[Herode]

Because llamabeast asked why people do not like CBM and because I'm one of those, I want to answer here and give my humble opinion.

Of course, I'm not an expert. I did not play a hundred games. And I did not play games for some couples of month now, so I did not play with CBM 1.8+. Nevertheless, here are some thought about CBM < 1.8 :

I understand that the point is to balance the vanilla version. I think we can more or less balance things : scales are the first exemple coming into my mind, some spells costs, some troops costs. But perfect balance was obviously not aimed at by the conceptors and I am pretty sure that perfect balance is 1 - utopic + 2 - boring.

Also, you shall have noticed that I emphasized on the some adverb. Some modifications are interesting, a lot of modifications are... well.. a question of taste. As of CBM 1.7, it's more than a lot of modifications. It's the entire game that has been modified. And what is more interesting from my humble point of view is that on CBM 1.7, things were still on the edge on changing. I guess (but it's only my guess) that 1.9+ is not an exception to the rule. The policy of CBM only leads to more changes, more re-balancing, more mods and more stuff. Each version add new stuff that adds new unbalanced features that invites to a new version that add new stuff etc. Infinite loop.

I think that such infinite loops are the sign that something went wrong with the algorithm. I also think that vanilla version really needs some balance, but a modest one. It could be really interesting, now that players and modders share a lots of experience with various flavours of CBM and other mods, to plan another 'balance mod' from vanilla, a new BM who would aim to be a modest and a stable one.

That said, I'm not firing at anyone here and I very well know that QM and llamabeast did a lot of valuable and generous work for the community. When I don't like a mod, I just don't play with it and I do not have any problem with other people - more experienced or playing more games than I do - using specialized mods.

Cheers from limbo,
H.