Conceptual Balance mod 1.93 released!
 

After a fair few months, version 1.93 of the Conceptual Balance mod is now ready for release.

I haven't called it version 2.00 simply because I haven't done everything on my to-do list for a next major version. However I have been persuaded that more regular releases are a good idea.

This is not a huge release, but it does contain quite a lot of goodies. There are some balance tweaks and bug fixes that the community has been asking for a lot. One of the really big things is that EDM summons have been made harder to summon. Everyone can still have Zmeys if they want, but they're going to have to make a real effort to get them.

There's also some fairly extensive pretender work courtesy of kianduatha, and Sombre's sprite update mod has been incorporated, which makes a real difference to the quality of many sprites (with lots of the new sprites having been drawn by KO himself!). In the realm of new content, the Elemental Royalty have hopefully been made a bit more interesting and powerful, and LA Man has a few new summons.

A full changelog is downloadable below. Here's the short version:

Overview:
- Modified MA Ulm, EA Agartha and MA Agartha to address issues of OP-ness in CB1.92
- Incorporated kianduatha's pretender sub-project
- Incorporated Sombre's sprite update project
- Changes to scales to make scales builds less universally appealing
- EDM summons made generally harder to summon
- Elemental Royalty each given a unique buff, and made a little cheaper to summon (40 gems)
- Fixed various bugs, most notably the "free Ettins" bug. Forging spreadsheet update and all known bugs fixed.
- Minor national changes; LA Man gained some construct summons representing the engineering prowess of the Magisters

Re: Conceptual Balance mod 1.93 released!
 

I expect that inevitably I'll have made some mistakes, so it's probably worth waiting a few days for error reports before starting any mulitplayer games with this mod.

Feedback much appreciated as always!

Re: Conceptual Balance mod 1.93 released!
 

Thanks, llama! A new CBM release is always exciting. :)

This all looks pretty good to me (yay, boosts to the elemental royalty!). I'll have more feedback once I've had a chance to check out all the changes but wanted to get you these bugs ASAP:

* Shambler skin armor still enc 0 (you changed it but then it's referenced again further down in the mod setting it back to 0 once again).

* Ettin still only costs 14 gems.

* Shishis and Roc still only require A4 to summon and Aesir only requires A5.

* Also, the Kraken has gone from W4 to W5 summoning requirement. It's not mentioned in the changelog but I assume that's deliberate?

Re: Conceptual Balance mod 1.93 released!
 

There was one other thing I wanted to mention which was that a notable recent success of CBM was making bottom tier nations competitive. I'm most familiar with MA and for a long time there was a good size group of nations that really had problems (I'd put Ulm, Man, Eriu, Machaka and Agartha in this category). And now they're all competitive (ok, maybe a bit too much of a boost in some cases but some fine-tuning is inevitable). So, thanks for that!

Re: Conceptual Balance mod 1.93 released!
 

Also, the zmey nerfs appear to be set for only its first, three-headed, shape. Later forms have the old enc, attack and defense values.

Re: Conceptual Balance mod 1.93 released!
 

Thanks Valerius, great feedback!

I'm planning to do a hotfix release on Friday which will address all bugs reported by then. I will probably somewhat nerf LA Man's new Const-1 Automata since they may be a bit crazy.

Re: Conceptual Balance mod 1.93 released!
 

On the crazy-zaniness scale the colossus falls at least a grendelkin above the automaton. That's essentially what it is, a grendelkin with all the immunities of a mechanical man (and the sieging capability of 4 gate cleavers at half their cost). It is also cheaper and easier to cast.

The colossus should probably have its sumomoning cost at least doubled (perhaps more, I can not honestly say that it is weaker than the much more difficult to summon ember lord.)

The current automata should probably be two or three times as expensive in gem costs as it is. The closest comparison in difficulty to summon is the attentive statue. The statue has more general survivability but the Automata has all the immunities. They're otherwise very comparable. Seen in general utility there's the siege bonus versus a patrol bonus. The siege bonus is much more useful.

Re: Conceptual Balance mod 1.93 released!
 

Yeah, I am now planning to reduce the immunities of all LA Man's constructs to 50%. They are largely mechanical, with little magic to smooth their workings. Fire, ice etc. are likely to warp their gears, stiffen their springs etc..

Re: Conceptual Balance mod 1.93 released!
 

as a huge fan of MA Ulm, i was worried about this new cbm. however, i think the nerfing was very reasonable, and even i admit, necessary. forges of ulm will be missed, but it was a little ridiculous. kudos!

Re: Conceptual Balance mod 1.93 released!
 

how do you decompress/unzip the mod once it is in the mod folder?

Re: Conceptual Balance mod 1.93 released!
 

right click, then hit extract here

Re: Conceptual Balance mod 1.93 released!
 

lol. well, that was comically easy. but now i don't see cbm 193 in the preferences section. any ideas?

Re: Conceptual Balance mod 1.93 released!
 

Is CB1.93.dm in your mods folder? If it's in a sub-folder that would be the issue.

Re: Conceptual Balance mod 1.93 released!
 

I've been encouraged to continue my campaign against Send Hunter Spider. Please consider either making it harder to cast (N4 or N5) or more expensive (4 or 5 gems) or both! Right now it is far too easy to cast and far too cheap, which equates to a low startup cost (boosters) and spammability. I've been on both the sending and receiving end and neither time was it pretty.

Re: Conceptual Balance mod 1.93 released!
 

TheDemon: Okay, you've persuaded me. Thanks.

Re: Conceptual Balance mod 1.93 released!
 

I like LA Man's constructs - it's a neat theme. I think reducing their immunities to 50% is a good idea - they can still easily be buffed to 100% but it will take some effort.

Following up on Redeyes' comment regarding the colossus I think it might make sense to tone down the stats a bit along the same lines as was done with the grendelkin - it will still be a tank just not as skillful a one. In particular, I would lower the attack to 12 (matching the grendelkin and other SCs like the tart lightning cyclops and titan). Given the research level I think almost all of these will be GoRed so once equipped they will have a good attack score - this helps avoid a situation where they're incredibly hard hitting and also extremely difficult to escape being hit. Again keeping in mind the reasonable cost, reducing the siege bonus and maybe dropping MR a bit also seems reasonable. But the main thing IMO is the attack rating. Generally speaking, I think summons should have either toughness/strength or skill and if they have both, like the ember lord, then they should be priced correspondingly high to reflect that.

Re: Conceptual Balance mod 1.93 released!
 

Some beta code sneaked into release for LA Man.

#selectspell "Summon Bean Sidhe"
#researchlevel 0
#fatiguecost 0
#end

Also I am not sure that this code


#newmonster 3447
#copystats 1769
#copyspr 1769
#descr "Different descr."
#end

#newspell
#copyspell "Summon Shades"
#descr "Different descr."
#researchlevel 1
#pathlevel 0 1
#damage 1769 -- Black Dogs
#restricted 51 -- LA Man
#end

Is needed. The "Tune of fear" comment -broken with enabled spell looks not good too.

Re: Conceptual Balance mod 1.93 released!
 

No quickfix yet, I take it?

Re: Conceptual Balance mod 1.93 released!
 

Well, you could make one. It isn't that hard.

Re: Conceptual Balance mod 1.93 released!
 

My own quickfix based on the bugs found here:
http://z7.invisionfree.com/Dom3mods/...?showtopic=991

The only ones i did not fixed was the lack of description on the Summon Shades spell and the added pretender points on the Arch Seraph (no idea how to fix this last).

This is only my personal quickfix to play CBM.... i recommend you to wait for the "official" quickfix from llamabeast...

Re: Conceptual Balance mod 1.93 released!
 

Damn, I was also working on that. I do know how to fix the arch seraph:

And I just removed all the erronous spell data.

I didn't have a fix for the mind lord btw. It is a bit strange what is happening.

Change this:

into this:

This removes the double reference to the 1758 slinger.

Re: Conceptual Balance mod 1.93 released!
 

I updated your quickfix Makinus.

This version removes the summon shade spell, and the revel spell (as it was referenced as broken).

And fixes the two things I mentioned.