Game mechanics

[Seravy]

Sawmill is specifically designed as must have.

This. I decided it feels more appropriate to have this as a building instead of each city having a base production of 8 come out of nowhere.
It's a mechanism to get rid of the very long idle time on new cities where they produce absolutely nothing useful - With a Sawmill, your cities produce as though they had +4 population already. A marginal effect in the late game, but contributes a lot to making the early game work - without it, we would be back to the original game's "click next turn 50 times, yay I finally have my first building" which is boring, not AI friendly, and even less player friendly (by the time you get to do anything, high difficulty AI will have crushed you with summons). The fact that you already have to wait a lot for outposts to turn into cities doesn't work well with that city then having a base production of nothing at all (1 hammers).
So yes, Sawmills are an exception to the usual "more interesting tradeoffs" rule, and I hope it's the only one.
However, I suspect buying Builder's Hall and setting housing can be a better strategy than Sawmill for some cities in same cases? I didn't do the math but BH is cheaper and has less maintenance, so a high enough growth city might benefit more from that strategy?

Builder's Hall by the way is the "root" building for the advanced buildings tree, it's main function is to unlock those buildings for races who can access it (and from a code perspective, to ensure the list of "unavailable buildings" stays within the maximal size of 7 for races who cannot). The housing bonus, and unlocking engineers are there so the building has some purpose on its own as well, but in most cases, it's something you want to unlock University, Bank or Parthenon - it's not meant to be something that you always want to build even on its own (+40 growth sounds large enough to always want it early), more like, in specific situations only - if you plan to do lots of housing or need a road.
(a direct growth bonus would also make BH pretty redundant with Granary and Farmer's Market which are also cheap buildings providing a growth bonus)

[GermanJoey]

I thought part of the point of the mod was to introduce more interesting tradeoffs and encourage decisionmaking? At least that's my key objective. Building sawmill first every time is getting boring. I'd much prefer it were there were different viable alternatives depending on the site and your needs.

We go worker-first (nearly) every time in Civ4, but surely you don't that game has a lack of decision-making, right?

[Catwalk]

Civ4 is an excellent reference point. While worker is (almost) always the correct first move, that only goes for your first city. In CoM it goes for every city.

Why not make it so going for production, going for growth, going for food and going for gold are all relevant approaches? Right now all cities build up more or less the same, it's not interesting. Civ4 has many viable options for new cities.

[Nelphine]

No, its not for every city. If you ate going to be buying all the buildings for several turns *cough over 1000g income cough* you have no need for extra hammers, until your buying spree is over.

My extreme lizardman capital builds 6 settlers before a granary. (Can't work on impossible)

My late cities as inquisitor go straight shrine/cathedral because all I care about is power income. Etc etc.

[Catwalk]

I suggest removing the Guardian retort and giving that effect to the defender in every fortress battle. Fortress battle is still too easy, compared with the colossal advantage it offers. Not only do you get spells, taking out their other cities for the next 3-5 turns becomes easy mode. Having played more extensively with the mod, I'm even more firmly convinced that fortress strikes are a critical strategy. You actively want to avoid attacking other cities most of the time, unless it's just tiny stuff without much defense.

Meanwhile, Guardian is just a spoiler pick that makes wizards randomly impossible to attack. AI wizards can't utilize setup combos the same way we can, so they just rely on picks being inherently strong. It's an immensely unbalancing effect. I know you're a big fan of it Seravy, but I sincerely feel that this effect would be so much better suited for all fortress combat (where it would be great).

[Nelphine]

I actually rarely notice when the enemy has it :P But I go for pure brute force approaches - since I'm already planning to defeat things like elite hammerhands with my doomstack, i really don't care if halberdiers or swordsmen have guardian. Then later on, I plan to defeat rare summons and heroes - so I don't care if the elite hammerhands have guardian.

I basically think of it as an early game smash 'n grab preventer. I'm still not sure it's worth 2 picks even as it is.

Don't get me wrong it definitely makes a huge difference; it just isn't going to win battles by itself. I'd much rather have say archmage or sagemaster than guardian. And archmage scares me far more when the ai has it than guardian.

I do think fortresses need a slight boost, but mostly in strategic combat so AI don't accidentally wipe each other out early.

@Catwalk - I'd specifically try some other strategies and use them against the fortress. For instance, fight a fortress on impossible, after 1412 or so. (Or, like my lizardman extreme game, 1411 with 8 death knights and a beastmaster in the fortress. Ain't no way that needed a boost.) I think your problem is not so much fortresses, but the sheer speed you're able to get in and attack the fortresses. Which is simpler to fix by weakening the early units you are using rather than trying to boost the fortress (since that will affect late game as well.)

[Nelphine]

I know someone else has mentioned it, but it wasn't until recently that I really started to think about this.

Does anyone ever NOT use maximum tax rate?

I'm personally using maximum tax rate starting on turn 3 (turn 1 if lizardman or klackon, turn 2 if death), and I never change it for the entire rest of the game.

I very rarely have many unrest problems.

Similarly, almost every AI city I see has huge population.. and loads of unrest. Which means they have very high taxes as well.

Since the AI will do the calculation every turn and always choose the optimal tax rate, doesn't that just mean that no matter what is happening, max taxes are always optimal? (And the only reason they have so much unrest is because of their population growth bonuses hitting maximal population much faster than I do.)

(Obviously, widespread city curses/very rare globals might affect this, but those are extremely uncommon.)

This also may be one reason I think cult leader was weak - I never had unrest problems even with max tax rate, which means cult leader has always been purely about power generation, with the unrest being a tiny icing on top. Obviously cult leader has changed since then, this is just me thinking out loud.

[Seravy]

So, if I understand well, you start by producing 2 spearmen, so on turn 3 you can max your tax rate, but to feed those spearmen you have to lose a worker? Don't think that extra 0.25 gold is worth that much...
Or you always play lizardmen and klacokn only who have reduced unrest?

I often have less than max taxes, especially if I don't have 8 units in all my cities.

The AI has unrest because it's not trying to calculate the optimal amount (it can't).
It only has two triggers :
Total unrest in empire population<10% -> raise taxes and >30% ->lower taxes.

Midgame and later I usually have max taxes unless my races don't allow for that (move fortress can do wonders to fix that).

[Nelphine]

Its an extra 0.25 gold per population. That's a full extra gold, if you have no modifiers. Admittedly, it might not actually be worth it immediately with no modifiers, but, that's why I'm asking. At the same time, gold is always useful and can be stockpiled. 1 extra hammer only matters once it actually completes something. Since most of your production to start comes from the sawmill, it really doesn't actually change how long until you complete something.

However, I have been playing life/death omniscient. Which means most of my garrisons are skeletons (no food, because food is a problem), plus extra modifiers to both production and gold.

This is the big reason I'm asking.

[Seravy]

1 food produces 1 gold if sold. So 2 spearmen eating that food to get you an extra gold does nothing.
2 gold buys a hammer, and turning a worker to a farmer loses 1.5 of those but makes 2 food, so it's a loss of 1 gold (3 gold worth of hammers vs 2 gold worth of food). In case of klackons you lose more, for halflings you don't lose anything.
If you use skeletons, that's a different story. That's always worth it. (unless your cities are all so big that you can't get rid of unrest anymore and you can't afford Oracles or have races without them.)

However skeletons don't work long term. Eventually you need real garrisons if you don't want to lose the city (yes I know it works for you but most likely won't for most people) - in fact skeletons can make you a loss if the enemy gets Holy Word, Great Unsummoning, or Fire Storm that kills them in large quantities.
At that point, of course it'll be worth the food so the real question is, can your race build an oracle, and are there any other modifiers in place.

I'd say the goal is to be able to have max taxes if the player doesn't have large racial penalties, isn't affected by unrest increasing spells, has 8 garrison units, and plays a race that can at least build an Oracle (or has inherent unrest reduction).