Conceptual Balance Mod 1.94 released!

[Fantomen]

Vanilla as is very unbalanced for multiplayer yes, CBM adresses that.

The changes are not arbitrary at all, but it takes lot's of multiplayer experience to understand why they were needed. It's admittedly a bit of a catch 22 there because you can no longer fully obtain that experience when all games already use CBM, you have to trust the veterans who came to these conclusions in the first place.

In the specific case of hammers, dwarven hammers were so good that it forced everyone to make them in order to compete in mp. Without dwarven hammers you lost, so every nation that did not have national earth magic had to take it on the pretender, this limited the number of viable pretender builds and thereby the number of strategies available.

This was not so much a balance adjustment as it was a way to diversify the strategic spectrum. Not only in the sense of pretender builds, but also because forging any item at all before you had your hammers made was wasteful playing, which really shaped the strategic options for competitive play.

[Smeghead]

Originally Posted by Fantomen

Vanilla as is very unbalanced for multiplayer yes, CBM adresses that.

The changes are not arbitrary at all, but it takes lot's of multiplayer experience to understand why they were needed. It's admittedly a bit of a catch 22 there because you can no longer fully obtain that experience when all games already use CBM, you have to trust the veterans who came to these conclusions in the first place.

In the specific case of hammers, dwarven hammers were so good that it forced everyone to make them in order to compete in mp. Without dwarven hammers you lost, so every nation that did not have national earth magic had to take it on the pretender, this limited the number of viable pretender builds and thereby the number of strategies available.

This was not so much a balance adjustment as it was a way to diversify the strategic spectrum. Not only in the sense of pretender builds, but also because forging any item at all before you had your hammers made was wasteful playing, which really shaped the strategic options for competitive play.

Thank you for your reply, Fantomen.
Ok, that all sounds very logical ... but that makes every tutorial, walkthrough and FAQ for the various factions I've read on WIKI and watched on YouTube redundant and a complete waste of time
Kind of annoying.

Also, Earth seems kind of nerfed now, as well as Construction.
That means I'm even more of a noob than I thought I was and everything I thought I knew will need to be rethought with CBM 1.94 in mind, as CBM appears to be pretty standard for multiplayer.

And every time there is a CBM update, all strategies will need to be rethought.
New CBM versions must be keeping a lot of people busy reassessing their strategies.