Mod: Adept's Mod (weapon, magic and monster changes)

[rdonj]

Making glaives and other two handed weapons do less damage is not necessarily a good thing. It's already very hard to get troops that do enough damage to beat the highest protection recruitable units. For example a 20 protection heavy cavalry with a shield is nearly impervious to a glaive troop. It can only be defeated by bizarre DRN rolls and criticals from fatigue. If these are fatigue neutral sacreds with 20+ protection, it will take a LOT of glaive wielders to kill one. Two handed weapons barely did enough damage in dominions as it was. I have a very hard time imagining using them in your mod unless I absolutely had nothing else worth recruiting.

[elmokki]

I haven't read this thread in a while and now I read it as a whole.

The critique about the weapon changes is that it doesn't really do anything meaningfully beneficial to the game unless you happen to get gratification out of percieved weapon realism. Weapon balance when comparing weapons between each other matters in situations where you choose a weapon for a troop and don't touch anything else. Now the thing here is that in dominions those choices aren't available for many nations and often when they are it's not a ceteris paribus situation.

When you blanket change weapons without looking at units themselves you open Pandora's box: there's no telling how exactly it changes nation balance without going through a lot of stuff. For example Marverni has currently rather viable situation dependant choice between Ambibate and Carnute noble warriors. First wields a broad sword and second an axe. Buffing axe might shift people's focus towards carnute nobles enough to monopolize them more.

Simply said, Dominions is a game where you should compare balance between nations, not balance between units or weapons. Sure, MA Arcoscephale Hoplite (11g, 30res) is considerably less desireable than MA Ulm Black Plate Infantry (11g, 36res), but then again what magic does Ulm have available and what magic does Arcoscephale have available? Same goes for weapons. Sure, a mace is generally not considered worth it compared to a sword of any kind, but usually mace is added to an unit to make it worse so that the nation as a whole hits the level of balance it's wanted to hit.

What I'm saying is that you have in my opinion totally wrong design philosophy. A philosophy which would suit more for a game like Mount & Blade or a clone version of Dom3 where you actually design your units by yourself.

Now, those japanese weapons are only used by Jomon/Yomi/Shinuyama and their summons and I consider balancing those nations by slightly modifying weapon stats viable, but you'd still have to be careful since as far as I know Yomi and Shinuyama aren't as underpowered as Jomon. The direction of the balance should consider balance between nations and not balance between weapons though: weakening japanese stuff just makes a bad nation worse.

EDIT: I also agree that 2h weapons should actually be fairly powerful in terms of damage, possibly even slightly more powerful than they are in any mod that touches them that I've seen.

[Doo]

Chill to some Strawberry Alarm Clock

Always good to see people tweaking games the way they see fit. Personally I'd like to see a buff to Phantasmal Wolves.

[Adept]

I like consistency elmokki. I seriously doubt anything will be thrown to disarray with this. I will really _like_ it if axe armed troops are actually worth something now. Same goes for the poleaxe armed troops of Ulm.

As for overall balance I can comment on that much better after the next (few) multiplayer games.

I still don't know if I should change the name of the mod, or if I do, what should I call it. Damnations.

[Adept]

Btw elmokki, I don't quite understand your example. Are you saying you think things are better so that axes are useless and Marverni only stick to sword armed troops?

[elmokki]

Currently (CBM 1.92) Marverni has two very viable choices since the axe wielding unit is different in other ways (berserker 3, more hp, less att/def). By buffing the axe you'll risk making Marverni only want to use the axe wielders.

That's the first example that I got to my mind really and you should not open a game with Marverni and look at the units. What I mean is that when you change balance of weapons by comparing only weapons themselves you risk changing balance in ways you can't anticipate without looking at every nation's unit selections.

I consider the werewolf nerf horribly stupid. The spell and forging changes I like. Those are at least things changing actual percieved balance problems. Weapon changes on the other hand - unless you get gratification from playing with percievedly more realistic weapons - are just a big box of surprises. It's hard to say what the weapon changes even achieve. You'll mostly see the same kind of units in the field since nations don't really have alternatives. In some rare cases you might've achieved more variety, but in general what you did is give random buffs/nerfs around to nations. Awesome balancing!

Simply said: the balance in this game is primarily balance between nations. Weapon changes in general are a blanket changes which buff/nerf relative powers of nations fairly randomly. That's not balance, that's just err... pointless tweaking?

If you want to give players options regarding weapons, you'll want to start editing sprites to give nations more options with their troops. The weapon changes would be more understandable if all nations had the ability to actually choose between the weapons, which they generally don't (Marverni does not, the berserking on Carnute Noble Warrior is the differentiating factor)

Oh, also, generally nerfing Jomon is something I would not put under mod with "balance" on title either, or do you really think Jomon as a nation is more in line with other nations in terms of power now, in which case I guess you can call it balance.

[thejeff]

No, he's saying the troops are balanced now. Swords may be better than axes, but the axe troops are cheaper or have better stats to make up for it.

Make axes better and now you have cheap troops with better weapons, or better troops with better weapons.

Actually with Carnutes, they have berserk, IIRC, which makes them good even with poorer weapons. With better axes, they're probably too good.

Making a change to a weapon across the board means you're changing the balance of every unit that uses that weapon and you really should look at each one individually, in the context of the nation and see whether it's still ok or whether it should have it's stats or cost tweaked to make up for the change.

[Adept]

Originally Posted by thejeff

Making a change to a weapon across the board means you're changing the balance of every unit that uses that weapon and you really should look at each one individually, in the context of the nation and see whether it's still ok or whether it should have it's stats or cost tweaked to make up for the change.

Unit costs in Dominions (vanilla anyway) are based on the training level of the troops. Their resource cost comes from the gear. This is logical and consistent, and has been so since the original Dominions with very little change.

http://illwinter.com/dom2/modinstructions.html

[Soyweiser]

Originally Posted by Adept

Unit costs in Dominions (vanilla anyway) are based on the training level of the troops.

So a giant with lesser training is cheaper than a normal human with more training?

[Adept]

Originally Posted by Soyweiser

So a giant with lesser training is cheaper than a normal human with more training?

No, bigger units have a higher baseline cost. Are you just trolling here?