EitB 0010 Wishlist/Progress

[gekko64]

also, I've seen someone mention elves become OP with republic boosted towns and I'm inclined to agree. cottages are already good enough once fully mature, the real cottage vs aristofarms issue is because aristofarms demolish them earlygame where the snowball starts.

you'll remember cottages used to grow at doublespeed for a long while due to a bug, and they were considered on par with aristograrian back then. unsurprisingly, once the bug got fixed aristofarms became the new economy of choice. so, imo cottages need a boost to their base growth speed. this would also help fight earlygame stagnation, especially alongside the bronze warrior nerf I suggested above. Republic could get another bonus, I like the elections giving traits it has in other modmods like WM ( kind of a crossover between insane and adaptive, very interesting )

but the REAL problem is the OPness of agrarianism and of course its combo with aristo in particular. boosting the other civics was much needed. Eitb claims to raise cost upkeep from low to medium but it's also medium in MNAI so maybe this is obsolete info?

agrarian is SUPPOSED to be balanced by its ill effect on hammers, which of course gets effectively nullified by the players by not farming plains. this is very poor design for a couple reason: 1) makes choices of improvements even more of a no-brainer and 2) very unfair to those with too many plains, who would love some extra food but get robbed of their hammers in the process while people with grassland prosper. this is particularly bad for mapscripts like ErebusContinent where dwarves get shafted by pure plains starts.

I really think agrarian needs an overhaul WM style, I'll keep the exact numbers as flexible as possible here for discussion but the general idea is:

low/medium upkeep ( I guess low since it's supposed to be somewhat of an earlygame civic so upkeep doesn't matter much )
+2 health ( I think this is more interesting than +1 as health is situational )
+x% food, with x between 10 and 20
-y% hammers, with y between 10 and 20 ( possibly not needed if x is 10 )


this scales much better than the current agrarian, still useful but no longer OP.

[gekko64]

on the other hand, isn't conquest at education a bit too much? aside from the fact that seems a bit too early since by then your empire will most likely still be expanding and growing, education already gives apprenticeship and cottages which seems quite enough ( city states was moved from Education to Cartography exactly for this reason after all )

warfare honestly seemed fitting, maybe you could give it the full 3xp back at that tech. if anything, the prereq could be made a bit less stringent with a couple more t2 military techs as OR links ( something like education and BW/HBR/construction for example )

[Mardoc]

The Conquest boost was precisely to make it a viable alternative to Agrarianism, without having to nerf Agrarianism. My main worry with your proposal is that Agrarianism becomes extremely situational - guaranteed hammer loss, and only gaining a bit of food, means most people won't want it most of the time. Especially proportional food - you want food most in the little cities, where your proposal gives food mainly to the big ones. And small percentages mean rounding hurts. I would possibly prefer no civic at all to Agrarianism they way you've described it - and certainly I'd rather all the other options in that column.

[Qgqqqqq]

Besides the +3xp is OP with lategame stuff like mages.
I agree, your proposal would just make it the eitb enviromentalism.
You do realise FT boosts cottage growth?

[gekko64]

I view this "boost conquest to nerf agrarian" similar as I see the "boost axes to nerf warriors" though : it changes the balance of the game without addressing the real issue directly. I think we can agree that agrarianism is too good in ffh, which makes food generally too easy to come by.

if the above recommendation seems useless, what would you think of:

+2 health
low upkeep
+20% food
no hammer penalty

this is pretty damn good and considering you get it very early I think it'd be OK for its power to fade away a bit lategame like the other early ones do. while I agree that lategame civics shouldn't be automatically the best choice, surely they should be powerful enough to justify the tech investment ( I think Sareln agrees based on his past changes )

another option: keep the farm bonus but replace the hammer malus with a per-city percentage so it's finally meaningful. I think at the very least this change is needed: as it stands now, the hammer malus could be removed outright and the game would be more balanced, not less! ( due to starting terrain being less of a factor ) . also more interesting on the improvement placement because it's no longer green = farm , yellow = cottage/mill .

[gekko64]

@Qgqqqqq: yes, of course I realize foreign trade boosts improvement growth and it's certainly nice to add variety to the game and usefulness to the civic ( perhaps not very fitting for foreign trade but w/e ) . however I think it's the base cottage growth that needs a boost to compare to aristofarms, a civic can only go so far as it will always have considerable opportunity costs.

[Qgqqqqq]

One of the things thats awesome about aristograrianism is its very easy to SEE the effect, and I really like the way it boosts a rarely built improvement (in BTS) to worthwhile-ness.
You could make the new aristo WAY more powerful, but Id still prefer the current system.

I think cottages are well balanced atm, and I worry that it would unbalance the economy's further, leading to ICS (C=cottage).
I think boosts are a better system then nerfs - the problem with warriors was that they were never effectively replaced, so buffing their replacement makes sense IMO.
It would also hurt SE + early growth, I like that in FFH2 low-food spots are viable because of straight Agrarianism.

Have you tried a straight CE in EitB (JC)? Not one that is specifically CE, but a neutral one like the Amurites.

[Mardoc]

I view this "boost conquest to nerf agrarian" similar as I see the "boost axes to nerf warriors" though : it changes the balance of the game without addressing the real issue directly. I think we can agree that agrarianism is too good in ffh, which makes food generally too easy to come by.

Well, as it happens, it wasn't just Conquest - all the civics in that column got a dramatic boost.

if the above recommendation seems useless, what would you think of:

+2 health
low upkeep
+20% food
no hammer penalty

this is pretty damn good and considering you get it very early I think it'd be OK for its power to fade away a bit lategame like the other early ones do. while I agree that lategame civics shouldn't be automatically the best choice, surely they should be powerful enough to justify the tech investment ( I think Sareln agrees based on his past changes )

That's more like it. I'm not yet convinced that agrarianism is really that broken, but this replacement is reasonable.

another option: keep the farm bonus but replace the hammer malus with a per-city percentage so it's finally meaningful. I think at the very least this change is needed: as it stands now, the hammer malus could be removed outright and the game would be more balanced, not less! ( due to starting terrain being less of a factor ) . also more interesting on the improvement placement because it's no longer green = farm , yellow = cottage/mill .

Huh. This hasn't much come up in our games, but that's probably because we tend to play on handmade maps where terrain is equal for everyone (and usually pretty lush, for that matter). I can see your point, that the main problem with Agrarianism is that its hammer penalty is sometimes significant, sometimes negligible. I think I agree that at a minimum the hammer penalty should be changed as you suggest.

[gekko64]

Sareln, do you follow Tholal's thread on CFC? I hope I won't have to repost here all the suggestions I've posted there lately

[Qgqqqqq]

It shoukd be easy multi-quote plus cntrl-c plus cntrl-v.
That thread is VERY long though.