Rebalancing Civ4: RtR Mod

[Dhalphir]

That's part of the calculation about whether it is a good idea to move out, which as you stated can be stated as: Are the increased per turn hammers, minus the proportion dedicated to military, enough to offset the loss of slaving?

That's the trouble though - the answer to that question is almost always "no, the flexibility of Slavery is worth more". Differences between civics to create a choice don't work if there isn't a real choice.

[Qgqqqqq]

Then why do people give up slavery at all? Because while that may be true for the mid game, given the power of workshops even in the medieval era, and the necessary larger armies because of the slavery nerf mean that the influence of slavery in hurrying production can be too slight compared to the mfg advantage of rivals or that there is not enough time to respond through simply whipping to a army at the gates.
An BTS example is PB9 - even ignoring the benefits of other civics, slavery wasn't worth much as a army producer post-azza because armies were too large for those units to make much of a difference, especially given the delayed response time.

[Dhalphir]

I agree, lategame slavery is unnecessary because your cities are too big with too many multipliers on worked tiles to give up pop points for hammers

but Slavery isn't really a choice in the early game, and arguably not in the midgame either.

[Qgqqqqq]

Its also the only thing available in the early and much of the mid game

[Krill]

Basically, Slavery becomes less useful than Caste or Serfdom the moment you meet the following criteria:

1. You have grown you cities large, working enough hammer tiles that the cities that they produce a constant stream of units,
   
2. You have the ability to build HA and cats (because those units don't obsolete until Rifling/Steel so you can just constantly add to a stack without risking the units becoming obsolete and the hammers wasted), and
   
3. You have enough units in each border city (and to cover a new city) to defend it that slaving 2 additional defensive units won't make a difference in holding the city compared to what your opponent can move to attack with.

That can be distilled down to 3 basic factors: What tech you already have, how much happiness (and food) you have, and how big your opponents armies compared to yours. If you have a bunch of small cities, size 4-6 because you haven't hooked up any happiness resources then no, you don't want to be out of slavery. In that case, you want to focus on getting happiness resources and growing cities. If, OTOH, you already have HE built, and are building 1 HA or cat a turn from there, and you are pretty close to top power, you can consider how much you need slavery for defense (you might still want it to improve new cities quickly for example).

That means that choices made earlier in the game have a huge impact on the viability of the civics. To put it even more bluntly, the usefulness of Caste and Serfdom is based off the players ability to defend against invasions, which is dependent on they ability to manage the growth of a civ.

So, yeah, I agree with you that for some players, it may seem like Slavery is always the right choice for a civic, but it's not because of the way the civics are balanced (either in base BtS or RB mod).

[Commodore]

By the way, this might have been mentioned before, but RBmod barracks don't double culture after 1000 years.

I do like how they let barbs pop borders though.

[Krill]

Thanks for the heads up. Probably a missed XML tag, I can fix it for the next update.

Anything else that needs looking at?

[Serdoa]

Dun only gives G2. Not sure if that is intentional or not. Also it states units, but it seems to be only Archery and Melee-units. Maybe Gunpowder too, I don't know yet.

[SevenSpirits]

Dun only gives G2. Not sure if that is intentional or not. Also it states units, but it seems to be only Archery and Melee-units. Maybe Gunpowder too, I don't know yet.

There was some discussion of this earlier. http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthrea...#pid394643

I think Duns are a bit overpowered giving just G2, and giving it to melee units as well, unlike BTS. Giving that AND G1 would be absurd.

[Krill]

Yeah, the current functionality is pretty much as intended (even if the reasons that it works that way are...not the expected way for them to work).