[Cainehill]

Originally posted by Boron:
perhaps illwinter could include some well balanced player mods as additional themes / nations in 2.13

pvk's amazon empire + thilocks draconian mod so far are good candidates .
your fire gigant jotunheim may be a 3rd one if you make a mod with this yourself

What makes you think those mods are well balanced for MP games?

To the best of my knowledge, they have received little use in multiplayer games, thus they can hardly be said to be well balanced - they haven't been tested for balance.

Most of the mods that I've seen are in fact very unbalanced, and I only know of one MP game in which the different mods are being played.

From what I've seen there, the latest Version of Ashikawa is pretty decently balanced, but most of the other ... 5 mods in that game are overpowered, noticeably so even in SP games.

Before any mod was brought into the game as a theme, I'd expect a _lot_ more playtesting and balancing to go on, to avoid the "Oh! Who would ever have thought of _that_! Wow, that's great! I want that theme because it is so powerful!" syndrome.

It's a lot of work to balance in-game modifications and additions.... Now, maybe Illwinter's beta testers have been looking at the mods for balance - but since the mods are someone else's IP, Illwinter can't simply tweak them as needed. Intellectual Property right complications also arise, because someone's mod would be getting bundled with a commercial, for-sale, product.

A couple of companies have done this, but they've tended to be larger companies, with lawyers to deal with just such complications. (Think maps and mods being distributed with/for Quake, HalfLife, etc.)

Edit : For that matter, how can you seriously propose a mod that hasn't even been created yet, hasn't even had proposed troops / commanders / etc, as a "well balanced mod"?

[ August 04, 2004, 16:11: Message edited by: Cainehill ]