Mod: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6

[Sombre]

Originally Posted by Squirrelloid

Well, I don't understand that particular example at all. Samurai archers weren't very good before they were inexplicably nerfed by QM, and are totally unplayable now. I can't imagine anyone actually hiring them even in vanilla.

So if that example is supposed to support your point, it failed pretty badly.

Er, what?

My point was qm does downgrade units with the goal of within nation unit balance. Which he did in the case of Jomonese Longbows. Whether or not you agree with that change is immaterial. It just goes to show fault in the logic that 'downgrade to unit = qm nation balancing not unit balancing'.

Again, if you want to talk about CBM /should/ be doing, that's a different issue to what CBM (and thus qm) /has/ been doing. Some changes have been made with nation balance in mind, but CBM is not moving towards more towards attempts at nation balance. At least not during the released version. The vast majority of the changes are still about spell/unit/resource choices.

[Maerlande]

Personally, I would like to see the Lord of Rebirth available for TNN and Eriu. It would provide a nice alternate chassis for the E9N? type builds with adding enough death to have a late game. And I think it's quite thematic.

[kianduatha]

Sad though I am about it, Sombre is right--as per the stated goal of CBM, changes are mostly for the purpose of giving nations multiple strategies. Jomon longbows were nerfed because at the time it was the only thing Jomon players even got, turning them into a rather boring one-trick pony. Now at least Jomon has a lot of options that are fairly equivalent in effectiveness, even if it is a weaker nation overall.

Similarly, Ashdod is in reality quite one-sided with cheap Adons. They're simply so good there's no reason to do anything else. It also helped balance Ashdod compared to other nations, but it came from in-nation balance.

Unfortunately, this is why something like Ichtycentaurs getting a hoof attack will never happen--because those are already their best troops, and buffing them further would make Oceania a one-trick pony(haha). Trident Knights, however, might get the extra attack(and even maybe one flavor of ichtysatyr to give a Reveler analogue).

[Squirrelloid]

Originally Posted by Sombre

Er, what?

My point was qm does downgrade units with the goal of within nation unit balance. Which he did in the case of Jomonese Longbows. Whether or not you agree with that change is immaterial. It just goes to show fault in the logic that 'downgrade to unit = qm nation balancing not unit balancing'.

Its only unit balancing if it actually looks even remotely like balancing units. It doesn't, it made their worst unit even worse still, which is mostly inexplicable. Which does nothing to demonstrate any particular balancing agenda, since it has no (positive) effect on balance, nation or unit.

Further, as the change happened many iterations ago, its hardly relevant to my claim that *CBM 1.6* is more about between-nation balancing. I will happily stipulate earlier CBMs were entirely about unit balancing if you insist, regardless of the factual value of that statement (although it is plausibly true, I don't care to review them all), because its irrelevant to my claim. So the only relevant examples come from CBM 1.6.

--------

So, looking at the CBM 1.6 changes:
-obviously most of the item and spell changes are not nation changes, and therefore not relevant one way or the other. Despite this, there are some examples of nation balancing even here.
--Naiad warriors cost reduction, despite being a spell change, is specifically called out as a nation balance change.
--Burnsaber's UWGIM item changes are very clearly nation balance changes, as they were done specifically to make it easier to traverse the land-sea divide by nations that had a hard time doing so. Burnsaber is quite explicit about this in the UWGIM thread.
--The umbral change is clearly an attempt to make Agartha more competitive again.

-Specific national changes:
--MA Agartha's change log does nothing to increase play of lesser used options, and is more about adding new options and increasing the capabilities of old options to make them more competitive. (ie, the old options that were improved were already the ones people were playing with. The new options obviously don't balance units within the existing nation).
--EA Agartha's cheaper oracles do nothing towards unit balance, as you would buy an oracle per turn every turn as soon as you could before the reduction. Thus, it is clearly a between-nation balance change.
--Similarly the change to Pans, Panic Apostles, Capricorns, et al.
--Similarly the other MA Oceania changes.
--Androphag archers price was increased because of the bug, ie, because they were too effective *against other nations* for their cost. Clearly a nation balance change.
--EA Atlantis changes are all about making it more competitive. Same for changes in price/effectiveness for Marveni and Man top tier mages, and the same for Kailasa as well.
--Giant SC cost increases are certainly because they were too effective against other nations, not because of internal nation dynamics (you will always recruit your best cap-only every turn if the option is available, so its not like increasing their cost causes you to consider buying something else if you can afford them).

Now, the rest of the changes are arguable either way, but by and large improved units belong to *weaker* nations, suggesting that between-nation balance was a motivating concern. If unit balance within a nation was the only concern, you'd see a more even distribution of improved units across nations regardless of power. If you really want I can do the statistics on it, but I guarantee the effect is highly significant.

So, to conclude, to pretend CBM 1.6 is not heavily invested in nation balance would suggest you haven't actually reviewed the changelog.

[Festin]

Are there any good reasons to _not_ increase the gem cost of Tartarian Gate? Because I fail to understand why this was not done a long time ago. It would be very nice to have some diversity in the endgame (which is the most boring part of a game as it is, in my opinion).

[Squirrelloid]

Originally Posted by Festin

Are there any good reasons to _not_ increase the gem cost of Tartarian Gate? Because I fail to understand why this was not done a long time ago. It would be very nice to have some diversity in the endgame (which is the most boring part of a game as it is, in my opinion).

I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, tarts are really good at 12d and 15n for the GoR. And I'd really like to see GoR at 5n so you can use it a little more frivolously without shooting yourself in the foot.

On the other hand, increasing their gem cost isn't going to do much to change the ideal endgame, because there are no options that compete with tarts in terms of performance. So all you do is raise the bar to be able to play the endgame, making Well of Misery even more essential to winning, etc...

Basically, tarts need a non-unique alternative that is competitively good in terms of performance. Preferably one that involves one of N,W,F to summon. This would make balancing tarts much easier, and diversify end-game strategies.

[Maerlande]

Tartarians are so cool that increasing the cost would be a coolness factor reduction.

QM is totally into coolness factor. It's really not hard to comprehend the changes in CBM if you use the coolness ration. For example, Jomon archers are uncool so they get nerfed. Androphag archers, while cool, are bugged so get nerfed.

Devala are cool so they get buffed. Armless dom spreading prophets for pearls are way cool.

Kydnides are cool so get cost reduction.

Dragon master is super coolio so gets cost reduction.

I don't know why you guys spend so much time debating QM's motivation. It's simple. It's the cool factor.

[Festin]

I am all for SC diversity, especially for the said paths. Unfortunately, there seem to be no suitable candidates for this role. Nature has some top-level summon which is never ever used. I think it is a dragon of some kind, so it is probably hopeless, since it does not have enough item slots to be a SC.

It would be interesting to see how a game would go if Tartarians were banned.

EDIT: Oh, and what actually is "Abomination"? I do not have Dominions here on the netbook with me, but I recall there is a high-level SW summon named like this.

[Trumanator]

Abominations are decent army killers, bad SCs. They are summoned as a unit, have only misc slots, and several life drain attacks plus gaze of death.

[Stavis_L]

Note that astral pearl income reduction has the side effect of reducing wished-for SC chassis units in play.

A list of SC units, aside from pretenders:

1) Tartarians, various flavors
2) Angels (wishable for all or summonable for some) - Chayot, Seraph, Grigori are definite SC, some others are high end thug/low end SC (iron, vengeance, fallen angels)
3) Giant nationals - Hinnom, Ashdod, Niefel, and to a lesser degree Fomoria, Gath, Yomi, possibly some more
4) Rudra, Mandaha, and Davana for Indian themed nations
5) Elemental royalty
6) Unique demons/devils
7) Golems
8) Wraith Lords
9) Tarrasque (nature dragon summon)
10) Iron dragon (earth construction summon)
11) Abomination (SW summon)
12) Eater of the Dead (SD summon)

Now, I've probably missed some, and obviously not all of these are of equivalent value - some of these are more borderline for "SC-ness", but it seems to me that reducing the ubiquity of Tartarians in the end-game would mean leveling the opportunity costs and/or effectiveness of some of these options relative to Tartarians.

This is a hard problem in that many of these are restricted to particular nations or require otherwise less useful paths to summon (vs. general utility of high Death), while any nation may use Tarts, and a high Death caster is always valuable. Also, if Tarts were overnerfed or eliminated entirely, it would cause a large shift in nation to nation balance- nations with easier access to the "unlimited" chassis options above would be effectively boosted (this is probably bad for e.g. Ashdod.)

I think that the main issue is that the game is designed for a smaller endgame (and probably smaller fields of players in general) than seems to be currently typical on these forums. If you have e.g. 3-4 nations left, the fact that the uniques are "used up" is less of an issue.

To that end, something that limited the number of Tartarians, or, taken the other way, removed limits on e.g. unique elementals, would be a way to see more variety. Not sure you could do the former, but the latter would probably be doable.

Wasn't someone (llamabeast??) working on an elemental thug/sc mod?