Trait Balance: A Poll

[Old Harry]

Probably too late to suggest, but it'd be thematic for the Colosseum to have a decent bonus (unit production or XP) that gets obsoleted by eg Gunpowder...

[Krill]

One thing I was considering was a flat hammer decrease to unit costs. Not sure it's worth implementing.

[GermanJoey]

K-mod gives the Colosseum +1 XP to melee units. Pretty nice if you're Cha.

[Krill]

And junk if anyone elsr.

[Krill]

The issue with the Colosseum is that it fits into 2 themes, that of providing happiness, and that of improving military functionality in some form. Flat happiness doesn't really appeal, or even exist in many respects in civ 4 (outside UB). But because of those UB increasing the flat happiness leads to somewhat worse problems with the Ball Court. XP gets very weird very quickly due to traits, and how it affects the ease of reaching Commando units and stuff, and there isn't really a solid place to put power on it that doesn't lead to new problems either, with 3 promotion knights and Cuirs.

On top of that, it sits in a somewhat awkward position in the tech tree, because it's the least economically useful tech that follows on from maths; if there is a one right choice in the Classical era tech tree, it's beeline Currency. And then Calendar is the tech that tends to fix a lot of the happiness issues that civs experience, plus MoM. Construction is basically ignored until a set period before war occurs to build cats by leaders, and that is a downside in a snowball game IMO.

One of the ideas I've toyed with for a whacky CIV rebuild is to give the HR happy mechanic to the Colosseum, so that it stacks with HR for +2 happy per military units in a city; combined with moving the free trade route from Currency to Writing it would make Construction beelines more formidable from an economic standpoint. There are others, like -10 hammers to unit cost, which are more bland, and a straight forward +hammer when building military unit mechanic, or +1 happy for each military unit build in the past X turns. Or even that a Colosseum spawns a specific unit every X turns, benefiting from the XP enhancement effects from the city. But they are all somewhat novel and not really suited to base RtR. So perhaps a +25% hammers to units that expires at Rifling is more reasonable, Gunpowder would come to early.

[Old Harry]

Having an XP effect expire with Military Science would be thematic and (perhaps) alleviate the Commando issue.

I don't think that Construction needs an economic aspect - its a war tech and gets researched when needed/wanted. I like looking at someone who's just got it and thinking "Ah, war".

Would your HR happy Colosseum give happy if the player isn't in HR? How about a reverse war-weariness effect giving happy instead of unhappy faces the more units you lose in foreign lands? Again it'd need to expire before the modern era... Oh, and an extra trade route at writing would stop anyone ever crashing their economy .

[Krill]

Having an XP effect expire with Military Science would be thematic and (perhaps) alleviate the Commando issue.

I don't think that Construction needs an economic aspect - its a war tech and gets researched when needed/wanted. I like looking at someone who's just got it and thinking "Ah, war".

Boudicca needs 13 XP for Commando on melee/gunpowder untis and can always upgrade after taking promotions. She can get 10XP just from Barracks/Vassalage/Theo/SoZ. Even 1 XP to melee/gunpowder units makes it somewhat trivial to get that magic 13XP.

Would your HR happy Colosseum give happy if the player isn't in HR? How about a reverse war-weariness effect giving happy instead of unhappy faces the more units you lose in foreign lands? Again it'd need to expire before the modern era... Oh, and an extra trade route at writing would stop anyone ever crashing their economy .

1. Yes, work even if not in HR.
   
2. TBH it sounds somewhat boring, and potentially cheezy if you want to throw away old, junk units for happy.
   
3. I do rather dislike ordinary buildings that expire, as a falvour issue.

In all honesty, I'm surprised how people never make that comment about crashing the economy in base BtS when sometimes players could get 3 commerce trade routes at Writing for no cost, which to beat with 2 normal routes would require a player strech themselves to settle an islandm, with te consequent difficulties that entails. It's not exactly much different to that, and it would really make people question which is better out of Maths and Alphabet. I imagine it would actually make people focus more on tresearch than expansion for a period.

[GermanJoey]

If you wanted players to focus more on research over expansion early, wouldn't it be easier just to fiddle a bit with standard RB Pitboss map settings? For example, any of the following map settings would have a big effect on the tradeoff calculation here: Torodial wrap but with no coast-accessible islands, Deity difficulty (but no barbs) to increase maintenance, normal size despite being a bigger-than-normal map, sparser food density (especially seafood), no gems/gold/silver/furs found anywhere near any capital's BFC.

[Krill]

Couple of reasons, but they are more based around the idea that more decision to make, is what makes games interesting.

• Islands give players more land to fight over, not just in a linear line between capitals, and bring in some amount of naval warfare.
  
• Toroidal wrap and flat maps have the same costs as cylindrical maps (one of the first changes, IIRC).
  
• Sparser food resources generally has the effect that there is much lower flexibility in dot maps, which then leads onto set front city positions and then this iterates down to forced warfare due to indefensible front cities due to culture output. Note, this doesn't actually change the tech rate versus expansion rate much, it just slows the entire game down due to slower pop growth.
  
• Good luck finding a map maker that will actually do that /s. Seriously, I know map makers fuck this up consistently, but even if they are placed 10 tiles from one persons capital...they aren't going to be 10 tiles from another players capital, not with around 200 land tiles per player. It's simply not possible to have these resources be as far as possible without placing them in "disputed" positions, which can then also cause players to prioritise settling those positions and create an imbalance and snowball problem.
  
• Difficulty...this generally has the effect that players lose options on expansion, such as forcing players to focus on a strategic resource and then on a happy res, because you can't have more than 3 cities without effectively losing due to the tech costs. And good luck for those players that need 4 cities to grab a happy, copper and horse, compared to the player that only needs three...or the player that has his resources placed towards an opponent, opposed to behind him, on the coast. Having less painful commerce costs to expansion is helpful, and frankly, Monarch is a good balancing point, there is a cost but there are a variety of potential options.

The stuff I was talking about earlier isn't for RtR. RtR is at a fairly reasonable point given standard settings...although people should stop being wimps and play on toroidal. PB18 is, IMO, a farce because it isn't.

I suppose all this is redundant though: if it turns out pitboss games are DoA then I don't see any reason to carry on mod development.

[TheWannabe]

Flat hammer decrease would have really interesting consequences, since it's effectively a massive proportional decrease that fades as you move up the tech tree. -10h = 5h warriors in a city without metal, or of archers for the price of warriors in any other... ok, maybe that's broken. I guess I should do some math, but I feel like even -5 would potentially make spears+cats the new optimal defense against knights, by sheer virtue of cheapness... potentially damping knight rushes since their proportional cost decrease would be much less?