Game:

Caster (2009)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 1:08:46

184 views

6

I knew it had to happen at some point - it does with every game I've ever played with a "rebalancing" mod... and the reason why I normally hate playing them.

Rebalancing mods try to take an unbalanced game and make things balanced. It is an admirable attempt at making the game feel fresh and remove a lot of the pressure toward going after one or two particular strategies to win.

Rebalancing mods in reality typically are focused on what the creators of the mod view as the "unbalanced" thing and balance it more in the favor of the type of game they play, not taking into account the idea that multiple strategies currently exist. The end result being that games become focused in whatever area the devs saw as the "normal" game and killing off a huge number of other ways to play, putting *more* pressure on the players to use one or two particular strategies to win.

Case in point, Caster of Magic. By fixing the AI's priorities to match that of what the devs viewed as the "best" case, the game has turned into a Civ2-style ICS (Infinite City Sprawl) type of game where the AI will slam a settlement anywhere where one can theoretically fit as fast as possible, as that's what the devs viewed as the most optimal play strategy. This is what broke my first and second run.

Or this run (which isn't ended, don't worry). One of the things the devs of CoM focused on was rebalancing how summoning and movement worked. They removed the Recall Hero spell (which teleports a hero to a summoning circle) in order to emphasize units needing mobility and nerfed roads to hell and back to make units slow. They instead made moving a summoning circle free to point people more toward summoning defenses in the nick of time instead of moving defenses around.

In Civ2/SMAC parlance, that's "buy defenders" instead of "move defenders where the action is". On top of that, AI behavior has been tweaked to swarm all of your cities at once, further destroying the idea of having a limited but strong military over having massive stacks of weaker forces everywhere. The latter of which I don't find fun in Master of Magic (strangely enough, that's my primary strategy in SMAC or Civ2).

Rebalancing inherently breaks the game for some people. This isn't how I'd rebalance the game, but I'm not going to pretend I would be any better; I'd probably break it for a lot of other people in other ways (probably by nerfing the snot out of Torin and ranged attack heroes). Unfortunately, this type of thing tends to annoy me a great deal, so this video is very ranty.

This is the last ranty video of my third run at least, so there's that.

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