Realms Beyond Balance Mod for Civ6

[Bacchus]

Do we agree that the pain points are:

* Uncounterable advantages (VenArsenal, DotF, any others?)
* Scarcity of meaningful production choices, especially in the late-game (both because there is nothing to choose from, and because you only make 1 choice per city for like 10-15 turns)
* Lack of interesting trade-offs in location/tile management
* Lack of meaningful city customisation
* Lack of potential for vertical expansion and hence lack of horizontal/vertical trade-offs
* Overwhelming importance of chopping compared to natural production + overflow tricks through propagation of policy card multipliers down the production queue

These seem to be popularly named, more individual ones are:

* Overly onerous, and disbalanced cost of progress, especially on the culture tree
* Inefficiency of peaceful expansion compared to conquest, especially of city-states
* Occupation
* War weariness
* Movement speed
* Cost of upgrades vs natural production
* Effective absence of wonders as a gameplay element

These are all things that I remember seeing in threads on multiple occasions. Anything I missed?

If we take the most frequently floated pain points, the uncounterable advantages obviously have to be dealt with piecemeal, but all the others seem to have a common root cause in low yields of tiles and improvements. Sulla's suggestions are almost all about addressing the cost side, but of course we can just as well act on the income side. Let's say we make farms meaningful and add multipliers to district buildings. Suddenly, there is genuine competition for builder charges -- sure, you can take that chop, but in return your city will never grow as high as it could have, with all the science/culture consequences that implies. In any case, I think it's worth wracking brains for a while to see what mechanical lever we've got that can address as many pain points at once as possible, rather than introducing multiple changes to different formulas, if only because the effect will be easier to calibrate and debug.

Another thought I had is that the current relatively steep cost scaling is actually quite interesting (it can't be a problem by itself in any case, it's how it manifests in currently unfun situations that's a problem) — it allows for promotion of 'balanced' development and a way to control beelines. Tech by itself gives you a good unit, but it's unrealistically expensive, you can't win on tech alone — please also either develop culture and get a strong policy discount or industry to shoulder the cost. Same with food growth — if we make farms viable, it's the steep non-linear growth in cost that ensures that the player needs to keep modernizing his agriculture through things like Feudalism triangles, otherwise his growth will stagnate out, and rightly so. The steep increase also allows cities planted later in the game to be relatively fast in catching up to older cities, which I personally enjoy.

TL;DR
Don't set goals as "food should be more important" or "change scaling", the goals should be game effects — how they are achieved mechanically is the next step to consider, as mechanics changes don't map neatly onto desired game experience outcomes.

[Cornflakes]

DotF is not uncountable, probably a bit overpowered but certainly not uncounterable. Apostles with the proper promotions can knock out offending religious. Religious warfare has yet to be seriously tested in any of the PBEM games so far. Adopting DotF is a large investment, and has opportunity cost of using up a belief slot (giving up for example Church Property). Crusade is in the same category and probably should get treated the same, whether that be dropping both to +5 or +7.

Another thought I had is that the current relatively steep cost scaling is actually quite interesting (it can't be a problem by itself in any case, it's how it manifests in currently unfun situations that's a problem) — it allows for promotion of 'balanced' development and a way to control beelines. Tech by itself gives you a good unit, but it's unrealistically expensive, you can't win on tech alone — please also either develop culture and get a strong policy discount or industry to shoulder the cost. Same with food growth — if we make farms viable, it's the steep non-linear growth in cost that ensures that the player needs to keep modernizing his agriculture through things like Feudalism triangles, otherwise his growth will stagnate out, and rightly so. The steep increase also allows cities planted later in the game to be relatively fast in catching up to older cities, which I personally enjoy.

This is a very good point. The scaling costs mean development has to remain in balance. Making flatland more useful (and relaxing housing) may go a long way towards easing the scaling. I think the biggest pain point with the scaling costs is that unlocking the next generation of military is often the WRONG choice until first building a hoard of units "obsolete-by-only-a-sliver-of-research". A possible solution this is to allow one generation of obsolete units to be built, and fix the upgrade formula such that building an older unit and upgrading costs slightly more than just outright purchasing a newer unit. This way research doesn't have to be artificially delayed.

Cost scaling of district buildings (to the point where their return isn't worth the investment) might be fixed by adding a new policy that boosts production of district buildings.

One massive pain point is the production overflow not being divided by policy boosts. The fix needs to include applying the appropriate policy boosts to the overflow on the next build item. Not sure if this can be fixed by modding or is too much of a core mechanic.

[Mardoc]

* Uncounterable advantages (VenArsenal, DotF, any others?)

I still haven't played Civ6 so I don't have much to add, but I do notice about half the civs are banned in most games, and there's also a large group which are considered unviable.

After you handle the uncounterable things, you may also want to look at buffing some of the unviable options - religion choices that no one ever takes, wonders that are ignored, etc. Assuming that the main gameplay changes don't promote them by accident, of course.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

* Uncounterable advantages (VenArsenal, DotF, any others?)

I still haven't played Civ6 so I don't have much to add, but I do notice about half the civs are banned in most games, and there's also a large group which are considered unviable.

After you handle the uncounterable things, you may also want to look at buffing some of the unviable options - religion choices that no one ever takes, wonders that are ignored, etc.  Assuming that the main gameplay changes don't promote them by accident, of course.

The only consistently banned civs are Scythia and Sumeria. Scythia produces 1 extra horse unit every time they build one, by default - by contrast the VA only comes in the Renaissance, costs over 900 production, and applies only to ships, and it's still considered the most broken wonder in the game. Sumeria gets a strength 30 UU available on turn 1 when other players can only build warriors at best, meaning a determined Sumeria could rush players with basically no ability to counter (I've even ahd the AI do it to me once or twice). You're right about a lot of civs being nonviable - Spain, Egypt, Norway, America, and France all come to mind as weaker choices. But we've already ruled out trying to rebalance entire civs, though. 

One thing I think WOULD be in keeping with the general cost-reduction we're considering is a look at wonders. A lot of wonders are just too expensive for what they do, so they're never built. You have a few key ones - Stonehenge, Pyramids, Petra, and the Colosseum - and the rest are mostly ignored, more or less. We could look at that.

[The Black Sword]

But we've already ruled out trying to rebalance entire civs, though. 

IMO, the trait rebalancing in RTR is biggest reason it's been so successful. It feels like the easiest way to create variance between different games and increase replayability. I don't think there's much point discussing it until the main gameplay is ironed out, but I'd be more interested in a mod with tweaked civs.

[Mardoc]

The only consistently banned civs are Scythia and Sumeria

Plus most of the DLC and expansion civs.  Although maybe they shouldn't count because they are also a logistics challenge.  Making sure everyone has the same version of the game is easier when you go with the base game, and keeping critical mass on the MP community is definitely more important than variety of available civs.

But we've already ruled out trying to rebalance entire civs, though. 

Hmm, I don't see that, myself.  I see that you've placed civs at a lower priority level than the other changes, and that makes sense.  I also see that no one has made any tangible suggestions on civs yet, which is a natural consequence of lower priority.  But I don't see why they should be totally ruled out, unless the modding energy runs out before you get to them.

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An unrelated suggestion for the mod: anything you can do to make mapmaking easier would also be a major benefit. It would be easier to find mapmakers if the hurdle is 'install the mod' than 'follow this list of tweaks'.

[Bacchus]

I think the biggest pain point with the scaling costs is that unlocking the next generation of military is often the WRONG choice until first building a hoard of units "obsolete-by-only-a-sliver-of-research". A possible solution this is to allow one generation of obsolete units to be built, and fix the upgrade formula such that building an older unit and upgrading costs slightly more than just outright purchasing a newer unit. This way research doesn't have to be artificially delayed.

I think the core issue here is that military upgrades easily provide the best return on gold spent, which is grounded in a couple of mechanical issues:

* Military upgrades are the only type of goldrushing which receives a policy card discount
* There are no attractive alternatives for gold expenditures due to weakness of buildings
* There are considerable 'passive' sources of gold, which you get just in the course of chasing other things — amenities and trade routes
* Presence of 'era discounts' in upgrade formula resulting in greater efficiency of conversion of gold to cogs when upgrading compared to purchasing, albeit this is dwarfed by Professional Army
* Bad policy card placement — let's take a key unit, Cavalry. You need Chivalry to discount it, but Chivalry is on Divine Right, which is a dead-end civic. Hilariously, if you get Divine Right, you probably will get Theocracy, which means you'll have no use for Chivalry at all, as you are faith-buying units.
* Upgrades let you convert yields into assets in a superintensive fashion, plus you can move units into position, so that yields are deployed immediately where necessary, as opposed to at city centres all over the map. Upgrading at the front also saves you money on maintenance-in-transit

What's good in the above, is that we see immediately that boosting buildings actually addresses this particular pain point directly. Add in economic policies that discount buying them, and now you have a meaningful choice — whether to spend cogs on military and gold on buildings, or the other way round. The upgrade cost formula might need adjustment anyway, but it's the "don't nerf hills" issue again -- the game is already awful at giving you a return on yields collected, here is one thing that works, and we instinctively jump to adjusting coefficients down.

One massive pain point is the production overflow not being divided by policy boosts. The fix needs to include applying the appropriate policy boosts to the overflow on the next build item. Not sure if this can be fixed by modding or is too much of a core mechanic.

That would be lovely, but I think not possible.

[Cornflakes]

Does Professional Army policy just need to be eliminated? Or toned down massively, maybe only 20% discount?

[Bacchus]

It's definitely bad design to have only one policy affecting gold expenditures. If you have that, you have only two options: make that form of expenditure completely inefficient unless running the policy or let it be the most efficient form of expenditure available when running the policy.

The other problem with PA is that it affects all units at once, so it's incredibly wide-ranging in scale, to the extent that no other policy in the game is.

I would say that we need to either create other policies which discount other gold expenditures, or have no such policies at all. Having weak policies to me is an even worse thing than not having them at all. Which reminds me to put "wonders" and associated policies on the pain point list.

[Ichabod]

I think the way to fix chop overflow is by getting rid of all +% production policies. I don't think they add anything strategic to the game, as you always want the % policy that gives the most hammers in any single time frame (and those time frames, especially in the early game, where they matter the most, are more easily controlled by the players with "unfair" advantages, like cultural CSs or Rome, which is not due to player ability), which is just a trivial decision and will only lead to a meaningful decision in fringe cases.

Perhaps make them available only to later era units, so upgrading gets some competition (and chops aren't as meaningful).