RtR mod 4.1.0.1 Discussion Thread

[Krill]

All are available with the standard requirements; that is a list of what is different from the standard national wonder.

[BaII]

What if instead of IND being able to build 2 copies of a national wonder they just get a massive discount for any of their national wonders. Like they get 200% hammer modifier when building national wonders.

[superdeath]

I think IND just needs something like a flat 10-20% hammer modifier on ALL buildings to be worth a crap imo.

[Azoth]

How about something simple?
+1 hammer on the city centre tile if it only produces 1 hammer
(i.e. treat all cities like they were founded on plains hills)

[Krill]

Azoth: the view of map makers from PB27 is that is an absolute pain in the arse to balance for.

Superdeath: unless it's 35% bonus on classical and later buildings...does it actually do anything? The whole point of IND, if that is what it does, is to allow building periods to fit into the tightest of windows so you can get back to unit building. I figure it's workable, but IND might need to lose the 100% on the forge.

[Krill]

So, let me phrase my question for Khmer this way: is there a problem comparing a War Elephant UU to a base unit that most players may not have access to due to how ivory is distributed by the map generator? And if so, does this mean we need to review the WE? We can do that, put the Khmer to one side and carry on with another civ.

[RefSteel]

If we accept that availability of ivory will vary from player to player on the same map, and accept that a unit can exist that requires a non-guaranteed resource, then I think wellies are about as well-balanced as they can be for the purpose - meaning that they do have legitimate usefulness for those who can build them, but failure to build them is unlikely to prevent an otherwise-successful player from winning the game. The issue with Khmer then is that both of its uniques come on builds of which a winning player might in many cases build few or none. I actually think this is pretty cool, but it is difficult to find the right power level for them.

A Baray with +1 food and +10% storage is probably worth building almost everywhere with Exp's +100% production bonus, but would still go into only a few cities without it. If Ballistaphants could build the things, the point as I see it would be to give a unit with a relatively short useful lifetime and no upgrade path a way to "retire" when they go obsolete, but I'm not excited about "retiring" into barays. My preference would be to give them a longer and/or greater usefulness themselves; something like an additional bonus against mounted (even just an extra +20%, for +70% total) on top of their horse-hunting ability shouldn't make them uncounterable, and would increase their versatility and lifetime. And I'd consider using the giant siege weapon on their back as an excuse to give them an upgrade path that other wellies don't have - to Cannons, for instance, which would open up weird promotion-upgrade shenanigans that could be interesting but shouldn't be game-breaking.

[EDIT: On recollection, do wellies upgrade to Cavalry already? It's been too long since I used both in the same game. I'm not sure if that changes my thoughts above, which are partly just further brainstorming anyway....]

[Krill]

If we accept that availability of ivory will vary from player to player on the same map, and accept that a unit can exist that requires a non-guaranteed resource

I think this is the crux of the issue: is this something we can accept? I think it shouldn't be. WE are counters to HA and knights, both of which are the main units used to bulk out an already constructed SoD and then run down cities after a stack is broken. They also counter small stacks of classical and ancient era units, because of the strength difference. In short, WE sit on top of the ancient and classical era units, and are only countered efficiently by siege in stacks and pikes, and maces. They fit into the combat system, they are part of it. We balance for other strategic resources. Why aren't we balancing for WE as well?

[RefSteel]

For what it's worth, I agree, which is why I led with that "if."

To your question:  If you're just asking why map makers don't always include ivory among the strat resources they check, I can only agree that they should, and observe that sometimes mapmakers miss stuff unintentionally, from a specific instance of a given resource to "oh, right, I need to include ivory/coal/other-often-overlooked-strat-resource in my balance pass."  If you're looking for mod suggestions to obviate the need for mapmakers to distribute ivory to everybody, making war elephants (not just ballista elephants) resourceless is the obvious answer. If ivory were placed as accessibly as copper, horse, and iron on every map, considering it also gives happiness, how often will a player in the running fail to connect theirs by the time they tech HBR + Construction anyway? This would also create more leeway for more varied (and more natural and potentially less lush) luxury distribution on a well-balanced map. [EDIT: So the only real difference would be that there would be no way to stop someone from building WE by disconnecting a resource - which I admit might matter in some cases.]

[Krill]

What I'm checking first is a general agreement: is this something we can change without people going "WHY? YOU DON'T NEED TO CHANGE THAT! YOU'RE MAKING CHANGES FOR NO GOOD REASON!" I got bored of that 5 years ago.

The simple change I'd suggest is just remove ivory and add iron as the required resource. If WE sit on top of of the classical units and work against knights, then putting them at the end of the Classical era, requiring Construction, HBR and IW seems reasonable to me, keeps the ability to disconnect resources and keeps the problem from being affected map makers fatigue by the point it comes to resource balancing.