I do remember some people on Desura contesting it, but I certainly don't remember any well-supported arguments discrediting it as an actually useful dataset.
I do. I also remember as much of the unreasonable discussion being in its favor as against it.
Hm. Maybe share some of those reasonable arguments then, because they've eluded either my initial notice or my memory. The closest I saw was that it was insufficiently rigorous for some scientific disciplines, but since it's good enough for ecology or sociology, which it most closely resembles, those complaints never seemed relevant to me.
On power creep, are we talking about the total available power in the game, or the subset of which actually sees play? In the former case, the changelog does support your statement since a lot of things are made cheaper or stronger, but in the latter case, I disagree. The strongest and most commonly used options are typically nerfed; the things receiving buffs are great in number but are typically not used without summod except in very rare instances or in single player and otherwise non-competitive environments. As such, the overall power level goes down.
There's not a lot of nerfing going on. There are a few narrowly targeted nerfs, sometimes coinciding with other buffs. There are a huge amount of buffs, to most everything. As with CBM, the balancing philosophy is "moar is MOAR"; overall powerlevel is fairly drastically increased rather than applying significant nerfs. It's a powergamer mod.
There are a lot of buffs to things that generally don't see a lot of play. Dominions has thousands of things in each general category, so it's understandable that this would include a lot of them. The nerfs are as narrowly targeted as the buffs, applying (generally) to single spells or single nations rather than entire strategies. Also, the notion of a powergamer mod doesn't even make sense in a multiplayer game. But if there was such a thing, it would be stripping away or ignoring the weaker options in favor of the strongest, so this is clearly not that.
Also, I'm not sure how the last sentence of the above-quoted paragraph is supposed to follow from everything before it. Weak (or perceived-as-weak) things get significantly boosted to the point that they're competitive enough to use against best-in-class things. The overall power level is unquestionably raised - however, if the things are now powerful enough to merit use in play with/against of the unnerfed or lightly-nerfed OP things, how is that in any way, shape, or form reducing the overall power level?
Are you actually looking at the changes? Ermor received massive nerfs. EA Xibaba received massive nerfs. Rain of Stones received massive nerfs. Frost Brand received massive nerfs. Growth scales received massive nerfs. What best-in-class things are you seeing which are nerfed only lightly or not at all.
If the mod is as well balanced and competitively used as you've argued, those buffed things aren't going to see use unless they're as good or better than the oft-used-in-vanilla OP things. So again, how is that reducing the overall power level? If I may strain the analogy you seem to be alluding to: you're not proposing dilution of the cauldron of content by "adding" thinner solutions; you're proposing a bigger pot with more solutions of roughly equal strength being added in addition to the strong solutions that were already there.
It's better balanced because things draw closer to the same level of power. That level of power may be higher than the median level in vanilla, but the strongest things are weaker and the weakest things are stronger. There's still a range, of course, but it's a smaller range than it used to be. And the higher median power may be an accurate assessment, but in actual play, the weakest options rarely saw use so the mean power level (if we count each nation's appearance in a game (or that of each spell or etc) as a separate datum) doesn't necessarily rise just because the median does, and as we see the options that are in most every game getting nerfed, the level can even fall.
Tuning for shorter games is a complicated claim, so I want to make sure I know what you mean here; what do you define as a shorter game vs. standard game length?
Blitz. summod grew out of direct-connect blitz meta. It may have moved on beyond that, but I'm skeptical, as it still has a huge raft of changes aimed at getting more stuff out with fewer mage-turns and less research.
Oh. Well that's just factually wrong. It comes from PBEM meta, and is based on other balance mods that also came from a PBEM meta. It came from an almost purely PBEM community, though sum1 intentionally broadened out to include other communities and collected tons of PBEM data. I don't know if he even accepted blitz data from the mod, I don't think he necessarily specified, but he was playing tons of PBEM (hell, he ran and won the first one on my AAR blog) and that's the meta he was from and developing for. Pretty much the only connection that blitz has to summod is that it's used to beta test, but that's more to do with bugs anyway since balance changes aren't going to come to the fore there.
Another note: looking over the current changelog last night, I have to say I'm seeing a lot more content changes than I expected to see. Some of it is dubious (Sharknado? Really?), and some of it is extremely involved (LA Pythium). This is, to be charitable, straining the notion of "just a balance mod".
Yeah, I don't care for the involved shit either and the sharknado reference is utterly retarded. I'm not saying there's nothing questionable in the mod (I already mentioned two other examples) but rather, that it's an improvement over vanilla if you're in a situation where balance matters. You're welcome to add your voice to mine in telling sum1won et al that those particular changes overstep what the mod should be, though I'll tell you now that he's of the opinion that involved additions are okay for nations that see almost no play in vanilla. I disagree with him on the specifics of this, but I do at least see his point.
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Topic: Dominions 4: Thrones of Ascension (Read 544262 times)