Modding Idea List - Page 3

DrPraetorious · #21 April 18th, 2007, 12:50 AM

Mods can always be rebalanced post-development.

I have a long-running intention to do some extensive playtesting on the existing new-nation mods, and see if I can get them all fairly balanced against eachother.

Sombre · #22 April 18th, 2007, 01:11 AM

You could just help me out with CBM balance versions. Unless you don't like CBM for some reason.

DrPraetorious · #23 April 18th, 2007, 06:46 PM

Indeed, I don't like CB.

Once the megamod can actually be played, I'll be releasing the following mods:
1) A new nation megamod. This will include new nations (incl. the many by Amos) which I have rebalanced for Vanilla. I'm still running sims and studying to get the balance right. There will actually be three versions, one for each era, once they are playable, I'll see if I can talk people into doing a few cycles of playtesting.

2) An expansion megamod. The "black tome of alsophocus" plus some additional nations based on existing nations (so EA Mahcaka, LA Pythium, etc,) plus the worthy heroes mod. This will also need playtesting.

If anyone wants to fork either of those to make it conceptually balanced or whatever, it wouldn't bother me at all, but I disagree with CB so completely that I don't think discourse on the topic is even useful.

llamabeast · #24 April 18th, 2007, 09:24 PM

I'd be very keen to help with testing for number 1). I've been thinking a bit of multiplayer mod action would be fun for a while now.

Sombre · #25 April 18th, 2007, 09:50 PM

Well I'm curious; without trashing CB (it represents hard work by a group of people), what is it that you don't like about it? Seems like a few posters around here are dead set against it and I'm not sure why.

DrPraetorious · #26 April 18th, 2007, 11:13 PM

I think that the entire process guiding the CB mod is fundamentally flawed, and not salvageable.

I disagree with the basic philosophy, I disagree with essentially every change that they make, note only that the stated goals are not good or desirable, but that the changes made do not achieve those goals.

I could go over the list of why I don't like them but it's been done by others and I see no profit in repeating the discussion.

Sombre · #27 April 19th, 2007, 01:20 AM

Could you then point me to where the discussion took place?

I'm genuinely interested in balance discussion and your reply isn't really telling me anything, other than that you 100% disagree with everything in the CB. I don't see why, but if you don't want to go into it, fair enough.

I'm not any kind of balance expert, but a lot of the changes made by the CBM make sense to me. I was under the impression that it was generally held to be more balanced than vanilla, but again I don't really have the experience to make that call myself. I can see that vanilla totally favours using only certain units/spells, making a great deal of the variety in dom3 worthless. CB make changes with the aim of rectifying this, which is attractive to me.

If there was some other theory of balancing the game for better variety I might be on board with that too, but I haven't seen one.

VedalkenBear · #28 April 19th, 2007, 01:24 AM

I tend to agree with Sombre's point. When I play with the CBM (and I play with and without it), I tend to like it, though there are some minor points (Awaken Sleeper at too early a level, I think) that I can disagree with.

DrPraetorious · #29 April 19th, 2007, 06:20 AM

Well, in the vanilla game many units and spells are niche - only useful under specific, fairly narrow circumstances.

CBM tends to flatten everything out, making all units equal.

So, yeah, you use everything - but it doesn't make any difference what you use because everything is the same.

That's an exaggeration.

It makes some efforts to tone-down W9F9 blesses - but encourages D9N4 blesses (for example). It also fiddles with the costs for boosting items in a way that is ill-considered, IMO.

Sombre · #30 April 19th, 2007, 06:58 AM

I don't think it really flattens the units out too much. I mean it's not like it makes the elite units any less elite. It just makes them cost more if they were stupid powerful. And the crappy low end units need something to make them more attractive or they will /never/ be useful. Actually even at 9 or 8 gold instead of 10 some units are still damn near useless - there's no real niche for units which are strictly inferior. Like for Mictlan in CB they raise the cost of the jaguar warriors considerably - that makes sense to me, since Jaguar warriors were cheap, available everywhere, sacred, low resource cost, even without bless were extremely powerful and hard to kill etc etc. The end result being that in vanilla /no-one/ could use sun warriors without handicapping themselves. By making jags less uber, at least people might think about using sun warriors if the situation suites them. So there you have a unit restored to its niche role (against massed shortbows, if you have tons of resources, if you want an earth/blood bless etc) and hopefully more variety.

The item costing I honestly don't know about. If you say they made bad mistakes changing the costs there I can't disagree, I don't have enough experience with forging.

I like the fact that some truly awful summons were reduced in gem costs. I mean who would ever use reanimation at its old cost? It might as well not have been in the game. I also like the changes to the scales, since stuff like the magic scale just didn't make sense to me in vanilla.

You don't like it, I'd still like to know more, but if you're talked out about it that's cool. I'm going to stick with it, maybe work out which bits work which bits don't for myself.