[Squirrelloid]

Originally Posted by ano

We may call it anyhow but nation balance in CBM is, most probably, worse than in vanilla. Yes, you may be happy, that PoD costs 125 instead of 75 and that weakish nations for whom PoD was nearly the only viable choice can't take it anymore.

And who is that? What about all those nations which were good and could take an undercosted PoD? What about those nations which couldn't take an undercosted chassis like PoD?

You may be happy that there's no more fever fetish that was nearly the only hope for Machaka to do at least something.

Empirically disproven. Machaka beat the crap out of Vanheim in Land RAND, which is CBM 1.6.

(Machaka did die to Mictlan, but Mictlan jumped them while they were fighting Vanheim, and because they ran over a poorly played Shinuyama, they had a lot more material and had lost a lot less in their first war. So that's not really indicative of any nation balance issues necessarily.)

This isn't to say Machaka is necessarily good, but they're hardly hopeless.

You may be happy that there's no clam of pearls for MA C'tis which has nearly no chance in CBM now unless it is really, really lucky.

Empirically disproven, MA C'tis was 4th (admittedly a distant 4th) in Land RAND, and beat Pythium (a power nation in MA by any metric).

I think you're the only person I've ever seen claim MA C'tis is bad.

Yes, you may live and be happy but it is nations, not pretenders, or fetishes, or clams what people are supposed to play for and lead to victory, aren't they?

Sure, but you can't balance nations until everything else is balanced, because so much of the material is shared between nations. Most pretenders are available to multiple nations. Any item can be forged by any nation. Almost all spells can be cast by any nation. And so on. While these options remain unbalanced there's no good way to balance nations. (A great nation benefits disproportionately more from unbalanced options than a poor nation does).

So now that items and pretenders and spells have been (mostly) balanced, nation balancing can actually happen. Indeed, CBM has done some of that, but its only started making changes specifically for nation balance.