Conceptual Balance Series (Mod)

[Ivan Pedroso]

Great comments Atul. You are quite right about the early-game risk of an event hitting your capitol, and that would hurt ones income badly, and that should raise the parameter somewhat above the "naïve" 1/0.90 value.

I have made some graphs on the sheet - it's all quite a bit more informative now.

It is obvious from the graphs that the value chosen for the "Order-effect-on-bad-events"-parameter plays a more important role than the other (well-known) parameters. This means that any conclusions drawn from this method are sensitive to ones choice of this parameter. My estimate of 1/0.90=1.11... for Order+2 came from the observation that in an Order+2 domain event frequencies are reduced by 10%. If a value of 1.40 is chosen (corresponding to an "effective reduction" in event frequencies of 14.2% pr. Order pick - an extreme value in my opinion, even in light of Atul's analysis), then the accumulated income from Growth+2 overtakes that from Order+2 at around turn 120. That indicates that if you are especially scared of an early income hit due to a bad event hitting your capitol (i.e. your private estimate of the parameter is close to 1.40) then Order is what you want even in a long game (with Zen's choice of scales).

I've attached the new and improved sheet to this post (and removed it from the other one above).

[Zen]

I've had a chance to read the data and I'm fairly satisfied with the results. Good job Ivan! It seems my calculations were a slightly off (I was less extreme on the event reduction than your latest spreadsheet).

As such, I think it would be a fair accessment to reduce the population effect of the scale to .25 (as far as I know this is a possible value). This would still give Order the single strongest gold% scale and still regulating Death as painful as other negative scales.

I will also be modifying the Temperature scale back down to 5%.

Barring that debate, anyone have any more feedback about the scales portion of the series? If it doesn't have any outstanding issues I haven't had a good hard look at I will move on in my work with the other aspects of the series.

[Zooko]

Is there a README for the latest balance mods yet?

I'm going to launch a MP game in a few days and I'd like to use the latest or bestest Zen's Balance Mods. The MP game will be slightly non-conventional, in that it will be intended to be a shorter-running game with more international war all along instead of only at the end:

1. Two teams of two players each.
2. Not too large map -- maybe Inland, or The Desert Eye, or even a smaller one if I could find a smaller, wraparound, good-looking map.

Thanks!

Zooko

http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...rt=&PHPSESSID=

[Chazar]

What about the magic scale? Is it moddable? I always wondered what that 0.5 mr bonus/malus is good for, so magic+3 = magic+2 with respect to magic resistance? Why would it not be sensible to have a full point of mr?

Have you, Zen, or anyone lese, considered the balance of fatigue due to magic scales?

[Yvelina]

Zen, we are about to start a new game with your pretender balance mod. I have played with the 1.72 Version, and I loved it, but I do not know where to find a list of the changes in Version 2.0. There is no 'read me' file in the archive.

[Alneyan]

Zen posted a change log for the 2.0 Version in this thread. Clicking here should bring the post in question. If it doesn't work, then I got something wrong while making my link.

[Zooko]

Didn't work.

How about this link:

http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...=20#Post318733

Thanks for drawing it to my attention!

Now what about the spell and scales readmes? :-)

update: Alneyan fixed the link to this:

http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...181#Post318733

update update: but Alneyan's link doesn't work for me -- it brings me to the beginning of the whole thread. :-P

Anyway, go to the 20th page of the thread and scroll down to post #318733.