Game balance

[Hadriex]

Minerals: I prefer variety over balance myself. If you get a game with adamant, well then you get a game with adamant.

Dwarves: I haven't played much with dwarves so i can't comment on them much. I find their slow movement very offputting. Being slow to move around the map is much to cumbersome.

Armorer's guild: I've mentioned this before, but i view the game as divided between 'tall' and 'wide' races. High men are a tell race. They take a long time to build up, but get some of the strongest units in the game. Lizardmen are a wide race. They don't build up very far. But they get strong units early and conquer as much territory as possible before the tall races get their superior units.

You could argue that this has been somewhat undermined as neutral cities are far rarer, making it difficult for wide races to find cities. But since their are still lairs to raid I think it's still viable. If you throw a wrench into the wide races ability to produce deadly units super early, then you'll have to give them something back. Perhaps cheap settlers, or some other way of implementing their strategy.

Retorts: You feel these two together are OP? Well then make them exclusive. So long as taking just one is good enough i'm fine with it.

[Nelphine]

On warlord and tactician - they're both practically mandatory for a hero strategy. I'd be fine with making them mutually exclusive for non heroes, but they must both be available for hero strategies.

So I'm completely against making them exclusive.


@catwalk:
Agreed, ish.

Things like magic immunity, that we can't teach the AI how to deal with in overland capacity, simply due to space restrictions of a very old game, I don't think we could balance. 

Things like overall unit balance, including dwarf resistance, rushing armorers guild, and early life buffing, we 'could' balance, but that's a huge amount of work that would basically require us to throw out all the balancing that has been done to date. In this case, the 'fun' impact is also on Seravy, because he put the initial work into all the current balancing, and this would require changing practically all of it (even if what is already done would provide a baseline, and the majority of details wouldn't change.)

[Nelphine]

@hadriex: HII! you should post more often! And I agree with on wide vs tall.

I don't think most armorer's guild units are an issue - except with common life buffs. But those are required for mono life AI play. Its much more intricate than just armorer's guild, and I don't think we should restrict wide races too much.

[Seravy]

@Hadriex
Dwarves aren't slow anymore, they get the 2 movement anyone else does currently.

Tall vs wide is actually a pretty good perspective to define the problem on Armorer's Guild.
The problem is, to go "tall" you only need two steps : build a Fighter's Guild and build an Armorer's Guild, and you have the top tier unit in the race. That's not very "tall" at all, compared to the original game where this meant 5 buildings. Meanwhile early production availability is higher than original, so not only do you need less, but get it done quicker.
In other words, you can go tall and have your mid/endgame unit on turn 20 when no one can hope to compete with that. Which is not how that should work. (Or maybe I'm wrong on this? How does going tall works in other games? I'm under the impression you have to research a ton of stuff first to get better units, but in MoM that's not the case.)
As Fighter's Guild is pretty much the standard level for producing units aside from the very earliest turns, there isn't much room on making that harder to reach. Which means it's literally only the armorer's guild where we can do anything. (and it's twin sister, the Fantastic Stable, ofc)

Basically where this whole discussion originates from is, if you produce a single armorer's guild unit of almost any type, put 2-3 buffs on it (Life spells, or Adamant, or warlord/tactician, you don't even need them all), then you can ram that unit into a capital by itself and beat whatever is inside. And you can do it so far that this wins on the highest difficulty - remember your Impossible game with Doom Drakes? Testing shows you can do that with pretty much any unit in the game as long as it has decent resistance, hit points and armor. Fighter's Guild and below units don't have that (except for 3 specific cases which have been dealt with though various small tweaks to stats) but almost every AG unit does and is meant to do. This sort of playing is guaranteed to beat up to Expert, maybe even Master or Lunatic which I haven't tested - the game should be balanced at medium difficulty first and foremost.

Fortunately, in MoM, the true late game units are all the summons - top tier normal units are still only "midgame". But even with that, they are too much for turn 20-50.

The main problem is, Arm.G units are way too overpowered for the early turns and the AG is underpriced compared to that...but once the game progresses to everyone having some at least fighter's guild units and uncommon spells, they are no longer a big step up and are worth as much as the AG costs as is. However any sort of restriction on AG based on turn count or equivalent, is artificial and triggers the below problem :

Game balance (almost) never needs to stand in the way of fun.

This is very much dependent on the player. Some people don't mind intrusive game mechanics that make no sense and just tell you "Don't do X because it's not balanced". Other people are annoyed by that and avoid those games like plague and I'm closer to this group than the former - I find balance important but I consider "overdoing" balance the worst, lack of balance the second worst possible.

[Domon]

i'm for 2. i see this game as much as a roguelike or something akin to dwarf fortress: i want it to be unpredictable and not really fair, and i can have fun with it even in losing.

[Nelphine]

If I was forced to pick, I would side with domon. I'm currently playing on easy difficulty against one opponent - obviously completely unbalanced - and I'm having a blast dungeon crawling with heroes.

[zitro1987]

The worst aspects of balancing are probably the Civilization 4-5 games. For its theme of advancing through the eras, updates generally don't feel powerful and even the wonders feel like just building an animist guild. No matter what major choice you make defining your civilization, it doesn't seem to punish you or reward you much, feeling very similar.

The best aspects of balancing I may have seen is Master of Orion 2 with 'Very Difficult Choice' mod,  with choices of amazing tech advances but you can't have them all, and a wide variety of useful 'retorts'. The game advances fast and feels 'powerful' with the mod while granting countless different options.

Caster of Magic 5.02 is about 75% towards the Master of Orion 2 'Very Difficult Choice' theme due to its amazing flexibility and 'powerful' feel and 25% with the batsh*t crazy 'forget balance, let's have fun' theme of the original Master of Magic. I think where it struggles the most is the early game. While most wizards and races have stuff at their disposal, there's certain crazy advantages that can be used to steamroll to a winning trend:
*Armor is extremely important in early game because of the unbalanced aspect that nearly all early units are very multi-figured and thus armor beats them. That's generally ok until we get to a couple of problems.

*Assuming endurance stays, it needs less access to early high-armor non-hero units and I find 'holy armor' in same realm and common compounds the problem. We should not have any base unit statistics of 6+ armor without armorer's guild / fantastic stables  unless there's a major weakness somewhere (klackon halberdier can have its armor bypassed). So far, it's clear golem is the biggest example because it combines extreme armor with magic immunity, which is why I recommend just 5 armor (even if hp is increased)

*I think dispel magic is such a basic game spell that maybe all players (or AI in high difficulties) should start with it. If a player goes full buff-stacking, the benefit is already there (lairs/nodes) and the AI should have the option to attempt to remove them, which is not easy if playing with 'specialist'.

*Stuff like draconian bowmen or other early flying ranged, though they have been nerfed recently.

*Adamantium early on can change the tide of the game. Playing life and seeing a nearby adamantium, rushing 2 settlers and placing them both to use adamantium, allowing a bunch of beastmen bowmen, followed by centaurs while rushing 'prayer' helped me defeat both myrran wizards (not a very high difficulty however). 
- Maybe adamantium could be +1 armor, +1 range, +3 melee.

*A few others, tho they involve multi-color realms (life buffs + resist magic + spell lock), focus-magic cockactrices, and some other really powerful tactics against lairs and/or wizards.

[Seravy]

Retorts: You feel these two together are OP? Well then make them exclusive. So long as taking just one is good enough i'm fine with it.

I think it's not OP but definitely far above average. I do think being able to pick both is bad for the variety in the game though as picking both is the trivial better choice in almost every case.

I'm actually unsure how to interpret your opinion on the armorer's guilds but I think it's a "don't nerf"?

The worst aspects of balancing are probably the Civilization 4-5 games. For its theme of advancing through the eras, updates generally don't feel powerful

Exactly! This is what has been driving me away from the Civ 4 realism mod. The game was literally telling me I control too much population and am about to win the game every turn. Whenever I wanted to do anything, I ran into walls. Use clams? No, work boats cannot explore - I wasn't allowed to even leave port with my ship. Use gems? No, you need water pump to clear the jungle there first - it's just some 50 more techs away (mining is the first tech in the game). Growth in capital? No sir, your pop 6 city is now overpopulated and unhappy so they refuse to work, who cares if there are 20 tiles available to live on? Build settlers to expand and grow that way? Forget it, settlers cost 600 hammers and while you build them your city stops growing to balance it...AND you have to pay exponential upkeep on your cities even if they are only pop 1 hamlets...
You want horsebowmen because that's your nations special and powerful unit? Erh too bad you need horses for that and your continent doesn't have any....but you can't leave it until the late game because old ships can't sail on the ocean.
Oh cool you researched courthouses, you can build one in 30 turns and it reduces your city upkeep by 0.53 gold! But here is the weaver's shop, it produces 1 gold and only 20 turns! Isn't it amazing? But to make sure you don't get carried away, you can have only 3 of these in the entire game. A world wonder? 100 turns just for you because you're so advanced, and once complete it'll produce you...well...2 science extra. erh what do you mean that's not worth it? But that's a wold wonder, it's amazing, and you even get extra culture with that! 6 a turn! Yes, sure, you need 4.8 million for a culture victory but 6 is still amazing!
Then I look at my empire after 6 hours of playing and cry inside...
"I'm about to win with this? 5 cities out of which the largest is pop 6? These 12 people are really 45% of the world's entire population? You're kidding, right? I'm struggling to stay alive against barbarians and they ruin all my farms... Hits retire....oh I was 3 times as powerful as the second best guy. Of course, I found 2 settlers in "treasure" and no one can produce any at a reasonable rate. Of course I'm 3 times as powerful, there is no way to make up for that difference in the game at all!"



So yeah civ 4 was an awful experience and restricting armorer's guilds would definitely fall into this kind of balance. Minerals and retorts are safer to restrict and take away less of the fun if done moderately.


PS : going to keep track of everyone's votes on each individual issue in the first post, let me know if I made a mistake in that.

[Nelphine]

I'm a big no for warlord tactician exclusivenesd. Too important for hero strategies to have both.

(For my own play, or any strategy based around troops, where I don't use heroes, I'd be fine with them being exclusive.)

[zitro1987]

Can tactician then be even more hero-oriented but lose the +1 armor? Besides giving heroes +2 armor/attack/resistance, it can also give +1 movement and/or +4hp and/or more caster points and/or 'super' abilities being 2X instead of 1.5X and/or heroes having 1 more random ability and/or +1 to hit

I'm not overly concerned with armorer's guild. After all the resources you spend to get there, the units that come out of it are not THAT powerful without war college, generally don't fly, and are resource-intensive given one costs in average what a settler would cost, or a mechanician guild, or a university, or some other useful building. If you use the resources towards magic (especially if alchemy), you could be sending stacks of giant spiders, chimera, werewolves, etc. instead.