Conceptual Balance Series (Mod)

[Edi]

Zen said:
Ahah! Yes, Edi is right (DAMN THE EDITORS!).

Well, it's the editor's job to make sure the facts are kept straight, no? And you DID name me as your official editor...

Zen said:
But Blood ones are particularly easy to come up with. The Thorn and the Vessel are only 20 Slaves (10 normal gems) and the Armor is 40 Slaves (20 normal gems). It's not too hard to bootstrap up to make these things and then have access to the entire selection of blood because of it's nature.

This is certainly true. The blood boosters all require just blood magic to produce, while many of the other path boosters require more than one type of magic and often in combinations that are not particularly plentiful.

• Skull of Fire is a death/fire combination, which aside from Machaka, T'ien Chi and Ermor (dusk elders) isn't all that common.
• Moonvine bracelet is astral/nature, which is a bit easier to get, and usually requires either one random pick or indie lizards.
• Bloodstones require the rare earth/blood combo, which is imo the hardest one to get at sufficient levels to make the stones.
• Armor of Twisting Thorns is blood/nature, so availability is usually limited to Pangaea and Mictlan out of the box. It makes for a powerful ritual casting boost, but is in other ways limited (not the least by being cursed).
• Crystal Coin requires the earth/astral (2/2) combination, which I've found to be annoyingly troublesome.
• The Staffs of Elemental Mastery are pretty hard to produce, because they require combinations of opposite elements. T'ien Chi, Arco and Atlantis are almost the only ones who have mages that can produce them out of the box (assuming proper random picks)

Besides blood, this leaves only air, water and death as paths where all boosts are producable without combo paths, and air has the limitation that you need 3 air to produce the first one. Ditto fire, unless you get the death combo.


EDIT: nevermind, you posted an answer to a question while I was typing it.

I'll get working on the readme. I can also comment the pretender mod file for you, if you like, so you can concentrate on the items for a while longer. Unless somebody else has something important to add in the meanwhile, of course.

Edi

[Edi]

Zen, one more problem with the pretender modifications: The ***** Queen's crone form actually has base hit point value of 16 in the unmodded game, so your mod just cranked them down by 4 to 12.

I suggest keeping the original crone form HP and removing Heal Troops, because otherwise there is no sense at all taking Crone for those nations that have BQ available. A cost difference of 15 points is a laughable price for the capability to heal injured afflictions. This would keep the crone and the ***** queen more in their thematic niches, instead of making the BQ a buffed up crone with two less misc slots and an armor slot (BQ crone has normal humanoid slots instead of crone slots).

I've made the appropriate changes to reflect this, and updated the readme according to those changes, so that the BQ crone and the real crone differ from each otehr in these respects. I've attached that mod as v1.65 into this post. Includes mod file v1.65, graphic file and readme v1.65.

[Zen]

Hah, you caught that right as I was mulling over fixing the attatchment

So it's all good. 1.65 is the latest Version with new and improved shapechanged creatures.

Edit: The Readme says it's for Version 1.3. You might want to change that on the next Version.

SCORE ONE FOR THE WRITERS BABY!

[Edi]

Zen said:
Hah, you caught that right as I was mulling over fixing the attatchment

So it's all good. 1.65 is the latest Version with new and improved shapechanged creatures.

Edit: The Readme says it's for Version 1.3. You might want to change that on the next Version.

SCORE ONE FOR THE WRITERS BABY!

You can't prove anything! (Unless the witnesses who downloaded the attachment before I fixed it come forth...)

Yes, the attachment in my previous post has been updated so that the readme says it's for v1.65.

Edi