Rebalancing Civ4: RtR Mod

[Krill]

That's an example, not the cause. What ends up occuring is that a scorched earth defense is always best because of the deterrance value, same with spite whipping, and all captured land is made profitable with workshops uber alles. That skews the late game with a preponderance of hammers and less commerce, where it is healthier if you can actually capture commerce areas rather than having to rely on your own cottage cities. Like OH said, it's preferable if players can make up their own minds about what to do with captured land, that includes keeping it as commerce area.

The emancipation change is an attempt to work around that issue as well.

[Commodore]

So here's a question, why would you ever take an ancient-era UU in the 3.x mod series?

[Krill]

Personally? They all have niches, I don't really have problems with the few I htink of off the top of my head. Why wouldn't you pick them, or perhaps which ones wouldn't be worth picking?

[Commodore]

Well, largely because the ancient age is gone in about half the time of previous games.

[Krill]

The ancient era UU are good because they are relevant into the medi era though, particularly on cost effectiveness levels.

[Krill]

In fact, as I suspect you are refering to PB27...the tech cost scaling is what's causing that effect, rather than the lowered tech costs. tl;dr it makes huge PB27 map closer to a standard map size tech cost and tech pace. That's actually a correction for what was originally an imbalance.

The starting tech costs and palace commerce increase I'm intending to change though. It all gets balanced around the workboat build time, so long as the wb is 25 food hammers, Fishing and other start techs need to be finished in 5 turns. I think they are currently a little to cheap and that's a correction that will be implemented when I have time to make the next mod version. Sometime after Xmas at this rate.

[GermanJoey]

I think reverting the starting tech costs and palace commerce is a good idea. Tech cost scaling by itself is enough to prevent the insane PB18 tech costs, with its ancient era lasting until like T80-T90 for some civs. You might also want to do something about huts, SUCH AS REMOVING THEM FROM THE GAME, but if not that at the very least force tech-cost scaling to scale the amount of gold they can give too. On a huge map, you can score over a 100 gold from a single hut. If you land a few of these, then that's like a free oracle whose beakers you can spread out however you please.

[GermanJoey]

Question: what do y'all think are the *ideal* ancient-era tech costs for standard speed games? Like, what map-size and mod feels "right" to you? Especially helpful would be specific games... such as "I thought the ancient era lasted way too long in PB18" or "the PBEMXX ancient game felt really good" or "Standard size BTS should be the standard" or whatever. Stuff like hut results, city maintenance, starting techs, all effect how long the ancient era lasts, so I want to run some comparison numbers against some test cases to see how big the turn-difference with these actually is compared to what we have in PB27 with RtR 3.0.0.4.

Personally, I feel like ToW with tech-speed scaling, e.g. PB20/PB21/PB29, feels pretty good, although I wouldn't mind if the first-row were even about 5-10 beakers more a piece. Second/third row techs feel about right. At those costs, it feels like starting techs still matter enough to force me to put serious thought into what I choose for my civ and the first 5-6 techs I research, yet I don't have to contort myself too uncomfortably to deal with barbs.

[Krill]

The pay out from huts is easily altered in the difficulties setting. They can be changed to not give a HIGH_GOLD payout, so no triple digits payouts from single huts. I don't think there is a huge problem with the first row techs being given out, when they would be worth about 45 gold a piece. I'm not sure if the actual gold values can be changed in the XML anywhere though.

So long as the first row techs are all the same cost, and Fishing specifically can be completed the turn a none EXP leader would finish a workboat, then that should be fine. I think that would add something like 10 beakers cost to each first row tech, and then remove an extra 50 beakers from teh lower palace gold which makes it a little bit slower. At the same time, the tech cost scaling effect making IW and HBR a bit cheaper compared to other Classical era techs keeps open the opportunity to wreck faces a bit more compared to PB18 etc.

The only difference to ToW then would be that instead of Fishing/Mining being 50 base beakers, and Myst/WHeel being 60 base beakers, they'd be 40 base. That's not a huge difference but does alleviate the start tech bias affecting civ choices.

I think with those changes to the PB27 tech costs that'd feel about right TBH. Ye Olde 50 turns to get BW and Pottery on direct beelines are boring.

[GermanJoey]

fair enough Krill. I think you'll also need to special-case the tech-scaling formula to make 40base-beaker techs be 45 beakers instead of 46, so that they'll exactly finish in 5 turns.

Is it possible to give players some starting overflow beakers? For example, if you could give players 12 bonus overflow beakers at start then you could make all the starting techs 45 base beakers (52 beakers after tech scaling) and they could still finish fishing in 5 turns.

hmmm, another idea to tune the early game tech speeds would be to lower the Palace commerce to +7 at the start, and then have Fishing give the Palace +1 commerce to bring it back to 8. (Like, maybe the Palace has a fish pond they charge people a tax to fish from or something. ) But. that way, Fishing would always be finishable in 5 turns, but the rest of the first-row techs are a tiny bit slower? The only other way to slow the ancient game down, while keeping the 5T fishing/workboat, would be to increase the costs of the second row techs, but I feel like messing with those effects balance of all kinds of other stuff...

And c'mon people, as much as people have complained about PB27's ancient-era tech speed, surely someone's a game they have in mind that they think is better?