a long time.:up:

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TheConway is just frustrated because every time there is a discussion about hammers, a couple of people will suggest that there should be multiple different hammer items. This has happened quite a few times by now. It sometimes distracts considerably from the discussion because everyone else goes "that's a good idea, why don't we just do that? Silly qm".

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All discount sites need to be removed probably. At least 90% of them. For construction and alt even 10% is too much.

I have won one game when I had Summoning Circle - 60% blood discount. I had 100 vampire lords, ice devils, arch devils, demon lords, heliophagis...

I had an epic game where I had Ultimate Gateway and I was fighting for victory against Lanka with blood40 site...

Game like that are totally unnatural. They break the game. They make it interesting, sure, but when you get the site and you are at least medium nation, it's almost like "I win" button. Or rather cheat code. And other players still play the game, not knowing they have absolutely zero chances of winning.

Sites like that should only exist when others know you have them. It's not possible at dom3. So it's best to leave these sites out of the game. They can still be placed by mapmakers, so you can use custom maps with those sites at well known location.

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I haven't voted either way, but I'm not sure discount sites really need to go, except for the Alteration one.

Sure, they are quite powerful and boost the nation that finds them - but then, so does finding great cross-path indep mage sites, or simply getting lots of 3+ gem sites. As long as sites aren't painstakingly distributed and balanced by hand by the mapmaker, magical luck of the draw is always going to favour some players and bone some others. And I'm not quite convinced I want to do away with that inherent unfairness, or the wonder and evil cackling associated with discovering the Steel Ovens.

Besides, it's not like they're an instant "I win" button, you gotta know what to *do* with them, right ? If you don't know squat about gearing SCs and thugs, a Const bonus is quite wasted on you.

Now, as has been discussed in the previous thread on the subject, the Alt discount site is problematic all on its own because it provides an explosively exponential boost whereas other discount sites only provide a linear one. But the rest of 'em ? Meh. I can see how people who've played the game for aeons and are into competitive rankings and such would want to do away with as much of the randomness as possible, but that's not really me.

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"it's almost like "I win" button. Or rather cheat code. And other players still play the game, not knowing they have absolutely zero chances of winning."

I think you got straight into the heart of the matter. When known they won't break the game. When kept secret they are horribly broken.
This can be addressed by house rules requesting that anyone encountering such a site report its location to the game thread. This will actually serve to further spice up the game - imagine the pandemonium when all players learn the location of the "holy grail" :)

EDIT: All that said I'm still against removing the sites - well except maybe alt. as mentioned before - If we go the path of removing random mechanisms that dare to give some advantage then where would we end up?- Probably with an increasingly balanced & boring game.

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Ah, what a lively debate!

Meh, who cares about complete balance? I don't give a crap if someone else has a enc 50% or const 20% site, it a luck factor, like a plague hitting your cap at turn 3 which pretty much means you're done for in most cases (yes it can happen even with luck), or constantly getting rapped by knights, but that's what makes it so fun.

You can have every single bonus site in the game and lose rather badly when everyone dogpilles you, which frankly happens quite often to nations that stand out sadly, which would presumably be nations with bonus sites for example. It could be in possession of a complete newb who doesn't realize it's potential... Anyway, those sites are quite rare and exist to spice up the game a bit.

And yes, I realize having hammers demands the first 35 turns earth income go to hammer forging, but having death gems demands them being saved for Tartarians, and having nature gems saving them for GoR and GoH, and so on... Every path is bound to have some item/spell/summon more demanding and more worthwhile than the rest, and removing one will just make the next in line stick out again, unless you're determent to make all paths as useless as fire.

Now as far as balance goes, my interest there is that items/summons/spells get reasonable prices (for example I think CBM 1.3 or 1.4 had vampire lords cost like 40 slaves, which was absurd), and rather not eliminate parts of the game.
Personally, the removal of hammers and discount sites came rather unexpected to me as I've never heard of a complain regarding those before the change was actually made.

There's was something else I wanted to say, but the thought fled my mind...:(

Removing all this things makes the game just duller me feels.
But luckily CBM is just an optional mode so I'll be sticking with 1.6 for now.

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I mostly agree with you Executor, but re. hammers I, at first, thought in similar lines to your own but since then came to think differently and accept the change (as rdonj has presented so well).

A random thought on the matter of hammers - when was the last time you saw a summoned thug keep his original equipment?- like say, a bane lord keep his bane sword?- Never, right?

brands + hammers make other weapons obsolete and in so serve to make the game poorer not richer.

At least w/o hammer players would have other alternatives to the forge action that today is a no-brainer.

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Well, I kinda agree too with Rdonj, but I agree with Calahan also.
And making a game with higher gems frequency, btw, doesn't solve the problem Rdonj.
I've said it many times, and I'll say it again, with hammers removed a lot of items need price fixing and a lot of thug based nations need a little re balancing, TNN, Van...

Lowering certain item prices can lead to even more unbalancing than balancing I think. It can give nations that rely on early thugs and SC's like Hinnom, Neif... a considerable advantage in cheaper equipment that they couldn't forge early on with hammers for one.

So keeping the hammers is the lesser of two evils I think.
I'm happy to hear how you think this can be fixed, and what are the actual gains of removing the hammers? Even at this point, with everything being left as it is, thug based nations are screwed, thugs are generally obsolete with high gem required equipment and SC's are even more important which was the one of the points of the CBM, to reduce the importantce of SC's in the end game and introduce some other interesting ways to play.

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Or gear is just as important, so you use less gems on spells and forge just as much gear just at a higher price.

What it really does is raise the cost of gear relative to other uses of gems: battlefield spells, globals, summons. If that makes more interesting stuff useful, it was a good change. If it just means you have to invest even more gems in forging then it wasn't.

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While that does seem correct in theory I doubt that's how it'll play out in games, but I may be wrong, as might you thejeff.

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I don't think this really makes sense. It's not like you need a fixed amount of gear, and then you have enough and spend whatever you have left on spells. Either gear is cheap enough to be better value than anything else, in which case you should make as much as you can (close to the actual situation when hammers are in the game), or not. I would argue that without hammers, the cost/reward ratio of gear is brought closer to that of typical spells and summons, so that basically you have more valid choices.

--

Edit: Or, to clarify (and make it more obvious that I'm mostly agreeing with you):

I agree.

I just don't see why this should be the case (the amount of gear you need is not fixed).

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I'm sure hammer existence has nothing to do with the choice between brands and bane blade: thugs with bb die and with brands don't, that's the point. So you just see less thugs in general (aka national units importance), which was one of the original points of CBM. However as Executor said it also hits nations that rely on national thugs and not on troops/bf magic, which should be considered. And I voted "no removal" for all questions except gemgens, which IMO create problems in big games but can be dealt with by using house rules, so my answer doesn't presented in the poll (leave them but limit their usage).

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I know raising the site frequency doesn't completely solve the "less gems" problem, but it would help a bit. Another thing that could be done mod-wise to provide more gems (not happening or even necessarily desirable) would be to increase the frequency of some of the sites that give more gems.

And basically my argument is the same as llama's. It seems to me that without hammers you're likely to see a lot *more* thugs relative to SCs, and fewer fully kitted SCs.

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That's why QM should release changelog for 1.8, there are really tens of nation balance changes :)