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

[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)

[Soyweiser]

Originally Posted by Foodstamp

I don't understand how too much penetration could be a bad thing?

Just look at this image:
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[Deathblob]

Originally Posted by Foodstamp

I don't understand how too much penetration could be a bad thing? Are you afraid a long shafted spear would get stuck? If that is the case, maybe a long shafted spear could be used as a high penetration weapon that is rendered useless after the initial thrust. This could be achieved by using the #charge tag or something.

That would leave your unit very vulnerable and exposed!

I suggest dual-wielding in this case, so your unit is not impotent after the weapon's charge is expended. If both weapons have long shafts, then ambidextrous units should probably get a double penetration bonus. Can you mod this in?

[Foodstamp]

Originally Posted by Deathblob

That would leave your unit very vulnerable and exposed!

I suggest dual-wielding in this case, so your unit is not impotent after the weapon's charge is expended. If both weapons have long shafts, then ambidextrous units should probably get a double penetration bonus. Can you mod this in?

Yeah, I think so. Especially if the unit is size 6 or has multiple arms.

The best way to implement it would be to give the unit two long shafted penetrators with the #charge tag. It's a bit abstract, but imagine that the enemy unit would receive double penetration that causes an immediate shock, but then the melee settles into your typical blow by blow. It would be awkward wielding two long shafted weapons though, so there would have to be penalties to compensate for loss of balance, lack of defense etc.

[Soyweiser]

Originally Posted by Adept

I'm sure you all know how to do this. All you need is enough vaetti hags (which you'll want anyway for cheap researchers) to score one or two with astral.

Also needed to sitesearch, sneaky protect vs mind hunts (blood hunters for example), and forging. You also want 2 so you can let the one run away, and the other to sneak into your next target province (or waste another turn).

(in the picture 2 of them are tearing apart experienced heavy cavalry).

So you use 4 mages against heavy cav? most of the cav should die then. Try a rematch against more cav, 20 for example. It does not really have critical mass here. (I did some tests myself, with only one skrattir with luck and eth, it didn't go that well. The long combat resulted in fatigue, the massed attacks overcame the eth+luck. Crits -> afflictions -> meant the end of the wolf).

Also, as soon as you hit research lvl 4 there will usually not be any indies left. Then you start to face the real enemies, the other players. (And your tactic of rushing to alt 4 means one problem. If a bless nation rushes you. You do not have a good magical counter. Only numbness. (After getting alt 2 (quickness!), I would either get con 4 for some serious magical items on the skrattir thugs (wha.. no hands!) or falling frost. Depending on the other nations I expect to face.

And other players have good troops. Attack 16 might not even be enough to dent the enemy troops reliably. Lets say marignon royal guards for example. defense 19, recruitable everywhere.

[Soyweiser]

Originally Posted by Soyweiser

Just look at this image:
**This link has been removed by the Shrapnel obscenity auto-detection. Do NOT post obscene links. You now have 10 additional infraction points**

For anybody interested, use this as a google search term http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piquerism turn of your safe search!

[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.

[Adept]

Originally Posted by Soyweiser

And other players have good troops. Attack 16 might not even be enough to dent the enemy troops reliably. Lets say marignon royal guards for example. defense 19, recruitable everywhere.

Er... the werewolf has 6 attacks due to being quikened. You did notice that they get _two_ claw attaks now? While the 50 gold royal guard may parry one or two, it's pretty much given that the werewolf will still tear up two of them / turn, and quite often four.

Nicely done, remembering that huge defence and kite shield. But that is the point anyway, the thing can be brought to bear very quickly, and shouldn't be super hard to counter. What is is is excellent value for money, especially as it's an excellent mage with movement that effectively approaches that of flying units due to the survival skill.

[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.