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Huzurdaddi said:
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The Panther said:
Very interesting that, so far, nobody has picked 2 of the 3 strongest nations: Caelum and Pythium! Maybe the mods are the reason? Or maybe because they both start in the middle of the map and the edges are a far better place to be.
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Pythium gets kind of Borked in this mod. Thurges more expensive, communicants more expensive, troops slightly more expensive. It's pretty watered down.
As for Caelum it's beyond comprehension but they were improved in this version. At least their primary troop: the archer.
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Pythium did get slightly toned down, but they're still very potent with cheap communicants and cheap, powerful, sacred, holy mages. Also, assassins were improved and cheapened, so they may now be of use to Pythium. I think that people just don't using things that are "nerfed" even if they are still powerful
. For example, I was trying to convince someone to buy a Celeron-based laptop (personally, I only use AMD, but notebook computers are one area where Intel still has some advantages). This person had a very tight budget, of around $600... and he was never, ever, ever going to use the computer for anything other than Word, Outlook Express, and Internet Explorer (so he really didn't need anything above a Pentium 100). But he would not buy the Celeron because "he had heard from people that Celeron is worse than Pentium," which is true, but made him pay $100 more on the processor and compromise on things like screen size and RAM, which would have been much more important to him in practice... just to avoid something that was "nerfed"
As for Caelum - the troop lineup was toned down, IMO, in that magical weapons and flight no longer came "free." Their scouts became more expensive too. The only units that dropped in price were:
Archers, who are essentially unarmored and unshielded and therefore die easily to anything (even soulless or 4g slingers) and also get -1 morale;
and Wingless, who are capitol-only and thus compete with Temple Guards for resources, and are hard to use with other Caelian units because they can't fly.
I'm fairly certain that Caelum was reduced in power, not boosted; considering that the gold cost of the Caelian Archer was dropped by 10% while indy unarmored archers were dropped by 25%, even that unit was weakened in the context of the mod. The only area where Caelum was empowered was in food, as the mod's 60% supply increase is very handy to Caelum (and Jotunheim and Ryleh, for that matter).
Both nations seem (to me) to still be stronger than average, and I think only the "nerf factor" prevents people from jumping on them like in unmodded games
But I'll be watching closely to see if I'm wrong...