Conceptual Balance Mod 0.91

[quantum_mechani]

v0.9

*Order scale income lessened, luck scale luck effect increased.

*Growth from growth scale increased.

*Pretenders ideal for blessing increased in cost. This was a hard change to commit to, since it makes such pretenders even less suited for roles other than blessing. However, that seems a necessary side effect to making blesses more expensive.

*Bows (shortbows, composite bows, longbows and crossbows) all slightly reduced range, and some increased in resource cost. This is not really enough to counteract their prevalence, but every bit counts.

*All cavalry given hoof attack, cavalry that already had it given warhorse hoof attack. This is bound to be a controversial change, due to it admittedly somewhat stretching realism. However, I see it as the lesser of several evils (such as useless light cavalry, or ridiculously cheap light cavalry) which strike me as even less realistic. More ideas on the issue are welcome, keeping in mind the limits of modding.

*Barding cost drastically reduced on all cavalry. Barding cost is another sticky balance vs realism issue, due to the fact it amounts to, in game terms, paying something for nothing. There doesn't seem a good way to mod in the benefit of barding, so instead I simply reduced the cost's impact.

*Some new factors in unit gold cost. Units wielding spears get a training cost discount. Units wielding a single one handed weapon and no shield get a training cost discount. Units with only leather armour given a discount (the idea being cheaper upkeep, but the way the game is set up that also means lower recruit cost). These are not necessarily universally applied, but then the old unit pricing wasn't exactly 100% consistent either.

*Independent commanders made poor leaders to encourage using national leaders. Independent scouts increased in price for the same reason.

*Some prominent sacred troops increased in price.

*Some primitive archers given a new crude shortbow weapon.

*Some site search spells and booster items more difficult to forge/cast, in order to improve magic diversity between nations. As it stands base game, it is not too hard by the time you have level 9 research in a school, to have dom2-like access to almost all paths.

*Many mediocre summon spells made cheaper.

*Falling frost/fires and similar spells got their range back in exchange for fatigue, and research cost.

*Other evocation spells moved in research and/or changed to allow more niches.

*Many rarely used globals made cheaper.

*No gem battlefield summons made more difficult to cast.

*Several blood battlefield spells improved.

*Treelords given increased magic.

*Many weak items made cheaper/easier to forge.

v0.91

*Marignon friar recruitment fixed

*Bladewind no longer costs a gem.

*Remote seach spells and earthpower/phoenix power have increased research/fatigue instead of path requirements.

*Cave of the pale ones allows recruitment of pale ones.

*Quickness (aoe) and numbness lower research.

[Nerfix]

Well, those changes look good. I'll check this out.

[Nerfix]

Well, the game crashed when I tried to create a new game with the mod enabled. Didn't even print out a stderr file. O_o

Tried a 2nd time and now it works, odd.

[KissBlade]

heh might I suggest asking a mod to merge this thread with the .90 one which has significantly more replies?

[Ighalli]

This looks really nice! I'm gonna start up a SP game this weekend to try it out.

[Ighalli]

Haruspex seems to be untouched. Was that intentional?

Because of the changes you made to raise skeletons, my casters tried to use raise dead and since there were no corpses, nothing happened. I think if you want to weaken the skelespam, you should leave the spell at death 2 and maybe lower the number of effects from 5 to 4. Making changes to the path screws up the battle AI.

[quantum_mechani]

Ighalli said:
Haruspex seems to be untouched. Was that intentional?

Because of the changes you made to raise skeletons, my casters tried to use raise dead and since there were no corpses, nothing happened. I think if you want to weaken the skelespam, you should leave the spell at death 2 and maybe lower the number of effects from 5 to 4. Making changes to the path screws up the battle AI.

Missing haruspex was a bug.

That's a good point about raise dead, as long as that bugginess remains a different solution is needed.

[Ighalli]

Crude shortbows don't display arrow animations, they just deal damage.

I've been testing more and I think it's more a problem with raise dead than raising the cost of skeletons. Even in the vanilla game, mages will cast it when there are no corpses to animate. Perhaps it should be removed until it's fixed.

[quantum_mechani]

Ighalli said:
Crude shortbows don't display arrow animations, they just deal damage.

I've been testing more and I think it's more a problem with raise dead than raising the cost of skeletons. Even in the vanilla game, mages will cast it when there are no corpses to animate. Perhaps it should be removed until it's fixed.

Ah, seems I forgot to set the arrow sprite for the bows.

I'll report the raise skeletons issue to illwinter, I think they heard it before but sometimes bugs get buried and forgotten.

Thanks for the testing and issue finding, this was the reason I released the early mod version in the first pace.

[Sheap]

* My first idea for fixing light cavalry is to find a new role for them that they aren't useless at. I think part of the problem is that cavalry don't really "work" in dominions like they did in reality, the mobility advantage is not used on the battlefield that much as the cavalry will stand and fight in melee like any other troop, the only benefit is that cavalry have a better chance to get to an interesting part of the fight before the bog down. Perhaps their defense value could be increased to reflect the difficulty of hitting troops who are supposedly riding around at high speed (sort of a counterpoint to the heavy cavalry's protection-oriented combat approach). I'd also consider a pillage bonus to reflect their raiding/harassing capabilities or stealth +0 to reflect their "armed recon" abilities. But, stealth might be too strong.

* I'm not sure of the gameplay benefit of making independent commanders poor leaders. This just increases micromanagement by forcing players to allocate commander production slots to national leaders and/or use more commanders just to haul troops from place to place. I don't see that troop shuttling is a good place to focus MM resources.

* Will the mod eventually tweak other gods besides those used for blesses? Some of them sort of need it.

* With SCs weaker, it's hard to come up with a good role for titan-style pretenders other than blesses.