Shatner wrote:If a Dominions 4 CBM were to arise (and it will, in time), what process should it follow/what form should it take to be the Carefully Balanced Mod? By way of an example, could you walk us through how you would balance Clams?
Clams are an extreme example because they affect something extremely fundamental. They are a method by which you convert (mostly Water) gems now into Astral Pearls later. Fiddling with the cost doesn't really change the fundamental equation that much, in that in a long enough game a Clam will always "pay off" and in a short enough game it will always be a shitty deal. Many of the big Astral powers are either lurker powers (Atlantis) or have lots of things they need to do with Astral gems in the late game (Bandar Log) or both (R'lyeh).
So first of all, you'd want to draw up several game "styles" to test your ideas in. You don't really need to do anything in Rush games, because it's already trivially obvious that Clams are already a pointless waste of time in them. It is in no way worth a hammer turn to realize a one gem profit in 15 turns in a game that is going to be over before the end of year three. But you're going to want to look at games that we'll call "short", "medium", and "long". You're also going to want to
consider the truly "epic" games like Mega Age games, where it is essentially inconceivable to put
any price on a gem producer that would not turn a profit eventually (to the point that people are already looking into Sea King's Courts as a way to
make gems) - but that's a special case.
Now we consider our balance targets. Certainly one available balance point is to remove clams altogether, at which point your new task is to show that all the Clam reliant factions still work. Another balance point is to change the cost so that they took longer or less long to break even on clamming. Another available option is to change the research level that Clams appear at, making it so that while it wouldn't take any more time for a clam to break even, you wouldn't be offered the option until later in the game. More complicated balance points, such as making absolute clam limits per faction or providing clams for other gem types are beyond the limits of Dominions 3, but they may not be in Dominions 4. But for now, we'll consider just the Dominions 3 options of cost and research requirement.
As a simple matter of arithmetic, any clams which have a combined time to research plus time to make back investment that adds up to more than the expected number of turns simply doesn't exist in games of that expected length. So for any game duration short enough for that to be true, you'd have to show that Bandar Log and Rlyeh are working (or at least working well enough to fit into your design goals).
For games which are still long enough for clams to at some point "pay off", you'd want to run parallel strategies. Clamming doesn't just have an investment time and payoff period, it has opportunity cost. Rushing to Construction 2 isn't
that big of a deal, and you probably want to get your grubby mits on a hammer in any case, but even so 100 research points could have gotten you from Evocation 2 to 3 and gotten you Acid Bolt and Fireball. And if we're talking about getting to 4 or 6 in Construction, we're now talking about being able to get some real power from other research paths. And of course, spending gems
now may be more valuable than spending them later if you can use them to bash heads in. Spending Water and Nature Gems on Clams must at the very least be compared to summoning up Naiad Warriors and Bog Beasts to simply go out and take provinces along with whatever gem generating sites they have. If a province's sites generate 3 gems a turn, then if you spent less than 33 Water Gems and 9 Nature Gems to take it, you're ahead of the clamming.
So that's what I'd be looking at. You'd make your proposed play dynamic, you'd test the relevant nations in the types of games that you had soft- or hard-banned clams in. And you'd test the relevant nations in the types of games where clams were still going to pay off eventually. And you'd compare those nations to strategically to simply spending Water and Nature gems
as water and nature gems to raise armies or outfit thugs or power battle casters and go out and carve a physically larger economy from the world.
And yeah, before you've done that, I can't really take your clam "fix" seriously as more than "some dude's random proposed change backed up by navel gazing".
-Username17