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Originally Posted by HoneyBadger
You know, the Devs themselves have even stated that they assumed balancing problems would be taken care of by the modding community, so I wonder why more people don't try to create MP friendly versions of Nations? Where's the great shame and doubt in this? There's good, easy access to in-game graphics now, so Hinnom will look the same, and it's a lot faster and easier than waiting for the off-chance that one of the Devs *might* someday play a Nation you think is unbalanced, and *might* rebalance it in a way that satisfies you.
Sure, you'll get the same arguments and hassles about how it's still not balanced, but once the work of actually recreating the vanilla nation is done, making adjustments becomes a fairly simple process that anyone can do.
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While this is a great theory, there are a couple of problems with it. First being that we've only even been able to properly use mod nations in MP games for a couple of weeks, so it's not as if everyone's mindset is geared towards that. But I think the major hurdle is that most people are going to be a bit leary about mod nations that they haven't experienced before. I mean, consider the body of effort that has gone into at least making a case for balancing Hinnom - to expect that sort of undertaking for a mod nation may be a bit fanciful. So it's likely that a lot of people (other than the most experienced, who are either 100% confident in themselves, or who can assess the mod nation at a glance) will continue to have a generally fearful perspective on the unknown. Obviously, you could release a mod version of Hinnom that was declared "toned down" or "weakened", but even if people acknowledged it were true, I bet you more often than not if someone said they were implementing that mod, no one would want to use the player nerfed nation.
I'm not saying no one will ever include player modified vanilla nations, or that no one would ever select that particular mod nation, only that there is a bit of a gap between where we are now, and that being commonplace on either end.
But also, it seems to me that everyone is pretty comfortable with there being "some" discrepancy in power. I mean everyone acknowledges that Lanka and Niefel are powerhouses, and they usually get picked fast, but they're within a certain variance that is acceptable, because they CAN be taken down with a joint effort, and often are as a result. Because of that, it does seem reasonable to ask for them to be brought within that range of variance so that perhaps they might be considered very strong, but not entirely unfairly so. And not necessarily to expect it to be this grand sweeping fine-tuning. A few increases in resource/gold cost, maybe a certain unit made capital only, a tiny change to starting army, and voila, you have surely brought the nation more in line with their expected performance.