Conceptual Balance Mod 1.9

After a few months of work, the Conceptual Balance Mod v1.9 is hereby released!

I have attached a link to the full changelog below, but here's the short version to give you an overview of what's been done.

- Huge review of items, with the intention of making every item have at least a niche use. Quite a few items recosted (generally downwards in view of the hammer change), others given boosts or even new effects in a few cases. Two-handed weapons are much better. Item descriptions have been updated - there should be no non-obvious changes.
- A PDF Forging Reference is included with the mod - this was a bit of a monster to create, but hopefully will prove useful. This may be worth printing out - I have tried to choose colours so that it will be comprehensible even in black and white. The reference is based on a previous document by Cleveland - thanks Cleveland!
- Boosts to a number of weak nations. EA & MA Agartha, MA Ulm, MA Man, EA Vanheim and EA Helheim in particular benefitted. Other nations to receive some changes include Marverni, Tir na n'Og and Eriu. Great effort has been put in to make the changes interesting and thematic. For example with MA Agartha the challenge was to increase the power of the nation while maintaining an overall theme of sorrow and loss. Hopefully this has been successful. These nations should have gained not only raw power but also diversity of choices.
- Full incorporation of Burnsaber's Underwater Gameplay Improvement Mod. Hopefully interactions between land and water nations should be much more interesting. The water nations also receive some new content. Playing Oceania or MA Atlantis should no longer feel so frustrating.
- "Unfun" spells, e.g. Burden of Time and Arcane Nexus, made harder to cast or more expensive
- Small scales tweaks - Production a little better, Order a little less good
- A large number of miscellaneous changes - see the full changelog for details. For example Storm Demons can no longer throw lightning underwater, Tartarians can be Gift of Reasoned again (via a new spell, Restore Soul), Tarrasques and Treelords are better, and some of the most powerful EDM summons got slightly more expensive.
- A lot of bug hunting and miscellaneous fixes.
- Thanks to quantum_mechani for comments and of course having done the huge majority of this mod, Sombre and kianduatha for contributing some code, Larz for his dom3editor which helped with bug hunting, and above all lots of you for the huge number of helpful comments I went through in preparing this update.

I really hope people enjoy this, it's been a lot of fun to create.

Comments are as always extremely welcome.

And finally, links to the full changelog and the mod itself.

Mistake in changelog.

Changelog says growth income effect was changed from 4% to 3%. It was changed from 3% to 2% instead.

I had similar problems trying to mod Man PD - could not get rid of the slingers.

Bug: Ulms Tower Shield troops have defenses in the mid 20s. The culprit being a shield parry of +21.

llamabeast, Thank you for your hard work and effort.
I'm reading through the change log and so far I'm quite impressed.
Thanks also for the heads up for YARG3. I'm now quite in favor of playing the game with 1.9 instead of 1.84. This will also be a good opportunity to test CBM in MP. Any comments I may have I'll PM to you directly since it's RAND.

Remember people, check the mod out and give feedback BEFORE starting games with 1.9

Any new mod will contain a few blinding bugs which can be sorted out quickly, but would be very annoying in a game. So let's find them first.

Tnx, for the hard work.

I'm certainly gonna enjoy this.

One thing, Argartha's spell Army of Statues has no description.

the great enchantress and the vamp queen got beautiful!

The Memory of the Ancients second form has 3 base fatigue rather than 0, which is probably a bug.

Ahh, Polypal spawn are sacred? They didn't use to be.

Star of Thralldom puts out ridiculous aoe 12 False Fetters

One of the component spells to Army of Statues, Paralyze Statues, is over in Thaum-3. Probably shouldn't be there.

Pale One netters at least in EA don't have the stat increases of the other Pale Ones.

Polypal spawn being sacred is probably a bug from my code. Not sure how I missed it.

1.91 released! Motivated mainly by the Ulmish Tower Shield bug.

v1.91 fixes the following bugs:
- Ulmish Tower Shields were obscenely good (I had been using them for tests of spells which were stopped by shields)
- Army of Statues had no description
- An erroneous spell "Paralyze Statues" was visible
- Curse of Blood still costs 66 slaves, was meant to be changed to 99
- Medallion of Vengeance used the bearer's strength to determine damage
- EA Agarthan netters had wrong stats

In addition a couple of design changes:
- Polypal Spawn no longer sacred. An earlier CBM had made them sacred but that no longer seems good with them being amphibious.
- Fay Boars have reduced rather than zero upkeep.
- Locus of the Seal has misc slots only.

Nooooo, well, for a couple of hours, even Ulm was imba

Prod. scales is now more akin to an extension of Order scale. Taking sloth, even for nations that could, would or should take it is now less worth it.
Full order vs. full turmoil will give 36% income bonus.
Full prod. vs. full sloth will give 24% income bonus.
Basically income from order is 6% per tick, from prod. 4% per tick. They are very close . Too close for proper differentiation.

Sloth 3 less worth it also means bless strats. are somewhat less worth it as well.

Perhaps order should be 7% per tick?

I agree that it is a pity that they have become more similar in terms of income bonus, I would have liked to avoid that.

However I am optimistic that the new settings make for more difficult/interesting choices. Generally order was a better choice than prod before, with only rare exceptions.

The two remain very different in terms of their other effects of course - order in reducing random events, and prod in giving resources.

It might be a good idea in the next version to move around the weapon numbers of Hamstring and the new Bite, maybe to 917 and 918 so that CBM's weapon numbers are more congruous. Right now they're in 975 and 976, which is out of the way for now so it's nothing pressing or anything.