If you tighten every weapon, we would get around 20 blades with such a little difference in handling that it doesnt matter at all which sword you use.. and thats not a good feature in a RPG.
Which is why that is not what I did. To explain again, I gave the worst swords, the min level 1 guys, about a +4 to damage, and the lowish to mid, about a +2. Since the worst swords are only on the player's radar for a brief moment, this mainly had the effect of still allowing the AI to equip the worst swords sometimes (which is critical part of the balancing system for AI armor), while preserving all the old progression for the player and interesting tradeoffs between swords.
I already responded to the blade differentiation and reward sword argument above, to quote: "Tradeoffs are just as present among kinds of blades by the balance between their piercing/block/damage stats--indeed, keeping damage in a tighter range between best and worst tiers won't limit tradeoffs among different kinds of swords within a given tier at all. The range between best and worst weapon tiers is just a matter of better/worse, not tradeoffs. And reward blades can fully offer valuable improvement within a more moderate range."
Your post reads as if there were no interesting weapon selection or blade progression in POTC before. There was. That isn't a new idea. There are blades with more damage, more piercing, more block, or less of these, all different types of blades for the player with all diferent balances among them to select depending on style.
Your post also reads as if in POTC blades of a certain style didn't behave consistently. That isn't true either. I spent enough time studying the stats of cutlases, rapiers, straight swords, sabres, etc, to know that the previous balance and stats on swords were well thought-out and thematic. With only a very few exceptions, like the Kilij, were they not what they should be, and I corrected the very few ones I could find.
Seriously, take the base mod sword stats, find the swords for s given tier with a block stat relatively low compared to others of similar min level, and look them up on wikipedia. You will find they lack a hilt guard usually, or otherwise aren't as defensive. Block stats still go up as tier goes up, so the highest tier swords have a reasonable block stat regardless, but definitally low for their tier to reflect sword style.
So the original balance already had well-designed thematic swords, with plenty of variety. This isn't a new invention just now being discovered and discussed. Past modders understood this.
Which is why I didn't mess with it except very conservatively and moderately. By only really changing the lowest level to mid blades, and only very moderately, and basically not touching the mid to highblades (except where I improved balance for a specific sword needing it, like the Kilij), I entirely preserved the existing balance, with all the interesting blade selection of different syles of sword, and all the previous progression.
Basically,the mod already well designed swords that generally reflected their style, and offered interesting choices, and so I entirely preserved that.
I am very much against throwing out all that past work and wisdom of past modders and trying to achieve an entirely new sword system with a complete overhaul.
At the same time, my very limited changes to tighten weapon tiers (again, only at the low end and progressively decreasing to 0 as it reaches mid, leaving high end swords alone, and preserving all the wonderful balance and variety), is NEEDED as an essential part of the current experiments. It explores the idea I discussed with Pieter above, and also, even more pressing, it is an essential part of the expanded weapon selection for AI and balancing the addition of AI armor.
I do NOT think it makes sense to unbalance a carefully designed system when it is critical to testing the new balance of multiple other experiments--AI armor and expanded weapon selection deserve to be tested in an enviorment in which they were carefully balanced and tweaked and tested over weeks of preperation, not something entirely new!
Consider this my final plea to avoid scrapping my experiments before they have even been tried. But all the things I said before apply--I carefully tightened weapon tiers to achieve a thoroughly tested balance with the expanded weapon selection and AI equips armor mods, and I don't think it is fair to throw that immediately out in favor of a different (and far more dramatic) experiment going in the entirely opposite direction.
There is enough modding work to be done here that we don't all have to experiment with the exact same files at the exact same time, no? Because I think mine should be tried out before being entirely replaced with something entirely different. I am all for people tweaking my experimental rebalance within its own principles, but entirely and immediately reverting my tightened weapon tiers with a new "vastly increased weapon differences" mod doesn't seem right, before we've had any chance to see how it works. Especially since the moderate and limited nature in which I've done the experiment preserves the previous variety and general sword balance, and is needed to balance some very interesting other experimental systems that would become unabalanced otherwise (AI armor and expanded weapon selection). And I do not find pursuasive claims that somehow the new complet overhaul would automatically be bakanced, especially when it was designed under version 4.0, without my AI armor system or the expanded weapon variety, and under personal modifications of Pillat that include drastic modifications to the way HP works for AI. That just isn't a recipe for balancing something for general use.
There really is enough work for modders in POTC that we don't have to immediatelly come in and create conflicting experiments that replace other modder's hard work before it has even been tried. That just doesn't seem fair.
I feel like I'm talking in circles, repeating the same pleas over and over. So this time it either works or it doesn't, if the above (especially the last paragraph) aren't convincing, then oh well, I give up and will just consider it wasted time and move along. Throw out my experiment or not, this will be the last of my pleas.
