Mod: CBM 1.7 released

[llamabeast]

I do wonder about the earth booster, though. Given that CBM has already killed off gem generators except as uniques, why was a perfectly good and fun artefact, the Boots of Antaeus, replaced in favour of a Ring of the Earth booster rather than stripping the blood stone of its gem generating ability and newfound uniqueness (the simplest solution) or, if such was impossible (if the gem generation was in the game code and couldn't be modded), why not choose to replace some low-priority magic item that is almost never used such as Boots of Long Strides or the Main Gauche of Parrying?

None of your suggestions can be done with dom3's modding capabilities You can't take gem gen off the blood stone, and you can't add earth booster ability to other items. QM is working within considerable restrictions.

[Peter Ebbesen]

Originally Posted by llamabeast

None of your suggestions can be done with dom3's modding capabilities You can't take gem gen off the blood stone, and you can't add earth booster ability to other items. QM is working within considerable restrictions.

Thanks! I suspected the first restriction but was ignorant of the second. I guess that in those circumstances it really does make sense to destroy one of my favourite artefacts (sob!) in favour of a generic path booster if it has been determined that a second generic earth booster is essential.

(I am tempted to argue that it isn't and wasn't because in the MP games I participate in only few earth magic nations ended up with blood stones anyhow, so blood stones were almost solely used for their gem generation capabilities by the few nations that could make them, but that is almost certainly a result of the smaller scale of the games I play in)

[WraithLord]

Dimaz, I like your suggestion re. making house rules to deal with gem gens instead of removing them.

I think same can be made for SDRs and hammers, so for example all my future games will have a 20 pieces cap per nation rule.

So, If you, or someone else could volunteer to make a CBM 1.7 version w/o these changes (gem gens, hammers + SDR) it will indeed be the version I'd be using when hosting games. I think if CBM had a technical way to enforce this it would have, but for MP games (with house rules) we can trust the players to adhere to the rules.

makes sense?

[Calahan]

Originally Posted by WraithLord

I think same can be made for SDRs and hammers, so for example all my future games will have a 20 pieces cap per nation rule.

If I understand correctly, and based on what I know with how the Artefacts game was setup. Limiting nations to a specific number of items can be modded (rather than use house rules) by giving each nation X starting commanders (who are immobile and die on turn 2) each equipped with whatever item you are limiting. With X being the number you want. And making the item unique (or Const 12) so they can't be re-forged.

My limited modding knowledge means I'm not sure if this has to be modded via map commands though, which might prevent it being an actual mod. (although nations starting commanders can be changed using a mod, so maybe commanders can be added as well, unless there is a hard limit of two)

[WraithLord]

Sounds great
Any idea where to start looking for how to get it done?

And come to think of it, 20 is too much, even for a large game. 5 makes more sense if the idea is to keep it for flavor only. It will also allow nations not to go out of their way in order to get those hammers. The only difference from 1 is that it's less drastic so instead of turn off the lights they are just dimmed.

[Stavis_L]

Originally Posted by Calahan

..giving each nation X starting commanders (who are immobile and die on turn 2) each equipped with whatever item you are limiting. With X being the number you want. And making the item unique (or Const 12) so they can't be re-forged.

My limited modding knowledge means I'm not sure if this has to be modded via map commands though, which might prevent it being an actual mod. (although nations starting commanders can be changed using a mod, so maybe commanders can be added as well, unless there is a hard limit of two)

1) Yes, this would need to be done via map commands vs. mod commands, because
2) Yes, you are hard limited to 2 commanders at the start (i.e. the starting commander + the starting scout.)

(I realize the discussion progressed past this point, but in case anyone was interested.)

[Dimaz]

Yesterday when I was going to sleep I was thinking about how to deal with gemgens (if I had the code access) in some more or less balanced and flavored way. So these ideas can be considered as produced by half-asleep mind, but still...
Clams - they are supposed to concentrate astral magic from environment and solidify it as pearls, so they can be connected with the amount of magic gained from other sources (showed in the graphs). Something like Nexus, but connected to one nation. So you can get maximum of your pearl income + 1/2 of other gems income divided by some coefficient (4?), and if you have more clams they have no environment magic to grow the pearls, so they will either stop working at all or give you pearl with 10% probability. So for example with income of 20 gems of each kind (140 total on the graphs), you'll have max 20 clams working - big number, but not insane. As I understand another problem with clams was that they lead to turtling for nations that can forge them efficiently - and when your clam income becomes connected with "real" income, it becomes less of a problem.
Bloodstones - they seem to be connected with "earth blood" and the earth that constantly bleeds becomes dead sooner or later. So concentrating large amounts of them can reduce resources and/or supplies for the nation. Like, every BS subtracts 5 resources from each province of the owner. This way the ability to build units and later even mages becomes reverse proportional to the number of stones, so sooner or later you'll have to stop producing them (this will also give more importance to production scale). The only exception that I see is LA Ermor but he has problems with blood slaves so probably it won't give him big advantage.
Fetishes - they can start spreading desease when there are many of them collected in one place. So for example if you have more than 5 fetishes in the province they start to act as bane venom charm. This will increase MM however so probably there are more elegant solutions.
WL, I will join such a game if I'll still play Dom3 at the time (currently I'm a bit tired of it so maybe I'll take a break after my games are ended).

[Calahan]

Don't forget that another problem with gem gens in general was it led to the bad playing mechanic of being able to conquer all of your opponents lands, but in doing so only managing to cut his gem income by a tiny percentage.

And this, combined with the huge defender advantage of having 1st combat action a player gets during fort storms (especially with several wish casters on hand for master enslave spam), led to many situations where actually capturing your opponents provinces didn't get you anywhere near defeating your opponent, regardless of how many provinces he had. And any sort of gem income advantage you had over your foe didn't matter much when storming, since you could have double your enemies gem income, but easily lose 10x the gem investment when trying to storm forts.

I am no lover of the changes CBM 1.7 has made, but gem gens in general were bad for large scale games, and so did have to go IMO (although I guess probably not much of a problem for small scale games. But I've never played small scale games so I wouldn't know). Even game rules, that for example, allow one clam per turn # would mean raid-immune gem income of 175 every other turn from wishing alone by turn 50. (and good players would easily be able to safeguard their gem gens from assassinations spells, remote damage attacks, Armageddon's etc. So relying on them to deprive your enemy of the gem gen income is not a real option in games involving proper players).

I know I will never play another game with gem gens again (although this is just my own personal preference of course)

[WraithLord]

Calahan, your points are true when gem gens are unlimited. Limiting them by house rules to 10-20 makes them just flavor and extra boost, nothing more. It's the same as with LaD, why castrate it in CBM if we can have a gentlemen agreement not to abuse it?

I'm not a modder myself but I like that solution. If enough players would like that we could have games set that way.

[Executor]

As someone who had over 400 clams in a single game, and pretty much concentrated every game on them until they were removed I have to say I agree with Calahan, one player could have much worse stats in the score graphs and still be the far superior nation.
However limiting them to say 20 max per game for example shouldn't have much of an impact. There are various magic site discounts that act in the same way, while they don't give you gems per say, you do sort of 'gain' gems when using them. A fine line is to be made here, I neither agree that gem gens should have been removed completely or let to stay, same applies to both hammers and SDR. Eliminating any one of them will just lead to new problems that will need balancing, eg. cost of items, thug usage, blood supremacy of certain nations...
So rather than eliminating them all completely a compromise should be made.
As for monitoring their usage, that is rather simple, once victory is achieved a player will submit random mid-late game turns as to confirm there was no cheating, and/or trowing away of items near the end.