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Cyneheard

Most recent version:

Download the mod here

GitHub repository for C++ DLL source code

Change log:

Change log 2.0.5.3

Traits:

Civs:

Leaders:

Civics:

Wonders, Projects:

Base unit changes:

Buildings:

Technology:

Renaissance era technology prices increased by a percentage of base BtS tech cost as follows:

All medieval and earlier techs are untradeable:

Espionage:

Tile Changes:

Game Mechanics:

Events:

Miscellaneous:

Included additional bug fixes:

Selrahc · October 2nd, 2010, 17:00

No changes to corporations?

Krill · October 2nd, 2010, 17:02

Not yet...figure out a way to balance them, then post it here. Personally, I'd prefer it if corps were small wonders, so everyone could get them, but neither me nor Cyneheard are, well, great shakes at coding...

pocketbeetle · October 2nd, 2010, 17:04

Sounds promising. smile

Suggestion: Come up with a unit or Promotion (prereq: Sentry?) that can see Spies.
(It's been done before, see the Defense(?) mod that comes with BTS)

Edit:
Any thoughts of adding a small bonus to Pikemen defending vs WEs?
The Str numbers on defense may be the same as Spearmen, but the hammer costs aren't.

Cyneheard · October 2nd, 2010, 17:11

One thing to consider with corporations:
In SP play, it's relatively easy to get large numbers of resources in trade.
This is a rarer problem in MP play. Also, MPers will charge full value for their resources, either directly, or indirectly via alliances.

Option 1) Increasing the opportunity cost of spreading a corporation.
This can be done by increasing the cost of an executive, increasing the cost of spreading the corporation, something like that. These are relatively easy to do, but don't really solve the problem that corporate bonuses can easily be too big.

Option 2) Limit the corporate bonuses per resource. Not sure if this is an XML fix or not.

Option 3) Buff State Property.

Option 4) Making Corporations National. Needs a ton of coding to do right.

Krill · October 2nd, 2010, 17:21

pocketbeetle Wrote:Sounds promising.

Suggestion: Come up with a unit or Promotion (prereq: Sentry?) that can see Spies.
(It's been done before, see the Defense(?) mod that comes with BTS)

Need to try and figure out what the entire point in spies is, in an MP environment. I'm not entirely sure they even have a place: you make them visible, but are they killable or not? If they are, they are just another combat unit and get killed because they can't have a military escort. You make them immortal, and what are you supposed to do when you see them coming? Maybe make them hidden nationality? Same problem as above. Never mind the entire spies as a sentry net problem...

You need just so much coding, development and rebalancing to make spies worthwhile, that using spies as units in a small mod is nigh impossible. And the whole point of this mod is to have just a few small tweaks where possible to rebalance the really bad shit, and add a bit more life back into C4.

Sareln · October 2nd, 2010, 17:51

Quote:We wanted to tweak Slavery. How would we do that? Well, the plan was this:
Whips would now give 20 hammers, but slavery would give +10% hammers to all forms of production. THIS WAS NOT DONE IN THE MOD. I do not have any experience with working in Python, and it doesn't seem to be an XML value. If a lurker could either make the slavery change, or walk me through the python, that would be greatly appreciated (I can add the +10% hammers, since that's an XML change).

Elaborate upon the exact changes you want. I've dorked around in the SDK and python before, so I might be able to help you track it down.

1. Slavery gives +10% hammers (Done)
2. Whip gives 20 base hammers at normal speed (Undone)
3. You don't need to run slavery to do whips (Undone)?? This seems to be implied by the whole statement (you can always whip but slavery improves that with hammer output) - but I may be completely misreading you and you only want points 1 & 2.

Krill · October 2nd, 2010, 17:55

Points one and 2 are correct. Point three is not correct, you should still need slavery to whip. The production bonus idea is there to not completely screw early game production - you could go to slavery, but leave a high production city working hills and making use of the 10% bonus hammers.

**SevenSpirits** · October 2nd, 2010, 17:56

I really like the idea of this, as I am not averse to playing slightly-modded versions of games. Also, I should be able to to any necessary coding - I've made complex mods before.

In terms of designing it though... I think we need to be a bit more deliberate. Specifically, the critical first step is to agree on what aspects of BTS's current state are undesirable and worth changing. I'm guessing you already have some understanding of that with Krill, but it needs to be explicit if you want this to be a good mod (and a community mod).

It's important to be careful in defining what you want. For example: as we all know, slavery is pretty good. One of the three main goals of "balance" mods are to make more strategies viable, and currently, early slavery for a long time is much more viable than alternatives. So a pretty obvious goal is to make slavery worse, or competing civics better, such that you have a harder time choosing between them.

However! Another important consideration in balance mods is to make the strategies that people choose interesting to play and skillful. In this case, before nerfing slavery, we should ask whether the fact that it's part of the best strategy is actually improving the gameplay. Arguments in favor could include: Slavery benefits the defender in wars, and the result is a better balance in emphasis between economy and war; slavery allows for interesting and skillful city micro; slavery allows a greater variety of city sites to be viable by allowing food to hammer conversions; slavery allows the benefits of new techs to be gained more quickly, which rewards clever beelines. (Keep in mind, this is an EXAMPLE. I am not making any claim about whether I believe those or not. Don't try to debate me!) So it's possible that we would look at slavery and conclude that while it's disappointing that other labor civics don't get used, the net result is a more interesting game. Or not.

(The third thing a balance mod tries to do is make the game fairer for players with different initial conditions (i.e. leaders and civs). This is more straightforward.)

The second step is to come up with changes that accomplish those goals, and justify that they do accomplish those goals without screwing up other things. It's useful to explain what you believe the old strategic balance was (certain options being shut out) and what you believe the new balance will be.

Throughout all of this there will temptation to throw in insignificant changes to things that annoy you personally. Maybe I'm underestimating the impact, but I think the vassalage change might qualify. Does that GPT really matter that much? There are lots of things that are dumb in the game; the question is always whether it will significantly improve the game.

Edit - One other comment: It's my personal preference to keep things "elegant". I would call the spearman's bonus against war elephants "not elegant". I can't tell you exactly why, but you know, it's adding more separate things. Why not just reduce the War Elephant strength instead? However, I'm not sure if there's a legitimate reason for this preference. Also by the way, I will comment on specifics, but right now I have something else to go to, and maybe you will elaborate on things in the meantime anyway.

Cyneheard · October 2nd, 2010, 20:14

NOTE: I forgot to mention this earlier (and will promptly edit in the OP): Pikemen get a 25% bonus against WE.

We're trying to remove some of the "one right answer" decisions that Civ4 has.

Issue #1: Slavery + Cottages is king for commerce (as intended), but it isn't all that weak for production. I think that's one thing Civ5 has gotten right, that it does attempt to improve the balance between 2/0 and 1/1 tiles. If pop growth wasn't so crazily expensive, and if Maritime States didn't exist, then I think Civ5 would actually have that balance about right.

Hence, the Tile and Civic changes.

The slavery change is definitely a big one, and maybe we're better off seeing what the changed Workshops et al do for allowing other production options.

But I don't think it solves the Cottage Economy Is King On Land issue.

Right now, non-HE cities basically get a few farms to get to a +5 to +7 food surplus, and the other grassland tiles are cottages. This works really well, because a 2f tile doesn't hurt production: grow on cottages, and then whip away population for hammers at about a 1f:2h conversion. A 2f cottage is worth almost as much production through the whip as a 1/3 grass hill mine! And it provides a nice pile of commerce. Another option is to nerf the granary, but I KNOW that will have a massive number of side-effects, and is worse than the disease.

For micro, I think this moves a lot of the micro decisions from the city screen to worker management, so I don't think it's a huge loss of skill there, just a different focus.

We don't want to kill the cottage economy, or the ability to slave population. And I think we definitely need to look at this on water maps.

The other changes are a lot smaller in scope.

Vassalage: This was meant to work with Pacifism. If someone wants to run Pacifism in an MP game, well, they can't without breaking the bank. This doesn't make Pacifism an easy choice, but a viable one (at least for Spi players), when they want to spit out a GPerson or two.

Drafting: Rifles are incredibly dominant units to begin with. Grenadiers kind of counter them, but Grenadiers can't be drafted, are in an awful tech, and only work when attacking the riflemen. Add in the fact that a rifleman (110h) can be drafted for about 15-20 food (and some unhappiness, unless it's the Globe city), and all of a sudden there's a hole in the game begging to be abused.

On Normal Speed, a Globe City is incredibly map-dependent. This isn't an issue on Quick Speed: Just about any city can be irrigated to the +10 food surplus at size 5: Corn + 4 grass farms. I know in PB3 that was going to make a big difference: I didn't have a chance of getting a 1t drafting farm until Biology (and I'm not even sure then), while the Maya could run a pile of floodplains and be good to go.

The Trait tweaks are from looking at PBEM10 (7 Pro civs "chosen" as being awful, out of 12 picks), and some of the other games that have banned either Fin/Phi or Fin/Exp. The granary bonus seemed like an easy way to fix two of those

Terraces needed something of a nerf. An Expansive Inca player gets, for 30h, a monument and a granary, and another culture? Granted, the Quechua isn't much an MP UU, but I think Krill's shown clearly that the Terrace's free culture makes a huge difference. And this at least makes the Terrace more like a combination Granary/Monument, instead of Granary/Creative.

The UUs, I'm not terribly happy with our choice of nerfs for the Praetorian. Cataphracts act too much like Cuirassiers, who are several techs beyond Cataphracts. What beats them? Nothing. Pikemen? A similarly-promoted Cataphract wins, because his Combat promotions are more useful. Similar situation for WE. Knights? Definitely not. At least now Pikemen and WE might have a chance.

After PB1, we've banned WE from all RB games. So that's why we felt something needed to be done about them. Something like 6str, +100 vs. Mounted units merely turns the War Elephant into a Mounted version of a Pikeman, available earlier and with a different resource. A weaker WE becomes unable to counter Knights, who would otherwise only lose to Pikemen and LB inside cities. I think those choices end up being a lot less elegant than adding the anti-WE bonus of Spearmen (and Pikemen), although on paper they look a little more elegant.

I don't think anything more needs to be said on the Civics and Religion missions.

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