Conceptual Balance Series (Mod)

[Cainehill]

Or the "Undying Treelord", albeit given how long it takes trees to die, I can see how a Treelord dying for centuries would become attuned to death from being on the threshold for so long.

Trees and Forests are both life and death, so I think it is perfect thematically to have one of them with death, without being undead, thematically evil, etc.

[deccan]

Say Zen, couldn't you throw up a webpage at www.techno-mage.com/~zen/ listing the files that you have there? WIth all the different Versions and soon-to-be many modules, it can get kind of confusing to find what we need...

Edit: I like the list of changes! Haha, no more cheap false horror spam, no more easy ice devil SCs massacring entire armies...

[deccan]

Typographic error in the 1.72 Version of the pretender mod in the description of Son of the Sun (Fire)

It reads:

"The Son of the Sun is a demigod of immense size claiming the divine heritage of teh sun. Possessing considerable magical and physical might, the Son of the Sun is surrounded by an aura of splendor that strikes mortals with awe. The sun has gifted it's heir with such heat that once per season he recieves two Fire gems."

It should be "the" instead of "teh" and "receives" instead of "recieves".

[Daynarr]

Any changes to "Burden of Time"?

[Zen]

Not at current, no.

I actually stayed away from Globals since my personal experience is that Globals, their effect, and their 'strength' really depends on the players you are playing with.

I've been in situations where any global go up was brought down in a matter of a handful of turns, regardless.

I've also been in a situations where certain globals have stayed up much longer than I feel it should and am pulling my hair out that people are letting them stay up.

So with the variability of this I don't have the personal experience to adjust them one way or the other (the exception being Purgatory which is, to me, less of a game factor).

If you have suggestions, reasoning and such, please post them. As I said before this isn't just a pure "MY WAY OR THE HIGHWAY" type of mod, I'm looking for reasonable feedback to create a better sense of balance. I just merely took the first step.

[Huzurdaddi]

Zen,

I love a lot of the changes. Here are a couple of I am a couple of questions about:

1. Soul Vortex. The new cost makes casting it from a wraith lord or a vampire lords very difficult. I assume this was the idea. However I now have a hard time thinking of why Wraith Lords are worth 40 gems ( perhaps the immortality is worth far more than I give it credit for ).

2. False Horror. I guess this is sufficient. I don't know. It's still not too hard to spam the crud out of them if you are Caelum. But perhaps that is more of a Caelum problem than a problem with the spell cost.

3. Love the Bane Lord fix. However I *do* use him for his leadership Not like it matters 15 gems is perfect.

4. Wrathful Skies/FireStorm/Battlefield spells. I'm still drawn to these spells even with the current costs. More play testing will be required ( and I will try to start one this weekend ) but I think that people will still attempt to blow armies up at this cost. Perhaps the requirements have to be boosted across the board for all battle field spells by 2 or so making them pretender only ( basically ). They are all far more powerful than the Shimmering Fields/Nifel Flames/FireSomething yet they are lower on the tech chart and they have similar requirements ( but lower gem costs it is true ).

5. I think that the angels may whomp on humans a little too much, but I think that the change is ( over all ) much for the better.

I have no other negative observations. This Mod is, IMO, fantastic. You have done a bang up job. I mean that. And no, I'm not sucking up I really think that you have done some good work here.

There are now so many good spells and so few less than useful spells it's freaking great.

[Boron]

Zen said:
I've been in situations where any global go up was brought down in a matter of a handful of turns, regardless.

I've also been in a situations where certain globals have stayed up much longer than I feel it should and am pulling my hair out that people are letting them stay up.

So with the variability of this I don't have the personal experience to adjust them one way or the other (the exception being Purgatory which is, to me, less of a game factor).

If you have suggestions, reasoning and such, please post them. As I said before this isn't just a pure "MY WAY OR THE HIGHWAY" type of mod, I'm looking for reasonable feedback to create a better sense of balance. I just merely took the first step.

Did you talk after the game with the players ?
I just brought up a thread asking about ppls favourite global strats cause i am curious as well .

So when ppl brought down globals always i guess they wasted at least quite some amounts of gems by dispelling .

There is at least 1 global that you should change imo :
The forge of the ancients .

Maybe i am blind but i didn't find a weapon mod so far . So if you already modded artifacts then sorry .


But with forge : If you play a blood nation and can bring up the forge of ancients with the current bloodstone EVERY B2 mage can forge a bloodstone .
Abysia / DF marignon can even forge a few bloodstones with their mages with good randoms .
If they time the forge a bit they will be able to forge 20-30 bloodstones / turn in midgame .
So if the opponents don't react immedeately and the forge is up only 3-5 turns Abysia / Marignon DF / Mictlan will have already 50-200 bloodstones .
Then they can bring the forge up again almost 1:1 in cost vs. pearls .

I remember that you wanted to change clams + fetishes to higher requirements that they can't be massproduced so much anymore .

So if you keep the Forge of Ancients as it is then you need either to make bloodstones harder to forge as well ( Maybe B5E ) or change something with the forge of ancients .

[Daynarr]

Well, as far as my MP games go, I have yet to see Burden of Time being cast. It’s probably due to the fact that such spell would turn EVERYONE in the game against you, which is next best thing to a suicide.

I was thinking that BoT needs fixing for SP since, apparently, AI still likes to cast it when he can. A simple increase in casting requirements (from death 5 to death 7-9) would be good, or making it higher-level spell (from 5 to 8-9) level would fix this in SP.

Personally I like the first method since it would limit the casting of the spell to powerful Death nations, which is quite thematic.

However, I have no idea how this would impact MP, so I'll leave it to your judgement.

BTW nice changes so far.