Mod: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6

[Humakty]

I rather agree on the mage frustration part, as you can't plan on anything, apart on a giant map where you'll be able to pump enougth of them so as to be 'almost' sure to have the paths you need. Even in SP I had problems with those damn randoms.

But the troops seemed to me rather good, ok you have no shields, but you'll crush any recruitable troops in melee, thanks to awesome attack skill and good damage output. And your cavalry is here to flank ennemy archers. Heck, the attack skill of your troops is so high you can even hope to reliably damage water blessed sacred troops ! The only real threat is crossbows/ fire arrowed archers, as basic archers will have great pain damaging your troops.
Think the other way around : who will I send to the frontline to hold those god damn samurais that won't end sliced up in two rounds ?

As I'm a SP player, I won't praise the jomon specific summons (AI can't react properly to thugs) but they seem to me efficient enougth to be worth using. Those plus the ones you get as an heritage of earlier time gives you a enormous lot of tools to use.

[Festin]

The tread is actually about CBM, so I will try to be brief, so that we can concentrate on discussing possible mod suggestions

If you hire mages at all your castles every turn, and continue castling aggressively, you should get most variations you need.

This does not really solve the problem. Sure, if I hire a huge number of mages, eventually I will get all the needed combinations - and end up with scores of nearly-useless high-upkeep mages.

First, your god doesn't *need* to do anything for you except provide good scales.

IMO, Jomon absolutely needs death on their pretender. Without death, they will miss one of the best thugs in the whole game, and their late game will be completely unimpressive. Nushi is _not_ an option for death access, because it is difficult to summon, and, far more importantly, comes far too late. Ghost General is Conj 4, and as Jomon I would want to mass summon them ASAP. Not to mention the amount of death gems Jomon will have available using this approach. Forget Dai Oni, I am not sure Jomon will even have enough for some generic late game summons.

You have summonable thugs capable of raiding, you have good battle magic especially in earth and astral, and you have solid troops. You even have mages capable of casting Wind Guide and Flaming Arrows (F2 + Phoenix Power + 3f gems - so keep an eye out for good indie archers).

Sure, Jomon has all these options. In addition, it has good national SCs, powerful amphibious troops, great flying shapeshifting water mages, etc, etc. Too bad most of these options are best described as "hypothetical". I mentioned communions because this is one of the precious few things Jomon can _reliably_ access.

So, to keep this constructive
Jomon as it is, in my opinion, is flawed in several ways. It has access to very, very intersting things that can make this nation unique, competitive and just fun to play. But Jomon practically cannot use most of them. I would accept the mage-frustration thing by itself without any problems - lots of nations have problems with their mages, and they should compensate for it somehow, it is part of a game. But in Jomon's case it is a part of a greater picture. Heavy armor, bad randoms, no death, weak starting army, no underwater access, etc - all these things combine in a way that cripples the nation and ruins its great potential. Remove a few of these, and then players will be able to either compensate for the nation weaknesses, or accept them and boost the strong sides instead. This is the usual approach with most nations.

[Squirrelloid]

Originally Posted by Festin

The tread is actually about CBM, so I will try to be brief, so that we can concentrate on discussing possible mod suggestions

This does not really solve the problem. Sure, if I hire a huge number of mages, eventually I will get all the needed combinations - and end up with scores of nearly-useless high-upkeep mages.

....

I'm not about to go through all the possible path combinations to tell you what they're useful for. Suffice it to say that most of them are good for something, and you do need researchers after all, so even the few 'bad' combinations aren't actually useless. There are lots of great spells available at X2 for most paths, and quite a few at X1Y1 or X2Y1. Once you get some boosters you can cast 80-90% of the spells in the game. Most nations *cannot* say that.

IMO, Jomon absolutely needs death on their pretender. Without death, they will miss one of the best thugs in the whole game, and their late game will be completely unimpressive.

...

No. In fact, Death is among the *last* things I would want on my pretender. Nushi -> Kolkythiad -> Lich -> Tarts gets you all the death you could ever possibly want, and the early steps don't even require d gems!

Nushi is _not_ an option for death access, because it is difficult to summon, and, far more importantly, comes far too late.

Conj 5 being late is hilarious, considering most pretender achieved D-access is acquired at conj 5 or 6 (lamia queens, streams from hades)

Ghost General is Conj 4, and as Jomon I would want to mass summon them ASAP. Not to mention the amount of death gems Jomon will have available using this approach. Forget Dai Oni, I am not sure Jomon will even have enough for some generic late game summons.

Ok, first of all, ghost general (like dai oni) is a yomi/shin summon that you are *lucky* to still have access to.

Second, you have your own perfectly good thug summons at conj 2 and 4 that don't require death.

Third, you will never have the d gems that early to mass ghost generals. You might get one, maybe 2. You'd be better off saving those d gems for something you actually need.

If your pretender is awake so you can get d-income that early, your scales aren't good enough. Jomon lives or dies by its scales. Then you consider sites in LA are often fairly rare, and you're really wasting your pretenders time if all he's doing is site searching and casting thug summons.

Sure, Jomon has all these options. In addition, it has good national SCs, powerful amphibious troops, great flying shapeshifting water mages, etc, etc. Too bad most of these options are best described as "hypothetical". I mentioned communions because this is one of the precious few things Jomon can _reliably_ access.

When i said summonable thugs i meant the e/s ones that are actually Jomon's, not the shin/yomi summons that jomon happens to have access to.

Jomon does not have national SCs really - it has access to shinuyama's SC summons (which is, in turn, a yomi recruitable). Its lucky to even have that as an option. Not being able to predictably use it should not be interpreted as a Jomon disadvantage - they only have access to it because Shinuyama has it. It was never intended to be cast by them.

So, to keep this constructive
Jomon as it is, in my opinion, is flawed in several ways. It has access to very, very intersting things that can make this nation unique, competitive and just fun to play. But Jomon practically cannot use most of them. I would accept the mage-frustration thing by itself without any problems - lots of nations have problems with their mages, and they should compensate for it somehow, it is part of a game. But in Jomon's case it is a part of a greater picture. Heavy armor, bad randoms, no death, weak starting army, no underwater access, etc - all these things combine in a way that cripples the nation and ruins its great potential. Remove a few of these, and then players will be able to either compensate for the nation weaknesses, or accept them and boost the strong sides instead. This is the usual approach with most nations.

... the starting army can expand just fine with some recruits - it is by no means especially weak.

They have everything but death, and all you need is a swamp to bootstrap up death in a real way. You won't need death magic until the endgame, so...

Kappa provide UW access. Also Naiad warriors, which you can easily summon, or happening across merfolk/shambler towns.

Basically, stop whining about things that Jomon doesn't do well when it was never intended to do those things well. Look at what Jomon actually does well instead - there's quite a lot. Not having easy access to death magic isn't exactly the end of the world - plenty of good nations don't have access to it, and Jomon can bootstrap into it *without* using precious pretender points!

[Illuminated One]

Instead of linked randoms why not make the master shugenya for example 2e1n + 100%fawen and somewhat more expensive. Or even make that a copy, so the player can choose if he wants to recruit the new or the old one(s) (i.e. you could theoretically have 5 versions, giving the player the decision over his magic).
This could produce quite powerful combinations reliably while you still need to balance them against the cheaper s2 + 200%fawen mages.

[Festin]

Oh, of course Jomon has its strong points. It even won a game once(according to HoF)!

I do not think it is a most productive use of time - trying to convince everyone that Jomon mages are perfectly nice, when they are obviously not.

I do not think it is very reasonable to explain that Jomon is unable to use most of its national summons because it was not supposed to have them at all. Meh.

And I would so like to listen about the way you managed to enter water with Kappas.

But I guess it would be considered as more "whining", so I will stop here.

[Squirrelloid]

Originally Posted by Festin

Oh, of course Jomon has its strong points. It even won a game once(according to HoF)!

I do not think it is a most productive use of time - trying to convince everyone that Jomon mages are perfectly nice, when they are obviously not.

...
-recruitable mages with E+S is nice.
-Recruitable mages that cover 6/8 paths, where one of the excluded paths is blood (and thus easy to access if you really want it) is nice.
-Recruitable mages capable of remotely searching all 6 of those paths is nice.
-Access to a summons which grants sufficient access to bootstrap the 7th non-blood path is nice.
-Access to E1 + 2 chances at E randoms is nice (early game alteration to counter rushes).
-Access to E2+ with boot slots to permit hammer forging is nice.

Jomon's mages cover so many bases for which many nations have to use their pretender, its hard to consider them 'bad'.

Try comparing their mages to other LA nations. There are a few LA nations with powerful mages (Patala, Rlyeh, and Bogarus spring to mind), but most of those are capital only, and Rlyeh has other issues (hard to find the gold to buy mages). The only LA nation with better recruit-anywhere mages that I can think of is C'tis, and their mages don't cover their holes very well (they need an E+S pretender to forge hammers, coins, RoS/W, etc...). Well, and Rlyeh, who has other issues, and can't wear boots, and thus can't forge hammers without a pretender.

If you can't come up with good things to do with Jomon's mages, you really aren't trying hard enough.

I do not think it is very reasonable to explain that Jomon is unable to use most of its national summons because it was not supposed to have them at all. Meh.

That you have access to them at all is an advantage regardless of how hard it is to use them. But demanding the nation have good access to them when they aren't intended for them is ridiculous. Shinuyama similarly has access to some summons (eg, Dai Tengu) it would really like to use but can't, because they are intended for Yomi or Jomon.

Not that anyone would summon Dai Oni over Tarts given the difference in gem cost.

And I would so like to listen about the way you managed to enter water with Kappas.

There is *one* water nation in LA, and it is often banned (for stupid reasons) or has expansion issues. I leave acquiring a water province as an exercise to the reader.

[Tollund]

Originally Posted by Festin

I do not think it is a most productive use of time - trying to convince everyone that Jomon mages are perfectly nice, when they are obviously not.

They aren't that different from Arcoscephale's mystics, so they really aren't that bad.

[Festin]

You almost convinced me that I was missing something, so I decided to check the situation with other races: surely, Jomon's situation is not unique? So, here are the results:

There are 21 nations in the Late Age, and only 2(two) of them do not have death or blood (or both) on their recruitable mages. One of them is Jomon, the other one is Patala.

I admit that I have never really played as Patala (monkey troops are not my thing), but the only guide I found in Strategy Index suggests picking a pretender with death and blood. And Patala has _very_ powerful sacred mages and national Astral end-game summons like Rudra. It must have suffered greatly after clam nerf, so I assume that death on pretender is even more important now.

Well, that's it. If you still insist that Jomon is one single nation in whole LA that can do just fine without death or blood on their mages or their pretender, then so be it, I admit that I was wrong.

[Illuminated One]

The problem of Yomons diversity is that it's so random.
Sure, Yomon makes one of the best sitesearchers in the game, but one of the worst combatants and booster forgers imo.
Sure there are other very random mages but the nations that have them have either someone else to base their strategy on or they are enchantresses (which pretty much means that your sitesearching advantage is an illusion as some power nation will luck into them).
Yomon has only these. So, you start the game at turn 1 and start researching into conj3 and evo5 for GfH and Falling Fires. Let's say you have it with 25 mages. The chance that you have not a single mage able to cast these spells on his own is ~ 20% for each (the chance that you can get there with a communion is ~ 98% - I did ignore that the chances are not independent for the spells, i.e. if you have no GfH caster you have a better chance to but this shouldn't make a too big difference I think). Now maybe these values look not so bad but in comparison with other nations who can get their spells without communions always and ever, or with a very high probability (the chance that Tien Chi has 4 or more Rain of Stones casters in 20 Ancestor Smiths to kill a lot your communions is ~ 80%). Now, you also have the bad mapmove which means you either teleport around a lot or don't have the mages that can cast the spells that you went for where you need them.
In any case I've yet to see a game where Yomon does more than defend it's territory, so a boost certainly wouldn't hurt. I disagree about giving them d or b though.

[Squirrelloid]

Festin: there are things to do besides d or b. And breaking into b is easy if you really want to do it. Why are you so obsessed with these two? You get death eventually, enough to bootstrap up to tarts (which is why everyone wants death), so its not like you're lacking that.

Jomon has pretty good astral, which is enough to base a strategy around.

I completely disagree with Illuminated One and don't know why you'd try for Falling Fires at all. GfH is good, but not enough to make racing down Evo right away worthwhile.

Here's the actually good spells you want early on:

Conj:
F: (2) Bind Scorpion Beast, (3) Summon Phoenix Power
A: (5) Dai Tengu
W: (5) Contact Nushi, Naiad Warriors, Naiad, Kaijin? (haven't tried, looks plausibly useful)
E: (2) Summon Ujigami, (3) Summon Earth Power
N: (0) Contact Jigami, (3) Awaken Sleeper, (4) Summon Bog Beast
S: (4) Summon Kenzuoko,

Alt:
F: (2) Blindness
A: (1) Aim, (4) Windguide
W: (2) Numbness, Personal Quickness (use with eagle eyes/aim and a bow)
E: (2) Earth Might, Armor of Achilles, Earth Meld, (3) Curse of Stones, (4) Destruction
S: (3) Body Ethereal
N: (1) Eagle Eyes, (3) Protection, Mossbody, (4) Swarm, (5) Wooden Warriors

Evo: Slime, Rusting Mist, lightning bolt, vine arrow, magma bolt, acid bolt, sleep cloud

Ench: Gift of Flight, Str of Giants, Dragon Master (combo with frost or fire drakes, or wyverns)

Thaum: Farstrike, Curse, Bonds of Fire, Panic, Paralyze

Much of that is even available without boosters. Note i've listed through Conj 5, Alt 5, Evo 3, Ench 3, Thaum 3. Overall recommendation on early research targets was Conj 5+, Alt 4+, Evo 2, Thaum 2, and Constr ++, which gets you most of that.