Mod: Adept's Mod (weapon, magic and monster changes)

[Adept]

I'm afraid you guys are right. I can't find a formula that would work.

By the pricing used in other Dominions nations the units should be a touch more expensive than they are for their skill, but I guess the reduced hitpoints give an excuse to ignore that.

I've adjusted the prices like this:

samurai: 11 gold (veteran troops, defence 11, morale 11)
(should be gold 12)

O-ban: 14 gold (11 / 11 skill, mor 12)
(should be 15 gold)

Go-Hatamoto 17 gold (att 12 / def 11, mor 13)

Aka-Oni Samurai: 20 gold (att 12 / def 12, mor 14)

***

They get a progression of +3 gold each which is nice and consistent. I'm gonna leave the Aka-Oni samurai as generic tough guys. Too bad, but I just can't find a way to fit any ability with their description.

An updated 1.01 version will be out in a few hours.

[Soyweiser]

Skrattir in wolf form no weaknesses? Have you even played with them in MP? They have enough weaknesses. (ps, I think CBM reduced the HP a bit). Sure they are powerful, but removing the hand slots really takes away they usability as thugs. 250gold is way to expensive for a unit without shields, or the ability to hold shields, or a head slot. Against any opponent even with shields and head slots they usually die like flies. (They do not have a lot of MR for example, without hand slots they are stuck at reasonably low damage and attack (for thugs/sc anyway), defense and only normal damage, not AP or AN. Which removes large swaths of jotun and urdheims midgame strategies). And without head or hands you cannot even give them enough resistances against attacks. Using them against a skilled opponent is now a big mistake.

Nobody will ever use them in wolf-form anymore. As you get more mage bang for your buck in normal form. (Fallen frost spam for example, blood gives easy access to communions).

Fear on recruitable units is a big no no. Fear is way to good massed. That is what makes the demon knights so good. The massed fear on the super heavy cav. Also the nightmare is not recruitable in the base game, and I think they have never been balanced for ingame use. (The 15 enc is a bit strange for example).

Other stuff you could try with the samurai, give them patrol and pillage bonuses. Make them auto remove unrest. (Doesn't work on troops iirc).

[Adept]

Originally Posted by Soyweiser

Skrattir in wolf form no weaknesses? Have you even played with them in MP?

Heh, indeed I have, and they are a royal pain in the arse. Way too good for their price. Shields you say? I say etherealness, luck and as many attacks as you can pile on them... like this, with cheap early game magic items: (The etherealness and luck come from vaetti hags buffing them at start of battle).




Other stuff you could try with the samurai, give them patrol and pillage bonuses. Make them auto remove unrest. (Doesn't work on troops iirc).[/quote]
Pillage bonus could be a good idea for feared troops. For now I think I'll just leave them as straight elite tough guys.

[Soyweiser]

Also, s1 random hags are not that easy to get. You never have enough of those. (You want them sneaking around to prevent mind hunts, sitesearch, research (you are a blood nation, these suck at research), forging etc).

Also, the rainbow armor is not standard forgable by any of the heims. You need to work for that. (or put it on the pretender, which takes away a lot of pretender turns (who needs to be everywhere at once, and could even be sleeping/imprisoned if you have a bless (and you probably need one else your sacreds are worthless in the early game)). Pretender turns are never cheap.

Also, you put 20 nature gems on this unit alone, which are the best gems. And he isn't even fatigue neutral (3+3 from the quickness) quicken self already adds 21. But who gets 20 N gems to use like this each turn? You cannot outfit that many like them. Or you at least use up a lot of other gems.

And like people said, any fire/air spells kill them. Flaming arrows? And they are gone. Sure you can swap in an elemental protection ring. But where are you going to get additional fire and air magic? Without poison resistance you can stop their regen. Which also works nicely. (And tends to afflict).

Also, luck+eth only works cheaply for jotunheim, nief and utgard have less cheaper ways of getting astral. (nief has gygjas and utgard needs to build additional labs to build the mages). The hags are also easily sniped away (archers at front set to shoot large target/rear). And if you set them to cast cast retreat, you can only use the trick every other turn (And your retreat routes could get wiped). Also body eth+luck tends to miss if you do use gygjas. As they buff themselves first.

And if somebody starts raiding you back they can raid a lot quicker than you can with this setup. As you can only create one each turn. (and it uses a pretender turn, five fort turns (1 for the skrattir, 4 for the hag (at average)), and 6 mage turns, and 40 gems).

Without eth they get killed by cavalry charges.

A blood nation with lvl 8 blood can life for a life them. Or just wound them with with a flesh eater. +10 fatigue each turn. Bye bye!

Death nation? Hand of death! 40AN damage. Almost enough to one shot them. (A bit hard to use btw, but every once in a while you get lucky). But piling on enough fear might also do it. Morale 17 isn't great (according to the manual lone units get a penalty). Wailing winds, terror, fear aura's! Brave sir robin!

They get hit a lot, so they get afflictions rather quickly, and some really wreck them. (chest wound like above, blindness, armloss, crippled, never healing wound, etc). A chest wound deep in enemy territory just means you lose all the items. (as you transform to wolf form and sneak away, sure you could add scouts, but that is even more stuff you must recruit before your guys are workable).

And they can also be countered with the standard skelly spam, or put a lot of cheap chaff between them and the important stuff. Bigger SC with AP/AN weapons.

But yeah, they work, unless you go up against a fire/air nation, a death nation, or raiding nation, a heavy cav nation, a fire bless nation, a blood nation, etc. They can dish out a lot of damage but can't really take it. Sure they arrive early at the game. But so do niefel giants, or other recruitable SC chassis. Sure these are usually more expensive, but also have one other distinction. They are always sacred. Which adds even more powers.

Removing the hand slots just means one more thing. They do even less damage. I would then only use them as falling frost casters who cannot be killed easily. (give skrattir a water ring, and they can always cast falling frost, do they get hit bad? they transform into werewolves that run away).

You just don't like the skrattir do you?

On a different topic? Furies useless? I disagree, they did a number on my bloodhunters in Bootcamp. I lost a lot of blood random hags, high blood gygja's, and skrattir in that game due to these *****es. But that was using CBM, where the spell is moved waaaaay down in cost and research (lvl 6, 30 f gems, f4 n3). They poison like crazy, auto cast darkness. Lot of stuff dies to them. And them picking up a blood thorn did not improve things.
Also, how do you make them worse by letting them pick up items? Sure if they pick up 2 shields it is bad, but then they still have high fear and a poison aura. But most other items either don't do anything or they add to their abilities. And trying to kill somebody with 2 shields is hard, and the poison and fear aura make you run.

And squirreloid has a point. By putting fear on cheap recruitable unit you prove that you don't really understand balance. Or at least the fear mechanic.

And I don't think he is that insulting. Balance? You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Squirreloid has a valid complaint there.

You brought up the insults and age thing.

Edit: I take way to long to type this stuff)

[Adept]

Originally Posted by Soyweiser

Removing the hand slots just means one more thing. They do even less damage. I would then only use them as falling frost casters who cannot be killed easily. (give skrattir a water ring, and they can always cast falling frost, do they get hit bad? they transform into werewolves that run away).

You just don't like the skrattir do you?

Don't like = it's too good for it's price and the synergy it has with the nation.

I have nothing against thugs and SCs, but the super werewolf skratti is cheese and a half. I never claimed they are unstoppable, just that they are too good. Again, this is my preference, and I don't expect it to be shared with everybody.

On a different topic? Furies useless? I disagree, they did a number on my bloodhunters in Bootcamp. I lost a lot of blood random hags, high blood gygja's, and skrattir in that game due to these *****es. But that was using CBM, where the spell is moved waaaaay down in cost and research (lvl 6, 30 f gems, f4 n3). They poison like crazy, auto cast darkness. Lot of stuff dies to them. And them picking up a blood thorn did not improve things.
Also, how do you make them worse by letting them pick up items?

You missed it the first time I guess. All they need to do is pick up an item that let's the cast a spell, and they are neutralised. A fury that picks up a skull amulet will sit in place, summoning one skeleton / turn.

I _like_ the Kindly Ones spell. It's very atmospheric and can be quite effective. What I don't like is the creatures being neutralised by such sillyness, especially as it's this easy to fix.

***

I guess I should have re-stated the goals of the mod in this thread. Ignore the name, think of it as Adept's Mod if you are confused by the word balance in the name.

What the changes are meant to do: The weapon changes are easiest to understand. Many of the weapons in vanilla Dominions are prevalent, but really horrible choises. I've gone for a combination of getting closer to historical weapons in effectiveness, and making sure that better weapons have higher res cost. It's not very important as weapon res costs in Dominions are rather low anyway compared to those of armour. Still it has some effect, and at least one can now get a bit more use out of polearms.

The removal of forge boosters and gem production moves the emphasis a little towards armies, and away from magic. More importantly it lessens micro management. No spending time moving forging hammers from mage to mage over your empire, nor flushing out gems from people carrying fever fetishes, bloodstones and the like.

Making Jomon be more in line with rest of Dominions is a personal fancy of me and my friends. Blame it on an interest in history and martial arts interests if you will. I'm quite keen to see how Jomon will stand up now in our next match. A part of the motivation is that Dominions is actually one of the best (pseudo) historical wargames out there. It is interesting to see how a more realistic take on the samurai squares up with it's European rivals.

Fixing the people who only carry a spear will give a little more punch to some units in sore need of it. It won't come up that often, but like the chariot fix when it comes up it will be nice.

[Happerry]

...Right.. Look, I just have to ask. If this sin't actually a balance mod, and you aren't actually trying to balance things but are just making things make more sense to you.. why did you call it a balance mod in the first place and complain when people pointed out it doesn't actually balance anything?

[Soyweiser]

Originally Posted by Adept

You missed it the first time I guess. All they need to do is pick up an item that let's the cast a spell, and they are neutralised. A fury that picks up a skull amulet will sit in place, summoning one skeleton / turn.

I _like_ the Kindly Ones spell. It's very atmospheric and can be quite effective. What I don't like is the creatures being neutralised by such sillyness, especially as it's this easy to fix.

Skull amulets? Who even uses those? On valid kindly targets I would expect more powerful stuff. (actually, I would expect no spellcastable items, these are usually used by non casters, mages have their own magical power.

I think you are solving a problem that simply does not happen in normal games.

I've gone for a combination of getting closer to historical weapons in effectiveness, and making sure that better weapons have higher res cost. It's not very important as weapon res costs in Dominions are rather low anyway compared to those of armour. Still it has some effect, and at least one can now get a bit more use out of polearms.

So, you want historical effectiveness, but use resources as balance? You understand you are getting your messages a bit mixed here.

Well it doesn't really matter that much. defense +2 or defense +1 does not matter when you get hit in the face with a frost blast, burn yourself to death on a banefire aura. Get killed by an earthquake, get eaten by a skrattir in werewolf form. Or any of the other milions of ways normal troops are obsolete from turn 12 onward.

[Soyweiser]

Also, without gemgens, the monkey nations (except lanka, which is more an ape nation anyway ). Are a lot weaker. As all require a lot of S gems. Same for LA R'lyeh.

[kianduatha]

What nations are you using as a baseline for this pricing scheme you have going on for Jomon? Gath? Because those troops are largely overcosted themselves and have thematic reasons for their costs(see: Asherite Soldier).

As an example: LA Arcosephale. 10 gold for utterly average Peltasts. 11 gold for 11 hp, 12 morale, 11 str, 11 attack, 11 defense Phalangites/hoplites. Hypaspists are 15 gold but only different from Phalangites etc. by 14 morale instead of 12.

LA Man has 11 HP 12 morale 11 attack 11 def 11 precision crossbow-wielding Tower Guards for 13 gold. 15 gold to bump hp and morale to 13 and def and precision to 12.

Gath: 13 gold for 13 morale, 11 attack 11 def on Zebulunite Soldiers, 15 gold for Asherite Soldiers with *worse* stats than that for thematic reasons. The only troops so far priced similar to yours--and at least they have shields.

I'm also very confused about increasing the gold cost of the sacreds--were you finding people using them too much?

Overall, it feels like instead of making the various weapons more unique or fitting, they are all homogenized. For instance, all of Jomon's weapons are more or less the same. You can use a Katana for 7 damage 2 attack...or a No-Dashi for 8 damage 1 attack. Not enough of a difference to recruit one over the other for different situations. Or the Naginata, which used to be a good option for dealing with high-protection targets. Now it is no different from a No-Dashi damage-wise. Everything is either 7 or 8 damage and...boring. Your changes have reduced the amount of strategy that you can use recruiting Jomonese troops.

[rdonj]

The hammer change also affects hoburgs and siege golems iirc but yeah, the main change is to make ulm's hammer troops the only unit they ever use.