Do you use CBM?

[brxbrx]

Originally Posted by JonBrave

@brxbrx
I'm surprised at your answer, and interested. I only play SP, vanilla. Like you I squander a bit and play around, just to have fun/experiment/theme. And I am useless at computer games, not like the experts here! Yet I am up to "Hard" AI now, and never lose --- I don't think I've even ever lost a single castle to the AI. Love the game, but finding the AI lacking (not surprisngly, and no I don't have any time/commitment for MP). Don't do CBM as been told it certainly doesn't help the AI. So, how do your settings/play help make the AI "challenging", I'd actively like to know? (Perhaps a different thread?)

Maybe I'm just worse than you?

Also, I like to play on large maps, like Glory of the Gods, with a bunch of players. And I sometimes make reckless early game decision which results in slow expansion. So I often find myself beating back enemies from all sides with only a few dozen provinces to my name.

[JonBrave]

Originally Posted by brxbrx

Maybe I'm just worse than you?

Nope, nobody could be worse than me

[Gandalf Parker]

I play almost entirely Solo now.
Here is a pretty good thread about boosting the AI with recommendations on settings, maps, mods, 3rd party programs, etc
http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=44783

[Bananadine]

10) I want to use the latest CBM but have been putting it off until my current, non-CBM game ends. Because of gem generators, my current game has turned out to be VERY LONG.

[DeadlyShoe]

I don't really go so much for strategy, and I will willingly squander gems and resources just to get a thematic army. That sets me back a bit.

The thing about this is, CBM goes to significant effort to make thematic choices more viable. Pretenders, troops, spells; the lot of em. Just because it is conceived for multiplayer doesnt lesson its value for singleplayer in any way, really. The only thing it strips out of the game entirely are gem generation farms.

[Herode]

Because llamabeast asked why people do not like CBM and because I'm one of those, I want to answer here and give my humble opinion.

Of course, I'm not an expert. I did not play a hundred games. And I did not play games for some couples of month now, so I did not play with CBM 1.8+. Nevertheless, here are some thought about CBM < 1.8 :

I understand that the point is to balance the vanilla version. I think we can more or less balance things : scales are the first exemple coming into my mind, some spells costs, some troops costs. But perfect balance was obviously not aimed at by the conceptors and I am pretty sure that perfect balance is 1 - utopic + 2 - boring.

Also, you shall have noticed that I emphasized on the some adverb. Some modifications are interesting, a lot of modifications are... well.. a question of taste. As of CBM 1.7, it's more than a lot of modifications. It's the entire game that has been modified. And what is more interesting from my humble point of view is that on CBM 1.7, things were still on the edge on changing. I guess (but it's only my guess) that 1.9+ is not an exception to the rule. The policy of CBM only leads to more changes, more re-balancing, more mods and more stuff. Each version add new stuff that adds new unbalanced features that invites to a new version that add new stuff etc. Infinite loop.

I think that such infinite loops are the sign that something went wrong with the algorithm. I also think that vanilla version really needs some balance, but a modest one. It could be really interesting, now that players and modders share a lots of experience with various flavours of CBM and other mods, to plan another 'balance mod' from vanilla, a new BM who would aim to be a modest and a stable one.

That said, I'm not firing at anyone here and I very well know that QM and llamabeast did a lot of valuable and generous work for the community. When I don't like a mod, I just don't play with it and I do not have any problem with other people - more experienced or playing more games than I do - using specialized mods.

Cheers from limbo,
H.

[brxbrx]

I thought Dominions was supposed to be unbalanced.

[kianduatha]

Originally Posted by Herode

And what is more interesting from my humble point of view is that on CBM 1.7, things were still on the edge on changing. I guess (but it's only my guess) that 1.9+ is not an exception to the rule. The policy of CBM only leads to more changes, more re-balancing, more mods and more stuff. Each version add new stuff that adds new unbalanced features that invites to a new version that add new stuff etc. Infinite loop.

I think that such infinite loops are the sign that something went wrong with the algorithm. I also think that vanilla version really needs some balance, but a modest one. It could be really interesting, now that players and modders share a lots of experience with various flavours of CBM and other mods, to plan another 'balance mod' from vanilla, a new BM who would aim to be a modest and a stable one.

I wouldn't call it an infinite loop--the balance chaos since 1.7 was almost all a result of the hammer change, so I would characterize it more as punctuated equilibrium. That one change(and SDRs becoming unique I suppose) threw a lot of stuff off-balance--a lot of that was simply that almost every strategy was affected and it took a while for people to understand the changes well enough to be able to rebalance things. Only just now are item prices settling down from the disruption. And a lot of that is simply that it takes months usually to get good feedback on changes because games take a while.

It's almost impossible to make both a modest and a stable balance mod. For instance, say you wanted to not have gem generators(a noble enough goal). This *greatly* disrupts the balance of most every nation, alters the relative value of various pretenders, and wreaks havok with prices for many items and summons. At that point, your modest mod either becomes rather far-ranging or loses all semblance of balance. And likely no matter what you'll fail to account for a few of the hundreds of spells and variables in the game and have to go through a few development cycles to catch things.

All that being said, in my mind CBM isn't a balance mod in that sense--it isn't about making all the nations perfectly balanced with each other(as you said, that's impossible and perhaps even boring). Instead it's about opening up possibilities and making otherwise useless options usable. I think a better description is that CBM wants every spell, every unit, every item to have a legitimate use in serious play, even if that is a fairly obscure niche. It wants people to see even occasionally Ziz(hey, they might be really nice with medallions of Vengeance these days. I'll have to look into that) and other really really useless things in play because they're cheap enough and useful enough that someone will find a way to do something awesome with them.

[Gandalf Parker]

I know thats the pitch. But I personally do not agree that its the result. I dont feel that it opens up tactics. But it does close some.

For MP play, of certain groups on certain map sizes and certain game settings then it does seem to open some things up. It doesnt make them possible, it just seems to make them more spreadsheet balanced in order to make them a viable strategy for winning. I also have never been thrilled with the "thematic" changes to some of my favorite races such as Pangaea and Caelum. Making them "balanced" for small tight maps and king-of-the-hill games doesnt really work for me. Just IMHO

[llamabeast]

Lots of interesting comments in this thread.

Regarding the "infinite loop" comment, I think that kianduatha's comment does a good job of explaining why that hopefully isn't the case. I think that the recent large number of changes have been caused by three things:

1) The uniqueification of hammers. This is the second really big and IMO brave change made by qm, the first being removing gem generators. At the time that was hugely controversial, but I think most people would agree now that it was a good change. The hammer change is possibly still somewhat controversial but I think many people like it; that's a discussion for elsewhere anyway. Regardless it did lead to a need for some rebalancing since it affected some nations and strategies more than others.

2) An attempt to make all items useful*. This was my big project in 1.9, although qm worked on it in 1.8 too. Hopefully, unless I have made a lot of mistakes, there should be little need to make many changes to items in future.

3) An attempt to bring weaker nations somewhat up to par. For a long time this wasn't really attempted, and MA Ulm for instance languished as borderline hopeless. Hopefully 1.9 has covered most of the nations which needed help. There may be need for a couple of tweaks if I have got things wrong, and maybe there are another couple of nations who need some help (Yomi perhaps). But again I hope we are most of the way there.

I think there is room for some significant attention to be paid to pretenders (where there are still some which are pretty useless, particularly national pretenders), so that may be the next area to focus on. But the objective is for the mod to settle into a kind of equilibrium.

--

Gandalf - you seem to have the firm opinion that CBM is balanced around small blitz games, but I don't know where that comes from. Certainly I don't lean that way and it's not obvious that qm did. Consider gem gens for example - they're probably fairly reasonable for small games (4 players or so), and only become monstrous in larger games. Anyway I don't really understand much of your comment so I guess we're not going to get anywhere.

Out of interest, what "thematic" changes to Pangaea do you find objectionable? I'm not familiar with the Pangaea changes.


* - This is a reasonable place to address a common concern about CBM. People might think that for example by making all items useful, there is a danger of making them all the same and removing the interesting diversity from the game. I've tried very hard to avoid that - rather the idea is to make all items *potentially* useful. Some items will be very niche in their use, but if a player finds just the right situation and plans ingeniously, hopefully they will not be punished for trying to use an unusual item.