A thought on the Talisman / Live on Pay-Per-View: Geo vs. Fyron

[minipol]

Geoschmo,

is it me or do you lately mold your sentences into bullets?
Anyway, nicely put about the mod but such a mod would be impossible to make. Everybody has different ideas of game balance. What you think is balanced could tick me off and vice versa. But making a mod to balance out the major points of discussion like the talisman should be possible.

[Fyron]

Adamant already has a lot of balance fixes... I have put up. But a balance mod is not a bad idea. Maybe for after camping trip...

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by minipol:
Geoschmo,

is it me or do you lately mold your sentences into bullets?

Eh? I don't understand.

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
Adamant already has a lot of balance fixes... I have put up. But a balance mod is not a bad idea. Maybe for after camping trip...

Yes, I know. But if I recall correctly it also has a lot of stuff that isn't strictly balance oriented, but is new ideas.

I wasn't trying to say noone had ever added certain balance tweaks to their mods. Certainly many have. But the idea of a balance mod is that it could be inserted into the stock files with little or no unintedded consequences, or at the very least be a mod standard such as the TDM mod. and thus get very wide play in the community. Such a focused scope mod has been attempted before, but never completed.

Geoschmo

[PvK]

Actually, people mostly seemed to agree with the changes I put in my balance mod. I just never posted a completed Version, but most of the hard stuff was figured out. I should probably take the time to finish it.

PvK

Originally posted by minipol:
Geoschmo,

is it me or do you lately mold your sentences into bullets?
Anyway, nicely put about the mod but such a mod would be impossible to make. Everybody has different ideas of game balance. What you think is balanced could tick me off and vice versa. But making a mod to balance out the major points of discussion like the talisman should be possible.

[spoon]

Originally posted by PvK:
Actually, people mostly seemed to agree with the changes I put in my balance mod. I just never posted a completed Version, but most of the hard stuff was figured out.

Geo's point about compatiblility is a good one:

But the idea of a balance mod is that it could be inserted into the stock files with little or no unintedded consequences, or at the very least be a mod standard such as the TDM mod. and thus get very wide play in the community.

Since you mostly balanced the empire setup Characteristic and Trait costs, would this have an impact on modded races?

What else is important to consider? For example, would changing the size of a component mess with how an ai designs ships?

I suspect for components, messing with the tech tree and comp sizes would be a no-no. Anything else?

I should probably take the time to finish it.

Yes, yes you should

[PvK]

AI races, even the included ones, would be affected by a mod which only changes the empire creation costs.

All empires designed with the old point system would be likely to come out slightly differently with a new point system. Except for 5000-point empires, though, they might tend to come out better balanced than before, because the AI selects abilities until it runs out of points (or out of things on its shopping list).

AI empires which are set to capitalize on underpriced advantages in the unmodded game won't get to have as many of them, while AI empires designed to use overpriced advantages will get more of them, until they run out of things they are programmed to try to get, at which point they'll just lose their extra points.

Changing component sizes would affect AI designs. Not necessarily for the worse, though.

I think the main point of a balance mod is to help PBW games between humans, however - the AI impact isn't particularly important, it seems to me.

PvK

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by PvK:
I think the main point of a balance mod is to help PBW games between humans, however - the AI impact isn't particularly important, it seems to me.

PvK

The objective I stated was to come up with a balance mod general enough to have a chance of being implemented by Malfador into the stock game. So AI performance is quite important. Effect on exsisting mods and custom AI's should be considered, but not be a critical issue. If it becomes the stock they can be adjusted accordingly after the fact by the authors or others. But the stock AI's will have to be adjusted as part of the blance mod itself if any changes are made that affect them.

I am not saying any balance mod has to meet these objectives, but if it doesn't it won't have much of a shot of becoming part of the stock game.

Geoschmo

[ July 22, 2003, 18:55: Message edited by: geoschmo ]