OK, OK, strong armed me. I've emailed T-hawk with the alteration.
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Rebalancing Civ4: RtR Mod
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OK, please don't shoot the messenger.
T-hawk has been absolutely amazing in getting this mod off the ground, pretty much every single DLL change has been implemented by him (and thanks to Seven for finding, producing and providing the bug fixes in the as unreleased DLL). T-hawk has just this minute finished implementing the EXP change for city hammers. And it's supposedly much too difficult to code the change for just the capital, but it has been implemented for all cities. Are people going to be totally opposed to this? Or would some alterations with the cheap buildings for EXP be helpful (in your opinions?)
Um, break worker/wb down to 25%?
A reason you killed corporations is that the "free stuff in city tile" is antithetical to Civ4's design, isn't it?
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I think having it work for all cities is a better rule. Buffing just the capital isn't very expansive. If it makes Expansive a bit too strong, there's other knobs to nerf on it like the worker bonus.
Also, I ran into problems in implementing it for just the capital. When the game creates the city and sets its production values, the city isn't yet the capital, because the Palace wasn't created yet. I don't think the game ever re-reads the plots from then on, it just applies production plus/minus changes to the city's values. It's hypothetically fixable of course, but would involve too much code to properly handle all possible state changes later (moving capitals, conquering capitals, colonies getting a new capital) that I don't care to get into.
Min 2h for city tiles
25% worker, WB production 100% grocer, harbor production Potentially still be a bit strong - I am not sure how to value the min 2h city tiles yet. 
Commodore, yeah, I think that might be the best way to handle it. A guaranteed 2/2/1 capital will always make a worker in 12 turns without a 2 hammer tile (for 4hpt for the bonus) and 10 turns with it. I think that's OK.
T-hawk: just spit balling, not going to ask you to do this, but would it not be simpler to make the palace give +1 hammer for EXP leaders? IE check if trait is EXP, then give the palace the extra hammer? I don't know about implementation, just wondering about different ways that changes are possibly implemented as a none-techie person.
I'm okay with it if we nerf it in other ways to counteract it.
You really almost need someone to be willing to play a test game and a control game to see how badly they can break things with min 2h city tiles. Seven's outline sounds like a reasonable guess, but I think the impact of this change is going to prove really hard to estimate.
If you want to be conservative, just take BTS EXP, remove the granary bonus, and add the 2h min city tiles.
The way I'd first try to value the extra hammers is how many turns would it shave off the first build in that city? It saves X turns on a worker, in the capital, that is fairly easy to calculate, but what does it do for getting borders popped, or getting that granary in the second and third cities, compared to other traits.? And then what happens if chops are taken into account?
TBH, when you consider the hammers available from chopping to speed up critical structures, I don't value that extra hammer as much as I perhaps could or even should do. Yes, 2hpt v 1hpt could get a granary, monument, warrior etc completed significantly faster in that second city, but drop 2 chops into a granary and it's, what 2 turns saved on a 6 turn build? To be honest, it's not that difficult to sim out a different start for 30 turns with and without that change: the main issue is that this change in isolation doesn't mean much, it's in conjunction with tech costs that it would really break things: time to reach Pottery and BW being the main constraints. 
...this is still hard to qualify, particularly given the behavior of the plant. Plains hills are abundant, and copper/iron/coal hills, plains ivory, plains marble/stone, etc...2h plants aren't rare, so exactly how many "more" 2h city tiles are made this way? I'm Exp and start on a plains hill tile. Now I feel kind of gypped.
And even further on the other hand, though, with this modded Expansive maybe you can settle differently; sure, I could settle that plains hill, but I'm Expansive so I'll instead settle the useless desert, and hey my dotmap is better, plus I just gained a plains hill! That's a far-reaching change. Aqueducts and Markets buff an already workable trait; Exp Rome/Ottomen/Khmer in particular look nicer. I'd be more for the extra cheap buildings than the oddball 2h city tile IF THEN ELSE rule.
If only you and me and dead people know hex, then only deaf people know hex.
I write RPG adventures, and blog about it, check it out. |
