Re: Doedicurus - an introduction to CBM (PBEM, Llamaserver)
I don't think I should sign up, but I just wanted to posit that with CBM, production dependent nations get a huge buff and are worth considering and playing with max prod max turmoil max luck.
In general, production dependent nations (without some superpowered troops like the giant nations) are rarely on the same power level as nations that don't need to depend on this scale. read through the nations evaluations thread, the OP of the preponderance game thread, or just look around at nation strength opinions in general and you will notice that all of the nations believed to be particularly powerful tend to sport at least one high-powered/low resource unit, or at least very high cost to resource ratio units. Mictlan, Vanhiem, Lanka, Pythium, Nief, ect. There are of course many other such nations that are not considered powerful, but the point is that for any nation to really be considered effective they need to be able to produce lots of good troops. Those nations that are too dependent on production for their good units can't produce them fast enough, and are really forced to build forts in very specific areas where they can get more resources. They also must divert points into the production (generally considered an overall weak scale) rather than order (generally considered on of the most important scales) or another scale (like magic). Overall, the production dependency just puts a burden on these nations that the typically high-powered nations do not need to deal with.
CBM fixes this by making production intensive units a little cheaper in gold cost, and by making the luck scale more intense. Taking a production scale is more efficient, allowing a nation to swing with a turmoil luck scale. But the luck scale is more intense, meaning you will get more good events. The higher efficiency of the high resource units (being lower in gold cost, and typically being more robust due to higher prot) allows the nation to run fine with limited funds. But the luck scale will kick in intermittently and you will get nice gold boosts that allow you to build things like forts and such pretty painlessly. Additionally, you will get some bonus gems from the luck scale. On the flip side for the Order lovers, they will have to deal with a more intense misfortune scale, typically a favorite point mine for Order nations. With the intensified effects of this scale, even max Order is really getting risky with Misfortune of 2; this helps deprive these nation of at least one basically free positive scale pick.
At least, that's my analysis of one of the biggest changes in CBM. In my testing, the nations that have some high resource units as their elite units are really a lot better now.
|