[llamabeast]

Lots of interesting comments in this thread.

Regarding the "infinite loop" comment, I think that kianduatha's comment does a good job of explaining why that hopefully isn't the case. I think that the recent large number of changes have been caused by three things:

1) The uniqueification of hammers. This is the second really big and IMO brave change made by qm, the first being removing gem generators. At the time that was hugely controversial, but I think most people would agree now that it was a good change. The hammer change is possibly still somewhat controversial but I think many people like it; that's a discussion for elsewhere anyway. Regardless it did lead to a need for some rebalancing since it affected some nations and strategies more than others.

2) An attempt to make all items useful*. This was my big project in 1.9, although qm worked on it in 1.8 too. Hopefully, unless I have made a lot of mistakes, there should be little need to make many changes to items in future.

3) An attempt to bring weaker nations somewhat up to par. For a long time this wasn't really attempted, and MA Ulm for instance languished as borderline hopeless. Hopefully 1.9 has covered most of the nations which needed help. There may be need for a couple of tweaks if I have got things wrong, and maybe there are another couple of nations who need some help (Yomi perhaps). But again I hope we are most of the way there.

I think there is room for some significant attention to be paid to pretenders (where there are still some which are pretty useless, particularly national pretenders), so that may be the next area to focus on. But the objective is for the mod to settle into a kind of equilibrium.

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Gandalf - you seem to have the firm opinion that CBM is balanced around small blitz games, but I don't know where that comes from. Certainly I don't lean that way and it's not obvious that qm did. Consider gem gens for example - they're probably fairly reasonable for small games (4 players or so), and only become monstrous in larger games. Anyway I don't really understand much of your comment so I guess we're not going to get anywhere.

Out of interest, what "thematic" changes to Pangaea do you find objectionable? I'm not familiar with the Pangaea changes.


* - This is a reasonable place to address a common concern about CBM. People might think that for example by making all items useful, there is a danger of making them all the same and removing the interesting diversity from the game. I've tried very hard to avoid that - rather the idea is to make all items *potentially* useful. Some items will be very niche in their use, but if a player finds just the right situation and plans ingeniously, hopefully they will not be punished for trying to use an unusual item.