Civ 6 Balance Mod Ideas: Brainstorming

[Emperor K]

Well i know i am new around here but it seems like almost all of these fixes really take out the randomness of the game which i think is the funnest part. The whole cs first issue change suggested really favors a specific start. I can see no reason to ever go scout first if that is the case. Just seems like much of this could be solved by just playing the 4 leaf clover type maps where every one has a mirror start, and i don't think that is as fun.

The anti-calv fixes seem to be the only thing i can see as a net positive due to the fact that even at reduced cost I don't see them as a standard unit. Even without the fix i still when i see a barb camp with horses build one spearman. He can solo the camp himself.

[suboptimal]

What about the idea of providing +50% production policy cards for anti-cav instead of just reducing their costs across the board?

[RefSteel]

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.

Speaking as somebody who doesn't even anticipate owning Civ6 for the foreseeable future, here is my exhaustive list of changes that I think should definitely be made in an RB Mod right away!

...

Okay, but the thing is, talking about modding games (like many forms of amateur game design up to a point) is fun! No reason not to talk about it. As for stuff to actually implement, the only change that it looks to me like everybody would definitely agree on would be an improvement to the UI - but the CQUI mod already exists, and nobody's even proposed using it for any of the PBeMs we've seen starting up (as far as I can tell). If there are players who tried Civ6 but never got into it because of the bad UI and AI, it would be neat to see some of them have a look at CQUI (or some other interface mod that doesn't change the underlying game) and maybe start up a PBeM with that. Beyond that ... I dunno. It's not like I've ever even played the game.

[BRickAstley]

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.

talking about modding games (like many forms of amateur game design up to a point) is fun!  No reason not to talk about it.

That is my #1 driving factor. Sullla, your point is well taken about possible community fragmentation, I'm not planning on releasing a mod anytime soon unless there's agreement on a big imbalance. Honestly the main thing I'd like to do if anything is get civs playable that are currently being banned or ignored, i.e. Scythis, Sumeria, France. Unless someone wants to prove they aren't as strong or weak as we'd think.

A more soon action is having people try out CQUI in a PBEM. Which I'll be happy to help pioneer soon.

[Bobchillingworth]

Give me any civ and I will easily prove that it isn't as strong as you think



I also wouldn't worry about community fragmentation; it's not like RB has ever enforced a standard mod everyone had to use. People will always be free to start & join games which employ any combination of mods and DLC, and in the past we've seen vanilla and modded (and mod-modded) PBEMs coexist without any detrimental effects on the community.

[Woden]

One issue I can see with changing the costs of districts is that forest chops are always worth 1/3 the cost of districts (~41% with a harvest) as they scale the same. Therefore, if you change districts to a static cost or based on number of districts, wouldn't that change the strategy of placing district as soon as possible to a strategy of waiting as long as possible to get as much out of a chop, and maybe complete it with a single chop? Would it be better to maybe have a discount based on average number of districts in your cities? Much like they already have in the game but not type dependent. For example, I have 3 cities, where 2 cities have 2 districts each and the third doesn't have any. It could get a 40% discount on its first district. That could make building districts in late game new cities actually feasible without much change to current game and making districts too easy to build. Just throwing ideas around.

One other question about removing the first met envoys. If you remove the initial envoy on first met, CSs will only have 5 tiles at the start, they gain the 6th to make a full circle of 1st rings tiles with that first envoy. Will you change that so they start with 6 tiles? Then, will the 1st envoy grab a 2nd ring tile? Would it work to change it to have it be an envoy the first time anybody meets a CS? IDK, just split balling and trying to wrap my head around how this might change the game.

[Krill]

I didn't know that CS get tiles for each envoy they received. That's interesting.

Question is, do late game cities become worthless due to cost, inability to get districts? What happens in those later era games?

[Woden]

They get a tile for the each envoy the person with the most envoys in the city puts in. Defenses also go up with each envoy and sometimes I see walls finish if I put an envoy in them (not sure if they get added production or it is linked to walls themselves)

In my experience, I stop building settler at about turn 100 and any new cities come from conquests. If I do build a settler, it usually is for a reason, i.e. grab a new luxury or strategic placement (canal city) or if there is a lot of cogs that can be harvested to get it up to speed. Are 300+ cog settlers plus 300+ cog districts really worth it? That is a lot of investment that could go into military units to grab an already developed city.

If you think about this way, roughly every 11% you complete of either tree raises the cost of a district 1 fold (base cost of the district), so 50% of the tree completed equals 5.5x the base cost (if my math is correct). I think this plus the increased cost of settlers, we will/have see/seen not much settling after T100 in most MP games.

[Krill]

Ok then. That suggests that either the settler cost increase should be reduced, or capped, or the district costs should not grow so stupidly large.

Late game the cost of growing to size 2 remains constant, as does the output, but the cost of improving a tile increases. Should district costs increase in the same manner? Plus a constant cost for each district? Because that's the link in cost to output.

[Sullla]

What you're overlooking though is the fact that everything else scales up in the game to match the increased settler costs. Cities are larger and can work more overall tiles, the tile yields are significantly better after advancing through the tech/civic trees, trade routes get much better as cities build districts and get buffed via policies, and so on. The same settler that took 5 turns to build at 16 production/turn when settlers cost 80 production still takes 5 turns to build at 60 production/turn when it scales up in cost to 300 production. New cities are still worthwhile to acquire because it's so much easier to grow population at lower sizes than it is to grow them at higher sizes. Districts aren't hard to build either, not when a couple of forest chops, a trade route, and several mines can knock them out in a dozen or so turns. Now maybe it's more optimal to build units instead of settlers to conquer territory from the AI, but that's a flaw in the AI, not in the gameplay itself.

I'm not finding any issues with settlers or districts being too expensive to build in my offline Single Player games. Maybe it's different in Multiplayer but I tend to doubt it. I think this is another one of those places where Civ6 simply plays differently than Civ4, and it isn't necessarily better or worse, only different. There's no immutable rule that says a Civilization game has to have cheap settlers and that the entire map has to be filled up within the first 100 turns of the game. I'm kind of interested in the gameplay that results from making it more of a choice as to when the player should expand, weighing the cost of whether to build another scaling cost settler versus growing vertically or trying to claim territory from another player. Obviously this tradeoff falls apart for Single Player, where rushing the AI will always be the path of least resistance. I'm not convinced that it does for MP though; at the very least, I'd need to see a lot more evidence that this is a problem. Based on the MP games we've seen thus far, it looks like the map is filling up just fine and the top players are creating large empires in the same fashion we've seen in Civ4.