Rebalancing Civ4: RtR Mod

[Krill]

TBH, those changes aren't for naval warfare. It's to try and provide the different choices for city specialization. I've kind of "given up" on the naval warfare aspects because frankly by the time dry docks, destroyers and battleships abound the wars want to be bloody and quick.

I'm not entirely sure how the ideal balance is achieved here, but I do think that a 2/1/4 coast and 2/1/3 ocean are reasonable tiles to have, so it kinda makes sense to me to rebalance the other buildings around the quay and breakwater. I don't claim for this balance to be ideal, tweaks are probably necessary and welcome.

Keeping the health off the quay is one of the ways to add some asymmetrical balance. Keeping a trade route modifier on the harbour and CH is probably enough to make up the rest.

As to the hammer production issue, I think that the health from a harbour plus dry dock is something worth considering in a production city. I'm noticing that in PB18 that even with every single health multiplier I'm limited on the size I can grow cities to.

[GermanJoey]

Ok, so I investigated the route buildings vs the tile buildings. I wrote a matlab script that calculates the number of LH+quay+breakwater coast tiles a city would need to work to beat out the trade route approach. This assumes the quay player is in Merc, for the two free scientists, while the route player is in FM. This assumes that a city has many routes as it needs to a foreign city of the same size with full peace rating, so it is very optimistic towards the routes.



The custom house does not look great here; it's really only better than the quay+breakwater in huge, mostly-landlocked-yet-still-coastal cities, but... if a city like this has enough hammers to build a CH to begin with, then it probably also has enough hammers for a drydock to be better. If we look at internal routes, the CH seems even worse. So, it seems to me that you're almost always gonna want quay+breakwater in highly watery cities, and then harbor+drydock everywhere else, at least thinking about what most coastal cities in PB22 look like. I suppose, if one was smart, you'd just want just a few CH in a huge empire to suck up all your best routes, treating them like mini national wonders or cathedrals or whatever, and then harbor+drydock or quay+breakwater everywhere else.

Code:

% +5% for each point of population of the From city over 10
% +25% if the city From is connected to its capital
% +50% if the city From has a harbor
% +100% if the city From has the Temple of Artemis
% +100% if the city To is on another continent
% for foreign To city, +100% if it is on another continent and the From city has a customs house
% for foreign To city, +3% per turn (up to a max of 150%) since the last war between civs owning To and From

close all;
clear all;

c = ['r'  'k'  'b'];

pop = [10:22];
routes = [4:6];
h = [0 1 1];
ch = [1 1 1];

popmod = (pop-10)*0.05;
fpopmod = pop/10; % assumes our from city connects to foreign cities of the same size.

% set to 1 if we want to say the 1 hammer per coast from breakwater is equiv to 1 commerce
% otherwise the hammer is ignored
include_hammers = 1;

% base route yield is 3 routes (base + currency + corp) plus two free rep scientists from mercantalism
route_total_base = 12; % the two scientists
for i=[1:routes(1)-1]
    routemod = 0.25 + (0.5*h(1)) + (0.5*ch(1)) + 1.0 + 1.5 + popmod;
    route_total_base = route_total_base + floor(routemod.*fpopmod);
end

figure;
hold on;

% calculate the additional commerce from trade routes
% first iteration is just free market (red), second iteration is FM+Harbor (black), then finally FM+Harbor+CH. (blue)
% then calculate the number of quay+breakwater coast tiles we'd need to work to bring in the same much income
% negative values mean that quay+breakwater is always better for a city of this size
for r=routes
    x = r - routes(1) + 1;
    route_total = 0;
    routemod = 0.25 + (0.5*h(x)) + (0.5*ch(x)) + 1.0 + 1.5 + popmod;
    for i=[1:r]
        route_total = route_total + floor(routemod.*fpopmod);
    end
    
    route_difference = (floor(1.25*route_total) - route_total_base);
    num_of_equiv_coast = route_difference/(2+include_hammers);
    
    plot(pop, num_of_equiv_coast, c(x), 'LineWidth', 2);
end

xlabel('city population')
ylabel('number of quay+breakwater coast to generate same income')

what are your ideas about the water UB?

[Krill]

Im not sure those values are right ie could be better. What about harbour giving +50% tr yield and one trade route and CH gives 1 trade route and +100% traderoute yield. Not just from overseas routes?

[Krill]

UB I was thinking keep feitoria as in base bts but with new CH effects. Carthage I'm not sure but toying with health or happy bonus from seafood or just extra base health. Netherlands I am really not sure.

[GermanJoey]

looks like this:



a lot better, IMHO. part of the issue is that the new merc is so strong... the red baseline, which compares merc vs FM with no water buildings, is about break-even and leaning towards merc, and yet merc is a lot more flexible and less vulnerable to route nukeage. merc might need to be high upkeep...

[Krill]

I have no issue making merc high upkeep.

[GermanJoey]

UB I was thinking keep feitoria as in base bts but with new CH effects. Carthage I'm not sure but toying with health or happy bonus from seafood or just extra base health. Netherlands I am really not sure.

the feitora seems good.

a health bonus on a harbor would be a pretty garbage classical UB... it would be pretty great on a drydock, though. happiness from seafood on a harbor seems kinda awkward . an expansive player already wants to get to currency to get happiness from a market, so this just seems like a redundant way of getting the same thing. by the time you get both techs, you tend not to have happiness problems anymore anyways.

[Krill]

Carthage has solid uu. Just like I thought Babylon UB was junk but I have a lot more respect now after pb18. Cheaper UB is basic option down to 60h. Don't really want to give a buffed bw as a UB. Seems too strong. I wonder if quay UB is wiser for Netherlands.

[AdrienIer]

Cothon available at iron working ?

[Krill]

That'd be one option but it's potentially quite strong if the currency trade route is moved off the specific tech and onto an era change. That said the amount of era changes for techs would be quite large.