EitB 0011 Wishlist/Discussion

[RefSteel]

The Sheaim as a civilization aren't too hard to figure out though.

Yeah, I should have been more clear about what I meant. However...

Hahahaha this is why I shouldn't split the civilopedia thread - half my replies aren't about the actual modding.

...I'll do that in the other thread.

On game mechanics stuff re:Averax, I feel I'm not really qualified to comment.

On mechanics stuff re:Rivanna, I'd advise leaving her at Org/Sum at least to see what players can do with her given the new boost to Summoner.

On making early Slavery more important, closer to BtS: Please no. This would impact so many areas of game balance, I couldn't list them all, and this isn't a mod that should strive to resemble BtS in the first place; I can think of no reason to do this and countless reasons not to.

On making early chops more important, closer to BtS: If elves in general need nerfing, this is an indirect way to do it, but the impact on other aspects of the game, again, would be enormous.

All the one-line proposals: Look decent to me, though my mechanics understanding of e.g. the new Keelyn is very limited and the Luchuirp change raises my brows a bit. (e.g. wouldn't it be simpler to just boost mud golem cost by less?)

[Bobchillingworth]

On making early Slavery more important, closer to BtS: Please no. This would impact so many areas of game balance, I couldn't list them all, and this isn't a mod that should strive to resemble BtS in the first place; I can think of no reason to do this and countless reasons not to.

I agree with this 100%.

[GermanJoey]

I guess the only reason I mentioned slavery and chopping is because I find ffh2/eitb's early game to be a big turnoff for me. The late-game is rich and interesting with all kinds of crazy shit but getting there is just so... boring. Mark it down to personal preference or whatever, but I feel like there's no real interplay between strategic and tactical objectives at all with regards to what your first few workers and cities are doing in this mod.

Basically, almost every early game plays out primarily like this: you move your workers around putting farms on farmable tiles. Farmable resources get them first, of course, but after that it doesn't really matter much in which order you plop farms down because you're gonna farm pretty much all of them anyways, and you'll often find yourself working unimproved tiles because you'll be growing faster than your worker can keep up. Farms, farms, and more farms - maybe you'll prioritize ones next to forests to prevent forest growth (due to those being a liability rather than a boon in this mod). Once Calendar is in, you put plantations down where you can, and then its back to farms until you get to Mining for mines (which are a lot more important here due to no slavery/chopping) and the occasional road of course... but, otherwise, its back to farming from here to as far as the eye can see. Maybe you'll replace some later with cottages once you have Education (if you're one of the few civs for which those matters in an important way), but probably not. Farms just do everything so well - commerce with Aristocracy, production with Conquest, and hammers directly into the extremely expensive settlers and workers.

Contrast that to BTS, where your civ needs to make tradeoffs between improving (and working) tiles, chopping, whipping, growing, etc depending on what you're trying to accomplish. I find it very exciting, its one of the funnest parts of Civ for me. Even if you know what you want strategically, getting there is very, very tricky to optimize and its very easy to screw up the balancing act between production, commerce, and growth if you don't understand what tradeoffs you are really making. For example, consider this thread, where many skilled players submitted many vastly different micro plans despite everyone having full knowledge of the map:

http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthrea...#pid437300

I dunno... I'm sure this just sounds like trolling, but I really do like the mod other than the farmfest-nature of the micro-metagame. Obviously, BTS's system as-is wouldnt work at all in EITB but I still wish a little bit of it would find its way here. Sounds like its a pretty unpopular suggestion though, if y'all don't even think its worth discussing, oh well.

[Qgqqqqq]

To me you seem to be talking about several different things - a balance of tiles, the slowness of ffh early game, and the blandness of ffh micro. These are things which I feel are only loosely connected to chopping and whipping, and to change them would have several large side effects to the detriment of the mod, as have been mentioned elsewhere.
I won't spend long on this today, however, as this is not only a very busy day for me but also my birthday do I'd rather not spend another half hour typing antisocially on the phone, but I will say that I hear and understand where you're coming from with your concerns and issues with the mod, and they are extremely valid - if not for the need to test the mod, I would've proposed a later era start earlier, and still intend to when I return - but i feel that what you've mentioned isn't actually connected greatly with the issue and I don't see a better alternative to help either. I will of course, listen to and respond to any alternative proposals or models you create, or debate this one further if you continue to advocate the idea...but I won't have time for that tonight, and possibly not for several nights to come.

As an interesting but more fundamental point of discussion on a change, what do people think of the concept of fundamentally changing the cost of settlers to be more on par with the base game? Not as a minor change to be thrown in (like summoner ) or even a proposal, but a point of discussion that I think is interesting and useful to have.

[Bobchillingworth]

Well, I really like that FFH isn't at all like the base game, where REX is always preferable to fightan. As I've probably said in chat to multiple people at this point, in BTS your goal is to build great cities, which your military protects. In FFH, you want to construct a great military, and your cities are there to produce it. The two have generally divergent priorities, and I really don't want FFH to be a BTS clone where the emphasis is on chopping, whipping and laying cities and cottages across the map as quickly as possible. I stopped playing regular civ in large part because that gameplay philosophy doesn't interest me.


I see no reason to make settlers cheaper. It's not like FFH lacks options to spam cities, if that's really your thing.

[GermanJoey]

Chops and whips can be used to produce military units too, you know. You could even try balancing chops by preventing them from going into units that can be produced with food, like settlers, workers, and military under Conquest, if REX is what you're concerned about. Whipping could be further balanced by giving it reduced yield without being in the slavery civic, e.g. only 15 or 20 hammers/pop without slavery, and perhaps further reduced hammers for multi-pop whips like in RtR mod, but 30 hammers/pop with the slavery civic. Or give double unhappiness without the slavery civic, or prevent slaving while in Agrarianism or Aristocracy. Lots of ways to make it work without turning FFH2 into BTS w/ magic.

[The Black Sword]

I think it's fair to say that the early game in FFH is a bit slow and more boring than in base civ. After all, we often take methods to speed it up; in my games, 28 we used a shade, 33 we must have set a genuine record for turn pace. That said, I think the problem is that the early techs are so expensive and we have a relative excess of hammers, not the other way around. There are plenty of early game decisions in FFH that aren't in BTS too, and often extra ones based on your civ. I think you should give MP a go before making those claims(bet you didn't expect that argument ), I think you tend to notice these decisions more in an MP environment.

Some other points relating to your post Jojo:

In EITB, farms are not the be all and end all of city improvements. I didn't go for an aristofarm economy in either of my games.

Quick speed FFH forests: 13h, 2t to chop, BTS forests: 20h, 3t to chop. In terms of worker efficiency, chops don't lose much, only slightly worse due to the extra turn moving onto the forest.

[GermanJoey]

I actually have played multiplayer FFH2 (EITB, even) just not on this site - it was a game I won against some friends on another forum as Mahala with a massive aristofarm economy feeding beastman -> battlemaster and scout -> chariot upgrades. (I actually did expect that argument, just not so late in the conversation - to say that people at RB are welcoming and considerate of outsiders in any way shape or form would be an extreme irony)

I'm aware that aristofarms are not the be-all, end-all of FFH2 economies, but I actually did take a survey of all the currently running EITB games on this site, and, at least for the ones that actually reported, every empire was blanked in farms around T80-T100 or so. Even with some other civ-specific options out there, aristofarms are still the de-facto economy in the mid game, without even mentioning the pre-education Agrarianism-only period.

That said, I completely agree with your comment about the early techs being a part of this problem. If you can't even build a mine until like T60 (on normal speed), well, that doesn't give you many options as to what your worker is going to do. My proposed solution on the other site was to completely cut the first row of techs, essentially giving them to every civ, make the second row half price of what they are now, and the third row 2/3 cost. I didn't mention it here because I thought it would be completely dismissed out of hand. But, if someone else as the same idea...

p.s. I may be completely mistaken, but the game I did just play a few months ago was a normal-speed pitboss, and I'm quite sure that chops were 3 turns, 13 hammers at Mining. I haven't played a EITB quick speed game so I'm not sure what the numbers are there.

[Qgqqqqq]

Germanjojo, please don't look for offence where none is given. I would say RB is very welcoming of outsiders, and TBS comment was very mild.

As to your points, I have to say I agree with my earlier comment that they are not related. If chopping/whipping are strengthened, then the result is that a) farms are strengthened for providing more hammers, and workshops, lumbermills and mines are effectively weakened, and b) lumbermills are weakened still further, and more hammers are made available. The early game micro *would* be sped up, but not greatly as the greatest obstacle is still tech. Thus whilst the extra hammers could go into military, the likelehood is that they would filter largely into buildings, with the strength of a farmers gambit considerably strengthened as an army can largely be whipped out. And for the other points, farms would dominate considerably more with a strengthened whipping and the challenge or when and what to whip would increase the micro, but I doubt so significantly.
There is a reason slavery is so weakened in RtR. And that is because slavery's strength meant there was little need to actually build an army, and little need to keep a standing one - hammer improvements were neglected because they were unnecessary if most hammers come through whipping, and the speedy response of whipping allowed a quick enough response time to mean that very little standing army was needed for a large proportion of the game (as a lead on from this, in standard BTS, cottages dominate nearly as much as farms in FFH because of slavery...and they don't even produce food!)
A FFH with a strong slavery would have its purpose and theme fundamentally changed. Whilst the speed of attack would mean they couldn't wait until literally the last minute, standing armies would be obsoleted for much of the early game (unless you know an attack is coming) and weakened long into the midgame.

And micro in EitB is most certainly deep, if different from that of BTS. I'll send you one of Jalapenos spreadsheets some time, but for a non farm setup look to TBS Dovellio game, or Mardocs Illian game (which also shows the present strength of slavery).

You are correct on the numbers for chops, but that is pre archery. The numbers go Quick: 8/13, Normal: 13/20, compared to BTS Quick: 13/20, Normal 20/30.

There is something to be said for speeding the tech rate of the very early techs (though I wouldn't be inclined to cut them out of hand). I wonder if SevenSpirits dynamic tech rate might be appropriate in some form...

[Bobchillingworth]

I can't be bothered to compose this completely in ordered alignment with contentions made. Forgive me.


The "pre-education Agrarianism-only period" doesn't last for an immense amount of time. Early-game FFH is slow. Late-game FFH is very fast. It transitions from one to the other at various points depending on what civ you're playing. Consider it as having the opposite flow of your typical BTS game. Aristofarms are not the One Right Economy. It's the most popular one, but several civs and situations favor cottages or specialists instead, and not just in the early game. Just play a start one-era in if you don't want to mess around with researching all of the worker techs, I've done that all the time in SP. We haven't run any(?) PBEMs here using a latter era because not all civs are balanced for them, but there's nothing stopping you from proposing such a game. Cutting all of the worker techs out of the game by default is ridiculous. Almost all of our FFH games are on quick speed, not normal. Normal speed makes an already admittedly slow early game downright plodding. Playing on normal speed and then complaining that FFH MP is too slow is silly. Please drop the martyr act. Nobody has, wants to nor will prevent you from proposing or joining games to your heart's content. It is a fact of life that not everybody will like your ideas, particularly when they involve sweeping changes intended to make one game play more like another, especially when many people play the former to break away from the latter.


I apologize if the above block of text upset you in any way. I already cut out all of the cussing and replaced it with passive-aggression, which really was an astounding act of good will on my part