Balance mod project

Adept · #1 June 19th, 2011, 03:40 PM

Hi guys.

I'm creating a mod to tweak aspects of Dominions that have bugged me for quite a while.

Many of the weapons are modelled quite weirdly. Glaives and other polearms are really bad in general, and almost anything aside from a sword seems to be a bad deal. As something of a medieval history buff and somebody who has done European MA, I've set out to fix this so that the weapons better reflect reality, and so that their resource costs and abilities make all of them reasonable choises. Details later. This is a teaser (and a rant).

The worst effected part of the weapons is the japenese set. Orientalism is a disease that tends to infect quite smart people, and make them believe in katana's that cut machine gun barrels in half. I've turned the Nipponese weapons back to real world values. For game fun, I've reversed the bonuses form their european equivalents. Where european swords give defencive bonuses, the nipponese ones give attack. It's meant to keep them as something exotic and to reflect different training and approach to personal combat. The cheese is right out.

I'm also turning the crazy values and costs of the Jomons human(!) troops down to normal Dom 3 mortal levels.

Other changes include.

- removal of gem producing magic items and hammers that reduce magic item forging costs. Removal of Forge of Ancients.

- removal of hand and head slots from werewolves, giant or othervice. They have a double claw attack and a bite. Same for werejaguars and the Vanir skinshifters.

- Removal of all equipment slots from special summoned monsters like the Kindly Ones. Having them pick up a pointless magic item ruins them quite effectively.

***

To do. Fixing Hinnom and it's other two incarnations. They make Jomon look balanced.

PriestyMan · #2 June 19th, 2011, 04:00 PM

move to other forum plox

rdonj · #3 June 19th, 2011, 05:10 PM

I'm kind of worried that your changes will make Jomon unplayably bad, actually. Jomon has no shields and only decent protection, so they rely on defense values to keep their guys alive. If they had normal defense values, and if their weapons lose the attached bonuses, they're going to become incredibly feeble. And pretty much die in droves. Which with their resource costs would make them pretty terrible. They'd be better than agarthans, but that's about all you can say that's any good. And the most base defense any unit gets is 13, and those are on Very Elite units. So the units themselves are not that bizarre as is. I really don't see what's so wrong with the current samurai that they deserve to be nerfed into uselessness. Even in CBM I don't think jomon's units are unbalanced, and they're strictly inferior in vanilla, which you seem to be operating under the assumption of.

I don't have any objections to the other things you listed though.

llamabeast · #4 June 19th, 2011, 05:03 PM

This sounds very interesting. Tell me - do you use CBM? I'm aware that it doesn't address most of the issues that you mention, but I'm just interested. CBM does (almost) remove gem producing items and hammers, by making them artifacts. As for some of the other stuff, e.g. removal of slots from the Kindly Ones, that sounds as much like a bug fix as anything and should possibly be incorporated into CBM.

Adept · #5 June 19th, 2011, 05:17 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by llamabeast

This sounds very interesting. Tell me - do you use CBM? I'm aware that it doesn't address most of the issues that you mention, but I'm just interested. CBM does (almost) remove gem producing items and hammers, by making them artifacts. As for some of the other stuff, e.g. removal of slots from the Kindly Ones, that sounds as much like a bug fix as anything and should possibly be incorporated into CBM.

I looked into CBM, but I disagree with it's maker on a lot of things.

Lord of the Hunt, the Kindly Ones and their kind having item slots is effectively a bug, and an example of emergent complexity. Interesting as it is in principle, it's really infuriating in practice.

Incidentally I'm thinking 30 gold would be a fair cost for the sacred warriors of Jomon. Pretty cheap if anything. At that price I'm putting their skills at 12. The katana user at 12 / 12, and the naginata guy with 13 / 11.

The Ashigaru seems to be a step above militia in price (and I suppose in history) so I'm setting their combat skills at 9.

Adept · #6 June 19th, 2011, 05:18 PM

As for Jomon, I intend to volunteer to play them myself in our next multiplayer match. If I make mistakes, I'll pay the price. As they are now, they are very silly indeed.

llamabeast · #7 June 19th, 2011, 06:17 PM

When you say they are very silly... do you mean they're too weak, or too strong? Or neither?

rdonj · #8 June 19th, 2011, 09:21 PM

He seems to be saying that they are too strong, because their stats are abnormally high for humans (10atk/11def on normal samurai, 13/13 on elites) and because their weapons give pretty high bonuses to attack and defense skill.

Of course I completely disagree, since they're still less survivable than any random heavy infantry, but...

Adept · #9 June 20th, 2011, 08:35 AM

More or less survivable is all a matter of their pricing. Realism > arbitary balance in a game like this anyway. At least to me.

Incidentally, something about the katana: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLWzH...eature=related

rdonj · #10 June 21st, 2011, 12:45 AM

Well, I certainly wasn't making the argument that katana are magically awesome weapons or anything :P I don't think anyone here would make that argument. The only argument I'm making is that Jomon with nerfed infantry seems like an unnecessary nerf, especially since they weren't that amazing to begin with. Vanilla jomon for example is pretty bad at expanding because they don't have any survivable units they can recruit, and everything that they can recruit takes a lot of resources even so. So they lose tons of units expanding and have to replace them.

As far as the video goes I'm not sure it's entirely accurate. In any case I've just seen some videos of katana cutting through steel pipes, sheets of metal, and japanese steel helmets well enough, along with various other objects. So while it may not be a wonder weapon, it also isn't an atrocious one. If I were to stat a Katana in dominions I would probably put them at 6/2/2/3 (vs a broadsword at 6/0/1/2), which is one less attack and one more length as compared to how illwinter did it. Mainly because a two-handed katana is a much faster of a weapon than a 1-handed broadsword is. I'm not sure I disagree with 3 attack though. If you compare the two and consider the samurai isn't using a shield, I think that's pretty fair really...

Counter-link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDkoj932YFo