Tides of War, a balance mod

[SevenSpirits]

Also, I am Christine Golden.

[Krill]

TBH I'm unsure of the effect for making Agri and Hunting cheap; I think that on certain settings you still have to start with one of them because otherwise you can't reach AH in time to hook the food res, so there is still that distorting effect on the tech valuation.

[Ichabod]

I agree on taking the circumnavigation bonus away, too unfair.

I think a PBEM is in order to test this. I'd play, if everyone else agrees on a Holiday pause.

I'd play Tokugawa!

[Catwalk]

How do you feel about war weariness mechanics? SoZ is often banned as an unfun wonder to play against. Also, war weariness gives a lot of "spite power" to players who have already lost the game but want to get back at whoever took them out of the running. Do you see that as a good thing or a bad thing?

[plako]

I like the package. It could be even more minimalistic and naturally more puffy, but it certainly is more balanced than original and gives also some new feats to try out so I wouldn't mind playing a game with it. Are you planning to include also bug fixes to this?

Concerning Espionage I would suggest mostly the approach of RBmod:
* Remove civic/religion switch missions
* Double the price of other missions (You could also use some effort to fine tune it more, but this is the simplest way)
* Remove counter-espionage mission
* Remove discounts based on religion (other discounts are ok e.g. the one based on OB is good since you can easily affect on it)

[Krill]

I like the package. It could be even more minimalistic and naturally more puffy, but it certainly is more balanced than original and gives also some new feats to try out so I wouldn't mind playing a game with it. Are you planning to include also bug fixes to this?

Concerning Espionage I would suggest mostly the approach of RBmod:
* Remove civic/religion switch missions
* Double the price of other missions (You could also use some effort to fine tune it more, but this is the simplest way)
* Remove counter-espionage mission
* Remove discounts based on religion (other discounts are ok e.g. the one based on OB is good since you can actively affect on it)

No active missions, so no tech stealing, no revolting civics, religion, cities...nothing to worry about.

AP reassigning cities still exists though.

[SevenSpirits]

TBH I'm unsure of the effect for making Agri and Hunting cheap; I think that on certain settings you still have to start with one of them because otherwise you can't reach AH in time to hook the food res, so there is still that distorting effect on the tech valuation.

One thing I was considering was changing map size's impact on tech costs to affect later techs more than earlier ones. i.e. on a large map, instead of multiplying tech costs by 1.4 across the board, multiply cheap techs by 1, future tech by 1.8, and techs in between by an interpolated value. The geometric mean of future tech cost and hunting cost is approximately the cost of paper - that being 1.4 seems about reasonable, right?

My interpretation of the intent of the increased tech costs on a large map is that they assume you'll own more land by the end of the game, so tech costs need to be higher. But at the start of the game you still get the same number of settlers, so it seems kind of silly to make techs so much more expensive than on a small map.

[WilliamLP]

Thanks for saving me endless debates with Krill about OB and map trading.

Swordsmen are an interesting case and one of the least necessary changes here.

There's a sword unit in Civ 4?

[plako]

No active missions, so no tech stealing, no revolting civics, religion, cities...nothing to worry about.

Yeah I know. Just trying to think of ways to not ban it totally, but still somewhat useful. Also no one will be using the infiltrate mission, if there are no active and somewhat reasonable missions to waste those EPs. changing the value to 1500 is good change, but not needed, if there are no missions to do.

[Krill]

One thing I was considering was changing map size's impact on tech costs to affect later techs more than earlier ones. i.e. on a large map, instead of multiplying tech costs by 1.4 across the board, multiply cheap techs by 1, future tech by 1.8, and techs in between by an interpolated value. The geometric mean of future tech cost and hunting cost is approximately the cost of paper - that being 1.4 seems about reasonable, right?

My interpretation of the intent of the increased tech costs on a large map is that they assume you'll own more land by the end of the game, so tech costs need to be higher. But at the start of the game you still get the same number of settlers, so it seems kind of silly to make techs so much more expensive than on a small map.

I'd expect that to fix a lot of "problems" with tech scaling, yeah. Doesn't really do much about AH, preferred starting techs and starting resources though, at least from the perspective of playing random leaders with random starts. Using a map maker and the problems go away, obviously, simply because starting resources can be balanced by hand. I think the beaker cost of trying to get to AH is still a bit high to the extent that maybe AH cost just needs dropping a bit, but I could very much be wrong on that.