I've just completed an analysis on the costs of upgrading your ranged weapons on CB1 and on CB2. And I do believe Jon has made some changes to the damage costs formulas from CB1 to CB2 that greatly affect the balance of the game.
Note: If you don't feel like trying to pick through all of the following calculations and interpretations, feel free to stop now. It can be summarized
with "All ranged weapons besides the ELB will grow to stink far more quickly than they did in CB1."
Also Note: I'm not saying these formulas are how Jon calculates upgrade costs, I'm saying they closely approximate the costs.
The cost to upgrade the damage multiplier on ranged weapons one unit can be approximated with the formula:
$ = A*e^(B*x)
Where A and B are weapon dependent constants. And x is the damage multiplier you wish to upgrade.
In CB1 A varies from weapon to weapon while B remains nearly constant at ~0.575. In CB2 this is not the case; B also differs from
weapon to weapon. This causes the upgrade costs for weapons with larger values for B to skyrocket far more quickly than weapons with smaller
values. I've included a graph of the total NW cost to upgrade an ELB, Compound, Exbow and Composite in each game to illustrate my point. (Figures 1 and
The order is still the same. But notice how quickly the exbow costs rocket passed $1billion in NW, just in damage for CB2, while in CB1 the costs are
all relatively similar from weapon to weapon. An x100 ELB in CB2 is cheaper than an x25 ELB in CB1, but an x100 exbow in CB2 would run well over
So, what does this all mean? Basically, it means either Jon has to rework the damage cost formulas or everyone needs to use an ELB (or a compound if you
can't find an ELB). Unless, of course, you want to spend $100 million to get a measley x70 Xbow.
Questions? Concerns? A desire for more numbers and graphs?