I think it is quite relevant that most of our understanding of BTS trait strength came from the era of quick speed PBEMs. The majority of Pitbosses have been played on RtR and now CtH at normal speed. So you sort of need to look close to see how many of these nerfs were made on an understanding of the game that doesn't reflect how we play games now.
FWIW, I don't think FIN can really ever be balanced without either fundamentally changing the trait or fundamentally changing the other traits. I've sort of always thought the best nerf to FIN is simply make it only work on water tiles. Its sort of the seafaring economic trait. But I'm not convinced that change to FIN doesn't sort of fundamentally change the game too much.
Your expansion traits are CRE, IMP, EXP. I think its relatively clear that IMP is the best of those but I don't know that anything needs to change much. I think you could realistically just reinstate the full Library bonus on Creative and remove the Stable bonus on Imperialistic and the three are then probably close enough for our purposes. The real answer might just be reducing the cost of Settlers a smidge at least so you can whip 4->2 in a reasonable amount of time without IMP.
I still continue to believe the fact that there are too many traits that aren't very good in our setups is probably the bigger concern. You didn't get the same leaders over and over because we had ban lists and exotic picking schemes in our BTS games. These games don't have any of that so every game is basically just picking the same guys except for the folks who want to try something different out. We might want to try a game soon where we do that thing where we ban every thing that's been picked in a CtH game (or picked twice or something) just to get some playtest on some of the other stuff. Maybe Zara's awesome we don't know because you think about it for a second then you pick Vicky or Charlie or whatever. I mean I think Isabella is awesome in base BTS but if Pacal and the gang were in every game I definitely wouldn't think that.
I guess the TL;DR is we're probably a lot further from really balanced than we really think we are here, because we have two game versions that don't tell us a lot here that inform our priors, namely base BTS on quick speed with lots of bans/tricks and normal speed RtR, which is a whole different game.
FWIW, I don't think FIN can really ever be balanced without either fundamentally changing the trait or fundamentally changing the other traits. I've sort of always thought the best nerf to FIN is simply make it only work on water tiles. Its sort of the seafaring economic trait. But I'm not convinced that change to FIN doesn't sort of fundamentally change the game too much.
Your expansion traits are CRE, IMP, EXP. I think its relatively clear that IMP is the best of those but I don't know that anything needs to change much. I think you could realistically just reinstate the full Library bonus on Creative and remove the Stable bonus on Imperialistic and the three are then probably close enough for our purposes. The real answer might just be reducing the cost of Settlers a smidge at least so you can whip 4->2 in a reasonable amount of time without IMP.
I still continue to believe the fact that there are too many traits that aren't very good in our setups is probably the bigger concern. You didn't get the same leaders over and over because we had ban lists and exotic picking schemes in our BTS games. These games don't have any of that so every game is basically just picking the same guys except for the folks who want to try something different out. We might want to try a game soon where we do that thing where we ban every thing that's been picked in a CtH game (or picked twice or something) just to get some playtest on some of the other stuff. Maybe Zara's awesome we don't know because you think about it for a second then you pick Vicky or Charlie or whatever. I mean I think Isabella is awesome in base BTS but if Pacal and the gang were in every game I definitely wouldn't think that.
I guess the TL;DR is we're probably a lot further from really balanced than we really think we are here, because we have two game versions that don't tell us a lot here that inform our priors, namely base BTS on quick speed with lots of bans/tricks and normal speed RtR, which is a whole different game.
I've got some dirt on my shoulder, can you brush it off for me?
