Civ 6 Balance Mod Ideas: Brainstorming

[Japper007]

Oh boy this is gonna be a long one, I see a lot of balance issues with the current state of the game:

Ranged unit rebalance:

Set Archer-line units to 1 Range this has several benefits:

-It makes Archers less OP, but still leaves them their nice niche of being able to damage without retalliation.
-It increases the relevance of the Artillery line, which is just in a sad state right now (has anyone even used anything in this line in any of the 4 pbems so far?), as that would be left as the long ranged damage dealer with 2 range. This way Ranged units become speedy but risky (as Archers now have to get into the thick of combat) or slow but saver (since artillery needs to set up first).

Cavalry:

-Movement 3, down from 4. I say we should go the other way from just speeding up everything by actually slowing cav down. I've played around with the No Quitters mod which speeds up all unit's and it makes the game feel absurdly "Arcady".
-Cavalry should suffer ZoC like all other units
-Cavalry shouldn't be able to use siege towers and battering rams, that's just common sense right

Great Generals/Admirals:

-Keep extra movement, remove Combat strenght buff.
-Remove General/Admiral stacking.

Economy Rebalance:

-Just remove the production scaling altogether, maybe leave settlers increasing in cost though. It forces the "wrong" kind of gameplay for the sake of efficiency, where you have to leave research and culture 1 turn from completion to avoid inflating production costs, which is neadlessly micro-intensive and counterintuitive too. It also ensures all you ever care about in terms of yields is production.
-Set districts to start at 3 pop, instead of 1, currently you can plop down a city in the middle of the desert and prosper so long as it builds it's Campus/other victory district in a reasonable time. This would encourage you to actually grow your cities.
-Make buildings percentage increases rather than flat yields, again to emphasise the importance of growth more.

Faction Rebalance:

Skythia:

-Remove the 50 hp healing from "Killer of Cyrus" LUA, the extra Combat Strenght against wounded units is OP enough
-Change "People of the Steppe" CUA to a 50% bonus to cav production, the double cav is ridiculous.

Sumer:

-War Cart moves to the Wheel, becomes Sumerian Heavy Chariot replacement (Honestly, the unit is fine, it's how early you can build them that's the problem)

DLC civs:

Would have to probably have to be redesigned entirely to even be worth playing

[BRickAstley]

Also, it looks like there's at least one well reviewed mod that does an overhaul of gameplay, so a lot of changes are theoretically possible...

[Old Harry]

Dunno if any of these have been patched since I last played, but my list is:

1. Almost everything about the UI
2. Show the length of time it'll take to heal a unit
3. Show how many Beakers/culture are invested in each tech/civic
4. Build queues
5. Make tribal villages visible
6. Stop resource, unit and yield icons overlapping - oh, and in the city view the tile-being-worked icon overlaps everything again

[greenline]

undo the settler cost increase

move the city defense bonus back to civil engineering

[Woden]

Here is something that might be nice to add, a demographics mod.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/fi...1185386956

[BRickAstley]

So I have a first mod version built, and am testing it now. I'm trying to be as minimal as possible, lots of changes aren't really necessary, and make rebuilding the mod after patches more difficult. Items I am looking at for an Alpha version of the mod, focused towards MP improvements:

• Palace gives 25 defense strength. (With the settler cost increase, the *one right move* seems to be early expansion taking place just by military. Giving the palace half-strength walls, early rushing requires a little more focus, against players or city-states, while still leaving early pink-dots risky.)
  
• Improve Roads. Ancient includes bridges, Medieval costs .75 MP, Industrial costs .5 MP, Modern costs .4 MP. (Improving the speed on roads to allow for a little more maneuverability.)
  
• No envoy for being first-to-meet a City State. Code of Laws gives 2 envoys. (Removing the imbalance of starting next to a specific city state, giving envoys back early to allow for some beginning investment. Ideal is starting with 2 instead of @ CoL, but that's not as immediately easy to do)
  

I would welcome feedback on these. Planned changes: mild nerf to Sumeria/Scythia, mild buff to France and maybe Egypt? (all to make all playable in MP).

Also, I'm playing around with the Community QUI mod, and it looks to be very helpful in cleaning things up and presenting info easier, without changing the gameplay. I'd like to test in an actual MP game, but I could well see it working for our games. Also, it has a flag set to "Not affect save files", so if a patch came out that broke the UI mod, we can just have players disable using it until a mod update without pausing the game.

EDIT: Alternative to road movement changes; make military engineers earlier and with more road building charges. Seems more of a disruptive change to the base game gameplay though.

[Woden]

For the added Palace strength, would that be a change to the base strength (i.e. going from 10 to 25) or would it be a change to the Palace guard (i.e. going from +3 to +15)?

I like the idea but trying to wrap my head around it. City strength is the melee strength of your best unit minus 10 and would be the melee strength of that unit if it was in the city. The capital gets +3 for the palace guard. If the change was to base strength, would that mean the capital's strength wouldn't start to increase until you get a unit with a strength greater than 35, right? Or would the Palace always have a strength of +15 plus the base strength (if the change was to Palace guards)? That might make capitals really challenging to capture (which might be good, IDK), but like I said just try to think it through.

[Bobchillingworth]

I would prefer if district costs were simply flat across all eras, rather than the current system which rewards players for "gamey" behavior by locking in costs early without actually completing them.


Some civs need a power boost. Brazil in particular is just awful, especially since it's one of the few without any sort of early-game military advantage. Perhaps they should be able to build improvements directly on jungle without removing it, like elves or something.

[BRickAstley]

For the added Palace strength, would that be a change to the base strength (i.e. going from 10 to 25) or would it be a change to the Palace guard (i.e. going from +3 to +15)?

I like the idea but trying to wrap my head around it. City strength is the melee strength of your best unit minus 10 and would be the melee strength of that unit if it was in the city. The capital gets +3 for the palace guard. If the change was to base strength, would that mean the capital's strength wouldn't start to increase until you get a unit with a strength greater than 35, right? Or would the Palace always have a strength of +15 plus the base strength (if the change was to Palace guards)? That might make capitals really challenging to capture (which might be good, IDK), but like I said just try to think it through.

Neither! The city strength isn't changed, and neither is the palace guard. What this does is gives the city walls to start out with, to both add more "hit points to remove for capture", which also introducing the malus for basic unit types without support. Apparently that is also tied with a range attack, but it's very weak at the level of City Strength.

I would prefer if district costs were simply flat across all eras, rather than the current system which rewards players for "gamey" behavior by locking in costs early without actually completing them.  

I agree I don't like the locking in, but I don't think the cost can be completely flat, or else they would be way to expensive early game, and way too cheap late game. A couple of possible alternative approaches:

1. Tie the cost to era, instead of the number of techs & civics researched. Still goes up, but stair-stepping instead of a straight line, which will reduce the frequency of price *lock-ins*
   
2. Tie the cost solely to # of districts already built, both personal and across the game. Seems more difficult to build well, I feel like that would effectively cap the # of districts buildable across an empire.
   

Some civs need a power boost.  Brazil in particular is just awful, especially since it's one of the few without any sort of early-game military advantage.  Perhaps they should be able to build improvements directly on jungle without removing it, like elves or something.

Right, France and Egypt are the main ones i'm thinking of. Brazil seems to be at least respectable on island maps, though the MG isn't as much of a bonus on Pangaea for sure. I do like the improvements right on jungle in principle, would need to see how that affects their power curve.

[Krill]

District cost should be tied more closely to city population and districts built, not to tech.

As it is they are tied to pop by using the total population as the upper limit of number of districts, but this should also be tied into cost: a late game district shouldn't cost more than an early game district.

One example is that there is a cost floor for a 1 pop, districtless city. If you grow pop in the city, the district cost doesn't change until you place one district, then the cost rises until it hits another cap at 4 pop, then 7 etc. This is probably the cleanest method of implementation because districts are actually just another form of population that don't cost food, so they should be tied into the population system only for cost.