Conceptual Balance Mod 1.84

[Stretch]

The updated CBM 1.84 is found here http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=47550

If you don't use this, and use patch 3.27 to Dominions 3, you'll have weird inconsistencies like losing 10 soldiers when you view a battle and then seeing that your army only lost 4. Or seeing one side win when you view it, and then look at the map and the other side's army is sitting in the province.

[Psycho]

What is the logic behind the removal of SDRs? I know that blood is overpowered, but wouldn't just changing them to B2 or B3 suffice? Forging brazen vessels for each B1 hunter seems overkill. Making certain blood summons more expensive is a harder path, but should be the preferred solution for balancing blood.

[rdonj]

Changing SDRs to blood 2 or 3 heavily favors nations that have strong national blood mages already, and is a nerf relatively to nations that only have b1s, etc, forcing them to spend a lot more time and slaves to get the same slaves. They're also like hammers, an item that basically you spam because there's no reason ever not to, as they will make their price up ridiculously quickly even at those prices. Whether those are the actual reasons for the removal I couldn't say.

[thejeff]

Not really. At least compared to not having SDRs at all.

If you put SDRs at B2B2, they'd cost 20 Blood, that's only 5 less than an actual booster. Do people really spam 25 slave boosters just to hunt with?
If you only have B1 mages then you'd have to empower to forge them, but if you only have B1 mages, you're going to empower anyway since you can't do anything with just B1s.
You'll start off slower than nations with B2s, but once you've got a B2 or two you'll start keeping up.

The nations with cheap B1's still won't forge much. It's cheaper to just spam Mictlan priests than to equip them all. The nations with recruit anywhere B2+s will use them. It's the nations with expensive, random or capital only B1s who'll make use of expensive SDRs.

[VedalkenBear]

I had a question. I'm running CBM (the latest version, I am aware), and apparently many many troops have 'doubled' equipment. Is there a way to avoid this?

[rdonj]

Llamabeast released a fixed version of CBM that fixes that problem. I believe it's on the first page of this forum still.

[Psycho]

Originally Posted by rdonj

Changing SDRs to blood 2 or 3 heavily favors nations that have strong national blood mages already, and is a nerf relatively to nations that only have b1s, etc, forcing them to spend a lot more time and slaves to get the same slaves.

Not having them at all also favors nations with strong national blood mages. These nations will be able to hunt with these B2/B3 mages initially, later adding B1s with boosters, vampire lords or some national summons. However, empowering one mage to B2 or B3 to do the forging for weak blood nations is a negligible expense. And as thejeff said, you will need to empower eventually anyway.

Originally Posted by rdonj

They're also like hammers, an item that basically you spam because there's no reason ever not to, as they will make their price up ridiculously quickly even at those prices.

Using blood boosters for the same purpose will also pay off eventually, so there is no reason not to do it. You cannot prevent this behavior and frankly I don't see a reason why you would want to. Why is it bad to have an item that is so to say required, like hammers and SRDs are?

[thejeff]

One difference between hammers and SDRs is that hammers were necessary for everyone, so many nations needed Earth on their pretender. SDRs were only necessary if you intended to go into blood. And if you were going into blood, you'd have blood mages and wouldn't need to go to any special lengths to get one who could make SDRs.

[rdonj]

Psycho - Actually shortly after I posted that I realized exactly why I was wrong. Having actually thought about it more I'm feeling that there really was no purpose in getting rid of rods, since you can do the exact same thing with boosters. The question then becomes, how badly do we want to nerf the ability to build slave pools. If it's severe enough I guess we could leave them out and just keep using boosters to do it instead (which is totally worth it even at 25 slaves), or do we bring back SDRs at a bit lower price? I'm inclined to think that we should bring back SDRs, probably at something like 10+5 per rod so they can be forged at lower blood level, but still have a fairly appreciable cost compared to blood boosters. It would be better to just increase the price of blood magic across the board so that it's not just a one time thing that easily pays itself back over time, but I really question the sanity of trying to do an across the board increase to blood prices due to potential errors in judgement/bugs (along with just being a lot of work), so for the moment my vote will lean towards increased expense on the SDR.

[Valerius]

I'm ok with nerfing blood. The problem with eliminating SDRs (or even increasing their cost for that matter) is that it impacts some blood nations greatly and others not much at all. A solution that barely impacts Niefel and actually improves their position relative to other blood nations seems flawed to me.

Now you could fix that by, say, making Skratti 1B1W 100% random but that would probably cause an uproar so I agree with you that the proper way to nerf blood is increase the costs of the spells. I don't know that it's all that much work to do since CBM has already adjusted many of the costs so you just change the value. It's a judgement call, but you could take a conservative approach and increase costs by a modest amount. If blood is still a problem just increase the costs a little more next version.

And as far as blood magic goes, I kind of think the main problems with it are with a few summons (autospawning, immortal) and some absurd situations like Jotun having recruit everywhere Claws of Kokytos casters.