Rebalancing Civ4: RtR Mod

[Serdoa]

For the boni on Org: I think you have to be careful to not make a trait worse simply because it seems it gets so much stuff. Lighthouses only help you in a coastal city. Factories come quite late. Courthouses are not always the way to go and you will often not build them in the cities surrounding your cap (or at least not for quite some time). The civic cost reduction is nice but again not all that substantial early game, normally much less then Financial in later parts of the game and at the difficulties most games are played here it is rather weak in itself. Having said that, I feel it is a trait I would like to play now, simply to see how it does play out. Take stuff away and it becomes probably again a trait which sounds interesting but not quite good enough to really use it in an MP-game.

Unit upgrades sound interesting though I am not sure on how that would change the gold <-> hammer ratio.

Salon is in my opinion another of those buildings which come quite late - it does have to give some substantial bonus to be worth considering going for it. Especially when so many games are decided much, much earlier then you could ever build it.

[Krill]

ORG is a bit of a junk trait though, -50% to civic costs doesn't do much. It doesn't get picked much for this reason, so I wouldn't take anything away from it. Though I wouldn't add a fifth cheap building either. It's definitely a support trait, but that's a nice support trait to pair with PRO, EXP or IMP...

Changing the upgrade costs is a bit iffy, supposedly the code (as implemented in FfH) looks fugly. Plus there is the point that, say, halving the costs for upgrade makes it easier to launch an attack (research up the necessary tech and save time by prebuilding the units you then upgrade, to add to the ones you build). Plus there aren't really any weak traits now.

The salon gives a free spec, like Merc. That's an upgrade from having to have an artist, plus the Musketeer is a pretty handy UU, and you have 2 decent starting techs.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Or... why not make it an exponential boost? Early game, when few cottages are around and we're only on basic worker techs, meeting someone gives a smaller boost. Later on scale it so that, say 2/6 people have a tech, make it a 10% boost, but 5/6 people with that tech makes it a 100% boost.

[Twinkletoes89]

I know it doesn't contribute as much to the whole tech boost thing, but I don't feel anywhere near qualified to discuss it.

On the whole 'let those who play poorly simply lose', I can see your point but I think you are being a bit too simplistic. We all know how a really good start can snowball quickly. With some things like the great lighthouse & Indian fast workers, some guys get an inherent advantage to this goal. Just because one guy plays an outstanding opening doesn't mean everyone else has to have played badly. However, with the snowball nature of the game, it is likely that the leader will simply stay the leader and the game will be over before we get too far into the game.

I do think Tech Trading can add something to the game. I personally think that one of the weaknesses of the NTT ethos here is that games are more often than not, over before they have begun. Have we ever had a more interesting conclusion to a game than Pitboss 1? PBEM 1 also had an end-game worth watching, seeing m_h fight so well against Dreylin in the near-modern era where without tech trading he *could* have been unable to do so.

I think its time to experiment with a tech trading game again, as we have too many NTT games which are all a much of a muchness with some occasional exceptions and it could add some much-needed variety alongside (hopefully) a game in which the identity of the winner is not determined until a much later point.

[Krill]

Or... why not make it an exponential boost? Early game, when few cottages are around and we're only on basic worker techs, meeting someone gives a smaller boost. Later on scale it so that, say 2/6 people have a tech, make it a 10% boost, but 5/6 people with that tech makes it a 100% boost.

Look, it takes me quarter of an hour to find a single XML value to change. I don't have the ability to go and start mucking around in the code. All I know is that the known tech bonus gets divided somewhere.

The mod started as an XML only mod due to our (Cyneheards' and mine) general level of suckiness with code. You can suggest all that changes you want but unless you can say exactly how to implement them, they're never going to be more than ideas.

Another point...an exponential curve would have a downside of not giving the second place player an incentive to follow in the first techers footsteps, if the tech bonus isn't decent.

[Shoot the Moon]

On the whole 'let those who play poorly simply lose', I can see your point but I think you are being a bit too simplistic. We all know how a really good start can snowball quickly. With some things like the great lighthouse & Indian fast workers, some guys get an inherent advantage to this goal. Just because one guy plays an outstanding opening doesn't mean everyone else has to have played badly. However, with the snowball nature of the game, it is likely that the leader will simply stay the leader and the game will be over before we get too far into the game.

The thing though, this mod is intended to balance out things like GLH and Indian fast workers and to prevent such inherent advantages. There are also more than enough means to slow down the snowball leader if the players know what they are doing -- war, beating them to important wonders, trade embargos, etc. Or hell, even playing well enough to have your own equally sized snowball. Especially with diplomacy enabled, there is no excuse for allowing a snowball to get so large as to be unstoppable.

I do think Tech Trading can add something to the game. I personally think that one of the weaknesses of the NTT ethos here is that games are more often than not, over before they have begun. Have we ever had a more interesting conclusion to a game than Pitboss 1? PBEM 1 also had an end-game worth watching, seeing m_h fight so well against Dreylin in the near-modern era where without tech trading he *could* have been unable to do so.

I think its time to experiment with a tech trading game again, as we have too many NTT games which are all a much of a muchness with some occasional exceptions and it could add some much-needed variety alongside (hopefully) a game in which the identity of the winner is not determined until a much later point.

Tech trading however has a number of problems. It tends to force two alliances to form which can limit diplo. In a game of skilled players, it also badly throws out of whack the game's balance between tech pace and production -- the game simply was not designed with the idea that you could research one tech and then trade it for anywhere between 3 and 10 others depending on number of players in the game. A large reason TT games last longer is that wars are significantly more difficult when the tech pace is so blazing fast (thinking of PB 3 here, although it applies to other games too). NTT games also better reward those who manage to balance expansion with short term teching ability.

@Krill: I still have not heard a convincing argument of why game mechanics should be changed to allow those who have played a worse game to catch up to those who have played a stronger game.

[Krill]

You say better and worse without defining them. IMO, I'd say a fair few players in different games have been behind in tech even though they've played better.

[Shoot the Moon]

You say better and worse without defining them. IMO, I'd say a fair few players in different games have been behind in tech even though they've played better; they've just had more problems to deal with.

At the end of the day though, isn't that just a part of the game? If for whatever reason someone is ahead of tech compared to someone else, shouldn't they be able to reap the benefits of that?

[Krill]

It's part of vanilla BtS and it's the reason why you need to dogpile the tech leader asap. Do we want to continue forcing dogpiles as the only solution to tech runaways that haven't been hindered previously? Or do we want to leave open the option that you can get screwed over and yet you might nick the game?

[Gaspar]

I really don't have a lot to say on the RB-mod, other than to say I think its moved too much in the direction of changing things based on a few theories and assumptions which are not always accurate, but seem accurate in our addled minds which focus on events that happened to us and recency effects. For stellar examples of this phenomenon, watch me fly off the handle again and again for no reasonable reason in the WW5 lurker thread.

On the greater point of snowballs and stopping them, I think there's a fallacy that the early game leader is always the winner in a NTT game. The early game leader is often the winner, but that's because they also tend to be very good at diplomacy. I had a huge post typed up that sort of analyzed how the games from RB's NTT era have gone, but in short form PBEM3 is a great example of how bad diplomacy can melt a snowball, Timmy was pretty clearly the leader at T100 and his Civ finished somewhere between 3rd and 4th. The T100 leader also lost PBEM10.

Krill keeps mentioning PBEM4, but that's an example of a different kind of game phenomenon here - the skill disparity. The greens game holds no value in post-game analysis, so much better than the other players Kyan was. The vets game is to me mostly an example that Krill was some combination of a better player/had better understanding of the format. Anyway, Always War is a very different kettle of fish, it removes the diplomatic options for dealing with a runaway.

Honestly, I can't think of a game here where there was an early game runaway the players could do nothing to stop that wasn't a function of either a highly unbalanced map (PBEM9, PBEM12) or a player so vastly superior to the other players that any attempt to make that game more fair for the other players could only be accomplished by handicapping the better player (PBEM4greens, PBEM6, PBEM12, PBEM13, PB2.) All the other games either have been competitive to later in the game.

I guess ultimately I'm saying I don't think there's anything to the snowball that needs to be done other than us doing a slightly better job of pairing up into skill tiers (easier now that there's been enough games to tell what those are) and learning to play and react better in that situation (I think a couple of the recent games have shown that we're getting better at this, though there is still plenty of room to grow.)

I don't have anything against tech trading in theory, but in practice I can't see the purpose of a game where out-of-game diplo is significantly more important than in-game decisions, and more damning to me, where everyone has tanks on T120 (if not earlier.) If you want that, just roll Industrial starts and skip the pretending that your ancient builder turns have any meaning.

My two cents.