Conceptual Balance Series (Mod)

[deccan]

Typographic error in the 1.72 Version of the pretender mod in the description of Son of the Sun (Fire)

It reads:

"The Son of the Sun is a demigod of immense size claiming the divine heritage of teh sun. Possessing considerable magical and physical might, the Son of the Sun is surrounded by an aura of splendor that strikes mortals with awe. The sun has gifted it's heir with such heat that once per season he recieves two Fire gems."

It should be "the" instead of "teh" and "receives" instead of "recieves".

[Daynarr]

Any changes to "Burden of Time"?

[Zen]

Not at current, no.

I actually stayed away from Globals since my personal experience is that Globals, their effect, and their 'strength' really depends on the players you are playing with.

I've been in situations where any global go up was brought down in a matter of a handful of turns, regardless.

I've also been in a situations where certain globals have stayed up much longer than I feel it should and am pulling my hair out that people are letting them stay up.

So with the variability of this I don't have the personal experience to adjust them one way or the other (the exception being Purgatory which is, to me, less of a game factor).

If you have suggestions, reasoning and such, please post them. As I said before this isn't just a pure "MY WAY OR THE HIGHWAY" type of mod, I'm looking for reasonable feedback to create a better sense of balance. I just merely took the first step.

[Huzurdaddi]

Zen,

I love a lot of the changes. Here are a couple of I am a couple of questions about:

1. Soul Vortex. The new cost makes casting it from a wraith lord or a vampire lords very difficult. I assume this was the idea. However I now have a hard time thinking of why Wraith Lords are worth 40 gems ( perhaps the immortality is worth far more than I give it credit for ).

2. False Horror. I guess this is sufficient. I don't know. It's still not too hard to spam the crud out of them if you are Caelum. But perhaps that is more of a Caelum problem than a problem with the spell cost.

3. Love the Bane Lord fix. However I *do* use him for his leadership Not like it matters 15 gems is perfect.

4. Wrathful Skies/FireStorm/Battlefield spells. I'm still drawn to these spells even with the current costs. More play testing will be required ( and I will try to start one this weekend ) but I think that people will still attempt to blow armies up at this cost. Perhaps the requirements have to be boosted across the board for all battle field spells by 2 or so making them pretender only ( basically ). They are all far more powerful than the Shimmering Fields/Nifel Flames/FireSomething yet they are lower on the tech chart and they have similar requirements ( but lower gem costs it is true ).

5. I think that the angels may whomp on humans a little too much, but I think that the change is ( over all ) much for the better.

I have no other negative observations. This Mod is, IMO, fantastic. You have done a bang up job. I mean that. And no, I'm not sucking up I really think that you have done some good work here.

There are now so many good spells and so few less than useful spells it's freaking great.

[Boron]

Zen said:
I've been in situations where any global go up was brought down in a matter of a handful of turns, regardless.

I've also been in a situations where certain globals have stayed up much longer than I feel it should and am pulling my hair out that people are letting them stay up.

So with the variability of this I don't have the personal experience to adjust them one way or the other (the exception being Purgatory which is, to me, less of a game factor).

If you have suggestions, reasoning and such, please post them. As I said before this isn't just a pure "MY WAY OR THE HIGHWAY" type of mod, I'm looking for reasonable feedback to create a better sense of balance. I just merely took the first step.

Did you talk after the game with the players ?
I just brought up a thread asking about ppls favourite global strats cause i am curious as well .

So when ppl brought down globals always i guess they wasted at least quite some amounts of gems by dispelling .

There is at least 1 global that you should change imo :
The forge of the ancients .

Maybe i am blind but i didn't find a weapon mod so far . So if you already modded artifacts then sorry .


But with forge : If you play a blood nation and can bring up the forge of ancients with the current bloodstone EVERY B2 mage can forge a bloodstone .
Abysia / DF marignon can even forge a few bloodstones with their mages with good randoms .
If they time the forge a bit they will be able to forge 20-30 bloodstones / turn in midgame .
So if the opponents don't react immedeately and the forge is up only 3-5 turns Abysia / Marignon DF / Mictlan will have already 50-200 bloodstones .
Then they can bring the forge up again almost 1:1 in cost vs. pearls .

I remember that you wanted to change clams + fetishes to higher requirements that they can't be massproduced so much anymore .

So if you keep the Forge of Ancients as it is then you need either to make bloodstones harder to forge as well ( Maybe B5E ) or change something with the forge of ancients .

[Beorne]

A little typo in the pretender mod. Asynja is described as having air magic but now she has no more air.

[Peter Ebbesen]

Boron said:

Abysia / DF marignon can even forge a few bloodstones with their mages with good randoms .
If they time the forge a bit they will be able to forge 20-30 bloodstones / turn in midgame .

That is either quite a lot of slaves saved ahead of time for this purpose or an immense empire being bloodhunted dry, but no matter - assume the slaves are available. Even with the half-price FoA, the price to get 20 bloodstones is a respectable 200 slaves - enough to cast Astral Corruption, summon a Demon Lord, several Ice Devils, 28+ Storm Demons or to forge five FoA soul contracts for that matter.

So if the opponents don't react immedeately and the forge is up only 3-5 turns Abysia / Marignon DF / Mictlan will have already 50-200 bloodstones .

Anybody who is unable to prevent an enemy from having the Forge of the Ancients up for 3-5 rounds deserves what is coming.

[Truper]

Peter Ebbesen said:
Anybody who is unable to prevent an enemy from having the Forge of the Ancients up for 3-5 rounds deserves what is coming.

This seems an odd thing to say. A lot of nations aren't likely to have either an Astral 3 mage for dispelling, or enough of their own gems lying around to overwrite a Forge.

[Daynarr]

Well, as far as my MP games go, I have yet to see Burden of Time being cast. It�s probably due to the fact that such spell would turn EVERYONE in the game against you, which is next best thing to a suicide.

I was thinking that BoT needs fixing for SP since, apparently, AI still likes to cast it when he can. A simple increase in casting requirements (from death 5 to death 7-9) would be good, or making it higher-level spell (from 5 to 8-9) level would fix this in SP.

Personally I like the first method since it would limit the casting of the spell to powerful Death nations, which is quite thematic.

However, I have no idea how this would impact MP, so I'll leave it to your judgement.

BTW nice changes so far.

[Peter Ebbesen]

Truper said:

This seems an odd thing to say. A lot of nations aren't likely to have either an Astral 3 mage for dispelling, or enough of their own gems lying around to overwrite a Forge.

Honestly, I was thinking that people would cooperate immediately to get it dispelled. Admittedly, I have only played MP in games with few people rather than the 10-17 big games, but Forge of the Ancients is something like the ultimate war declaration since anybody who has it up for a significant amount of time is quite likely to win the game due to his access to cheap path-boosters, construction of most of the artefacts not already made, good weapons and armour, much that you could not even forge before FoA - it all adds up to greatly enhanced power. Under the standard rules, Fever Fetishes (everybody), Clams (W1), and Blood Stones (B2) are just one aspect of its power, and I find Blood Stones to be the least abusive of the three as it requires a specialise mages (no random sage is going to do this), still has a non-negligible cost even with FoA, and the output (gems) cannot be converted to its input (primarily slaves) easily.

It is one thing to argue that Fever Fetishes/Clams of Pearl should be more restricted because they can provide an easy ramping up of power from the very beginning of the game due to reinvestment and low pathcost; it is another to argue that Blood Stones should be restricted because they become economic to make when one of the best global enchantments in the game is in play.