Work boats and Starting techs

[Krill]

Yeah, the variance of the seafood starts is one issue, that some starts are simply better than worker first starts. But also that bad starts are unplayable in some circumstances. Simply making work boat starts better by, say, making work boats cheaper, fixes one half of the problem and exacerbates the other problem. This tacks onto the issue with Fishing, and work boats not available from T0 compared to workers.

[GermanJoey]

Why is it better to change the tech instead of changing the start normalizer? Assuming a mapmaker isn't available to check the starts...

[Krill]

Because the tech is also part of the problem. Due to the difference of starting workboat on T0 and later ie T5 affecting the balance due to economic output in the long and short term, even making work boats not require Fishing affects the starting tech balance: why start with any food tech if you can research it before completing the tile improving unit (worker or work boat)? It is better to pick starting techs that are more valuable such as higher cost or innate utility. And that is where Fishing fails again: Every other tech has greater utility or higher cost, and making Fishing cost more just punishes those that need to research it compared to those that don't. It leads to Sailing, which is almost never one of the first 5 techs you research, and Pottery, but Agri does that plus AH so it is more useful in a wider variety of situations (and thus unless you need Fishing for seafood, you go Agri).

So that's why work boats and seafood are tied up with starting cost issues. It's not that it's "better" to change the tech, it's just that the tech also needs changing but for other reasons.

[novice]

Problem is defined as tech but it isn't really Fishing, the problem is workboat is not a FH unit, and dies on use. Even worker that farms a wet banana then goes on and can road, chop etc, so junk land starts still profit from having a worker but seafood starts end up getting shafted because fall behind on total worker turns for utility improvements like roads.

So scrap the work boat, and let workers walk on water.

[Krill]

There are a lot of options, however main question is how acceptable they are. Some changes that would work are pretty...novel, to put it politely.

[Krill]

Out of interest, does anyone know if there is a simply way to make the map generator not consider a certain resource as a food tile for the purposes of start balancing? Or is it all SDK stuff?