Civ 6 Balance Mod Ideas: Brainstorming

[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.

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.

Thanks, that make sense and I like it.

[Bobchillingworth]

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:

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.

Sure, but I think I'd be okay both with districts being expensive early on and cheap in the endgame. That's how many major city improvements have worked in previous iterations of the franchise, after all. Could be mitigated in part by adjusting some of the currently less-useful civic policies to boost district construction build speeds, and then having later-game policies obsolete them.


RE: weak civs, France, Brazil & Egypt have decent UU; it's all of their other bonuses which aren't up to par. You might be able to fix Egypt by simply making their current bonuses better- give them a larger early wonder production bonus, and stronger trade routes (perhaps unlocked at a certain tech, to keep them from being overpowered early on).

I'm not really sure what can be done for France. I've only played Civ VI in SP, where I've yet to bother trying for a cultural victory, which seems to be what the civ is geared toward. I also almost never bother with spy missions; I find it's better to use your spies to run counter-espionage missions than mildly antagonizing the AI.


For both Brazil and France the lack of an early-game combat advantage is crippling, given how rush-driven VI is. Even the mediocre and late-blooming American civ gets a decent bonus on their home continent.

[Bremen]

I like the idea of district cost scaling based on how many districts the city has (maybe not to pop, since that still runs into the "lock in costs early" problem).

[Quagma Blast]

If I were going to just change a bunch of things, here's some changes I'd like to make (but take everything I say with a grain of salt):

- Make Military Tactics a prerequisite for Banking instead of Stirrups. MT being a leaf tech with a highly situational wonder does nothing for anti-cavalry's already questionable usefulness. As a bonus this will help Japan and Norway's unique units.

- Reduce the cost of all anti-cavalry units by about 1/3. (Spearman 65->45, Pikeman 200->135, AT Crew 400->270, Modern AT 580->400) Thus they effectively always have a production card slotted. It may be possible to leave the gold-buy cost alone while changing the cog cost, but I think it would be interesting to give them a niche as "emergency troops".

Civs:

- Scythia: Killer of Cyrus "units heal 30 hp when killing a unit" -> "units heal fully when promoted". People of the Steppe "gain a second unit when you produce a Saka Horse Archer or light cavalry" -> "+50% production towards Saka Horse Archers and Light Cavalry."

- Sumeria: Nerf the War Cart. I think it would work as "22 strength, +8 cs if its owner knows Wheel, vulnerable to anticavalry" if the conditional is easy enough to do and you want to keep the theme of having all their stuff off the bat, or just push it back to Wheel as a Heavy Chariot replacement with no other changes. Either way, still strong, just not invincible.

- Spain: El Escorial gets an added "+1 Great prophet point to all specialty districts in the capital" and Treasure Fleet drops the intercontinental requirement for the trade route bonus. Spain's bonuses can be good, they're just all inconsistent.

- Egypt: The Maryannu Chariot Archer is powerful but so damn expensive (120! compared to the heavy chariot's 65) and kills knight upgrade timing attacks. Make it an independent unit like the Varu/Saka Horse Archer/et al and that would help. Bride of the Mediterranean can give +2 food to your trade routes in addition to the +4 gold. Maybe take a page from Nubia's playbook and add "City Centers adjacent to a Sphinx get +1 Amenity" to Iteru.

- France: Add "All Wonders generate 4 additional Culture" (or maybe "2 culture per era", so Ancient wonders give +2, Classical give +4, Medieval +6...) to Grand Tour and "One Diplomatic policy slot is converted to a Wildcard slot" to Catherine's Flying Squadron. Maybe make the Garde Imperiale an Infantry replacement (but leave it in the same place and give it +5cs with Replaceable Parts) so you can actually get some.

- India: Add "May purchase Builders with Faith" to Dharma, possibly Settlers as well. India has a lot of faith generation going for them, which usually requires you throw a lot of hammers at religion to make it useful. So let's just hand them a sink.

- Brazil: If they want an early game combat bonus, "Units get +5 cs in Rainforests in your territory" - possibly rainforests in general - can be added to Amazon.

- Norway: I think they're probably okay on watery maps, but need buffs for land-heavy environments. Making the Berserker not on a dead-end and adding "Land units ignore river crossings for the purpose of movement and attacks" (and ZOC radiation if possible) to Knarr would be a first step.

[oledavy]

Lots of good stuff being discussed here. 

I especially like QB's solution to the anti-cavalry dilemma. 

Also, I like making MT a pre-req for banking. Yes please.

[greenline]

While you're on the civs Kongo seems like it could use a buff.

I'm not sure if England needs the double GAdmiral points on the harbors. For naval maps it's like getting 4x GG points on land maps since the district is half cost. You could change it to normal without affecting their strength on land maps

[Japper007]

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:

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 already see one problem here: Rome! I might be biased due to playing them currently, but this seems to make Rome even stronger than it already is (IMHO it already is one of the strongest Vanilla civs). Rome hits Code of Laws around T6 on standard speed (give or take a slower or faster growth at start) which means they get their two envoys +- 20 turns earlier than the others. That's a pretty brutal snowball! F.E. Imagine a Rome with two nearby Scientific CS, it gets the yields of a well-zoned Campus before everyone even knows Writing!

While you're on the civs Kongo seems like it could use a buff.

Kongo is a very underrated civ, I keep hoping I'll get the chance to show how powerful they are in a PBEM, but I haven't had the pleasure of having them among my options yet. The key power is the Mbanza, which is effectively a 4food/4gold/4 housing improvement (the yields are 2 food and 4 gold, but it works out to 4 net food bonus as you don't have to use a pop to work it.) This improvement is also completely unfettered from the builder hammer-cost increase, so you can spam Mbanza to your hearts content. I've topped 2000 GPT as Kongo in this manner, by then the game is broken (that's a Mech Infantry/Modern Armour per turn!)
And That is only in addition to their awesome double Great People point bonus to Theatres and Commercial Hubs (Adam Smith and his free Economic Policy card anyone?), or that they basically have a faster version of Rome's Legion UU.

EDIT Which is all to say, I don't think they need a buff per se, or at least not as desperately as France

[Krill]

I like the idea of district cost scaling based on how many districts the city has (maybe not to pop, since that still runs into the "lock in costs early" problem).

I don't think it needs to be tied closer to pop than it already is: so long as the number of districts is limited by city pop size, the districts have a cost in food to grow to the necessary pop size. So just have districts cost 54 cogs and then increase at a linear rate seems fine IMO. Maybe +18 hammers for each additional district, with an additional cost modifier based off the total number of districts in the game similar how there is a cost modifier already in place.

Et voila, a simpler system to understand. It does mean that chops and harvests need modifying though, because if cost scaling from techs gets removed, so does the method of production and growth that is linked to the same modifier.

[AdrienIer]

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:

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 already see one problem here: Rome! I might be biased due to playing them currently, but this seems to make Rome even stronger than it already is (IMHO it already is one of the strongest Vanilla civs). Rome hits Code of Laws around T6 on standard speed (give or take a slower or faster growth at start) which means they get their two envoys +- 20 turns earlier than the others. That's a pretty brutal snowball! F.E. Imagine a Rome with two nearby Scientific CS, it gets the yields of a well-zoned Campus before everyone even knows Writing!

How about changing Rome to getting a monument in all cities once it gets CoL ? It delays their snowball but is still strong.

[Sullla]

I would again suggest caution before this community dives too deeply into creating a mod for Civ6 Multiplayer. With so few games under the community's belt at this point, we don't have a great sense for where the game balance stands at the moment. I don't think that most of the changes being suggested are even necessary, as they simply create a different playing environment, not a better one. Things like the district costs seem fine to me, and changing elements so basic to the gameplay will result in all kinds of strange effects. It's confusing to me that a number of people who have admitted barely even playing Civ6 are eager to start modding it into a different game entirely. The biggest issue with creating a community mod is that it immediately silos off Realms Beyond from the game that the rest of the Civ6 world is playing, which makes it harder to recruit newcomers in particular. Obviously you guys can do as you wish, but splitting the Civ6 MP playerbase at such an early stage in this game's history into mod and non-mod groups doesn't seem like the best approach to take.