Earlier quoted context omitted.
That code is a few lines maintaining a mapping though, changing it is not going to be hard and all the mappings are captured explicitly which makes it even more straightforward versus shaving off lines of code by making some of them implicit (e.g. by seeing a pattern in the mapping and using an if statement to capture them all). I'd really love to know what you think it should be to be more maintainable!
Something like this would pass a code review, while the original would not: function createObject(value, id, nominal) return { value = value, id = id, nominal = nominal } end local objects = { createObject(100, 1, "nominal1"), createObject(200, 2, "nominal2"), createObject(300, 3, "nominal3"), createObject(400, 4, "nominal4") } Still far from ideal, but I'm not that familiar with LUA either. And I do acknowledge that…
For starters its clear the code in the example expects self.base.value to already hold a value. So constructing an object blind isn't necessarily what's happening here, it's possible an existing object is even being decorated with extra fields. So your suggestion isn't preserving the semantics.
Secondly for the face cards there is an additional field being set which is not happening in your case.
That's what I mean when I said earlier that we can't just look at a piece of code contextless and say it's bad. Your refactor is definitely neater if we're initializing homogenous objects but that's an incorrect assumption on your part. It also comes with trade-offs for example it's not obvious anymore what any of the values relate to without going to the function constructing the object. Not the biggest thing in the world but if this is the only place in the codebase doing this then I'd argue that it probably isn't worth it.