I completely agree that Agri needed some form of nerf (really the combination of Agri/Wheel), I guess I just dislike the way it's nerfed.
I kind of think maybe just decreasing the food bonus for irrigation could have worked, as is wet Corn and wet Wheat are just very solid tiles, too solid in my tastes for something that can come as soon as your first worker pops out. Would bring them more in line with Pigs/Grass cow.
It's not just that Agri needed to be nerfed, Hunting also needed to be buffed; it was a horrible starting tech in many situations (and really, I think the cost of fishing should be boosted a bit, up to maybe the same as mining; it's the worst now, besides the not-comparable Mysticism)
Merovech's Mapmaking Guidelines:
0. Player Requests: The player's requests take precedence, even if they contradict the following guidelines.
1. Balance: The map must be balanced, both in regards to land quality and availability and in regards to special civilization features. A map may be wonderfully unique and surprising, but, if it is unbalanced, the game will suffer and the player's enjoyment will not be as high as it could be.
2. Identity and Enjoyment: The map should be interesting to play at all levels, from city placement and management to the border-created interactions between civilizations, and should include varied terrain. Flavor should enhance the inherent pleasure resulting from the underlying tile arrangements. The map should not be exceedingly lush, but it is better to err on the lush side than on the poor side when placing terrain.
3. Feel (Avoiding Gimmicks): The map should not be overwhelmed or dominated by the mapmaker's flavor. Embellishment of the map through the use of special improvements, barbarian units, and abnormal terrain can enhance the identity and enjoyment of the map, but should take a backseat to the more normal aspects of the map. The game should usually not revolve around the flavor, but merely be accented by it.
4. Realism: Where possible, the terrain of the map should be realistic. Jungles on desert tiles, or even next to desert tiles, should therefore have a very specific reason for existing. Rivers should run downhill or across level ground into bodies of water. Irrigated terrain should have a higher grassland to plains ratio than dry terrain. Mountain chains should cast rain shadows. Islands, mountains, and peninsulas should follow logical plate tectonics.
Pasture resources are arguably better than grains because they are never worse than a 5 yield tile that also generates commerce, whereas grains include that junk dry rice (and not so tasty dry wheat). And they require less worker turns to hook up. Of course, the weakness of 3 food tiles is well documented, but they are improved relative to high food tiles by the nerf to slaving (ie just sit at size 5 building workers if you have 2 plains cows).
The issue with increasing the cost of Fishing is that it is not really a buff to the tech itself, it's a nerf to those unlucky bastards that get a seafood start and don't have it. It's not really a solution to any problem. Realistically, any problem with Fishing itself is due to it enabling resource improvement via an expensive but disposable unit that can't be built unless you have that tech, so potential solutions (as in, if it really is a problem, because I don't think it is one of a magnitude that needs fixing) have to look at the cost of the work boat, the tech requirement for it, the disposable nature of the work boat, and the tile yields of what resources it improves. The tech itself is actually OK, it's everything else.
Hmm, that is a fair point. I hadn't taken the slavery nerf into account. Still, hitting Agri with increased Chariot time eh...this does kind of open up some interesting rush-times with a Hunting/Wheel civ, especially if you have pasture resources that grant bonus hammers, could be fun.
With Fishing, I really feel like balancing for non-Fishing coastal starts is impossible. Those starts will always be slow, if it's the only Food available..double ouch. As for Fishing itself, I kind of agree with the 'expensive' description for Work Boats, if Fishing were to be buffed, having Work Boats be cheaper is the best way to go about it.
Work boats are something that I think are fundamentally flawed in implementation, but it's not like there are any straight forward, simple fixes. Realistically it would take a redesign of that unit to make that area better, and whilst that's something that I think could be interesting to discuss (I do have an idea or two about how I would redesign it) I do not think it fits into this mod.
At absolute best, a player can make a work boat start "work" effectively for about 30 or so turns, but ultimately workers pay back over the course of the game by improving multiple tiles, and work boats just can't compete with that.
(June 24th, 2013, 04:48)Krill Wrote: The issue with increasing the cost of Fishing is that it is not really a buff to the tech itself, it's a nerf to those unlucky bastards that get a seafood start and don't have it. It's not really a solution to any problem. Realistically, any problem with Fishing itself is due to it enabling resource improvement via an expensive but disposable unit that can't be built unless you have that tech, so potential solutions (as in, if it really is a problem, because I don't think it is one of a magnitude that needs fixing) have to look at the cost of the work boat, the tech requirement for it, the disposable nature of the work boat, and the tile yields of what resources it improves. The tech itself is actually OK, it's everything else.
True, true, very true.
Merovech's Mapmaking Guidelines:
0. Player Requests: The player's requests take precedence, even if they contradict the following guidelines.
1. Balance: The map must be balanced, both in regards to land quality and availability and in regards to special civilization features. A map may be wonderfully unique and surprising, but, if it is unbalanced, the game will suffer and the player's enjoyment will not be as high as it could be.
2. Identity and Enjoyment: The map should be interesting to play at all levels, from city placement and management to the border-created interactions between civilizations, and should include varied terrain. Flavor should enhance the inherent pleasure resulting from the underlying tile arrangements. The map should not be exceedingly lush, but it is better to err on the lush side than on the poor side when placing terrain.
3. Feel (Avoiding Gimmicks): The map should not be overwhelmed or dominated by the mapmaker's flavor. Embellishment of the map through the use of special improvements, barbarian units, and abnormal terrain can enhance the identity and enjoyment of the map, but should take a backseat to the more normal aspects of the map. The game should usually not revolve around the flavor, but merely be accented by it.
4. Realism: Where possible, the terrain of the map should be realistic. Jungles on desert tiles, or even next to desert tiles, should therefore have a very specific reason for existing. Rivers should run downhill or across level ground into bodies of water. Irrigated terrain should have a higher grassland to plains ratio than dry terrain. Mountain chains should cast rain shadows. Islands, mountains, and peninsulas should follow logical plate tectonics.
(June 24th, 2013, 11:12)Krill Wrote: Work boats are something that I think are fundamentally flawed in implementation, but it's not like there are any straight forward, simple fixes. Realistically it would take a redesign of that unit to make that area better, and whilst that's something that I think could be interesting to discuss (I do have an idea or two about how I would redesign it) I do not think it fits into this mod.
At absolute best, a player can make a work boat start "work" effectively for about 30 or so turns, but ultimately workers pay back over the course of the game by improving multiple tiles, and work boats just can't compete with that.
No arguments from me here on that. Fishing could use a buff but you are correct in that Work Boats will always suck, barring a redesign. I'd love to hear your ideas though, just out of esoteric curiosity.
OK, a straight forward change would be just drop the price of work boats, but that potentially damages balance for civs that luck out into double fish starts having 2 improved food tiles much earlier, but the starts that have, say, ocean crab, still do almost nothing. So any change to the work boat itself still has issues with the tiles that can be improved, as they vary in value from 4/0/1 (ocean crab/clam) to 6/0/3 (freshwater lake fish and FIN). So whilst making it cheaper to improve the tiles is one part of a solution it is only part of the solution.
Second point is that work boats require straight hammers, cannot be built with food, and this makes them difficult to build in the first 10 turns of the game for some starts, so I'd consider if they ought to be built with food as well. That makes seafood potentially viable regardless of the amount of forests, hills and 3 food tiles available.
The next thing I look at are the tile yields: pasture resources are at least 5 yield and commerce at worst, can be river adjacent, and grains fairly similar. Workers can prioritise what tiles to improve, so the cost of improving junk tiles is pretty low. Fish is OK at 5/0/1 at worst, but if the investment cost is the same but a lower yield for clams and crabs I have to ask if they ought to be better? The output could be increased but that makes seafood more generic and interchangeable except for health. Maybe clams and crabs ought to give additional hammers and/or commerce. But really I begin to question the whole work boat disposable system.
If work boats were made like workers, and they spent time improving tiles, then all you would do is to make starts that had a single seafood much worse, and ones with lots of tiles to improve much better. Making work boats the water version of boats is just not a reasonable option IMO.
So I'd probably just discard the work boat concept. It doesn't fit well into the economic output game that workers and settlers make so interesting. What I'd instead look at is some sort of city improvement that increased the output of specific tiles: I know the code exists in the technology XML and buildings XML that checks for features on terrain, so it's perfectly possible to do it with some appropriation. A city improvement that costs a small amount of hammers that provides a food bonus on specific tiles...like a lighthouse, but only on clam, crabs and fish. This could even be integrated in the current set of city improvements quite easily: Make it cost, say, 20 hammers, and a prerequisite that enables a lighthouse, but lower the cost of the lighthouse to 40 hammers. This change would again limit the hammer expenditure needed to get coastal cities up and running compared to a more land based start
The effect of this is that there is a set cost to every new city to improve seafood, regardless of the amount of resource tiles that need improving. It would be compatible with tweaking of tile yields as well, maybe clams giving more commerce, crabs more hammers, and fish the extra food. If it were priced cheaply, like 20 hammers, it could be considered balanced in that it does not help new cities develop via overlapping improved food tiles to bootstrap growth, even if it gave something ridiculous like improving three tiles to 5 yield plus commerce. In fact a better balance might be to alter the hammer and food output of seafood to:
Fish: +2f base, +2fpt with improvement, and benefits from the +1f from lighthouse. Total yield: 5/0/0 plus base tile yield. Compare to irrigated corn.
Crab: +1f base, +1f,1h with improvement, and benefits from the +1f from lighthouse. Total yield: 3/1/0 plus base tile yield. Compare to a sheep.
Clam: +1f base, +2h,2c with improvement, and benefits from the +1f from lighthouse. Total yield: 2/2/2 plus base tile yield. Compare to plains hill sheep.
The new improvement wouldn't completely solve every issue though: low food starts that have a single seafood tile are still particularly weak. This is balanced out by the map generator valuing seafood less, so games on random maps wouldn't be that bad as the generator would give multiple seafood tiles; Seven's Torusworld map script OTOH wouldn't actually benefit from this sort of change, but that is more to do with how that map script balances the start locations. However provided it is still cheaper than a standard work boat, and a single tile yield is still the same as before, then it is not a nerf. However, there is a potential issue with multiple seafood starts becoming insanely OP if the tile yields are not nigh on perfect, yet this can be handled quite easily by a map maker whereas right now I can't.
Not that I'll ever do any of this, because it's a huge change, would affect a very important part of the game, require new art assets (or reuse of current ones) and a fair few people would probably hate it.
