Balance opinions

[Jazzepi]

Ironhawk said:
I only ever play with CB Mod. As Kissblade says above, playing vanilla is just asking for exploits to be brought into play which always ruins things for me.

I'm surprised to find that people feel there is a "learning curve" to the balance mods tho? I mean, you just plug it in and go. Do you seriously memorize every unit from every nation and every spell? It seems a better strategy to me to just abstract your knowledge of dominions - what values make a unit or spell good/bad and then you are ready to play any game with any mod. Just glance at the units and spells that fall into line with your strategy and you are good to go.

I'm not sure what "exploits" exist in vanilla that don't in CB.

The learning curve comes from these sorts of things...

"What gets me are the dozen or so "gotcha's", like when you forget that a key path booster has jumped a level and you can't reach it anymore. Or when a key unit is changed enough to be strategy-changing. They come up very infrequently, but they are frustrating when they do."

What ends up happening is that you have to forget everything you knew about the races in vanilla, and learn them new in CB. Even changing one level path on a nation's mage can make a huge difference in the strategies that are viable with that nation.

Jazzepi