MP: YARG3, non newb MA+ENP2 RAND game. Executor's Ulm winner on turn 76

[rdonj]

About mods some more :P

I think it is definitely true that in the case of new modders, they have a tendency to do exactly that. A number of mods were originally made by people with little experience with the game, particularly in multiplayer. And these people do often get sucked into comparing vs iconic units. Some of these nations eventually were taken over by more... sane modders who had a better idea of what sensible balance was and were willing to make changes to them. One of those is Chaos, which started off in crazy town and has been getting slowly pulled back ever since. I'm still not sure if they're balanced yet, but I've not played the most recent version :P They've come a long way though.

With more experienced modders, they do sometimes make mistakes, but I don't think this is really one of them. I know for example that sombre uses a unit balance point that strives for consistency with the rest of the game. However, he likes to experiment with unusual mechanics and abilities that may not exist in vanilla nations. And warhammer nations need to be thematic for the source material, which sometimes makes for a tricky crossover into dominions. Let's look at Warhammer Empire for a moment. In the warhammer universe, they have access to all generic magic paths, but not to race-specific magic paths. If they didn't have access to basically every path in dominions, then it would be highly contrary to the source material. This in itself is a major difficulty for balance as complete diversity is a huge strength in itself. In order to try and lessen the strength of their diversity and prevent the recruitment screen from being excessively cluttered, he made all of the empire's mages into summons, and gave them only incredibly useless 1 path mages for recruits. Initially, people were thinking that if anything being forced to summon their mages using gems would make the empire weaker due to not having many gems for other things. However when people actually got the empire into MP games it was realized that it in fact was a unique and powerful strength for the empire. Despite the fact that they had reasonable upkeep prices, it mostly allowed the empire to divorce itself from having a real gold economy and traditional for time concerns, and their ability to mass mages was eventually deemed too strong. The empire still has amazing magic diversity (all paths but blood), but they now buy their basic mages normally and their military strength has been weakened significantly from its former levels.

There are a number of similar examples in mods where the effect of a unique national ability was decided to be unexpectedly powerful, only to be put in its place later :P Most mod nations start with at least one thing that turns out to fit in this category, but when they are discovered they are usually changed pretty quickly.

Now, with Amos mods, he was open about his lack of worry over balance, and was only concerned with the internal balance between his different nations, ignoring vanilla nations altogether :P


Executor - Ugh, it's ridiculous when it's cheaper to turn a level 1 mage into a level 4 caster than it is to get EDM summons. It sounds like your nation got extremely silly by the end there. That was sounding pretty similar to play under a clamming environment. Except you're the only guy who has them.