Official Vanilla vs CBM debate thread

[Squirrelloid]

You're definitely doing it wrong

Lets look at it this way:
a 9 bless costs:
168 starting at 3 path length
224 starting at 2 path length
288 starting at 1 path length
360 starting at 0 path length

3x9 in the *worst case* scenario (all 0 length) = 1080 points

You also need to pay for:
Chassis Cost
Some Dominion (A Dom 1 bless chassis is useless)

Points:
350 starting
+250 imprisoned
+120 per 3 scales sacked (ie, totally sacking a category, 6 categories available)

Max possible points: 720 + 250 + 350 = 1320

1320 (max points) - 1080 (most possibly spent on bless) = 240 for chassis and dominion.

So if you ignore dominion, *every single chassis in the game* can afford a 3x9 blessing by your metric.

Ok, you didn't actually say you made them imprisoned, so you're working with 250 fewer points. But you also aren't factoring in the cost of dominion. So, by your metric:

-Any chassis which costs 0+ points and has no paths can't do it. (off by 10 points). So no Manticore, Wyrm, etc...
-Any chassis with only 1 path at length 1 can be worth up to 62 points and still do it. I'm not sure there is a chassis with only a single length 1 path that's worth more than 50 points...
-Any chassis with only 1 path at length 2 can be worth up to 126 points and still do it (covers every single chassis in the game with only a single length 2 path)
-Any chassis with 2 paths at length 1 can be worth up to 134 points (covers every single chassis in the game with 2 paths at length 1 iirc)
-Any chassis with 2 paths at 2/1 can be worth up to 198 points and still do it, so even the VQ can do it!

Any chassis with more than 2 paths or better than 2/1 path depth can do it.

That's all just mathematical certainty.

Of course, the main reason you're doing it wrong is you're not buying *survivable* dominion, much less reasonable dominion for running a bless strategy off of. Dominion is important because it limits how many of those sacred troops you can actually buy, after all. Once you factor in dominion, the frost father looks much worse because he starts at dominion 1. All those titans start at Dominion 3 and sometimes 4.

You're also taking negative scales over imprisonment, which is really weird, since everyone imprisons pretenders carrying a big bless.

[TheDemon]

Granted I wasn't around when CBM started up. But it seems to me the CBM changes these days are more drastic with each version. For example, unique gemgens, giving sea trolls to r'lyeh, the waterbreathing items major cost/paths reduction, half price blood summons, major changes in recruitables for MA argatha, dragon master buff. Upcoming: endgame diversity included, removal of major discount sites, nerfing of kelp forts.

I'm not saying any of this is a bad thing, and certainly there are many many CBM resources available these days including the majority of new guides. But it isn't like vanilla anymore.

[Rookierookie]

The issue being that GGs do not have enough power to be considered unique. If it's unique, it better be darn well powerful - and one astral pearl a month is hardly powerful.

[rdonj]

GemGens still give you a useful and unique ability that no one else has. Clams allow you to perpetually, albeit slowly, replenish the astral gem supply of a given army, which can be handy for logistic purposes. Or just permanently boost the gem supply of your nation, if you really hate the idea of sending it out. Bloodstones are actually pretty good as uniques, being a very rare earth booster as well as the gem resupply purposes. The bloodstone is easily comparable to the ruby eye, for example, except better relatively due to the greater usefulness of earth gems and earth boosters being so rare. And I think that a clam of pearls is probably reasonably equatable to some of the lesser pre-existing uniques, like say igor konhelm's tome, or the headless hoburg :P

And of course, when you allow clams of pearls to be mass craftable, that is what happens and the most powerful person in the game is the person who has the most clams and the greatest capacity to forge them. Making them literally THE most powerful item in the game, greater than any artifact.

[DonCorazon]

My take is that CB makes the game more fun. It does that by trying to make choices more interesting and in the case of gem generators, eliminating an aspect of the game that led to burdensome micromanagement. A noob is better off in a CB game because things are generally more balanced and so theoretically there are less bad choices. Not to mention it is always disheartening as a noob to survive into the late game and then learn about clamming when you start getting dumped on (oh wait was I supposed to be building clams every turn???)

The only reason a vanilla game makes sense to me is if you just have the manual to reference when you are learning and want to look things up. But even then, there are a lot of mistakes in the manual or things that have changed in patches so even that doesn’t make much sense.

CB foshizzle!

[KissBlade]

Vanilla is the original Halflife. CBM is Counterstrike.

[Finalgenesis]

I like the piecemeal edition CMB from Edi, it should be easy to control what mod to use in MP games? so you have the choice to activate gemgen if you want, disable easy water access ...etc

[sector24]

Just to add a slight counter point, I still play vanilla. But I play mostly SP, I can't commit the time to a competitive multiplayer game. I'm more interested in the story that unfolds between two epic nations of mythology, the "theme" of the game, and other Gandalfy things. I have the self discipline to not use the overpowered strategies against the computer, and I will do crazy things to give them a boost. For instance, give the AI a 3 year head start, limit myself to 1 commander per province I own, recruit all troop types in equal numbers rather than loading up on a nation's only good unit. Pretty much anything that either severely reduces micro or makes the game interesting or unusual.

I am not against CBM per se, but I would have to relearn everything and I'm not really that concerned with MP balance or some spells being useless, etc. If I had a nice uninterrupted 3 day weekend maybe I could get into CBM and I'd probably never look back but it hasn't happened yet.

[Finalgenesis]

Having just started CBM 3 days ago, I didn't see all too much that I need to adjust to (though I played vanilla for 2 weeks only before that).

Seens to be mostly cost change for unit and spells, spells moving up and down spell lvl charts and artifact cost / lvl, maybe some unit cap-only status change I haven't seen yet. Maybe I haven't tried long enough to note any significant changes, but I don't see any thematic difference so far, the race I played still have their theme intact, only a lot more spells/artifact become viable and making sense cost/lvl wise, all in all seems good so far.

[rdonj]

QM has tried very hard to keep the theme of the game intact for CBM. There are a lot of changes, but the nations still *feel* like the nations they're supposed to be. There have been a few that do alter that a bit (the biggest one I think being the UW breathing item change, to make getting underwater less painful for land nations).

Personally I was resistant at first to playing CBM, thinking it would require a lot of relearning. Then I got into a game that required it and realized that anything that worked in vanilla would work under CBM, too. The biggest initial draw for me was the pretenders. Many vanilla pretenders are overpriced for what they do, which really cuts down on which ones you can justify using. There have been a few changes in CBM that I question a bit, but overall I feel its had a very positive effect on the game, and especially the state of multiplayer.