Rebalancing Civ4: RtR Mod

[antisocialmunky]

While the national wonder thing works, here is another idea:

Could we have 2 versions: A GP World Wonder with a gold bonus but a National Wonder without one. The world wonder is a GP operates like the current version and costs gold to spread. The national one is buildable but you don't get a gold bonus and it can't be spread worldwide but it is free to spread. That way if you invest a GP to found a corporation, you get an extra bonus out of it but you can build the national version of it instead if you miss out. The national one provides no gold bonus but is cheaper to spread while the world wonder provides gold and costs money to spread but it can spread worldwide.

This would model a big private transnational corporation vs some subsidized and nationalized corporation.

[Cyneheard]

Oh boy. I'm going to have to say "too much work" to do that. There are too many programming complications (should the WW version get HQ bonus commerce for people incorporating it elsewhere?), and creating two different sets of buildings, one for the regular HQ, and one for the other...

Balance-wise, I think creating two different corporations (they ARE different: one nets you 12gpt every time you spread it, one does not) is a huge can of worms as well. I think the simpler the fix, the better.

[Gold Ergo Sum]

What about simplifying corporations in some way to accomplish this:

1) Simplify the gold requirements: no HQ bonus and each branch costs X gold.

2) All Corps have only one benefits: food, hammers, or culture. No secondary effects.

3) Make the Corps work this way:

Sid's-More expensive, more food.
Cereal Mills-Less expensive, less food.
Mining Inc.-More expensive, more hammers.
Creative Con.-Less expensive, less hammers.
Civilized Jewelers-Gold for culture.
Ethanol-Paying for oil.
Aluminum-Paying for aluminum.

4) Corps are a National Wonder. You build it, and then spread by building Executives. No foreign spread.

5) Each Civ can only found one. So that this is a tactical decision on what your Civ needs. And whether it needs the expensive versions for max food/hammers. Or you could have a Civ be able to found as many as they want, but each city can only have one.

6) Balance the bonus in such a way that you are actually making a choice and not just deciding that you have to have Corps to win. If you are going for culture, maybe you are willing to give up the gold in 3 Legendary cities. If you need food, you make a decision on which one you want--more/less food for more/less gold. And if you need to add hammers, then you have a decision there too.

Essentially, you turn Corps into a way to generate something your Civ needs out of thin air late in the game, but it is going to cost you enough that you have a real decision to make on which version you want and in which cities the benefits out weigh the costs.

Under this formulation, I would remove the GP requirement, but still require you to research a certain tech to gain access.

[Cyneheard]

First, let me lay out the corp maintenance formula:

Corporate Maintenance Explained

(BaseHQCommerce + Resources * Map Size Adjustment) * Population Modifier * Difficulty * Civics Modifier

The Map Size Adjustment is what's used for calculating per-resource benefits, like how on a Duel Map you get 4x the bonus per resource as a standard map, and on a Huge Map, it's 1/2 the bonus per resource.

I'm ignoring inflation here, because it actually doesn't matter: the corporation maintenance display for each city is after dividing by the current inflation rate, and then inflation gets put back into the equation when calculating final costs on F2. Let me repeat that: Inflation has no net effect on corporate costs. This makes balancing them significantly easier: the clock has no effect.

If we remove the HQ Commerce (which is both a bonus and a penalty), then the cost of a corporation in a city is directly proportional to its benefit.

Population: This is slightly weird, it's (Population + 17) / 18: So, a size 19 city pays 2x as much as a size 1 city for its corporate costs, holding everything else equal (ceteris paribus).

Difficulty: 1.0 for Noble, increases by 10% for each difficulty level above Noble, to 1.5 for Deity. For the purposes of balancing maintenance costs, Noble difficulty will be assumed, since for NTT MP games, that's the default difficulty.

Civic Modifiers: Free Market (-25%), State Property (sets it to 0), Environmentalism (+25%).

Example:
Mining Inc, Standard Map: 1h per resource.

So, for a size 19 city, Noble Difficulty, under Free Market, with no HQ bonus:

# of Resources * 1 (Map Size) * 2 (Pop) * 1 (Difficulty) * 0.75 (FM) = 1.5 * # of Resources, or 1.5gpt per base hammer.

That's very cheap: 1 hammer of output is typically worth more than 1.5 gold of output, and that's before taking into account forges and factories and various sundry situational bonuses. So expect large increases in per-resource corporation maintenance.

What about simplifying corporations in some way to accomplish this:

1) Simplify the gold requirements: no HQ bonus and each branch costs X gold.

Each branch can have a maintenance cost directly proportional to the benefits that corp gives. See above. Spreading costs could be tweaked.

2) All Corps have only one benefits: food, hammers, or culture. No secondary effects.

3) Make the Corps work this way:

Sid's-More expensive, more food.
Cereal Mills-Less expensive, less food.
Mining Inc.-More expensive, more hammers.
Creative Con.-Less expensive, less hammers.
Civilized Jewelers-Gold for culture.
Ethanol-Paying for oil.
Aluminum-Paying for aluminum.

Definitely agreed for Sid's and Civ Jewelers with their X + culture outputs, that should be simplified to one output each. Secondary beaker benefits for Standard Ethanol and Aluminum Co on top of their resource benefits should be fine, though. Or we could set the maintenance costs to those two corporations to zero (since paying for a gold --> beaker conversion isn't all that big of a deal). Secondly, I think the "more expensive" corps should be map-dependent: Both Sid's and Cereal Mills could provide the same amount of food per resource, and it just depends on how many resources you have for each of them.

Also, in this set-up, the two corps that provide the same bonus naturally conflict with one another, so you can't have both of them. Other conflicts exist, as well.

However, we could also consider changing the game into having no food corporations, because those are the truly difficult ones to balance: Food becomes everything else in very flexible ways.

4) Corps are a National Wonder. You build it, and then spread by building Executives. No foreign spread.

National Wonder = good idea. No foreign spread? Not sure if I like that or not. It could be done easily, but removes Mercantilism's uniqueness, among other things. Corporations should not be exclusive to a single civ.

The other option, and I'm not 100% sure that it will work right, is to turn the Corporations into Projects. You spend 1000h or so, and like the Manhattan Project, the Executives are now available to everyone to be built. There may be a way to have the Project builder get some executives for his trouble (Might require DLL coding, though).

5) Each Civ can only found one. So that this is a tactical decision on what your Civ needs. And whether it needs the expensive versions for max food/hammers. Or you could have a Civ be able to found as many as they want, but each city can only have one.

I strongly disagree for two reasons:
1) I don't think going corp-happy in the endgame would be a problem if the corporations were balanced. So restricting players to only one corp seems rather painful (especially if they need to use either Std Ethanol or Alum Co: What if you don't have either Oil or Aluminum?)

2) PITA to code.

6) Balance the bonus in such a way that you are actually making a choice and not just deciding that you have to have Corps to win. If you are going for culture, maybe you are willing to give up the gold in 3 Legendary cities. If you need food, you make a decision on which one you want--more/less food for more/less gold. And if you need to add hammers, then you have a decision there too.

Essentially, you turn Corps into a way to generate something your Civ needs out of thin air late in the game, but it is going to cost you enough that you have a real decision to make on which version you want and in which cities the benefits out weigh the costs.

Under this formulation, I would remove the GP requirement, but still require you to research a certain tech to gain access.

I think keeping the GP requirement makes sense if we're allowing players to have multiple corporations. The more/less distinction will be managed endogenously by each civ's resource access (within the Food Corps and the Hammer Corps), and whether or not they're worried about cross-conflicts between the Hammer Corps and Alum Co, or the Food corps and Std Ethanol, or Civ Jewler's and Mining Inc.

Also, I would be in favor of making corporate spread be 100% effective, or functioning more like missionaries where once there are several corps, it gets less effective. But if that can't be changed, then whatever.

[Gold Ergo Sum]

Corporations should not be exclusive to a single civ.

The way I was thinking, every civilization could build whatever corporation they wanted, even the same one (like other NWs), but they could only choose one corporation, so it would be a real strategic choice about what that particular civ needed most.

I do see your point about Merc. It would also change SP as well.

[scooter]

The more I follow this conversation, the more I am in favor of just removing them. Would it really be that awful if the late-game resembled Vanilla instead of BtS? I always got the idea that the consensus here (which I agreed with) was that corporations was a bad idea (in which case you'd want to remove them) rather than a good idea poorly implemented (in which case you'd want to fix them). Am I mistaken?

[Cyneheard]

The simpler option is to remove corps, yes. Is it the best one? I have no idea.



One note:

Changing State Property only makes sense once we know what we should do with corporations. Really, no matter what we do to corporations, SP will get changed somehow.

[Ilios]

The simpler option is to remove corps

Yes

I actually never really liked BTS because of Espionage and Corporations, they just added some more tedious micro. (at least for me)

[Ruff_Hi]

The way I was thinking, every civilization could build whatever corporation they wanted, even the same one (like other NWs), but they could only choose one corporation, so it would be a real strategic choice about what that particular civ needed most.

I totally agree.

The more I follow this conversation, the more I am in favor of just removing them. Would it really be that awful if the late-game resembled Vanilla instead of BtS? I always got the idea that the consensus here (which I agreed with) was that corporations was a bad idea (in which case you'd want to remove them) rather than a good idea poorly implemented (in which case you'd want to fix them). Am I mistaken?

With Corps in the game, going State Property has a significant cost. With Corps out, then SP is pretty much the best option.

[T-hawk]

Has anyone described what's actually wrong with corporations as they stand? I'm not convinced they're a problem at all, though admittedly as a multiplayer non-player. Sure, against AIs they push you farther ahead. But multiplayer opponents should be able to punish you for sinking hundreds of hammers and gold into executives and teching to Medicine instead of Assembly Line. Pillage the resources. Raze the HQ. At the very least, don't sell resources to a corpmonger like the AIs will.

For a balance mod like this, simple is better. Why not try a simple straight nerf to corp productivity? Just scale down the map size resource modifiers by 1/3 or 1/2 or something.