Rebalancing Civ4: RtR Mod

[Krill]

The issue isn't just the pillaged towns, it's the spite removal of towns by defending players by improving over them. Like in PB25 Retep pillaged a bunch of cottage improvements in Grimaces land that Commodore was capturing, but due to a peace treaty Commodore couldn't stop it.

Retep being able to pillage cottages and hamlets is fine, but the investment into villages and towns is much harder to replace.

[GermanJoey]

Wait, *attackers* can't pillage villages and towns? What? I thought it was just defenders that weren't allowed to pillage villages/towns that they own.

[Old Harry]

I imagine that finding towns all over the place due to AI stupidity is going to cause more aggravation than when you conquer humans due to more sane tile improvement locations.

You're giving me (and probably a load of other humans) way too much credit here - most of the cottages were ones I'd built and regretted later .

I'd like to be able to decide the purpose of cities I conquer - I might want my own cottage core and then to get production from cities I take, as the mod is set up you should probably have your core dedicated to production and try to use that production to capture towns and villages.

While I disagree with it I can see an argument that self-pillaging and/or attacker-pillaging is too strong. But if the defender can be bothered to build farms over towns he's using a load of worker turns, leaving workers vulnerable and can't just do it at the drop of a hat, I really can't see a problem with that...

[El Grillo]

The issue isn't just the pillaged towns, it's the spite removal of towns by defending players by improving over them. Like in PB25 Retep pillaged a bunch of cottage improvements in Grimaces land that Commodore was capturing, but due to a peace treaty Commodore couldn't stop it.

Retep being able to pillage cottages and hamlets is fine, but the investment into villages and towns is much harder to replace.

Ah, I misunderstood the problem. If the intention is to stop pillaging-by-way-of-improving, it's a bit trickier. Even though the ingame tooltip says "Will destroy the (existing improvement)," it doesn't call onImprovementDestroyed. On top of that, it would be difficult to separate legitimate oh-god-what-has-the-AI-done replacement with spiteful replacement.

One approach would be to increase the number of worker turns it takes to build an improvement over an existing improvement, or specifically for Villages/Towns. I'd prefer not to make any SDK changes for compatibility reasons, but this would be doable with a combination of XML and Python. I'd make an invisible dummy Feature called "Urban Area" that would appear on plots with Villages/Towns via onImprovementBuilt, and other improvements would have to first "remove" it in a manner similar to building a Farm on a plot with a Forest/Jungle via BuildInfos.xml. There would be no equivalent of Chop Forest/Jungle (i.e. a way to remove only the Urban Area without removing the Village/Town).

[Cheater Hater]

Why not have some late tech let Workers build Villages? It feels strong, but 4C doesn't seem that powerful compared to other late improvements (especially Windmills/Watermills post-Electricity).

[Krill]

I imagine that finding towns all over the place due to AI stupidity is going to cause more aggravation than when you conquer humans due to more sane tile improvement locations.

You're giving me (and probably a load of other humans) way too much credit here - most of the cottages were ones I'd built and regretted later .

I'd like to be able to decide the purpose of cities I conquer - I might want my own cottage core and then to get production from cities I take, as the mod is set up you should probably have your core dedicated to production and try to use that production to capture towns and villages.

While I disagree with it I can see an argument that self-pillaging and/or attacker-pillaging is too strong. But if the defender can be bothered to build farms over towns he's using a load of worker turns, leaving workers vulnerable and can't just do it at the drop of a hat, I really can't see a problem with that...

tl;dr is that I agree that players being able to fully control their tile improvements is best, yet at the same time spite removing towns is bad with the forced effect that all conquered lands just get workshopped. Ideal solution, disregarding coding effort, is that all tiles remember if they had a cottage on them, and how developed it was when it is removed, so if a player wants at a certain point in the game the cottage can be rebuilt at that development level. That removes the spite pillage/re-improvement.

The advantage of having towbns/villages being unpillageable is that air power no longer fucks up late game resources, as towns and villages give access to oil.coal./aluminium/uranium. That's actually a pretty big problem solved.

[Cheater Hater]

I imagine that finding towns all over the place due to AI stupidity is going to cause more aggravation than when you conquer humans due to more sane tile improvement locations.

You're giving me (and probably a load of other humans) way too much credit here - most of the cottages were ones I'd built and regretted later .

I'd like to be able to decide the purpose of cities I conquer - I might want my own cottage core and then to get production from cities I take, as the mod is set up you should probably have your core dedicated to production and try to use that production to capture towns and villages.

While I disagree with it I can see an argument that self-pillaging and/or attacker-pillaging is too strong. But if the defender can be bothered to build farms over towns he's using a load of worker turns, leaving workers vulnerable and can't just do it at the drop of a hat, I really can't see a problem with that...

tl;dr is that I agree that players being able to fully control their tile improvements is best, yet at the same time spite removing towns is bad with the forced effect that all conquered lands just get workshopped. Ideal solution, disregarding coding effort, is that all tiles remember if they had a cottage on them, and how developed it was when it is removed, so if a player wants at a certain point in the game the cottage can be rebuilt at that development level. That removes the spite pillage/re-improvement.

The advantage of having towbns/villages being unpillageable is that air power no longer fucks up late game resources, as towns and villages give access to oil.coal./aluminium/uranium. That's actually a pretty big problem solved.

Have other mods done improvements on top of improvements? If that solution exists, a "simple" solution would be to duplicate each improvement for each of the cottage stages (and be exactly the same other than the cottage stage that would be returned to)--that wouldn't save intermediate progress, but it's something (and similar to my "workers can build villages late" idea).

You could also do something that makes them similar to roads, so they can't be self-pillaged--the problem is that even if you say something like "this gives commerce only if no other improvement is on the tile", it probably would still grow even while something else is there (which is almost certainly gamebreaking).

[El Grillo]

I'm afraid that either of those suggestions would only be possible through the SDK, and introducing 4 sets of cottage-stage-improvements would almost assuredly wreck the AI's tile evaluation unless you told it to pretend they didn't exist. In light of the multiple limitations and to prevent the cure from being worse than the ailment, what you've got now seems reasonable.

As an aside, another alternative to address air-bombing of strategic resources is to give Forts 100% survival rate in the XML (iAirBombDefense in ImprovementInfos.xml). As I understand it, some players already settle on top of early strategic resources to guarantee access while trading off the bonus yield. That doesn't work with industrial resources because they often spawn within the BFC of an existing city, and Forts that could only be pillaged by land units might offer a similar tradeoff.

[Cheater Hater]

I'm afraid that either of those suggestions would only be possible through the SDK, and introducing 4 sets of cottage-stage-improvements would almost assuredly wreck the AI's tile evaluation unless you told it to pretend they didn't exist. In light of the multiple limitations and to prevent the cure from being worse than the ailment, what you've got now seems reasonable.

As an aside, another alternative to address air-bombing of strategic resources is to give Forts 100% survival rate in the XML (iAirBombDefense in ImprovementInfos.xml). As I understand it, some players already settle on top of early strategic resources to guarantee access while trading off the bonus yield. That doesn't work with industrial resources because they often spawn within the BFC of an existing city, and Forts that could only be pillaged by land units might offer a similar tradeoff.

1. We're already using the SDK, as it is needed to do a lot of things (tech scaling, 2H capitals fixing no espionage, surely other things I'm missing)
2. Krill doesn't care about SP at all--if you want to fix the AI feel free

I do like the fort suggestion though, though I'm worried it might get abused (maybe it degrades to something that connects the resource, but doesn't give a defensive bonus?

[Commodore]

The issue isn't just the pillaged towns, it's the spite removal of towns by defending players by improving over them. Like in PB25 Retep pillaged a bunch of cottage improvements in Grimaces land that Commodore was capturing, but due to a peace treaty Commodore couldn't stop it.

Retep being able to pillage cottages and hamlets is fine, but the investment into villages and towns is much harder to replace.

Wait, that was the reason? Dude, that was hilarious and I don't think we suffered overmuch for having to just build workshops.