Rebalancing Civ4: RtR Mod

[Krill]

I think giving FIN a straight malus would just be obnoxious though. A nerf, fine, but a straight up malus to the knee feels wrong and unfun. And according to Soren that isn't good game design.

[novice]

I think the value of traits depends alot too of the type of the game, for example if its Cton game I think your opinion on spiritual its totaly wrong, because there you realy can't plan too much in adavance because someone can atack you with galeons and screw your plan to get liberalism in 6 turns

A completely hypothetical example, I trust.

[Krill]

OK, now that I have a moment or two...

OK, as PBEM20 is entering the end game, I've been reflecting on the changes that I think still need to be made. There aren't many:

Possible changes in RB mod 2.0

Nukes? Increase the cost, but state that you expect the players to decide if they want them on or not - they need be more balanced on huge maps, even if it makes them overly expensive for smaller maps with less units. 5K for an ICBM, 1K for a tac nuke - discuss

Reason for nukes to not be banned is two fold IMO: At some point it makes it inefficient to stack more units (it is a real SoD killer, and PBEM4 shows just how many hammers you can throw into a static defence), and that it is one of the few ways of being able to counter bombers and fighters in a hammer efficient way. I think a comparison to bombers is an important one because tech is relatively equivalent, and they use different resources. If you have oil but your opponent doesn't, they can't counter bombers without SAM infantry which aren't that strong, but if they have uranium they do have a method of wrecking any stacks that you throw at him. Bombers and nukes give you a method of applying collateral (OK, for nukes it isn't technically collateral but nukes are used for the same purpose).

The question is just how much should nukes cost. Tac nukes that have limited range are effectively defensive unless you combine them with subs and a good surface navy to follow up with, but at 300 base hammers cost less than 2 tanks, which is obviously not great. How much should they cost? What size stacks are you likely to come up against on a huge map? How large were the armies that were deployed in PB1?

Another question would be if it is possible to mod nukes to just be really powerful guided missiles with different ranges, would it be worth it? I think it is feasible to alter nukes to provide collateral but not kill and against a fairly large number of units...to make them disposable collateral, and culture defense removal. Would that be a good direction to take? It would involve removing the nuke mechanic from them but that is exactly 4 keystrokes to achieve.

War weariness? Strip is out.
Extension - make it easier to knock to 0%? Effect on Polive State. Rushmore: Jails in every city? Need concensus. Might be possible to tie a “No WW” option to an option such as aggressive AI that doesn’t affect MP.

There are problems with the way that WW is set up: you can't get rid of it without being in Police State which screws up everything except the "Workshop Economy". Would it be worth "buffing" Police State, and Jails, so both of them provided -50% WW? In conjunction with Rushmore, that would mean pick 2 of Rushmore, Jails and PS to remove WW, giving a choice to the player about how to remove WW from their cities.

SoZ - 200 base hammers, no monuments, +3XP, 2GA gpp. Remove WW effect. Don’t want to remove as it is a good cheap wonder for use in culture wars early on in the game, and removing it weakens the Literature line which isn’t wanted, but don’t really have any minor tweak that makes it acceptable because the main effct is what is broken. The effect of +3XP in 1 city is worth more to Non-CHM leaders than CHM civs, OTOH, with this CHM civs can get to 8XP without a stables and with just 1 XP civic

SoZ WW is broken...so it basically needs a new ability. This would just be a straight forward change and easy to implement, but the player would have to decide where to build it: in a front city for hte culture, or in an established city that is about to get the HE and start pumping out high XP troops earlier into the game.

Internet - global beaker bonus, convert to a wonder? Beakers at that stage of a game are still useful but a beeline moves away from Apollo. One suggestion is 25% beakers, but I think I’d rather it be slightly on the weak side so it is situational. 15%?

No more freebies.

Cristo Redentor - needs to be useful to SPI. change to 2 turn revolts. Maybe +200% production with SPI. Consider that with IW, Power and factory you can make +200% already, an extra +100% isn’t actually all that much.

I can't really think of a way to not make CR into SPI, because ultimately that is what the wonder is. Maybe turn it into a project so it can't be GE rushed and/or up the cost?

Culture Victory - back to normal values then 33K on quick (up from 25K, back in line with other game speeds).

This is just me derping around...I screwed it up the first time.

Tech trading tech costs increase, known tech bonus: Perhaps copy into NTT, drop known tech to 35 from 50? - Major point. Would allow reintegration of mod versions.

The majority of recent games have shown players 1 turning REN and IND techs, this would slow the tech rate. There are many justifications for this change, one of them being that the current difficulty level scaling system doesn't really work for us, due to the expansion costs (Everyone can remember the pain that PB3 caused people), so this change is a balance between working in tech trading, recreating the slower tech pace from high level games, keeping expansion possible early etc. The known tech bonus was 50/100/150 in PBEM20 and it worked fairly well there with tech trading, but I think it could do with toning down slightly for use in an NTT environment, and it would still work OK with the phased entrance it makes.

FIN - f*** knows. 4 commerce kick in on land? Let them pick up cheap markets.

Options for FIN:

Leave as is, 3 on land, 2 on coast.
4 on land, 2 on coast
3 on everything
25% gold
25% beakers
Add in to this, cheap banks, cheap markets.
Any late era buildings? Potentially there are a few but nothing that really fits the trait. Could pick up cheap harbours though, with EXP picking up cheap Aquaducts

I think the 4 on land idea isn't that bad - it means you need towns on none river tiles to get the bonus pre-PP, but once you get to PP you only need villages, which is much easier to reach investment wise. So it goes from 30 for river tiles/70 for none river tiles to 30/30 post PP, so it kinda fits the idea of FIN as a later game trait, and FIN still keeps the 2 commerce on coast so the only real change is that FIN leaders need to invest in the cottages before they get the bonus, instead of planting the cottages and benefiting immediately as with the previous change, but requires a bit more investment. It does seem a bit on the harsh side though, but cheap markets and banks seem to me like a nice perk again: but you still have to plan how to use them and they aren't something you get for free.

[Mist]

Random idea for FIN :

Make it give extra trade routes ( and / or extra value on trade routes ) instead of straight up commerce?

I did not float this up in FFH discussions, because trade routes are negligible until late game there, but it might work in BTS.

[Krill]

Not easily codable AFAICT.

[Mist]

If Sareln could do it for FFHs Foreign Trade civic I can't see a reason why can't it be done in BtS.

But ease of implementation aside, would it hold water from a design standpoint?

[Krill]

You can do it for a civic, for a tech, for a building, easily enough. What traits do is in a different XML file which has very limited settings.

[Mist]

You can still do trade route % yield changes with it ( full list of stuff tweakable with XML here ). As for extra trade routes, you could try some workarounds like a free building with +x trade routes in each city or something ( say granted by financial palace the same way Stonehenge grants monuments ).

So again, ignoring the implementation issues for now, would it hold water?

[Lord Parkin]

Could you approximate it by giving Financial access to a unique civic?

Actually, scratch that. What about giving Financial access to all the civics in the Economy tree from the start? Would that be better or worse than its previous form? It'd probably frequently play out as taking early game Mercentalism, then at some point making a switch to Free Market. Overpowered/underpowered/inappropriate? Thought it might be interesting to throw out there anyway. Turns it into more of an early-game trait than a game-long one of course.

[Krill]

Could you approximate it by giving Financial access to a unique civic?

Actually, scratch that. What about giving Financial access to all the civics in the Economy tree from the start? Would that be better or worse than its previous form? It'd probably frequently play out as taking early game Mercentalism, then at some point making a switch to Free Market. Overpowered/underpowered/inappropriate? Thought it might be interesting to throw out there anyway. Turns it into more of an early-game trait than a game-long one of course.

The original and current design aims have been to change as little as possible and to stay as true as is reasonable to the vanilla implementation (basically, stick to the designers vision). Neither of those suggestions fit within those constraints.

You can still do trade route % yield changes with it ( full list of stuff tweakable with XML here ). As for extra trade routes, you could try some workarounds like a free building with +x trade routes in each city or something ( say granted by financial palace the same way Stonehenge grants monuments ).

So again, ignoring the implementation issues for now, would it hold water?

The trade route yields have already been altered for Free Market, so altering them again for Financial would be problematic. It also has a potential problem that it supports ICS (and on archi maps becomes incredibly broken because those maps basically work off per city boni). Also incredibly changable on their power - intercontinental trade routes become supreme, so FIN would depend on getting more OB with other players to really work. Otherwise it works out a few commerce per city bonus.

I'm not really sure that trade routes alone are the way to go, and when viewed as only part of a solution I wonder how thorough that solution really is.