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

[Fantomen]

You guys are so ****ing anal.

[Adept]

Originally Posted by Foodstamp

Adept,

The main thing to remember is that these people wouldn't be so passionate about critiquing your mod unless they intended to use it as a substitute for CBM.

Ah, I guess that makes sense. Sorry, I react quite poorly to poinlessly confrontational stuff.

For what it's worth I'm starting to see that putting the word balance in the name really did confuse people.

I was thinking about different things than balance between nations.

Adept's tweak Mod? Adept's consistensy mod?

The point was to fix things that have annoyed me and my friends over the years.

The biggest change in gameplay is getting rid of non-site gem production and forging discounts. What discounts remain (from special units and pretenders) will be non stackable, and hence not an issue.

I find the gem economy to be a very interesting and important part of Dominions, and the stackable fraction based (percentage) discounts as a disruption. I could write a long essey on the game theory of this, but I bet it would quickly move to TLR territory

So basically if you want to try what the game is like with those things removed, try the mod. If that doesn't interest you, you probably won't enjoy it.

I'm eager to hear from those who do choose to try it, and I'll report on what my own Dominions group things about it after our next game.

[Adept]

Originally Posted by Soyweiser

And did you just tell me to test out more mechanics? While you didn't even think that it might be a bit overpowered to have fear on 20 gold units?

I was still testing that. It was an attempt to get some personality into Jomon. The point about why it was unbalancing was well made (I would have noticed it too, I had just forgotten that fear auras stack), so I removed it. It was exactly the sort of feedback I was looking for.

And I played around with skrattir to know that without handslots their usage will be severely limited. So much that any usage of them in this form against non pd is a waste. No need to test that in MP. As I have never really fielded skrattir without weapons in MP.

Well of course you wouldn't as they previously only had 2 natural attacks. Using them without gear would have been folly of the worst sort. With their built in quickness giving them _any_ two weapons raises their attacks from 4 to 6.

Ps: one thing that must be said, kudos for modding all the different weapons everywhere. What a horrible task to do. And it doesn't even matter that much ingame. I would have given up, the time cost vs the effect would be way to small for me .

Yes, it's the reason it took months >.<

Like many things in the mod, it's partly an aesthetic change. Still, I think you'll find it makes all those glaive and poleaxe armed troops a somewhat better deal. Polearms should stand up well to cavalry, and they really are better at it now.

I rather like the naginata armed samurai, but that may be just me being stubborn ^.^

[Jiggymike]

Doesn't CBM already fix the whole 'gem economy' problem by removing generators? I do like the ideas of long weapons being more effective against mounted troops, but I was sort of under the impression that they already had an innate bonus against them. Like I thought that I read "all pikemen get a bonus against mounted units" but that may have been from a different game. Maybe I just got that idea because cavalry tend to have short weapons and therefore longer weapons like spears and pikes are more effective at repelling their attacks.

[Doo]

Chill to some Strawberry Alarm Clock

Always good to see people tweaking games the way they see fit. Personally I'd like to see a buff to Phantasmal Wolves.

[Adept]

Originally Posted by Jiggymike

I thought that I read "all pikemen get a bonus against mounted units" but that may have been from a different game. Maybe I just got that idea because cavalry tend to have short weapons and therefore longer weapons like spears and pikes are more effective at repelling their attacks.

Pikes don't have any hidden perks in Dominions. Their advantage over cavalry is their long reach, which means they get repel checks vs. everybody. Unfortunately at least the top level cavalry (knights, royal guard...) have such high morale that they press their attacks anyway, just taking the occasional 1 point hit from the repel check.

Glaives had very high damage (10), but -1 to both attack and defence. This mod brings the damage down to a still respectable 8 and makes them attack 0, defence +1 weapons in handiness.

[rdonj]

Making glaives and other two handed weapons do less damage is not necessarily a good thing. It's already very hard to get troops that do enough damage to beat the highest protection recruitable units. For example a 20 protection heavy cavalry with a shield is nearly impervious to a glaive troop. It can only be defeated by bizarre DRN rolls and criticals from fatigue. If these are fatigue neutral sacreds with 20+ protection, it will take a LOT of glaive wielders to kill one. Two handed weapons barely did enough damage in dominions as it was. I have a very hard time imagining using them in your mod unless I absolutely had nothing else worth recruiting.

[elmokki]

I haven't read this thread in a while and now I read it as a whole.

The critique about the weapon changes is that it doesn't really do anything meaningfully beneficial to the game unless you happen to get gratification out of percieved weapon realism. Weapon balance when comparing weapons between each other matters in situations where you choose a weapon for a troop and don't touch anything else. Now the thing here is that in dominions those choices aren't available for many nations and often when they are it's not a ceteris paribus situation.

When you blanket change weapons without looking at units themselves you open Pandora's box: there's no telling how exactly it changes nation balance without going through a lot of stuff. For example Marverni has currently rather viable situation dependant choice between Ambibate and Carnute noble warriors. First wields a broad sword and second an axe. Buffing axe might shift people's focus towards carnute nobles enough to monopolize them more.

Simply said, Dominions is a game where you should compare balance between nations, not balance between units or weapons. Sure, MA Arcoscephale Hoplite (11g, 30res) is considerably less desireable than MA Ulm Black Plate Infantry (11g, 36res), but then again what magic does Ulm have available and what magic does Arcoscephale have available? Same goes for weapons. Sure, a mace is generally not considered worth it compared to a sword of any kind, but usually mace is added to an unit to make it worse so that the nation as a whole hits the level of balance it's wanted to hit.

What I'm saying is that you have in my opinion totally wrong design philosophy. A philosophy which would suit more for a game like Mount & Blade or a clone version of Dom3 where you actually design your units by yourself.

Now, those japanese weapons are only used by Jomon/Yomi/Shinuyama and their summons and I consider balancing those nations by slightly modifying weapon stats viable, but you'd still have to be careful since as far as I know Yomi and Shinuyama aren't as underpowered as Jomon. The direction of the balance should consider balance between nations and not balance between weapons though: weakening japanese stuff just makes a bad nation worse.

EDIT: I also agree that 2h weapons should actually be fairly powerful in terms of damage, possibly even slightly more powerful than they are in any mod that touches them that I've seen.

[Adept]

I like consistency elmokki. I seriously doubt anything will be thrown to disarray with this. I will really _like_ it if axe armed troops are actually worth something now. Same goes for the poleaxe armed troops of Ulm.

As for overall balance I can comment on that much better after the next (few) multiplayer games.

I still don't know if I should change the name of the mod, or if I do, what should I call it. Damnations.

[Adept]

Btw elmokki, I don't quite understand your example. Are you saying you think things are better so that axes are useless and Marverni only stick to sword armed troops?