Tides of War, a balance mod

[Lord Parkin]

I'd rather go back to the original idea of giving the bonus per city, and if giving +1fpt straight out was too powerful, than perhaps make it unlockable at some basic building, like a Granary. If that's still too weak, have another +1fpt at, say, the Grocer. Or maybe go back to the original Agr/Pro and add the boni to the buildings which they make cheap -- Barracks, Walls, etc. Keeps the leader flavour too.

Moves away from simplicity though, and I don't like the idea of a trait changing building effects - feels like crossing over to UB territory (similarity to Baray, etc).

P.S. Generally, I think traits messing with tile yields are a poor idea, as they put the player on rails in terms of improvement choices. It's much more fun to be flexible in improvements depending on the goals, and use civics to boost the selected strategy. Any bonus to a specific yield necessarily restricts this flexibility.

I disagree completely with this. In what way do either AGR or PRO put you on rails at any point? PRO only has an effect on plains hills, Copper, Iron and sometimes Horse tiles in the early-mid game - all of which you're going to want to be mining (or pasturing) anyway. AGR only has an effect on food resources, which you're obviously going to be putting the correct improvement on regardless (farm/pasture/camp/fishing boat). The only other tile AGR affects before Biology is Flood Plain, which you typically don't have a lot of around in balanced maps. But even so, having a choice between an AGR farm and a cottage on a Flood Plain adds an interesting element to the game - and it's not always a clear choice which way to go.

[Lord Parkin]

Productive at 35% still lets plains hills be (essentially) 7 food-hammer tiles when building workers or work boats. Since these tend to be very readily available this still feels like a pretty massive advantage over those who don't have it, particularly in a trait with a very large potential effect on the late game.

A 25% bonus was my original suggestion, though Seven talked me up to 35%. Or you could have a different percentage for Workers and Work Boats (a higher percentage is definitely more powerful for Workers). But I think having plains-hill mines being 6-7 hammers for Workers and Work Boats really isn't that big of an issue, given how maps are balanced here. How many games have you played where you had more than one plains-hill at your capital? Sometimes they don't even crop up except under your Settler. It's still almost always better to settle on a plains-hill than to settle to the side in the hope of mining it later. And plains-hills are self balancing due to the food cost to work them - unless you only work them while producing Workers/Work Boats/Settlers, in which case there's still a cost of additional worker turns to make extra improvements for citizens to switch between.

[GermanJoey]

How much would it be worth if Agricultural trait straight-up gave you the Agriculture tech for free, regardless of what civ you picked? Would a trait of "Free Agriculture tech + coasts provide fresh water access" be worth picking if it let you play a strong opening with a civ like the Scandanavians, Rome, Carthage, Portugal, etc that you may otherwise be forced to ignore because of starting-tech considerations, especially in context of a snake pick?

[Lord Parkin]

A bonus cheap starting tech wouldn't really affect play much, except to eliminate a bunch of civs from the pool of possible picks to pair with that leader. I don't think it's worth changing.

Getting fresh water from coast and/or spreading irrigation in the early game might be worth considering, but I worry that it gets away from the general goal of simplicity a bit. I'm not yet convinced AGR even needs much of a nerf.

[Krill]

What is the concept for AGR?

[Commodore]

Agri/Prod confuses the hell out of me. I'd never play a ToW game with them in, how is a "minimalist" mod squared with outright inventing two new traits?

[Bacchus]

PRO only has an effect on plains hills, Copper, Iron and sometimes Horse tiles in the early-mid game - all of which you're going to want to be mining (or pasturing) anyway. AGR only has an effect on food resources, which you're obviously going to be putting the correct improvement on regardless (farm/pasture/camp/fishing boat). The only other tile AGR affects before Biology is Flood Plain, which you typically don't have a lot of around in balanced maps. But even so, having a choice between an AGR farm and a cottage on a Flood Plain adds an interesting element to the game - and it's not always a clear choice which way to go.

Sure, in the early-mid game you are already on rails, you don't even have a reasonable choice to make regarding improvements, so Agr/Pro in their current form don't restrict you any more than you already are and you could even argue that Agr might make you consider farming FP's. I don't quite follow why we are paying attention only to the early-mid game only, though, surely the period where Agr/Pro become widely applicable is a more interesting and relevant period to consider.

Another reason not to like traits messing with tile yields is consistency -- Exp, Org, Cre, Ind, Phi, Chm all give per-city bonuses, Spi is weird and special giving an empire-wide effect, vanilla Agg and Pro combine a per-city bonus with a per-unit bonus, Fin is the only one to give a per-tile bonus and guess what, it is far and away the most game-determining one in vanilla BtS. ToW's fix for FIN is thoroughly driven by the beakers-at-start-of-game valuation and works to balance it's effect in the early-mid game, but in the end the trait still gives the player an absolute advantage in productivity that simply cannot be met by other means at equal size of empire. It's a bad trait as long as other traits don't work on a per-tile basis and they don't. If you are intent on giving food and hammers, give them to the city, you just save yourself a hopeless situation of trying to calibrate a multiplicative benefit on a base which ranges from 1 to 300+ over the course of the game (# of tiles worked) to match a multiplicative benefit on a base which ranges from 1 to 30 (# of cities), an order of magnitude less.

And yeah, needless to say, Agricultural/Productive throw all notion of "minimalism" out the door. A minimalist and theme-neutral, net present value based fix to Aggressive/Protective would give those traits a beaker or two per city — boosting beaker-based NPV is much more straightforward than cutting it.

[SevenSpirits]

What is the concept for AGR?

The concept is: Your people are good at farming or whatever the terrain-equivalent food-production process for your lands is.

So in-theme bonuses would be bonuses related to various steps in food production (building food improvements, producing more food). I think bonuses to growth costs are not as well-themed.

[Krill]

You've discarded the "+1 food to city tile" mechanic right?

[SevenSpirits]

Agri/Prod confuses the hell out of me. I'd never play a ToW game with them in, how is a "minimalist" mod squared with outright inventing two new traits?

From the intro post: "It is a major goal of the mod to make only a relatively small number of memorable, high-impact changes, and avoid growing into a long list of every marginal improvement that can be made to BtS."

There are a lot of changes I would make if designing the game from scratch. Here's an example: Serfdom wouldn't be sitting there at feudalism not doing anything. It would either do something meaningful or not exist. Another example: Drill promotions wouldn't be so consistently inferior.

I didn't include changes to these elements. It wasn't because I hadn't thought of them. It's because I don't want to end up with a super long changelist, and that's important to me. The reason I don't want a long changelist is because it would make the mod harder to learn and understand and remember and keep track of. My goal was to patch up the balance in as few strokes as possible and add a tiny bit of bonus stuff, so to speak... not just flattening out the play experience but also adding some new territory to explore. And by the way, I wanted people to be able to play with random leaders and civs and not be totally shafted.

As I mentioned in my explanation post near the beginning of the thread, I don't think the concepts of aggressive and protective can be implemented thematically and with balance in the context of well-played Civ IV. I can understand not liking montezuma losing his warlike trait, for example. I can even understand being so unhappy with that change that you just can't understand it, and I don't mind. For me though, the type of change I chose - replacing the traits with differently themed ones that can be remembered mnemonically - produces the lowest cognitive load while still fulfilling my desire to have the same number of balanced traits as BtS had traits.