Mod: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6

[Squirrelloid]

Re:Sombre
Possibly a separate issue: Should the lifedrain used by illithid troops be #bonus to avoid them losing it when they lose an arm? This doesn't have the same balance implications as the commanders, as they cannot be equipped with items.

(Yes, I realize differentiating the two requires specifying a new lifedrain weapon that is #bonus rather than just making the existing one #bonus).

[Stavis_L]

Note that Illithid Lords and Illithid Soldiers do *not* have the Life Drain weapon. So perhaps, despite our DnD fueled preconceived notions, they suck out your life with their hands vs. tentacle beards? Note that life drain doesn't align terribly well to the concept of sucking out a brain anyway...perhaps it's totally unrelated.

[Warhammer]

Would it be possible for future versions of CBM to have two d/ls? One with gemgen and one without for those idiots among us, like myself, who has no idea how to mod?

[Rysan Marquise]

I believe that goes against the idea behind CBM.

It seems that the goal is to create a balanced game and improve gameplay, not specifically create a mod that people will like.

[Amonchakad]

Originally Posted by Warhammer

Would it be possible for future versions of CBM to have two d/ls? One with gemgen and one without for those idiots among us, like myself, who has no idea how to mod?

I agree with Rysan, it shouldn't be an official version, but just for you, here you go (didn't test it but it should be ok)

And I suggest you try out Dom3 modding, it's nowhere near as hard as it might sound

[zzcat]

A minor bug: Divine Lightning(weapon number 754) should be magical but it doesn't have #magic tag.

[Festin]

I am preparing for a new MP game as Jomon, and I ran a few quick SP games with them to test my strategies. So, I would like to talk about Jomon a bit.

The point is: am I the only person who thinks that Jomon seems specifically designed to induce frustration?

*)Jomon infantry have no shields - ok, fine, completely thematic. But why is their armor so horribly heavy? I do not see any reason for this to be so extreme.

*)Some of their infantry have 9 hp instead of default human 10. Why? If it is thematic, why there is no mention of this in the flavor text(Ulm units have it mentioned)? Is it for balance reasons? No need to worry, really, they suck anyway due to heavy armor and lack of shields.

*)They have great death summons (Ghost General and Dai Oni), but absolutely no death access. Worse, Dai Oni is a F/D summon, costs a huge number of death gems (which you will not have), and needs it armor replaced.

*)Kenzoku is a cool new summon: sacred, ethereal, awe - realy nice. He is quite cheap, and your mages can actually summon him(big improvement for Jomon). But guess what? His goddamn armor ruins everything. An earth bless could fix him, but Jomon does not really benefit from earth bless.

*)Why? Because your mages are not sacred. Also, they have movement 1, and a path selection that is so depressing that I do not even want to speak about it. No boosters for you.

*)Jomon has impressive underwater recruitables, especially Ryujin. But how do you get underwater without using a SC amphibious pretender? Each time I tried to use water breathing items, it was already late.

So. You have a weak starting army, and your units cost a ton of resources, so you may want to take Production to have a decent expansion speed. But your mages are not sacred, so they have huge upkeep, so you want Order. So, no way to save points by taking a "less troops/more mages and summons" path.
You have great, cheap thugs - Kenzoku and Ghost General. Too bad that you have no way to use them as a basis for your strategy: Ghost General needs death, Kenzoku needs an earth bless(or an armor replacement, after which he will no longer be cheap), and a priest to bless him because he cannot self-bless.
You have good archers, but you can wait for a long, long time to have a 2F or 2A mage.

Basically, Jomon has a lot of interesting options, but most of them are either unpractical or mutually exclusive and not good enough by themselves.

Is it possible to do anything about it?

[rdonj]

Festin - In our mp game together what I did is I took an awake celestial general with 4 air, 3 earth and 2 death. I didn't use him as an awake SC, but I used his freespawn as arrow catchers to help me expand. And used him to site search a bunch of provinces near my capitol. This was enough to get me a death income, and I was able to get enough death gems to summon mages and spam dark knowledge out a bit. You may not have seen them but I have a number of shura down fighting gath+midgard. This pretender also gives you easy access to both dwarven hammers and air boosters, which you would also ordinarily have a little trouble with. It's not too hard to fit decent scales on this pretender so long as you don't go overboard on the dominion. This pretender won't let you summon Dai Oni of course, but by the time you should be contemplating them, you should have a fairly solid fire income. If you have to empower, fire is probably one of the less painful gem types to do so with.

Getting underwater is a bit painful, and I plain couldn't do it. Your best bet? I don't know, probably to trade someone something for an underwater province.

The heaviness of samurai armor is also a bit of a pain. 7 encumbrance on a unit that doesn't have a shield or black plate is pretty bad. Luckily combats with them don't tend to last very long, as usually either you'll be shot full of arrows or the very high attack skill of the samurai will make mincemeat out of the enemy. They could probably stand to lose one encumbrance on the heavy and normal samurai armors, but certainly no more than that. While we are on the subject of armor though, have you tried using boots of the messenger on your kenzoku? 2 net encumbrance isn't really that bad, and should probably suffice for light raiding.

The low HP thing is from vanilla. I'm pretty sure it's supposed to reflect that japanese are shorter than european humans. So the average joe gets lower health.

You have good archers, but you can wait for a long, long time to have a 2F or 2A mage.

Am I the only player in dominions who thinks jomon's archers are terrible? They take more resources than anything other than your cavalry, have worse stats than anything else you can recruit, and they bring longbows into the era of super heavy infantry with tower shields. Chances are, if these guys are firing into the enemy and you have soldiers engaged in melee with them, your units are going to take far more casualties than the enemy as they can actually be damaged by the arrows. If you're just using nothing but samurai archers it's a little better, but they are still nowhere near as good as your other units in melee and cost more resources. I cannot imagine them being a better buy than your melee troops without both wind guide and flaming arrows. I would still probably just buy indy archers though.

[Festin]

Celestrial General is quite nice, but it still has some weak points:
*)No earth bless for thugs. Boots of messenger will do the job of course, but, as I see it, the whole point of Kenzoku and Ghost General is their low cost, and this means minimal equipment (something like Demon Whip/Vine Shield, I think). In thier current state, Jomon cannot rely on thugs in midgame, because they will not have enough of them.
*)Need to empower to summon Dai Oni.
*)He does not help to get underwater.
*)He is quite expensive. With their non-sacred mages, Jomon likes good scales.

I think I would try to do something with Ghost King, which really shows how messed-up Jomon is. Who actually uses Ghost King apart from Jomon?

Low HP thing seems a bit illogical: why are Tien Chi soldiers 10 HP then?

I think Aka-Oni Samurai are far better then other Jomon units, including archers. But archers could be very nice, hypothetically, if Jomon had reliable 2F and 2A.

Some suggestions:
1)Reduce samurai armor weight. Come on, it is ridiculous, really. Jomon infantry is not overpowered in any way, since there is an obvious counter for them.
2)In CBM, Jomon can summon Kappa commanders early on. Nice, but a bit pointless, because they are too weak to be used as thugs and have nobody to lead. Give Jomon a low-level Conjuration spell that summons several regular Kappas, or change an existing spell so that it summops a Kappa Chief and 10 regular Kappas(more expensive, of course).
3)I do not know what can be done with their mages and path access. Probably somebody more experienced can suggest something without ruining the balance.

[rdonj]

Well, I managed o3/p3 on him with decent dominion. You just need to take 3 negative scales.