Conceptual Balance Mod v1.92

[Bat/man]

Is Ulm's encumbrance in heavy plate 2?

Is Mictlan's encumbrance in furs 3?

Does this make sense to anyone?

[Amhazair]

Originally Posted by Bat/man

Is Ulm's encumbrance in heavy plate 2?

No. Ulm's encumberance naked is two. To that they add whatever encumberance their equipment gives.

Originally Posted by Bat/man

Is Mictlan's encumbrance in furs 3?

Yes. (if you mean the two very specific sacreds who wear furs, since their regular warriors don't.)

Originally Posted by Bat/man

Does this make sense to anyone?

I agree it wouldn't make sense if it was true. Luckily, it isn't.



Now, because I'm a kind person I'll expand a bit and also address the issue you were trying to point out with that false argument:

Partly for balance reasons*, partly bacause of "thematic reasons"** the base encumberance for Ulmish units was decreased from 3 (standard for most humans) to two. On top of that MA Ulm's heavy armors were also reduced in encumberance, as Ulm's armorsmiths were supposed to be some of the best ever. (Again balance and theme go hand in hand here.) This does mean that MA Ulm heavy infantry has 4 encumberance, (or 5 with shield.) which is indeed very good for heavy infantry. Did those two changes at the same time overdo things? I don't know. I haven't played Ulm (with or against) since. If you think it's unbalanced make an arguement as to why, preferably with a concrete ingame excample, and I'm sure Llama will look at it.

*Ulm's heavy infantry was really poor, and in fact easier to kill them in regular melee engagements than more lightly armored troops & the heavy infantry of many other nations, this while their heavy infantry was supposed to be their strength.

** From EA Ulm's Barbarians, to MA/LA professional soldiers and LA forresters all mention or at least imply great strength and endurance, so giving them 1 point less endurance (again, naked) than the average human seemed to make sense.

[Calahan]

Originally Posted by Bat/man

Is Ulm's encumbrance in heavy plate 2?

Is Mictlan's encumbrance in furs 3?

Does this make sense to anyone?

Which units are you talking about? Please give exact unit numbers, as what you wrote doesn't provide enough info.

(open the unit window and press Shift+I, and make note of the monster number of the units you refer to)

[Valerius]

Originally Posted by Torgon

Then we come to summons with magical diversity. Which I'll argue is just as important as the other dimensions I've listed above. Not so that everyone can just beeline for the best of the best, but for key forgings, a few key spells, etc. If you want to use a summons to diversity magically you only have death. Its not that death does it better than the other paths, its not that death does it more efficiently, or that death does it differently in some way. Its that death is the only path that has the option. Giving a little magic diversity to other paths isn't going to turn Caelum into a fire nation, or Tir into an astral nation. It would simply give them the option for a little diversity without having to conjure up mages from beyond the grave.

Going in the opposite direction had occurred to me at one point. Currently 3 of 7 tarts have fixed paths, with the lightning cyclops getting the prize for the excellent AE combo. What about limiting the randoms on the other four? Maybe they would have access to all paths, maybe they wouldn't. But they wouldn't have access to all combination of crosspaths as they do now. I'm not really suggesting this be done but I do think a variety of summons, each with their own limited sets of magic, is more interesting than giving units a chance at any path/path combination.

In any case, it seems to me your concern is with the thematic side of things. You don't want to have to use death to get access to S magic (though in all fairness, golems wouldn't be in contradiction to TNN's theme - of course you'd have to have your pretender be able to summon them). I can understand wanting to play within a nation's theme but it's a difficult thing to do.

For instance, TNN has two national heroes with D magic (one with D3, the other with D4 and immortal to boot). Will you use them to site search if you get them? If you do and you turn out to have a surprisingly strong D income will you use it? Even if you don't site search for D sites, if you conquer a nation that has will you make use of those D gems?

If gem income were tied to a nation's paths it would be one thing but that isn't the case (aside from the fact that you'll have some starting income from your cap and this will give you a jump on getting a gem generating global) so in each game you have to make do with what you get, even though it may not be thematic.

An idea that had occurred to me was to try a game where magic site frequency was set very low and compensate for that by a series of gem generating national summons such that your gem income would largely match your national paths. Such settings would emphasize playing within a nation's theme without putting you at a disadvantage by doing so.

[llamabeast]

An idea that had occurred to me was to try a game where magic site frequency was set very low and compensate for that by a series of gem generating national summons such that your gem income would largely match your national paths. Such settings would emphasize playing within a nation's theme without putting you at a disadvantage by doing so.

I was considering a game where there were 7 free or almost free remote commander summon spells, one for each gem type. The resulting commander would produce a gem of the appropriate type. A house rule would limit players to one such commander per province. However there would be 0% site frequency, or at least very low.

The effect: Each player could choose their own gem income, with the limitation that their total gem income would equal their number of provinces. Completely removes some of the main reasons to diversify and allows highly specialised nations. I reckon it might be fun.

[rdonj]

Potential difficulty - would you intend to have to put them out into each individual province, or to allow them to hide in forts? In the former case, it would mean huge networks of scouts running around your lands every turn delivering gems to labs, or building a laboratory in as many of your provinces as possible to avoid having to run the scout network.

Alternatively, you get a similar situation to gem gens where you can hide all of your gem producers in one or two forts and keep your extra gem income from being raidable, and still relatively difficult to assassinate (but at least a lot more possible than it would be in a gemgen environment). It would be pretty hard to police either way as well, due to scout reporting inaccuracy, especially inside of forts. You could let players police each other, or just play with trustworthy people, but it does seem like a lot of work either way.

[llamabeast]

Uh... I guess you could fill the map with labs using map commands to avoid the scout network.

The producers couldn't move and would be distributed one per province, so they could easily be killed by raiding.

You raise some good points. Maybe not such a great idea! But still I think it might be interesting.

[BewareTheBarnacleGoose]

I think your idea sounds really interesting, but definitely some balance issues. In addition to what rdonj said, I also wonder if it wouldn't give an extra advantage to blood. Because your gem-gen summons would only produce 1/gem per turn, but many magic sites produce 2 or more, players in this game would have overall lower gem income than normal, even though they have higher than normal income in certain paths. Blood income wouldn't be affected, though, so it would be proportionately higher than gem income in your game.

Or at least that's what I think . Does that make sense?

[llamabeast]

It does make sense, *although* actually it turns out that blood hunting income is related to site frequency (clever Illwinter!). So actually probably blood nations would do unusually badly if the site frequency was set very low. That could be compensated for by making a blood slave-generating special commander as well.

[BewareTheBarnacleGoose]

Wow, I had no idea that blood income was affected by site frequency. I had always thought that population and unrest were the only determinants. I tried briefly to test it, and sure enough blood hunting success does seem to be higher at higher site frequency, but I couldn't really be sure. But I'll take your word for it. However, you can still get slaves with magic sites set to zero, so the ratio doesnt correlate perfectly. Anyway, good to know!