FrankTrollman wrote:shau wrote: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