Modding Idea List

Sombre · #1 April 19th, 2007, 01:20 AM

Could you then point me to where the discussion took place?

I'm genuinely interested in balance discussion and your reply isn't really telling me anything, other than that you 100% disagree with everything in the CB. I don't see why, but if you don't want to go into it, fair enough.

I'm not any kind of balance expert, but a lot of the changes made by the CBM make sense to me. I was under the impression that it was generally held to be more balanced than vanilla, but again I don't really have the experience to make that call myself. I can see that vanilla totally favours using only certain units/spells, making a great deal of the variety in dom3 worthless. CB make changes with the aim of rectifying this, which is attractive to me.

If there was some other theory of balancing the game for better variety I might be on board with that too, but I haven't seen one.

VedalkenBear · #2 April 19th, 2007, 01:24 AM

I tend to agree with Sombre's point. When I play with the CBM (and I play with and without it), I tend to like it, though there are some minor points (Awaken Sleeper at too early a level, I think) that I can disagree with.

DrPraetorious · #3 April 19th, 2007, 06:20 AM

Well, in the vanilla game many units and spells are niche - only useful under specific, fairly narrow circumstances.

CBM tends to flatten everything out, making all units equal.

So, yeah, you use everything - but it doesn't make any difference what you use because everything is the same.

That's an exaggeration.

It makes some efforts to tone-down W9F9 blesses - but encourages D9N4 blesses (for example). It also fiddles with the costs for boosting items in a way that is ill-considered, IMO.

Sombre · #4 April 19th, 2007, 06:58 AM

I don't think it really flattens the units out too much. I mean it's not like it makes the elite units any less elite. It just makes them cost more if they were stupid powerful. And the crappy low end units need something to make them more attractive or they will /never/ be useful. Actually even at 9 or 8 gold instead of 10 some units are still damn near useless - there's no real niche for units which are strictly inferior. Like for Mictlan in CB they raise the cost of the jaguar warriors considerably - that makes sense to me, since Jaguar warriors were cheap, available everywhere, sacred, low resource cost, even without bless were extremely powerful and hard to kill etc etc. The end result being that in vanilla /no-one/ could use sun warriors without handicapping themselves. By making jags less uber, at least people might think about using sun warriors if the situation suites them. So there you have a unit restored to its niche role (against massed shortbows, if you have tons of resources, if you want an earth/blood bless etc) and hopefully more variety.

The item costing I honestly don't know about. If you say they made bad mistakes changing the costs there I can't disagree, I don't have enough experience with forging.

I like the fact that some truly awful summons were reduced in gem costs. I mean who would ever use reanimation at its old cost? It might as well not have been in the game. I also like the changes to the scales, since stuff like the magic scale just didn't make sense to me in vanilla.

You don't like it, I'd still like to know more, but if you're talked out about it that's cool. I'm going to stick with it, maybe work out which bits work which bits don't for myself.

VedalkenBear · #5 April 19th, 2007, 10:20 AM

I haven't noticed much in the way of forging that was an issue, though Owl Quills at lvl0 threw me for something of a loop. As I said, there were a couple things I didn't necessarily agree with, but they weren't sufficient to get me to chuck it out the window.

I feel that the summons especially were 'improved'. Now I don't feel like I'm wading through a lot of subpar choices to get to the one I want. IOW, a spell should be able to justify its presence, or otherwise why have it?