A new mod enters the ring - Introducing "Close to Home"

[Charriu]

For now I think the best way of nerfing FIN further is to tie the water bonus to the harbor. But don't take this as the final word on FIN and PRO. I still want to wait until I can get all the useful data in the other players thread in PB52. After that I will make a final verdict on those traits. There's one last trait that bothers me right now and that is AGG. But before discussing AGG any further it might be wortwhile to talk about another topic first as it might be linked in some kind to AGG.

Nerfing slavery

Yes, I'm going to implement a nerf to slavery. Now there is the option to implement the nerf from RtR with the 30/20/20... hammer progression. That nerf is pretty good and could most certainly be used here too, but I want to discuss two other ideas here too.

The idea and goal of the the RtR nerf is the following:

• The early slavery game evolving around 1-pop whips stays intact
  
• Slavery becomes less useful earlier, because everything above 1-pop whips is nerfed
  
• Make hammer tiles more useful and cottages a little bit less useful
  

With regard to that I have the following ideas as separate nerfs. First the less ideal idea that I only want to mention briefly:

Slavery as with BtS, but with the addition of "-25% Great People points".

The idea is that slavery becomes more of an obstacle with the later stages of the game, when you want more Great People. It's also fitting thematically. Now there are some big problems with this and this is why I only want to mention it. Those are that most of the time you want a Great Person to start a golden age and switch out of Slavery, but this is harder to achieve with Slavery active. So in a sense this is more a nerf to Great People then it is to Slavery. So we leave this idea mentioned and go to the better idea.

Slavery as with BtS, but with the addition of "every village and town produces +1 unhealthiness".

This is based on the fact that the cottage economy and slavery synergize so well. In the beginning you won't notice a difference because you don't have villages yet. But sooner or later you want to grow one or two cities taller and work that cottage economy there. For those cities it becomes increasingly difficult to grow, which in turn weakens the effect of slavery. It also encourages to build some health buildings like Aqueduct sooner. That unhealthiness will also effect multiple cities if those cities share villages and towns. Now could this lead somebody to build only 1 or 2 tall cities with enough healthiness and leave all other cities tiny? Could be. The question remains if that always is a good idea.
Also another stronger nerf that might also be possible is:

Every additional pop produces +2 unhealthiness instead of +1 unhealthiness.

This would not harm the synergy between cottage economy and slavery, but keeps the overall population lower without enough healthiness.

Another advantage of these kind of nerfs compared to the RtR nerf is that they are easier to grasp for newcomers then the 30/20/20... progression.

I'm very interested about your thoughts about that. I do suspect that many people will say something like "just use the RtR nerf as it has proven its worth" and you are absolutely right. Still I think it's worthwhile to think about other solutions, when I can still do so.
Also I'm very much aware that serfdom will need to be change too with any kind of nerf to slavery, but we'll get to that later. Just be assured that Serfdom will be nerfed along with Slavery.

[chumchu]

I think you should go with the rtr slavery nerf as everyone playing here already knows it and it is interesting, simple and quite balanced. Adding a different nerf of slavery forces people to learn another mechanic.

If you want an even simpler nerf of slavery you can make it high maintenance instead of medium. That might not be enough but is a step in the right direction and easy to grasp.

About Fin and water tiles: I play it that way in my mod and really like it thus far. If you make harbor give water tiles 1 commerce instead of 50% trade then Fin can be "+1 commerce on tiles with 3 commerce, 100% bank" which is simple and elegant. You can unlock the bonus with either colossus or harbor or combine them for 2f5c tiles. This makes it harder to get into fin but working coast stronger when you trigger the combo. This also makes coastal cities stronger for everyone which I do not mind. Also, removing the trade route bonus from harbors compensates slightly from the increased trade in the Mod from PRO and circumnavigation changes.

[scooter]

I actually don't really love the RtR Slavery nerf. It's such a fundamental change to the way the game is played, and it feels really unnatural until you get used to it.


So I'm quite open to the other ideas. The village/towns concept is interesting, but if it was implemented, it would be absolutely mandatory to tone Expansive down in some way, because then its health bonus becomes valuable, and the trait is already possibly too strong as-is.

[Cornflakes]

The RtR slavery is certainly a fundamental change, but in my opinion it is a good change and worth the learning curve. To me BtS slavery is similar to vanilla Civ 6 chops where the optimal play revolves around chopping through policy cards for maximum overflow ... except that in BtS optimal play revolves around keeping that whip timer always ticking and getting in a 2 or 3 pop whip every 10 turns, usually for maximum overflow. In RtR whipping 1, 2, or 3 pop feels about the same overall ROI per pop. Keeping the whip clock always ticking is still important but I rarely use RtR whips purely to maximize overflow. Whereas in BtS, 2 or 3 pop whips seem like a clearly better return (more hammers for the same 1 unhappy) and therefore whip-optimization becomes a micromanagement mini-game that distracts from the overall strategic nature of Civ.

Any slavery nerf other then affecting the action of slaving pop (hammer yield / unhappiness) buffs SPI and invites early micromanagement around swapping in-and-out of Slavery, back to the base civic ... 6 turns of whipping, 5 turns of growing without slavery penalty.

[Commodore]

This feels like scope creep. I think CtH is pretty close to the original req, "nerf banned things, improve never-picked things, keep it Close to Home". I'd honestly be fine with things mostly as-is, with Pro going to Wall-trade routes and maybe something else small to boost Agg?

[T-hawk]

I actually don't really love the RtR Slavery nerf. It's such a fundamental change to the way the game is played, and it feels really unnatural until you get used to it.

Slavery itself is an unnatural way to play the game. You're driven to build everything with food instead of hammers because the conversion via Slavery is virtually always more efficient. And it's even more unnatural to try to control your whip sizes to get max overflow per anger. You're not supposed to be constantly whipping and managing all your inputs to enable that, it's supposed to be an emergency or occasional supplement. I remember Sullla saying this in one of the community games, "what happened to simply building mines to get hammers?"

Here's possibly a different angle. Instead of the slavery button being "add 30*X hammers to completion, kill X population", it could be "add 30 hammers, kill 1 pop." And usable as much as you want, with 1 anger on each use. That would get rid of all the overflow and sizing manipulation into a much more streamlined and consistent mechanic.

[scooter]

I actually don't really love the RtR Slavery nerf. It's such a fundamental change to the way the game is played, and it feels really unnatural until you get used to it.

Slavery itself is an unnatural way to play the game.  You're driven to build everything with food instead of hammers because the conversion via Slavery is virtually always more efficient.  And it's even more unnatural to try to control your whip sizes to get max overflow per anger.  You're not supposed to be constantly whipping and managing all your inputs to enable that, it's supposed to be an emergency or occasional supplement.  I remember Sullla saying this in one of the community games, "what happened to simply building mines to get hammers?"

Here's possibly a different angle.  Instead of the slavery button being "add 30*X hammers to completion, kill X population", it could be "add 30 hammers, kill 1 pop."  And usable as much as you want, with 1 anger on each use.  That would get rid of all the overflow and sizing manipulation into a much more streamlined and consistent mechanic.

That sounds like a very interesting idea... for a different mod. I don't agree that it's an unnatural way to play the game because it's been like this from day 1. The early game was built around the ability to convert food into hammers at the cost of happiness. It's just overly strong in the early game when the conversion rate is best, food is the first thing prioritized, and the snowball is top priority. Going worker first is also overly strong, and we've just accepted that as part of the game at this point when I think that seems a little odd too.


IMO the best way to nerf slavery is with map design. We play a lot of games that supercharge Slavery thanks to exceedingly lush maps, and I think that artificially increases the appetite for nerfing slavery. Lower the food and easily accessible happiness, and there will be less slavery usage. Maybe give a slight power bump towards some of the Slavery alternatives in an attempt to end the Slavery Era earlier. I think the core mechanic should stay as-is, though. At least in this mod.

[Sullla]

As someone who was onboard for Civ4 pre-release testing, I can confirm that Slavery civic was never intended to be used in the way that it ended up developing. Slavery was actually really weak for most of the testing period and it was buffed shortly before release with enormous and unintended results. Yes, Civ4's gameplay was intended to revolve around working mines in order to create production, not stacking lots of food and running whip cycles while growing on cottages. It just turned out that the latter gameplay ended up being much stronger and the community eventually gravitated towards it because it worked.

However, with all that said, gameplay is not something that drops out of the sky from on high and then never gets touched or altered thereafter. Gameplay ends up being shaped by the community at least as much as by the developers, often even more so. I have to make an analogy here to the summoner spell Flash from League of Legends, the ability that lets your champion teleport a short distance on a lengthy (5 minute) cooldown. There are a dozen summoner spells and the designers of League never intended for Flash to be the absolute must-have, no choice, everyone-takes-Flash-every-game summoner spell. During the early years of League's development, the design team kept trying to nerf Flash in various different ways to create more balance between the summoner spells. It never worked though because Flash was so ubiquitous and ingrained into the fabric of the gameplay that every design decision was based around the assumption that everyone would be running Flash. Furthermore the community HATED it when the designers tried to push away from Flash because pretty much everyone had accepted that this was simply how the game was played. It wasn't intended but it was how the gameplay ultimately evolved over time.

As far as I'm concerned, Slavery civic in Civ4 is in the same boat. No, it wasn't intended to be dominant but that's how the game developed and it's not really possible to talk about Civ4 gameplay without it, any more than I can discuss Civ3's gameplay without discussing tech trading. Close to Home isn't my mod and it's not my call, but if you're really trying to keep gameplay changes to a minimum, I don't think you should be fiddling around with Slavery. I kind of liked the initial changelog for the mod and my interest is declining with every additional feature added. I don't think I'm the only one who had this sentiment either since we've had a number of older faces coming back for the last few games, specifically because Close to Home isn't the "Civilization 4.5" that Krill's mod turned into.

Again, you don't need to care about what I think since I'm not doing the hard work that goes into putting this together. I'd personally like to see fewer changes though, not more. It's OK if not every trait and civ ends up being perfectly balanced - a game can have stronger and weaker options and still be fantastic.

[darrelljs]

Removing all but one choice is just as bad as having only One Right Choice.

Darrell

[Charriu]

Wow, thanks a lot for the very constructive feedback. I have to say you were making this decision a lot harder for me that way and the decision is:

Slavery remains unnerfed.

As for my reasons. Some of you already mentioned that it is a bigger change compared to BtS and Commodore reminded me about the original requirements of the mod. The harder learning curve is also a factor. Once again this does not mean that the RtR nerf is bad, just not right for this mod. The reason why I thought I need to act on Slavery, was because a lot of players mentioned the now unnerfed slavery in their spoiler thread, which made me think, they don't like it.

I kind of liked the initial changelog for the mod and my interest is declining with every additional feature added. I don't think I'm the only one who had this sentiment either since we've had a number of older faces coming back for the last few games, specifically because Close to Home isn't the "Civilization 4.5" that Krill's mod turned into.

Again, you don't need to care about what I think since I'm not doing the hard work that goes into putting this together. I'd personally like to see fewer changes though, not more. It's OK if not every trait and civ ends up being perfectly balanced - a game can have stronger and weaker options and still be fantastic.

Developing this mod is a constant training in restraining oneself. I don't want to build a Civ 4.5 here and you can't imagine how hard it is to constantly kill your babies. For example I really loved the initial idea of moving Slavery to Masonry, but you were right in that it's not in the spirit of this mod.
I know Krill did run two mods in the past, the standard RtR and a more radical mod in which he expiremented with those changes. I don't want to run any kind of these radical mods. So once again thank you for reminding me about the goals of the mod and helping me in my daily mental restraining training.