On the subject of CBM "changes" and following my comment on the tempest thread...
On a personnal note, I'm not fond of reducing possibilities of a game. Which is what has been done with gem gen and hammers : as Callahan explains, and which I will not repeat. On the tartarian changes, the whole "GoR undead" aspect have been lost just for the sake of ONE unbalanced spell. I do not think that a game should be balanced by removing stuff, it should be done by adding stuff so that other avenues can be explored (much like EDM tried to do). But that's only what I feel, if most others think otherwise I'll bend.
The main thing I dislike about CBM though is that most of it is just undocumented. Which is another reason that makes me feel that CBM is as unbalanced as vanilla, since with so many changes and no documentation but "try every stuff" (and even then, some things can be missed...) it's rather easy to overlook stuff, which makes the game feel unbalanced whether you're doing better than your opponent(s) or the opposite. Not to mention the amount of knowledge needed to play this game well... Some of it was before you took on the project though.
Not that I don't respect the amount of work that has been done. It's just that when I look at what has been done, I'm unable to assess if any work has been done, and when I do look for information, it feels like a lot of reworking of some issues and overlooking of others. And when I play the game, it feels unbalanced. In SP games I crash AIs with "stupid" strategies on some nations while other need finer stuff, and the rather low amount of MP I did start show me mostly the same, with the main difference that diplomacy even things up a lot.
I'm not delusional enough to think "Balance" is universal. There are dozens of solutions to any problem. The problem I'm seeing in your (hard) work is that I can't see a path leading to some idea of balance defined anywhere, and that from my point of view, the work done done on CBM looks "reworking the same stuff again and again" while a lot is just overlooked.
My perspective may be flawed of whatever, but since my last comment was either badly explained or not well understood, I'm trying to get the points I wanted to make here
.