Do you use CBM?

[kianduatha]

Originally Posted by Herode

And what is more interesting from my humble point of view is that on CBM 1.7, things were still on the edge on changing. I guess (but it's only my guess) that 1.9+ is not an exception to the rule. The policy of CBM only leads to more changes, more re-balancing, more mods and more stuff. Each version add new stuff that adds new unbalanced features that invites to a new version that add new stuff etc. Infinite loop.

I think that such infinite loops are the sign that something went wrong with the algorithm. I also think that vanilla version really needs some balance, but a modest one. It could be really interesting, now that players and modders share a lots of experience with various flavours of CBM and other mods, to plan another 'balance mod' from vanilla, a new BM who would aim to be a modest and a stable one.

I wouldn't call it an infinite loop--the balance chaos since 1.7 was almost all a result of the hammer change, so I would characterize it more as punctuated equilibrium. That one change(and SDRs becoming unique I suppose) threw a lot of stuff off-balance--a lot of that was simply that almost every strategy was affected and it took a while for people to understand the changes well enough to be able to rebalance things. Only just now are item prices settling down from the disruption. And a lot of that is simply that it takes months usually to get good feedback on changes because games take a while.

It's almost impossible to make both a modest and a stable balance mod. For instance, say you wanted to not have gem generators(a noble enough goal). This *greatly* disrupts the balance of most every nation, alters the relative value of various pretenders, and wreaks havok with prices for many items and summons. At that point, your modest mod either becomes rather far-ranging or loses all semblance of balance. And likely no matter what you'll fail to account for a few of the hundreds of spells and variables in the game and have to go through a few development cycles to catch things.

All that being said, in my mind CBM isn't a balance mod in that sense--it isn't about making all the nations perfectly balanced with each other(as you said, that's impossible and perhaps even boring). Instead it's about opening up possibilities and making otherwise useless options usable. I think a better description is that CBM wants every spell, every unit, every item to have a legitimate use in serious play, even if that is a fairly obscure niche. It wants people to see even occasionally Ziz(hey, they might be really nice with medallions of Vengeance these days. I'll have to look into that) and other really really useless things in play because they're cheap enough and useful enough that someone will find a way to do something awesome with them.

[Herode]

Originally Posted by kianduatha

It's almost impossible to make both a modest and a stable balance mod. For instance, say you wanted to not have gem generators(a noble enough goal). This *greatly* disrupts the balance of most every nation

I agree with most of your post, and on this point precisely. But as a matter of fact, removing gem gens or hammers is not what I call modest modding .

BTW, I tend to avoid CBM since these features have been removed. The point is that all MP games are using CBM anyway, so I stepped to 1.6. And stopped MPs after that point.

I also happily admit that there are indeed pretenders who need to be balanced, and nations, and spells. I just stopped following to CBM when re-balancing began to mean rewriting. CBM 1.5 is IMHO the best version so far and I now SP with this mod.

Anyway, I'll give a try to 1.9+ one day or another. Just for sake of curiosity, you know