Conceptual Balance Mod 0.9

[quantum_mechani]

PDF said:
Still Titaness' 25 RP bonus is so high I thought it was a typo !

I think you will be hard pressed to find her overpowered with the that, a lesser bonus would have meant nothing because there would be no incentive to keep her around researching.

Yet there are *many other* things that aren't "balanced", but just changed because the author wanted to change it : the remote searches at level 3 research/ path 3 totally changes the way searches could be done, but don't change the game balance at all !

On the contrary, they change game diversity a great deal. People tend to forget, what balance really is allowing for the for the most diverse number of options to be viable. By the time reach the late game (level 9 research in a school or two), you most likely have very good access to all paths, and so near all spells. What this means, is that late game, everyone is playing with the same deck, so fewer options have niches. Every game, the same handful of spells rule the final phase. If each nation has a different selection of paths, it makes each game more unique, and more options can get their time in the sun. Without magic being limited more by nation, in makes carving niches for all the options many times harder.

Some other changes - BW nerfing and many Evo nerfs also are hard to justify as "balance changes", I didn't ever see anyone claiming BW was unbalanced...

You may not have- in the mp games I have played, it is the most frequently abused and complained about battlefield spell, after skelly spam.

Now for example Ulm that always was weak now looks utterly crap,

I agree, that was an unintentional side effect, and I'm going to work towards easing it in later versions.

As for the other evocation 'nerfs', look carefully, more spells were boosted than nerfed. Again, the effort here is to improve diversity, it is much easier to meet halfway than try to buff up every spell to the level of the best ones.