Serdoa's SPOILER-Thread: I am legend?

[Charriu]

ORG: I saw I even misremembered (and didn't read what I typed...). Only civic upkeep costs are reduced, not the actual maintenance. That makes it even worse. Maybe actually have all maintenance reduced would help, though the issue is imo that it is meant as a choice for higher difficulty games in which these costs can become crippling and you actively have to work to reduce them. Everything that works at these costs, that scale with difficulty, will always lead to the same point: Good to borderline mandatory in high difficulty games, weak to useless in low difficulty games. 

Changes therefore would have to be done to production cost reductions. Maybe the worker cost reduction bonus from EXP would make a good thematic fit.

Regarding the upkeep cost and difficulty. If you look at the formula for civic upkeep, the game multiplies the upkeep by a certain factor in the last step of the calculation. For everything Emporer and above this is 1 and for Monarch it is 0.95. Yes it is worse on Monarch, but not that bad either. I've integrated tracking tools to track FIN and PRO economic bonuses and I will compare those with ORG too.

Now what could be done about it. Removing the factory and giving it to IND wouldn't hurt ORG that much. In return ORG could maybe get a production bonus for markets. But I will only decide upon this after I have my tracking data.

[Charriu]

IMP: Like I wrote, I think it just has early-game bonuses and Stables don't do much for it. Especially as you often try to avoid building them (Barracks+Vassalage = 5 XP, no stables needed). I could see a production bonus for Harbor (but EXP has that already) or maybe - coming from a different angle - having some promotions for units. Maybe settlers gaining an additional move or gunpowder units gaining Shock (making it easier to run over backwards neighbors while not suddenly making it a war-powerhorse in late game). I really believe it is more of a flavor-change that is necessary with the possibility of leveraging that in an advantage IF you play your cards right.

The reason why I gave IMP stables is, because I thought it needed a slight boost. If you look at base BtS you have one full-time militaristic trait in AGG and two somewhat militaristic traits in CHA (XP bonus) and IMP (GG bonus). Giving stables to AGG would have been to strong and too much of a trick pony in my opinion. Giving another XP building to CHA, which already has an XP bonus is way too strong. So that's how it got to stables. Also horses were for the most time in history the most important animal for any wannabe empire.

[Charriu]

SPI: Well, I wrote enough about my thoughts on it I believe. As for actually making it stronger I could see buffs to the religious game as a possibility. I'm not very good at that (read: I'm even worse at that than all the other parts of the game), so I'd rather not go into details, but thematically it seems a nice fit.

The only thing that would fit thematically would be to give it a production bonus towards monasteries, which would bring it into the full religion mode. I also found your analysis of the civics in regards to SPI very interesting. Now I don't want to change too much regarding civics. My goal with the civic changes was not to improve SPI, but rather improve some underused civics namely Serfdom and Enviromentalism.

[Charriu]

Serfdom:
+50% worker improvement building speed
+1 commerce on farms (new)
+1 hammers on windmill, watermill (new)

No one was switching into Serfdom just for the worker speed I believe. When you reach Feudalism, you have already built a fair share of cities, you have (hopefully) improved them to the point of only needing to add another improvement from time to time when a city grows. Basically it came to late for what it provided because at the time Feudalism comes along you do have enough workers for whatever you need to do - or you have an issue that Serfdom won't help fix.

The change is meant to provide some more incentive to switch into it. And Windmills and Watermills can use the help, being not the most popular improvement. The question though is: Are these improvements good enough without the Serfdom-bonus as well? As nothing has changed about them, I'd say no. Else they would have been built much more often in the past. That means you have to stick with Serfdom, which feeds into the point of SPI not being worthwhile as you switch into your civic and stay there.

So, what about the other change? Is +1 commerce on farms changing my opinion? Slightly, yes. At some point you don't need or want to use Slavery anymore and usually what happens is a switch to Caste System, often together with a GA which in turn is used to produce 1, 2 or more Great Persons. The next logical step is to move on to Emancipation, but that is often a pipe dream at the end of your GA, with you having to choose between staying in Caste or switching back to Slavery, both being not really the greatest assets at that time. Before Serfdom also was not really worthwhile to switch into. Now at least it is an economic option, a choice besides Slavery, which often was used as a safeguard against attacks. But, what about SPI in that context? Well, SPI makes it easier to switch into Serfdom at the end of the GA without having to fear that one can't react to an attack. It therefore provides a slight economic advantage. But only slight, because you can always go into Serfdom, SPI just makes it a little bit safer, what, depending on game-state, might be completely irrelevant.

Final verdict: Serfdom-change itself is good and it might be able to compete with Emancipation now (I'm not sure about that), but it actually does little to make SPI better.

I think Serfdom is on a good way towards being at least considered and more often used. I previously had it with +1 hammer on farms, but that may have been too much. Also consider that Serfdom now does have a synergy with Enviromentalisms Windmill bonus.

[Charriu]

Environmentalism:
Available at Biology instead Medicine
Does not increase maintenance costs from corps anymore
+6 health in all cities
+2 commerce from windmill, forest preserve
+2 health from public transportation

One trick pony. If you need it, you'll need it either for a considerable amount of time (many health-issues or non-rectifiable) or not really at all (only few health-issues that will be countered in time via new tech). Either way, no reason to jump in and out of it via SPI.

Enviromentalism of course is a hard nut to crack. Moving it to an earlier tech is definitely required as was removing the corporation bonus, which was one major hinderence of that trait. But like you said the main problem is that the health bonus isn't worth it. In addition Enviromentalism also suffers from the fact that the Forest Preserve isn't useful at all, because by the time you can build them all the forests are gone. But I just had one idea regarding that, but I will discuss that in my mod thread.

[Commodore]

Charriu showing how reply spam is done right.

Not much to add at the moment, but I'll chip in and say I really enjoy the thoughts, Serdoa.

[Charriu]

Charriu showing how reply spam is done right.

Not much to add at the moment, but I'll chip in and say I really enjoy the thoughts, Serdoa.

I didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning

[Serdoa]

Let's push your post count some more:

Nationhood:
Can draft 3 units per turn
+25% espionage in all cities
+2 happy from barracks
Low cost instead of no upkeep

The only change in the legal column. And it just increases its cost. Which doesn't change anything at all because you are in this civic because you need to draft, which does cost you money anyhow. Together with the change to drafting, which makes it less worthwhile, this might even provide less incentive to switch between civics than before. Why would you leave free speech to go into this? Only because you need the draft - which you will need less often because it is less potent than before. I'd consider that actually an indirect nerf to SPI.

This is a very recent change and I'm not sure it will stay. One problem with Nationhood of course is that the whole espionage mechanic is so bad, but I don't want to dive into that topic right now. I could see myself turning this back to "No Upkeep" in the future.

Yeah, I think that is one of these things that will be really hard to "balance" in a mod that is set out to only make small changes. Espionage sounds like great fun to me in a MP-game, but the actual game systems regarding it are not. 

Nationhood itself though also has the issue that everything else in its column has to compete with drafting. It's not that Nationhood itself is really strong, but the opportunity costs for not being in one of the other civics is just too low. I don't think changing the costs of it will actually do anything about that. Rather, the other civics need to be more desirable, even if it means not having drafting as an option. I guess that was the goal with removing the hammer bonus, but I don't think it works for the aforementioned reasons.

[Serdoa]

SPI: Well, I wrote enough about my thoughts on it I believe. As for actually making it stronger I could see buffs to the religious game as a possibility. I'm not very good at that (read: I'm even worse at that than all the other parts of the game), so I'd rather not go into details, but thematically it seems a nice fit.

The only thing that would fit thematically would be to give it a production bonus towards monasteries, which would bring it into the full religion mode. I also found your analysis of the civics in regards to SPI very interesting. Now I don't want to change too much regarding civics. My goal with the civic changes was not to improve SPI, but rather improve some underused civics namely Serfdom and Enviromentalism.

Thinking about this, that of course runs into the same problem as IND then: Others basically know your game-plan from the start and have a much easier time preventing you from achieving it. I like the idea of SPI strengthening the religious path tough and I think it is not as easy for others to destroy it as with IND. But maybe it would need some "help" to at least make it more reliably able to get a religion in the first place. Is it possible to give a research bonus for certain techs? That would lock you pretty much into going religion with it, but that's not necessarily a bad thing I think. Certainly not if we are all fine with IND locking you into wonders or FIN into cottages. Of course, having more than 2 SPI-leaders would be rather bad for all of them, but if someone picks SPI after 2 players picked it (in a 4 to 12 player game) it's similar to picking IND under the same circumstances. 

Probably there are better ideas out there how to improve it. And maybe I do simply underestimate it and it actually does enough. Like I wrote earlier, I believe it has a high skill-ceiling and it might very well be that I do not actually am skillful enough to pull it off. I think there was a game in which Seven used SPI to great effect, but I can't remember which one it was and I'm not inclined to search for it in all the old games.

[Serdoa]

Charriu showing how reply spam is done right.

Not much to add at the moment, but I'll chip in and say I really enjoy the thoughts, Serdoa.

Thank you. I think I really like this part of the game the most, analyzing everything, pondering about it, weighing options and just in general discussing the pros and cons of everything. It also helps me remembering parts of the game. Like while discussing SPI I realized that I have not had given religion even one thought. Do I want one? In a 6 player game that should be achievable, especially if one picks a civilization that starts with Mysticism. It's just... I can't remember what religion actually does. Some culture in cities that have it? Some buildings like Temple and Monastery for additional research and priest slots. Some happy. I think there was some way to bulb with priests through to some tech, but I don't even have my bulb-sheets anymore I think.