EitB 0010 Wishlist/Progress

[DaveV]

My random thoughts:

* Freaks used to be the same price as swordsmen, archers, or horsemen. This meant they could upgrade to any of those units cheaply with no wasted hammers. Now, Freaks are 60 hammers at normal speed, vs. 45 for the other three units. So an upgrade means you're throwing away 15 hammers each time. Since Freaks are also a walking building, this may be intentional, but it's kind of annoying for cheapskates like me.

* I think the pendulum has swung too far in the cheap price for Smelting and Iron Working (and maybe for techs in general). I used to enjoy the feeling of making a hard choice on where to put my research beakers; now it seems as though the game reaches a point where the techs just start clicking off in a few turns each.

* I think the shipyard is overpowered. It needs to be more expensive, available at a different tech, or lose the +1 hammer boost. It used to be that coastal cities were garbage for anyone but the Lanun; now, with Pearls everywhere and a mid-game Dike, they may be too strong.

* I don't like the increase in Mud Golem cost: I think it was originally lowered so the Luchuirp wouldn't be screwed if they started in a high-food, low production area (e.g. floodplains). Maybe have the Industrious +25% worker boost not apply to Mud Golems, which would slightly nerf the MP standard plains hill start?

[Sareln]

@gekko, thanks!

I pulled Tholal's latest build about a week ago. He's really good at pushing to his repo, so it'll be mostly current, hopefully. I'm still getting a few BUG based errors, but I'm hoping to have the time to iron them out in the next few weeks. I'm quite happy with how his AI is reacting to the EitB changes.

I think I'm pretty solid for my v10 changes now, but I'll keep your thoughts in mind when I go to make my v11 list.

[Sareln]

@DaveV,

The freak/upgrade action is mostly an oversight on my part. Is the Freak -> Upgrade an interesting decision? Or is it just one that the Balsareph player makes automatically (eg. build only freaks, upgrade the good combat mutations make shows with the bad mutations etc).

Tech-wise, we'll look at that again later. Econ right now does get kicking later on. At a certain point, it's nice in that you get to play with all the toys for a little bit before the game ends, but at the same time you're right in that it does lose the scarcity of knowledge feel.

What role do you think coastal cities should play? My initial thought is that they should be both valuable and vulnerable. The value comes from the tile-enhancing buildings and the trade-routes, and the vulnerability by being coastal and subject to amphibious assault.

Luchuirp are in a weird way right now. I feel that the key isn't in the cost of the worker itself but a clean answer still eludes me. Something else is throwing it all out of whack, so we're not going to find a settling price for the worker until we figure that out. Perhaps the mud golems need to be enhance-able or not a worker replacement but a new worker unit that comes in later in the game instead of from the beginning? But it's nice that the Luchuirp start with the golem-making immediately.

[HidingKneel]

3) the harpy event is still horrible, it comes early game where the 5 unhappy is a death sentence. I'd make it similar to the prophet event ( small gold cost for a great bard )

Which reminds me... the harpy event is really hard on the AI. When I used to play high-to-low games, about half the time I'd get swapped to an AI who had completely stagnated by grabbing the bard with a single city and happy cap of 5.

IMO the event is fine as-is for human players, but the AI definitely needs to be taught not to take the bard (at least near the start of the game).

[gekko64]

problem is, in my experience that event always triggers in the earlygame.

another thing you might want to include is denev's fix for blitz+defensive strike from the ffh unofficial patch.

[Sareln]

problem is, in my experience that event always triggers in the earlygame.

another thing you might want to include is denev's fix for blitz+defensive strike from the ffh unofficial patch.

How recent is the fix? EitB was built on top of a 1.xx better Naval AI; would that have included Denev's fix? There's a lot of Denev comments in the source right now :P

I have something special in mind for events for v11, but I'd like it to be a surprise for now.

[gekko64]

not sure if it's already included ( it was included in wild mana at some point, dunno about tholal's ) honestly but should be easy to check.

wild mana also had a nice overhaul for random events probabilities and also included more random events. overall that would be a good source of content as the scope was similar to eitb ( spice up the game where needed without changing it too much )

[NobleHelium]

EitB's scope is to rebalance the game. It is not to spice up the game. I would strongly recommend against importing anything from Wild Mana which is an enhancement mod just like most of the rest out there.

[gekko64]

well it certainly had tons of good balance changes. balancing units vs buildings costs , nerfing uber civics and boosting crap ones, nerfing pyre zombies, calabim etc. are all things Eitb also addresses.

[Sareln]

What I really want to accomplish here is to bind the already prodigious amount of content included in base FfH into a form where people can see most of it when they're playing well - as opposed to the initial state where there was all this great content, but you'd never see it if you were trying to win the game since going for the cool and esoteric stuff involved making sub-optimal tech choices! So I guess we have managed to spice up the games by encouraging players to use all that stuff that was hiding in the corner unused and unloved .

With Events in v10, I expect we'll see pretty much all the PBEM's check the "No Non-Core Events" new option since the added entropy doesn't feel "fun" in a game that you're going to spend a year on. For the future, I'll keep thinking on it, but I expect that final change, if any, will be something that adds more (and reworks) choices to the built-in events, rather than adding more of them.