Rebalancing Civ4: RtR Mod

[Krill]

TBH, I'd look into fixing the underlying mechanic of health and happiness, especially in how they impact a city, before fiddling with buildings.

Each missing happy effectively give -2F, higher maintenance, and you miss out on the benefit of anything the citizen might do.

Each missing health gives -1F.

That's the point. Health was only ever intended to be a soft cap. The way it works is that you generally have to expand horizontally and settle for food res to make the cities viable, but the food res are all health res as well which is what allows you to then go vertical. It's one of the constraints against a player that lucks out and gets 4 happy res within seven tiles of their capital, they can't just get a size nine capital by turn 50 and then grow like a weed.

[kjn]

Even a soft cap can give serious side effects, and a soft cap would imply that the further beyond it you go, the worse the effects becomes.

Eg, what if the progression of missing health wasn't linear? It could be N! or a quadratic function, like NxN/2. Going 1 beyond the cap would hardly hurt you, 2 beyond would be managable, but 3 or more and you'd be really hurting.

[Krill]

But how/why is it broken or unbalanced?

[kjn]

You were all discussing how crappy the health bonus buildings were. I proposed that fixing that wouldn't necessarily require changing the buildings, but the health system.

[Krill]

So instead of changing one variable, change an entire game mechanic?

[kjn]

Or tweaking a game mechanic. Going from linear to N! or N*N/2 counts as tweaking in my book.

Just piling on tons of unrelated bonuses on a crappy building isn't a good strategy. Then you get an unfocused and crappy building. *cough* The inn and tavern in FfH *cough*

[Krill]

You can't actually code that in the XML IIUC.

[kjn]

No, it'd have to be coded in python or the sdk. But as I understand it RbMod already changes that.

[Krill]

Minimal stuff.

Ultimately, there isn't a reason to implement that change. The assertion that there are tons of changes to buildings isn't particularly true, when the change is to a single part of that building, the cost. Rebuilding a mechanic involves understanding the interactions of that mechanic with various other mechanics, for instance trait balance (is it a boost to EXP?), building and wonder costs (HG and aqueduct) and that knock on to the traits in IND, building utility (factories and power plants) which then affects 3GD and late game unit costs, which affects the viability of different tile improvements (town rush buy versus workshops as the multipliers are now affected).

Tweaking a mechanic is never just "tweaking".

[Qgqqqqq]

Btw is this linked anywhere on CFC?