Mod: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6

[Trumanator]

You know, its not that Squirreloid's wrong, but I think its obvious that as Jomon you have to work a lot harder than other nations to get similar progress. An interesting boost might be giving them linked randoms. I don't see why only Atlantis and Hinnom/Ashdod/Gath should be the only ones who get it?

[kianduatha]

Amusingly enough, Jomon has a caster which gets linked randoms. You know, their flying badass battlecasters that can turn into dragons.

[Micah]

Jomon could probably still use some love even after the patch, but their mages, which uninspiring, are functional. S2 provides a useful mage, regardless of other paths. The master shugenja are a bit more of a gamble, but you don't need tons of them.

Jomon's problem is that they combine a lot of individual uninspiring elements and come up with something uninspiring on the whole, that then gets ganged or rushed to death. One of the other problems they have is that they don't have any low-resource troops, which constrains their early options in terms of production scale and/or pretender selection, and a good, diverse pretender would go a long way to smoothing out their wacky randoms. Maybe looking at adding a new troop (similar to the o-bakemono in design, high gold, low resource, functional for expansion and then never bought again) would help smooth things out for them instead of messing with their magic?

Regardless, settling on one aspect of jomon and blaming all its ills on one factor doesn't seem like the way to go.

[Squirrelloid]

i dislike the idea of giving them a low-resource unit. Making Jomon playable with Sloth-3 is unappealing - especially since sloth scales are already a no-brainer for so many other nations.

Given that Jomon needs almost nothing out of its pretender anyway except for scales, I'm not sure I see the advantage to a low resource troop for their game play. They don't need an SC. They don't need a bless. They don't need any specific magic (being able to bootstrap up to tarts via a summons they have access to nationally is plenty good enough for D access. So the only path they're missing is blood, and putting that on your pretender is not an especially great way to bootstrap blood). Considering virtually every other nation is far more constrained on which pretender it chooses than Jomon is, it hardly seems like making their pretender choice a little more flexible is going to improve them much.

(Reasonable minimal scales for Jomon are Pr3 Mg1, hardly an onerous burden even for an awake SC or RB, and much less of a straightjacket than minimal scales for a number of nations.

It is possible to play without Pr3 if you want to focus on sacreds for expansion, since they (yamabushi) only require 15r/ea, but then you need a decent bless, a plan on what you're doing in mid-game probably involving summoned units, and you still probably don't want to take sloth scales. But it can be done).

I'd rather see CBM take steps to make Order and Sloth less of no-brainers in general than find a way to let Jomon take Sloth 3 just like everyone else.
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Trumanator and I discussed linking the master shugenja's randoms. In the longterm this is probably advantageous. In the short term it makes it harder to plan early research for defensive playing (since the perception that Jomon is weak will probably lead to your needing to defend a rush). E1N1 + 200% linked FAWEN (+10%...) would give you 5 possible distinct X2 paths, many of which don't share the same school of research for early rush defense (although Alt is a reasonable choice, being good for E3, and having reasonable uses for A2, N3, and W2; but thaum and evo start looking reasonably good as well).

On the other hand E1N1 + 200% FAWEN unlinked leads to a lot of E2 and N2 mages, making it much easier to predict what your likely useful paths are for early game magic given a limited number of commander buys.

As commander buys increase, guaranteed X2+ on every mage will be superior.

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If we really feel the need to improve Jomon, here's where I'd start:

(1) Improve the stats of the sacreds a little bit. Ok, not so much the Yamabushi, who is perfectly playable as is. But the sohei is shameful. He should have at least equal stats to the aka-oni, or possibly be diversified in some way so he's functionally different. (12 att 14 def? Higher strength?)

(2) Make Sohei not capital only. This would give Jomon an interesting option because choosing to play for a blessing would actually be more reasonable. (And Sohei aren't so overpoweringly better than Jomon's normal troops as to make playing for a blessing an obvious choice).

(3) Further diversify the unit list to make some choices actually useful. In particular:

-O-ban are useless given the existence of Go-Hatamoto, especially given their current price point and resource cost. Not sure how to fix without altering all the units - possibly make base stats at least the equal of the Go-Hatamoto so the difference between the katana and the no-dashi actually translates into a real difference in performance rather than strict dominance of the Go-Hatamoto.
-Samurai with a katana are similarly useless given the existence of the aka-oni, who is vastly superior with move 2, or the Go-Hatamoto in terms of stats and price point, being insufficiently cheap to be a reasonable alternative. See #4 below with some recommendations on changes to the samurai chassis in general.

(4) Consistency and sanity issues (most of this won't necessarily help with balance, but some of it might and a lot of it is strange):
-Of the basic samurai, the non-archer ones have precision 11 but the archer has precision 10. WTF? Recommend increase archer to 11 for consistency.
-Similarly, the archer samurai costs 2 extra gold. As resources are supposed to reflect gear, and the only difference is the gear, this should be fixed. (Recommend gold cost of 10 for the archer samurai to be equal to the others).
-Samurai are elite troops, even if they are most of Jomon's line-up. Recommend improving attack and defense by 1 each on all 3 basic samurai units (which might help make them reasonable alternatives to the superior go-hatamoto and aka-oni given their cheaper prices). Also recommend improving morale by 1 (to 12).
-A katana requires 3 more resources than a naginata and 1 more than a no-dashi. I have no idea why this is true. Recommend giving katana a reasonable resource cost. (Should be less than a no-dashi at the very least).
-A long bow requires 5 resources. This also seems rather excessive since that's 2/3 or so the resource cost of the armor... Given a longbow is a large stick with a string on it, this is rather ridiculous (i jest, but its not that far from the mark - there's a reason *peasants* in England used them - they were cheap and easy to acquire). Given the Japanese 'longbow' has its own name (Daikyu), a new weapon definition to restrict any changes to Jomon is certainly plausible. (Its also technically not a longbow since its a composite and asymmetrical).
-Ashigaru are levied troops and should be dirt cheap to field in large numbers, recommend slashing gold cost to something like 4. Resources are going to be more limiting than gold anyway, and the challenge should be *feeding* them, not paying them.
-The Hatamoto has one lower att/def than the mounted Gokenin and the Daimyo, who bracket it in the mounted commander choices in terms of quantity. Fix this. (recommend improving Hatamoto's stats to equal the others).

It bears noting that the Daikyu is asymmetrical *because* its intended to be capable of being fired from horseback. Similarly, the katana was originally designed as a cavalry sword (its curved blade and length are indicative of a one-handed mounted weapon). One might have expected a slightly more diverse cavalry selection given the historical uses of the weapons involved.

(5) 5FP Monk improvement: replace the F and E monk signs with something that's actually useful, or give those signs enough range that you can actually script them. Currently they're so close range that getting the monk to even *cast* them is next to impossible.

Recommend replacing them with small AoE buff spells to emphasize monks as a supporting element for armies.

(6) Delimit some of the national summons a little bit. Most relevantly, swamps are sufficiently uncommon that the Nushi is a tad hard to cast. Since many provinces likely have small swamps in them anyway (ie, there's a scale issue), possibly just give them the Naiad disadvantage of losing hp if they leave their home province? (note that the Naiad also thematically has a terrain requirement, ie water, but that isn't specifically enforced by the game).

The others may be ok, since mountains and forests are sufficiently common to not be unreasonable, although it certainly wouldn't hurt to reduce the penalties for moving off favored/home terrain or restrictions on location of conjuring.

Hmm... this is already longer than i originally intended.

[kianduatha]

Half the problem is simply that other players expect Jomon to be weak. Having excellent sitesearching also makes you a tempting target.

I agree though with Ashigaru being more spammable and some of the more 'normal' troops getting higher stats. Also Sohei becoming recruit anywhere would be fun to try out.

[Festin]

Jomon's problem is that they combine a lot of individual uninspiring elements and come up with something uninspiring on the whole, that then gets ganged or rushed to death.

Exactly. But it's not like they are not flexible - far from it. Rather, all these options sort of fail to combine into a coherent strategy.

I agree with Squirrelloid about the low-resource unit - it will only add another non-matching element to the whole mess.

Linked randoms look like a good idea.

Improving Sohei and making it recruitable anywhere can cause Jomon to become another generic bless nation, which is not very interesting. I would leave sacreds as they are, or slightly improve Sohei.

4 gp for Ashigaru is far too cheap. Weakest generic militia costs 5 gp, and Ashigaru are far superior in every way (morale 10, nice length 5 spear, decent armor for light infantry).

Other suggestions look good. I still think that 9 HP on ashigaru and samurai should be removed.

And it would be nice if Kappa spell provided some regular Kappas in addition to commander, so that it could be used to enter water. Currently, the spell is useless.

[Squirrelloid]

Originally Posted by Festin

4 gp for Ashigaru is far too cheap. Weakest generic militia costs 5 gp, and Ashigaru are far superior in every way (morale 10, nice length 5 spear, decent armor for light infantry).

I doubt you'd find them overpowering at 4gp. As such, its not far too cheap, its just a national advantage.

There's no point comparing to other nations or indies - a nation is balanced as a set of units against other nations as sets of units. Individual units most certainly do not have to be balanced against other units (Go cry about it with LA Ulm's Black Templars if you must).

Independents especially are notably worse than national units in almost all cases, and when a national unit is merely as good as an independent unit, it sucks. (You can cry with Eriu about their milesians, who are only very marginally better than independents, and suck).

I still think that 9 HP on ashigaru and samurai should be removed.

Eh, who cares? 9 vs. 10 hp is pretty negligible. And most of the units anyone uses at present don't have 9hp - go-hatamoto, aka-oni, and yamabushi have 11hp.

[vfb]

Kappas bleed awesome from their eyeballs. And they rip your guts out through your anus. What more could you want! What do they cost anyway, 2W?! This monkey PD discussion should be moved to its own Jomon thread.

[Festin]

Eh, who cares? 9 vs. 10 hp is pretty negligible. And most of the units anyone uses at present don't have 9hp - go-hatamoto, aka-oni, and yamabushi have 11hp.

Well, it's not like it is important - currently, nobody uses generic samurai anyway. It is just annoying and illogical.

And it does not matter how much Kappas cost. Even if they were 1W, they would still suck in their current state.

[rdonj]

I think the resource cost of a katana is a thematic thing. Making a katana is a lot of work, and requires very special skills and materials due to the way they're made. That said, I thought the no-dashi was basically an oversized katana. I'm having trouble finding non-game references to no-dashi on the internet so it's hard to say for sure. But from the look I would have expected them to be made the same way. I would say there's a good argument for them requiring more resources than a katana.

Making sohei not cap-only wouldn't be bad. There aren't really that many LA bless nations, and I think jomon would make a lot of sense thematically as a bless nation. I'm not sure that they need this, but I wouldn't object to it either.

4gp ashigaru is just wrong though, that would be less even than mictlan. They could maybe be justified in dropping a little, but they are pretty good for chaff, making them much less expensive would almost be too good.

I'm also not sure I like the idea of giving them linked randoms. They are one of a very few nations in the game that can have mages with such diverse paths. Sure, they can be really annoying and make site searching frustrating, but they also give you access to path combinations that are very rare, plus with communions you can power the onmyoji up sufficiently in their side paths to be fairly useful. Now, MAYBE if just the master shugenja had their paths linked that would be fine because you wouldn't really be losing out on anything. But that smacks of being too convenient and useful. And you couldn't link paths on onmyoji but not master shugenja or no one would ever buy them. I would almost rather just make Jomon's mages all less expensive. Say 120 gold for the mages and 70 for a monk.

It would be nice if there was ever a reason to recruit normal samurai units and o-ban.

And it would be nice if Kappa spell provided some regular Kappas in addition to commander, so that it could be used to enter water. Currently, the spell is useless.

I think kappa summoning would be fine if you could just summon more of them at a time. One is almost useless. 5 might get you somewhere.