Tides of War, a balance mod

[SevenSpirits]

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

Since yesterday I've been thinking that +1f per X pop (X maybe = 4) would be best. I'll get a chance to explain my reasoning tomorrow.

[SevenSpirits]

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.

This argument really falls flat for me because you haven't given me a reason to care that if two empires have equal size in the endgame and one is FIN while the other has a trait which helped them grow early game, that the FIN civ should not have an advantage.

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.

This is just fallacious. You might as well say that CRE should not exist, since it gives you thousands of 0.001 culture per city. Such wild swings!

Cities consist of tiles. The only difference between a bonus that scales with tiles, vs a bonus that scales with cities, is that the bonus that scales with tiles will also scale if you invest resources into bigger cities rather than more cities. In fact, the bonus that scales with tiles is likely to be less swingy. Tiles worked tends to scale more consistently throughout the game across different maps than city count does. The fact that the tile units are more fine-grained is a complete red herring.

[WilliamLP]

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 don't know, my impression is that Krill did just that in RBMod by giving them an economic component as well. AGG having a military component adds a lot of variety and flavor to the game to me.

Personally, I'd be more interested in either of these: the minimalist changes to take out the broken elements of BtS (and I agree completely with Commodore's point). Or I'd love to see your attempt to go whole-hog and make radical changes to the whole game, and converge to a balanced variant from it, like you're doing with AGG and PRO.

[Bacchus]

The fact that the tile units are more fine-grained is a complete red herring.

Indeed, that much more surprising that you thought my point was about fine-graininess, it wasn't — the size of the grain is easily adjusted by a linear transformation as you so pointedly illustrate with the CRE case. Partly my fault, it was 2.30 at night, and I didn't realize that the difference between growing from 1 to 30 and 1 to 300 will be interpreted as a difference in slope of two linear processes — the problem with tile growth is exactly that it's non-linear with respect to city growth. You get more tiles as you get more cities, but then you also get more tiles as cities get larger; so tiles worked grow as a higher power of time than city count — if city count were approximately linear (it isn't), tile growth would be quadratic, etc. Because tile growth is more convex, a bonus which is "balanced" over, say 300 turns would always be too small in the early turns and too large in the later turns.

But I get your point that it can be fun to survive through the early turns with a mediocre trait to reap it's full bounty in the later game. In any case, Fin is far too ingrained in Civ to be removed, I wasn't suggesting to remove it.

[Gaspar]

FWIW, and not much really - there is a certain group of players here who are uninterested in KrillMOD because it changes so much. The scope and breadth of those changes are daunting to learn and because there are so many changes, its much easier to find several that you find highly objectionable. For those players, a mod that only attempts to hit fewer targets like SevenMOD is more appealing. (Full disclosure - I'm one of those players.)

I also think it is absurd that people are bothered by changing Aggressive to Agricultural on some sort of a thematic basis but have no problem with Barracks providing culture, for example.

Anyway, I don't really have a thought on the traits themselves because I haven't played with them or lurked a game where they came into play and I find that the theorycrafting is much harder because the traits themselves are unlike anything else in the game. On a generic basis, I agree with Bacchus that traits that modify tiles are much harder to balance than ones that act on a city or empire-wide basis, simply because its much harder to get an accurate read on how much they'll impact the game. Almost everyone agrees base FIN is overpowered and almost everyone agrees that Food > Hammers > Commerce in terms of yield value so balancing to that is something that has to be done finely. That said, the traits assuredly sound a lot more fun than free Combat 1/CG1 so I'm willing to take a wait and see approach.

Its worth noting that KrillMOD has had a lot more iterations of playtesting and only after the last couple games where Krill has felt like its close to finished. So I think there's probably a lot of value in letting PB20 get further along before throwing out the baby with the bathwater on the revised traits. That said, I'm not lurking the game so maybe these questions have already been answered.

[Lord Parkin]

I don't know, my impression is that Krill did just that in RBMod by giving them an economic component as well. AGG having a military component adds a lot of variety and flavor to the game to me.

Aside from the "a lot to learn" problem with RBmod, I also personally have an issue with completely different/new effects being bundled under the same old names. At least with Tides of War, you know right from the start that "Agricultural" and "Productive" are going to be different because they're labelled as such. Here's a brief snippet of a conversation I had a while ago with Seven about this very topic:

Parkin: I'm not fond of the cultural Barracks, seems like a change for those who dislike the Monument

Seven: apparently it was mostly to give AGG something else
I am not fond of it either, and as you can tell I don't like giving random unrelated abilities to "aggressive" and "protective"
so much so that I'd rather make genghis khan a farmer ^^

Parkin: lol
Yeah, that was the main thing that irked me about RBmod too, the tagging of unrelated things under the same name just for the sake of balance
Plus there were so many little changes and I didn't feel like relearning the whole game.
Well, I guess the basics are the same, but when you've played for years and have all the defaults committed to memory, it's jarring when almost everything changes subtly
or not so subtly

Seven: yup, for example I know there is some sort of late game civic switcharoo with environmentalism being in a different column and having a completely different effect (?)... ugh

Parkin: Ugh about sums it up for me
Though to be fair I didn't mind FFH - if everything changes drastically from the ground up it's all good. It's when things look nearly the same on the surface but everything's mixed up underneath that it's not to my tastes.

Seven: yes, exactly

[WilliamLP]

Aside from the "a lot to learn" problem with KrillMod, I also personally have an issue with completely different/new effects being bundled under the same old names. At least with SevenMod, you know right from the start that "Agricultural" and "Productive" are going to be different because they're labelled as such. Here's a brief snippet of a conversation I had a while ago with Seven about this very topic:

I probably agree with you on most points. I don't like the changes that feel both unthematic and unnecessary. This includes the barracks culture, the Environmental / Free Speech switcharoo, Open Borders going to Alphabet, and I absolutely despise map trading at Writing since in practice, by obvious game theory, it means everyone gets Satellites during what is otherwise the most fun and mysterious part of the game. (And this is by Krill's design - he has stated he wants players to be more aware of potential runaway civs earlier.)

The weakest part of your argument is that shifting the names matters a lot. AGG and PRO are radical departures, which change the game completely, arguably more than any change in Krill's mod. If Krill just changed Barracks to be called "War Memorials" or something, that would alleviate your concerns? Commodore's point is simple and strong, these changes aren't a change for people who want to play BtS but avoid banning what is broken, they make the game a thematic variant, and already a significantly different one.

To me, the weakest part of Seven's argument is that AGG and PRO can't be balanced thematically. I wonder if he wants to try very hard. How many ideas have been thrown around? E.g. what if AGG gave +x% hammers to production of melee and mounted units, and PRO gave +y% hammers to archery, gunpowder, and siege. I bet you could find x and y such that they'd be equally popular to the other traits. Their strength would vary according to situation and preferred playstyle, but that's not a flaw: that's a feature. (This isn't a well thought-out proposal, just an example of a balance change that is still quite thematic.)

[Commodore]

Barracks culture makes sense to me; "Culture" and "Martial culture" were one and the same in most historical civilizations. But aesthetic objections are perfectly valid if it bugs you.

I just like the martial traits being valid choices. And I hate the utter removal of two traits, particularly in an ostensibly minimalist mod. If Seven wants to design a mod, that's fine...7mod is how Seven likes to play the game, and if you enjoy playing Civilization 7mod over Civ4, that's 100% valid.

[GermanJoey]

Is it really so bad "removing" two traits if they're considered so bad that nobody wants them in base BTS? If you gave Protective the "+1 hammer on tiles yielding 4 hammers or more" in addition to the worthless junk it has now, and gave Aggressive, I dunno, one of the suggestions so far in this thread that isn't "+1 food on tiles yielding 4 food or more", would you consider this more minimalist?

There are still two other martial traits, for what its worth: Charismatic and Imperialistic.

[SevenSpirits]

I don't know, my impression is that Krill did just that in RBMod by giving them an economic component as well. AGG having a military component adds a lot of variety and flavor to the game to me.

As I've probably mentioned many times before now, the RBMod AGG and PRO traits really don't do it for me flavor-wise. (I think they are reasonably balanced traits, but they don't represent aggressive or protective to me.) I don't think it's important so I won't rant about it here, but if you want more explanation you can look at my previous posts on the subject or PM me or something.