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So a lot of RB games start with the same set of house rules: No War Elephants, no Nukes, no cheesy city gifting, etc.
Is there any demand for a mod that just makes these relatively uncontroversial changes (and leaves out more debatable stuff like a Slavery nerf, trait/civ balancing, etc).
Here's what I'm envisioning:
* War Elephants cot 55 and are strength 7, instead of 60/8.
* Gifted cities get the same number of revolt turns as they would if captured. (Note: Sometimes, if the new owner's culture is highest, this is zero.)
* You cannot draft and/or whip a given city more than once in a turn.
* Blockades are range 1.
* You may not nuke a player (= drop a nuke in a player's territory) unless a) It is the first nuke ever dropped or b) That player has nuked you in the last 10t or c) That player has declared war on you in the last 10t.
And maybe...
Don't get hung up on any particular detail. The question is: is it worth the effort of using a mod to get these things? (Making the mod is easy.) I kinda think not.
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I think a minimalist balance mod would definitely be useful. Just nerfing the things that get banned every game, so that they're actually usable instead of being parts of the game that we have to lock away.
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Trouble is, where do you stop? GLH only giving one extra TR? Are ballistaphants nerfed too, or are they still okay? Pretty soon, you have the RB mod.
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GLH is not usually banned, so I don't think it needs changing. I think only changing things that are almost always banned is a good threshold to start with. If you have a conservative list of changes, it can't be worse than the base; any things unchanged can still be banned if necessary for that particular game.
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Why don't you just make it so that nukes don't kill military units, only non-fatal collateral damage and kill improvements/pop. That way since nukes are technically units, you have guaranteed second strike capability so that if one person unleashes the bomb, it all goes to hell. 
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Commodore Wrote:Trouble is, where do you stop? GLH only giving one extra TR? Are ballistaphants nerfed too, or are they still okay? Pretty soon, you have the RB mod.
The goal is to stop at the point where the majority of games no longer use house rules like those mentioned above. So, basically there. Since GLH bans seem to happen too (or if not, since the lack of them sometimes makes the mapmaker jump through hoops to not provide islands), I guess I would also probably cut it down to 1 TR.
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If it is possible to do coding wise, it might be most simple to just make each of these house rules an option on the game setup screen (as in just what no tech brokering, always war, no huts, etc. are now -- you just check the box if you want it). That way you could include some of the more borderline changes and just let each game decide what things to ban or change. Thus there wouldn't be the issue of where to stop with the changes.
September 23rd, 2011, 16:14
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well ... how about just NO NUKES and NO WAR ELEPHANTS
:D
the way I see it, those are the only changes needed, end of story. 
Edit: of course, I don't have a problem with War Elephants, (plus leaving War Elephants doesn't nerf the Khymer, whose UU is there) yet just have either a mod with no nukes, or a gameoption of no nukes ... similar to the game option of no tech trade
(there isn't already a game option, added in by some modder, for no nukes is there?)
September 26th, 2011, 13:02
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Basic mod is fine, but line drawing is important. Just examples:
- IMO blockades banned are overblown and ridiculous. You can't blockade someone without a tech lead or unless they've simply not invested in a navy. Navy should matter on maps with some water. Players who don't defend one aspect of their empire should be punished. Instead, my understanding is that someone didn't once or twice, some people threw a fit, and it got banned.
- Same goes for corporations. Corp strength is very much a function of how large an empire is. They're not truly strong unless either a) the empire is very massive (if an empire gets massive and is left un-touched while spreading corp execs, they're probably going to win regardless) or b) people are trading corp resources to them while the corp civ has a winning position (  is all I have to say to that). Where is the imbalance? Why are these banned again? People running heavy #'s analysis on corp ROI on civfanatics have shown them to be very situational...so why are they getting fairly global PBEM bans lately?!
- Same for spies. I get the civic/religion switching because it completely locks out nationhood and possibly slavery for very low cost...but what about the rest? There are quite a few ways to interfere with enemy spies and they're often cheap (run religion the guy isn't running, control its holy city, focus espionage, run counter espionage mission, station a spy in likely passes/mission targets). You can make spies require a SERIOUS hammer/resource investment to the extent of making the returns not worthwhile. There is a strategic tradeoff there and most of the struggles I've seen with spies in PBEM games gone by are rooted in the target not defending himself against it well. If you guys have an example of a game where the EP target ran counter-espionage, focused it on the offender, and used at least 1-2 defensive spies and the EP user STILL caused a major upheavel, show me. I will believe it when I see it.
Therefore drawing the line becomes important...and it's hard to single things out with such a mod.
September 26th, 2011, 13:38
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TheMeInTeam Wrote:- Same for spies. I get the civic/religion switching because it completely locks out nationhood and possibly slavery for very low cost...but what about the rest? There are quite a few ways to interfere with enemy spies and they're often cheap (run religion the guy isn't running, control its holy city, focus espionage, run counter espionage mission, station a spy in likely passes/mission targets). You can make spies require a SERIOUS hammer/resource investment to the extent of making the returns not worthwhile. There is a strategic tradeoff there and most of the struggles I've seen with spies in PBEM games gone by are rooted in the target not defending himself against it well. If you guys have an example of a game where the EP target ran counter-espionage, focused it on the offender, and used at least 1-2 defensive spies and the EP user STILL caused a major upheavel, show me. I will believe it when I see it.
Therefore drawing the line becomes important...and it's hard to single things out with such a mod.
I think I agree with you on corps, and blockades I don't mind personally either. Spies though are a problem for at least one more reason. They were designed with the assumption that tech trading is on, and let you steal techs too cheaply. Your counterespionage solution doesn't work because two people can collude.
The common complaint I hear about spies is that they can see things on the map. Can't say I mind that either.
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