[Calanor]

Originally posted by Pocus:
For Ulm, rising the earth boots cost the earth 3 prevent the smiths to forge them. So they cant have earth boots, and are thus unable to cast blade winds, except by spending gems, which is a very bad news for Ulm.
Also, not having access to earth boots, prevent them to reach the dwarven hammer (which is now earth 4 in your mod), and the hammer really shine in the hands of Ulm smiths.

Thats why I said Ulm get crippled badly, because they cant expect a random magical slot to comes on a smith (so to get at least one earth 3 mage), and as they use to forge many items, and are prevented to do so with your mod, then they have few advantages left.

Well, I am afraid that I still don't agree with you The hammer yields a straight bonus - I would have understood your argument if it would be based on the smith's personal bonus, but it is not. The +25 to forging will be received by any race using it - the only difference is that the Master Smith's total bonus will be +50. So, it won't be as easy to reach that level, yet they start out with a bonus equal to a "free" hammer, so the situation hasn't really changed. Any other race that might receive random path levels are still affected by the change - they have not received any extra path levels, yet the reqs have gone up. The net result is that they will, just like Ulm, have more probs getting a Dwarven Hammer.

The fact that the smiths can't hurl spells as efficiently on the battle field, due to the lack of Earth Boots, is something I have absolutely no problem with. IMO, Ulm should not rely on combat spells anyway. And again, all other races are affected in a similar manner - including races that might have great difficulties countering Ulm's heavy troops by mundane means. Besides, when the Earth Boots are concerned, "all" that has really changed is that your smiths will, in a manner of speaking, need a prototype of the boots to work from If your pretender creates the first pair and hands them over to a smith, that smith will now be able to create boots and then hand such boots over to other smiths and so forth. This will not give them the Hammer, but it will solve your concerns regarding Blade Wind. Also, you could always Empower a smith or two in order to be able to create more powerful items (this was something I had in mind when creating the tweak) - costly, yes, but perhaps worth it in the long run.

Again, though, mods are by their very nature very subjective - personally I prefer more demanding requirements for making items, but I realise that many players, quite possibly the majority, do not share my opinion.

By the way, there is a chance that my tweaks produce quite a different problem. Does the AI Empower his units? Personally, I cannot swear that he does - if not, then these tweaks will affect the AI in a disadvantageous way.