Quote:
Originally Posted by Gandalf Parker
I think the devs did a fantastic job of balance (but Im probably biased since I was involved in it). Especially since they took the difficult road to it. But the rock-paper-scissors balance for many different types of play is hard to see.
It is however, unarguable that the game is not balanced if you are looking at 1-to-1 balance for MP games on maps of 100-500 provinces which is where most of the comparisons occur (and the reason for a couple of mods)
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I think a standard of balance that requires more than 500 provinces is not a good standard of balance. Games at even 500 provinces just never end. And since the endgame looks the same for everyone... sure, if the map is big enough that you're starting endgame during your first war, then everyone is balanced. But that's both boring and uninteresting. There's no point in the research system if everyone is expected to be in endgame by the time they're fighting - might as well make all spells #researchlevel 0 at that point. Really, 300 provinces is too large, much less 500. And more than 15 provinces/player is definitely too many.
The real problem is that some nations have a really hard time surviving early game given the unit rosters, spells available, and so on. With a reasonable number of provinces/player (so that the game has a high likelihood of actually ending), you're almost guaranteed to have at least one enemy capital ~3 provinces away from your own. Which means you could very well lose a war by the end of year 1, especially against an opponent who spent pretender resources for the early game.
Arguing that very large maps are the way to achieve balance is also clearly not what was intended by the developers. The whole point of sacred bless strategies and awake pretenders is to be strong during the early game - and those strategies lose power the later into the game you go. Clearly maps are supposed to be of a size where taking that kind of strategic option is supposed to have a commensurate benefit. The first problem is that some sacreds can't be defended against effectively by some nations, even if you did take a strong bless or an awake SC. CBM tries to fix this by making many of these 'too good' options more expensive, and thus harder to rush with as early. Spending pretender resources on the early game should give you an advantage, but it should not be an insurmountable advantage that virtually guarantees you a kill against one or more nations.
The second problem is that the additional expansion afforded by an awake SC or strong sacreds often over-compensate for whatever bad scales you chose to take - ie, good scales in many categories are insufficiently good relative to the advantage gained by sacking the scale for a better pretender or bless. CBM tries to fix this by improving scales, but in many cases it hasn't gone far enough or can't go far enough given modding capabilities. (IMO and for example, Lk3 should absolutely prevent bad events from occurring - spending 120 points on Lk3 is often a poor expenditure even given the boost luck has already received in CBM. Of course, such a change is not moddable.) This is a nation problem because nations benefit differentially from sacking scales for strong blesses, based on the strength of their sacreds. Taking negative scales should involve a noticeable trade-off, not be something you do as a matter of course.
Basically, it isn't unreasonable to expect that nations be relatively balanced (that is, have some sort of trick that helps them against any particular style of attack) at every phase of the game. The reason to have spells accessible by research is to cause the game to change dynamically as research is accessed, and the game should be interesting across the entire spectrum from no research to full research. It fails on both ends right now. At low research, some nations just destroy others. At high research everyone summons tarts or loses.