Mod: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6

[BigDaddy]

Originally Posted by Squirrelloid

His point was that smoulderghosts in vanilla are so bad, no one would ever spend gems on them. You can pay gold for better troops. Since gems > gold (bar fire gems), you'll never spend gems to get troops worse than what you can just hire.

Er... non-sequitur? How? There are still nations, they have distinct national units, they have particular paths and pretender choices. In fact, CBM increases nation differentiation *because* it removes gem gens. Since you can't just clam/blood-stone/fever fetish your way to arbitrarily large gem pools, your endgame is no longer nothing but summoned troops and mages. National mages and troops are more important all game long.



... no no no. The objective should be to make the game more balanced and interesting so every nation has a fair shake. Rushing is already really powerful - if anything, it could probably use a little toning down in some cases. Ideally, mid-game should be longer and more relevant, since that's the interesting part of the game.



You could afford to send 3500 gold worth of commanders on an offensive on turn 16? You do realize how horribly inefficient that is right? I'd take equal gold against them any day. The smite isn't what makes them scary. One of them dropping divine blessing on 50 double-blessed jags would be a *lot* scarier, and a heck of a lot cheaper. (1600 gold vs. 3500 gold, assuming you had nothing but commanders in your example, which is almost certainly false). And by turn 16 he should have real counters. Like bladewind or thunderstrike. Smite is small potatoes by comparison.

Dar?

Where to start? Well, besides Ashdod (which CBM still hasn't nerfed enough).

We could start with their being only ~7 pretender chasses ever worth using in vanilla.

We could start with the strict domination of some nations over most others. I mean, nations like MA Man are still bad in CBM, but they are absolutely *hopeless* in vanilla.

We could start with the poorly balanced spells such that some of them are win buttons and others are useless or mostly useless.

I mean, what kind of specific examples would you like?

CBM doesn't just balance nations against each other, it also balances options against each other so more of the spells and units see play. Its done the latter of these rather well in many cases, in some as well as is possible without fundamental changes. (e.g., MA Ermor's censor cannot be priced so that it will ever be bought if it remains cap-only, so no change CBM could make that retains its cap-only status will effect how often it sees play).

He attacked them through PD, and they had blood slaves with them. We play on indy's 7 or more, I'm used to 9, so I tend to make really powerful armies that are inefficient. They did have lab and a few demons... I was Mictalan afterall... he was bogarus, they killed a lot of heavy calvary. It is probably bad for my "professional" experience. It is true that I haven't played dom3 that much, I'm just an old dom2 player.

What are the 7 chassis? Enchantress, statue, fountain, fountain... actually I think all the immobile ones have their niche.

I never liked the titans, as they seem like late game mage artillery... because they really aren't good for taking provinces early on, and it doesn't take long until taking provinces with a few basic spells becomes a waste of their time.

Maybe I'm just missing some tactics somewhere.

I feel like I'm missing something. So, to find out, I need to play MA Man.