Dominion of the Den

[Avoraciopoctules]

Perhaps so, but it's a rant I'd be interested in reading. Why else would I have asked? It should be obvious that that comment was designed to provoke such a rant... and, given that my existing ideas of Dom3 balance mostly come from lurking it's official forum (also full of CBM hype), I'd very much like to see an alternative perspective.

Have 3.

I am curious as to why Frank hates the Conceptual Balance mod so much, since it seems to be fairly well accepted in the Dominions community.

I am also hoping he responds to this in the form of a funny and scathing rant.

CBM is entrenched in the Dominions forum community largely by dint of the CBM people driving everyone else away. Thus, while they are a minority over all, they achieve total dominance over that particular forum. You can see something similar with group think in virtually any forum. Hell, there are a number of people who assume that you are using Tome rules during D&D discussions here.

But that's not why CBM is bad. CBM is bad because the number one problem of the game is that it has an incredibly steep learning curve. Every strategy in the game is emergent, produced by the interactions of a thousand different functions in the game. Every expenditure is a trade off with a hundred other choices, every choice is a branching affair that approaches the limits of what the human mind can even approximate. So when you make a change, you are making a lot of changes. Yes, Hama Dryads kind of suck ass, but if you make them better you're changing the relative utility of searching for nature sites, of spending nature gems on Vine Ogres, of saving up nature gems for Tarrasques, of investing research into Conjuration, of outfitting thugs in nature related gear like Rings of Regeneration, of having very powerful nature mages who would get a good return on Lamias, and so on. One change alters the utility function for many actions throughout the game. So if you make any change, you'd have to have a fucking good reason for it. Because the cost of changing anything is very large, the payoffs have to be very large as well.

Meanwhile, Quantum Mechanic is just an obsessive compulsive fiddler. His reasons for meddling with the numbers of this thing or that thing are more often than not that he simply can't stop himself from doing it. True story: his mod increased the resource multiplier of Productivity/Sloth scales. When the basic game got a patch that increased those modifiers, he changed his mod so that the gold multiplier was slightly higher. Because values he decided were sufficient for the Productivity/Sloth scales when they were a "mod" had to be changed as soon as they were "normal". In short, it is not about adding value, it's about adding changes. And for a game whose manual is several hundred pages written by an actual brain surgeon that is fucking hard to learn - change for the sake of change is fucking terrible.

Now let's get something straight: the actual Dominions programmers don't care all that much about balance. Yes, they nerfed the original overpowered Hinnom Province Defense, and bully for them. But they did write it in the first place. While you can win with MA Ulm or EA Maverni or even LA Pythium, those are very difficult tasks because a goodly number of factions are overpowered and/or suck monkey nuts. And it bears repeating that Kristoff seriously thinks that's OK. So I could totally see a mod that went in and smoothed some of that shit out. A mod that fixed some of the glaring weaknesses of MA Ulm for example, or even a more controversial mod that made Niefel Jarls cost more. That would make sense. But QM doesn't do any of that. In fact, he's not even interested in balance issues between factions. His self-proclaimed goal is that he wants to make all options for each faction be so good that he personally uses all of them. But that doesn't even make any god damn sense, because of the literally 865 spells in the game (before counting national summons of mod nations), the majority are situational. You're never going to script Arcane Bolt unless your enemy is cheesing you off with otherwise invulnerable golems or something. You aren't going to summon up a pile of Spirits unless you have a Cavalry charge you need to blunt. And so on. And the same is true of troops. Yes, Wolf Tribe Warriors blow, but if you're going to be casting Iron Bane and Strength of Giants anyway, they are actually pretty hard core. If my opponents have a lot of knights or giants, some neutral barbarians are a decent counter, but if they came in with a bunch of naked dudes with greatswords I would rather go with Lion Tribe Warriors (javelins and spears).

So the basic goal is not simply orthogonal to any worthwhile goal of making mods of the Dominions 3 game - it's actually detrimental. Seriously, the point of his fucking mod is to reduce the amount of skill required to play the game (by making all your options "the same") while the actual methodology is to take literally everything you know about how the game works and make it wrong. But even if you thought that was a good idea, he still goes about it in an incredibly shitty way. All he does is give essentially random boosts to stuff he doesn't use. He tripled the number of Bone Fiends you get from a casting at no increase in cost - which since they were already extremely competitive for a fucking Level 1 Blood Summoning makes them seriously competitive with shit like "competing for Heliophagi" that costs dozens of times as much and requires researching to level 8. For reasons unknown and completely unexplainable, he gives phat boosts to many options that are in fact already good. Some that are merely situationally useful, and others that are just plain good, that QM doesn't use just because he happens to not use them. No one has ever come up with a coherent explanation for why he thought that the Master Fucking Lich needed to cost less, for example.

Basically his mod is a perfect storm of making bad changes for bad reasons using bad methodology and having bad documentation. I have no doubt that there are people who are bad at the game who like it on exactly those grounds - that by nut kicking peoples' ability to know what the fuck is going on, it does level the playing field a bit. Except, it doesn't even do that, because interspersed with all the bullshit fiddling there are land mines of phenomenal cosmic power to be had. We're talking about shit like getting dozens of shade beasts or squads of bog beasts for a single casting sort of thing. Where you can literally overrun the world with fucking level 4 conjurations just by picking the ones where QM boosted them beyond the point of being merely inconvenient for experienced players, beyond the point of being merely overpowered, and straight into "Seriously guy, what the fucking hell were you thinking? Were you thinking? Is this a fucking typo? You fiddle with so many numbers I can't even tell any more."

Fundamentally, there are changes you could make that wouldn't hurt peoples' understanding of the game much. Adding extra national summons or giving boosts to genuinely shit pretenders that people really don't use, for example. It's not a problem if you make Vampire Queens a fuck tonne cheaper, because Vampire Queens suck ass and don't get used. But also because a Vampire Queen being passably useful doesn't change your Blue Dragon Bless Rush build at all. You don't have to play differently at all if you could have taken a Vampire Queen instead without feeling like a jackass. Further, there are changes you could make that would improve the game. Making shit factions like Ulm or Arcocephale in the middle era more competitive, for example. You could address Ulm's tragic army deficiency by making them a catapult unit that peppered the battlefield with large numbers of long range sling stones that would bounce off of Ulm Armor, or giving them access to some ability to make late game high end ritualists in Earth, Astral, and Fire.

But he doesn't do any of those things. Instead he makes Dark Vines cheaper. And then Jotunheim and Pangaea touch themselves.

-Username17

Why does he hate SC pretenders so much though?

QM hates SC pretenders because he only ever does two strategies. One is to get into a large multiplayer game and mad castle. The other is to play a one day blitz game. But the important thing is that the only meaningful playtesting he does on this shit is with the blitz games. And basically you can do whatever you want to the Master Druid (fuck, in his opus it is actually cheaper to buy an Earth Bless on one of those fuckers than on a Cyclops), you'd still rather have an early thug in a 4 player small map game that is going to be over by turn 25. So because no amount of boosting the pretenders who aren't focused on Blitz Play makes people want to use anything but the pretenders geared to Blitz Play during Blitz Play, he determines that the Blitz-focused pretenders are overpowered.

Basically it's exactly the same method of guess and check that leads him to believe that he needs to make Growth better / Death worse.

Between the selection bias and the very short sighted development cycle and wild overreaction of every fiddling number change, it all follows a rather depressing and stupidly predictable path. By CBM 1.8 he'll figure out that the high level summons have been totally left in the dust by all the improvements he made to the lower level summons. And then he'll respond, not by repealing his own bullshit, but by giving even more bonuses to the higher level stuff. By CBM 1.9, he'll note that actual heavy infantry are so ridiculously outclassed by 1 gem Bog Beasts and Scorpion Beasts that he'll improve basic weapons like Broadswords and Falchions (like he already did with the Pike). And so on.

The thing to understand is that the group he plays with (and the end game diversity guy plays with) is so bizarrely insular in its way that their group think is so strong that the changes it pushes aren't really about anything any more. The whole point of the changes is that supposedly everyone fights exclusively with Tartarians in every game that isn't over in the first 2 years. Seriously, that's their actual complaint. But you can totally fight Tartarians with Gargoyles or Legions of Wights or something backed up with some regular casters. Tartarians are very good, but there are already other options to use in the late game that work. A Legion of Wights backed up with Weapons of Sharpness and Fog Warriors will fucking tear a Tartarian pack apart. But they don't do those things, because the groupthink is very strong.

---

As for Name Changing, I got nothing against it.

Edit: Starting Provinces is always 1. That's not even a discussion.

-Username17

The basic problem with CBM is that he is incapable of telling the difference between something that is used frequently in his own circles and something that is overpowered. Or of telling the difference between something he rarely uses for stylistic reasons and something that is actually underpowered. That is why he decided to ban the fucking Dwarven Hammer, the Dousing Rod, and the Clam of Pearls - and also why he decided that Bone Fiends and Dark Vines needed to be several times cheaper. People always use foundational economy items of their national economies, so obviously they use those because they are over powered, and not because those are a basic part of the economy of the game. It's the same logic that might lead you to ban Holy Symbols, Iron Rations, and Military Saddles in D&D. Or to buff the Commoner class.

But that sort of thing is boringly predictable in CBM's slow descent into micromanagement and madness. The real gems of CBM 1.7 is based on the fact that everything that works in a way he didn't expect is assumed to be an exploit. Which is why he is nerfing Life After Death. I know you've probably never used Life After Death, because all it does is replace your fallen living soldiers with soulless for the duration of the battle. Not even soulless warriors, just regular meat shield soulless. It's... good for a Breath of Winter strategy or something because it takes that much longer to hack through your troops. But naked soulless aren't really capable of accomplishing military goals on their own. But it's being nerfed because... you could use it to turn your mages into soulless who don't cost upkeep. Never mind that you could do that way easier with much lower level magic making Wight Mages.

Or how about nerfing Jade Knives? Why? Because dominion rush strategies work at all? I mean, when was the last time you heard anyone say that Sauromatia was overpowered because of Dominion Rush? Maybe... never? That strategy isn't being nerfed because it's too good, or because it's used particularly often, but merely because it "feels cheap" when it works.

What it comes down to is that CBM has finally become a parody of itself. It never claimed to be about international balancing, it was always just supposed to be about making more different strategies "viable" within each particular nation. A silly goal, considering that the strategies that are viable are already heavily dependent upon the metagame you find yourself in, but whatever. Now that QM has finally gotten down to the brass tacks of eliminating strategies that displease him aesthetically, he has revealed CBM for what it always was: a complete fucking waste of time. It isn't about making more strategies valid, or he wouldn't be invalidating strategies (including frankly obscure strategies like Grip of Winter + Life After Death + Expensive Human Mages). It isn't about improving international balance, or he wouldn't be nerfing marginal nations like Eriu. Or buffing powerful nations like Niefelheim.

It's an incredible amount of work, and it is all wasted. All of it. You can't even fish out the good ideas from the bad because it's all jumbled together into a pile of spaghetti code that makes no sense. Every change is essentially random, so you'd actually be better off starting completely from scratch when making your own balance mod. Nothing is added to the game by changing Scorpion Beasts from being too expensive to use except in an emergency to being too cheap to bother using other things.

There is only one strategy left in CBM 1.7 - get Conjuration and/or Blood 3 or so, summon a bunch of low level stuff, and go on a fucking rampage. It's worse than being unbalanced and stupid - it's boring and stupid.

-Username17

[Rabelais]

That's pretty damn awesome Frank. I salute you.