Rebalancing Civ4: RtR Mod

[Tatan]

Have you guys considered nerfing coastal blockade a bit, like reducing it to two tiles in every direction or something?

[Cyneheard]

Hm. Hadn't thought about it, but agree that it definitely needs to be either nerfed or removed. I think "removed" is better: If the ship can't pilllage the fishing nets, then those fishing nets should be workable. See PB2, Sullla complaining about that. He's right.

An XML-based solution would likely lead to simply removing the ability to do a coastal blockade.

[T-hawk]

I'm traveling this weekend, just a short note now and will read this in depth later.

All three of Workshops, Windmills, and Watermills now give +1 more base hammers. However, the bonus hammers from Chemistry (Workshops), and Rep Parts (Windmills and Watermills) have been removed. Instead, Mines now get +1 hammer at Replaceable Parts.

This only makes windmills the one right choice for hills instead of mines. A windmilled hill at 2-2-x is just about strictly better than a mine at 1-3-x, since the whip allows conversion of that one extra food to more than one hammer (even with your Slavery change to 20H.) Same deal as that a 2-0-x grass cottage is virtually always better than a 1-1-x plains cottage, or more generally that grass always beats plains.

Suggestion: remove the commerce from windmills and add it to mines instead, so at least the choice is between 2-2-0 and 1-3-1. (Maybe mines get the commerce at Machinery so as not to distory the early game research pace.)

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.

I don't have Civ in front of me right now, but I'm pretty sure Slavery whip yield is in the XML. Try GlobalDefines.xml. Remember it is really 20 hammers base and Mathematics increases it by +50%. So if nothing else, you could just lose the Mathematics bonus.

[SevenSpirits]

Some specific comments.

#1: Tile Changes.

All three of Workshops, Windmills, and Watermills now give +1 more base hammers. However, the bonus hammers from Chemistry (Workshops), and Rep Parts (Windmills and Watermills) have been removed. Instead, Mines now get +1 hammer at Replaceable Parts.

Starting with Watermills: I agree. This is a good change; it makes watermills comparable to mines, but with double build time and pretty heavy restrictions on where they can be built. Their advantage is they can be built on different (and better) terrain. At 2h, they are a good supplement to other improvements you will build.

Windmills: Whoa. That kind of obsoletes mines until RP. I also don't like how much better than farms they become. The improvement balance for most of the (most significant part of the) game is that you can get 1f, or 2h, or more commerce. Having a 1f/1h/1c improvement changes that radically. While I admit that existing windmills kind of suck, I doubt this is a good change. It will additionally have the effect of mass windmills everywhere in the middle ages which is hilariously ahistorical.

Workshops: Again, I don't like this. The basic implication is that starting at Guilds, you can make the equivalent of a mined hill on any flatland tile. (Previously this required Chemistry or Caste.) Additionally, once you add Caste System, they are just plain better than mines. I think it's important that hills vs flatland has implications of whether you can more efficiently get hammers vs food.

Mines +1 at RP: This is kind of tied to the other stuff I guess. I have no big problem with it, however remember that they also get +1 with RR which isn't much later.

So I don't want to be all critical though. What are some changes I'd like (other than the watermill one)? Well, I think the best would be moving Lumbermills to Machinery. Lumbermills are also effectively a 2h improvement that can exist only in certain terrain (tiles with forests you didn't chop) and with small ancillary implications (health!). (This is also reasonably, if not perfectly, in line with history.)

One thing that could perhaps make me accept the proposed boosted workshops is if they gave -2 food instead of -1. This would mean you only want to build them on plains, not grass. Still not my favorite improvement, but at least it would be reserved for specific terrain. Another possible way to differentiate workshops from mines would be to just flat out give them +1c (but cancel the other proposed workshop changes). This also has minor implications for placement: they can be nice on non-river tiles in golden ages, or riverside for financial leaders.

I'm not really sure what could be done with windmills.

The thing I most want to avoid is having base tiles be too interchangeable. (Well, grass/plains I wouldn't mind so much, but hills/flat I do.)

#2: Civic Changes.

Vassalage now gives the same number of free Military units as it does free Units. This only matters when one is in Pacifism.
Serfdom: Now provides +100% worker speed, and +1 hammers to both Workshops and Watermills. When was the last time we saw someone use Serfdom in an RB game? PBEM1, with Ruff using Serfdom + Hagia + FW?

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).

The Vassalage change is fine.

Slavery: I don't see the point of the +10% hammers. This isn't going to make a difference to normal early production anyway - it will only matter for whips and chops. Boo. It will start to matter at about the time that we, the benevolent modders, are gently nudging the player to consider adopting Caste or Serfdom instead!

Serfdom: Absolutely needs a boost, though I wish this didn't entail something available in Caste too (+1 to workshops). I don't know, I'll reserve judgment for now. Thematically it's also pretty weird - serfdom is about peasants working the land, pretty much the exact opposite of making machinery more effective. Literally it could improve every other improvement instead, and this would make decent sense.

#3: The draft.
Specifically, the Rifleman draft. The minimum population to draft is now 7 + Drafted unit's cost, not 5 + Drafted unit's cost. Also, Rifleman now cost 2 pop to draft. The other drafted units' costs are unchanged.

Unanswered question: what to do with the Globe Theater? The Globe can still be used as a drafting farm, but only at 1 Rifle every 2t.

I don't know that much about this, but this seems like a great change.

#4: Traits
While everyone has their own opinion on the various traits, for most people Fin and Exp are the top two traits, and Pro is universally regarded as the weakest.
Financial is hard to balance. We suspect that we've implicitly nerfed Financial by making the Cottage Economy relatively weaker, especially if the Slavery nerf goes through.
Expansive and Protective, however, can be solved simultaneously.
This version of the mod moves the Granary bonus from Expansive to Protective.
Other options considered:
Giving Expansive a +35% Worker Production bonus, keeping the Granary shift.
Keeping the Granary bonus with Expansive, but moving the Worker Production bonus to Protective, and either keeping it at 25% or buffing it to 35%

IMO these changes don't go nearly far enough. Plus, it's really easy to balance changed traits compared to stuff like tile improvements or civics! I'll leave discussion for later as it seems a really big topic, but I also just wanted to say that I viscerally HATE Protective. You know how the AI builds WAY too many archers, to a point that is clearly not smart, but also irritating? And as a human fighting it, you don't really build any at all, because why the heck would you be passively defending a city?? Protective is basically the embodiment of that. It literally makes you better at being attacked in cities, and aside from that first strike chance, that's it.

No matter how many granary discounts you give it, I will still loathe it for this reason. I'd rather it was renamed and made to do something completely different. But that's just me.

#5: Unique Units and Buildings
These were few, and fairly simple.
The Incan Terrace now gives +1 culture: Now it's a free Monument, not free Creative.
Praetorians now get a 10% PENALTY when attacking cities. If we wanted Praetorians to be countered by axemen, then another option would be to make Praets have 7 str, and restoring the 10% City Attack bonus.
Cataphracts now have 11 str, not 12.

I actually want to ask about swordsmen. Are they ever good? Would it be good it improve them? I don't think I remember seeing them ever get built in RB multiplayer games, though I wouldn't stake anything on this.

In any case, these are obviously good changes, and the only thing I'd comment on is that praets with a negative ability will feel less cool than weaker praets with a positive ability, so I think the latter would be better.

#6: Unit changes
It's a serious problem for game design when just about every single new PB and PBEM removes Ivory or bans elephants. The problem with elephants is that they don't really have a counter: even spears don't do all that well against them. So, let's fix that.
Spears now receive a 50% bonus when attacking War Elephants, and a 100% bonus when defending against War Elephants. This stacks with the +100% vs. Mounted units.

Flanking has also been hit with a nerf: Flanking is half as effective as it was.

I definitely won't argue the flanking change. For WEs, I just don't think it's worth the trouble to give spears/pikes multiple new and generally useless abilities just to balance a different unit.

How about a str 7 WE, with X% vs mounted and made Y more expensive than currently? Could there be workable values of X and Y? I don't think we should worry that much about it being too similar to a pike; losing to spears instead of axes is a fairly big difference.

A less blunt variant would be to make WE's more like early mounted Pikes, but also give them flanking vs catas. Would that be interesting at all?

#7: Spy Missions
Switching Civics and Switching Religions now require that you have researched Future Tech. These missions have no place in an MP game.

This deserves a bigger discussion. I definitely think "you may not build spies" has a lot of merit as a rule commonly used so far.

[SevenSpirits]

I don't have Civ in front of me right now, but I'm pretty sure Slavery whip yield is in the XML. Try GlobalDefines.xml. Remember it is really 20 hammers base and Mathematics increases it by +50%. So if nothing else, you could just lose the Mathematics bonus.

You're thinking of chops.

Hurry stats are in
sid meier's civilization iv beyond the sword\Assets\XML\GameInfo\HurryInfo.xml

You guys didn't see it because it is not in the beyond the sword subfolder; it's only in the base game assets. You can safely copy this file to your mod assets folder and modify it, and it will work.

[SevenSpirits]

Suggestion: remove the commerce from windmills and add it to mines instead, so at least the choice is between 2-2-0 and 1-3-1. (Maybe mines get the commerce at Machinery so as not to distory the early game research pace.)

Expanding on that...

I doubt this is a good idea, but maybe you could have those better workshops and 1f/1h windmills (with long build times, I hope) if serfdom gave +1c to farms and mines, which incidentally would make historic sense. (You are pretty much stealing the economic output of the peasants slaving away on the land.) Countering this idea, a) it's really late and I can't think if this would be balanced at all and b) I know I get a bit too sentimental about that whole historic sense thing.

[Cyneheard]

Thanks for the Vanilla XML mention. I knew it had to be an easy change, but didn't know to even look in the Vanilla XML, thought BTS would, you know, have everything it needed. on me.

Thanks for the comments! Trying to figure out how to amend the tiles/labor civic changes based on everyone's feedback.

Version 0.2 will be up once there's a new set of changes there. That could be today, but more likely will be some time this week. Today is football: Ravens/Steelers and Washington/Philly.

Another change, that I just found at the end of the Global Defines: Blockade Range has been reduced from 3 to 1. Why 1, not 2? Well, a galley now blockades a 3x3 set of tiles. That's also essentially the galley's movement range from end-to-end. Also requires that one galley isn't enough to shut down a truly coastal city, although it's still effective if you're next to food res. Removing Coastal Blockade would require a lot of secondary modifications, so I don't want to set the Blockade range to 0 because of misclicks/people forgetting about the change.

Question: Should WW be removed from AW games? It's easy to do.

On the "cannot build spies" option:
Two ways to do it.
1) Make Spies require Future Tech to be built. No spies. Still keeps EP in the game, so graphs/research visibility/almost-worthless Great Spies/city visibility in corner cases still matter.
2) Fixing "No Espionage" as a game option/game default. I think this could actually work.

There could even be two versions of the mod, one with normal espionage, and the other with No Espionage as the default. I don't want to do that until the mod is in at least a beta state, otherwise errors are far too likely to creep in, where I don't correctly change both versions.

What are the problems with the No Espionage setting, as it currently exists? I'm envisioning an XML-only way to fix these problems, at the cost of making the No Espionage option the ONLY option for this mod. Basically, I would make "No Espionage" be the default game option, and make it not be selectable in the options screen.
1) Culture. The game converts all EP into culture, and doubles the cost of culture expansions. Well, that's easy enough to fix: Remove all of the EP bonuses from buildings (removing the EP-only buildings from the game, and considering buffing Jails somehow), and halve the cost of border expansions, only to have them doubled again by the No-Espionage option. This may mean that Quick Speed requires 6 culture for the first border pop (4 culture is slightly too cheap: 1t of an unimproved Artist under Caste System), which is slightly odd, but also closer to the 67% of 10 that most Quick Speed things are like. If it's possible to
2) Spies/Great Spy Wonders: So, a bug with No Espionage is that the game still increments the Great Person counter for Spies and Great Spies, but does NOT give any Great Person TYPE points. So running a Spy, having the Great Wall, and running an engineer spec gives you 8 GPP/t...but only Engineer points are going into the pool. The easy half of the fix is removing Spy specialist slots from the Courthouse et al. The hard part is deciding what GPP points should come from the Spy Wonders:
Great Wall
Pentagon
Kremlin
Forbidden Palace
The Great Wall's the hard one. Engineer points are a bad idea (IIRC, that was what Warlords did?). Philosophical + Stone = Automatic Pyramids. Even without one or the other, TGW becomes the "Free Pyramids" wonder. No Great Person points is incredibly inelegant IMO, as is making it 1 Great Person point, when no other wonder does so. Still, The Great Wall can be an awesome wonder, so limiting the value of its Great People points might not be a bad thing (I saved an absurd number of hammers in PB3 because I didn't have to worry about barbs. Because I put two chops into TGW once I got stone. Best chops EVER).
Forbidden Palace: Merchant or Artist? Either one makes sense thematically IMO.
Pentagon: I think Great Merchant works here thematically. Two words: Defense Contractors.
Kremlin: Great Artist.

AFAIK, No Espionage does correctly give you graphs on everyone when you make contact with them.

[luddite]

Interesting idea. I'd like to know what your goals with this are, though. Specifically, what sort of game are you trying to balance it for? multiplayer vs singleplayer, maps, and difficulty all radically change the game balance.

I feel like the game is already pretty well balanced for singleplayer on high difficulties. I definitely wouldn't say that fin/exp is clearly the best traits there, or that cottages or the "one right answer" for research. That is probably true for a lot of multiplayer settings though. Is that what you're trying to balance?

[Cyneheard]

This is about Multiplayer games, first and foremost. I have heard that on Immortal/Deity with Tech Trading, tech path is somewhat less flexible, as GSci bulbs are fairly key in trading one's way to parity. But that's nearly unfixable, at least in making any sense for MP games.

So the default difficulty is Noble, but anything up to Emperor can happen. Maps have been many types, although some of the more extreme map types (Boreal, Arboreal, Rainforest, Great Plains) aren't used.

[plako]

I wouldn't change anything unless it is really broken. This is mind, here are some random thoughts.

Is it really nescessary to change tile yields as radically as suggested? Maybe minor adjustments so that the extra hammers come a bit earlier would be sufficient.

Serfdom with 100% worker rate sounds quite much. I suggest 60% so that at normal speed chops come down from 3 to 2. Some hammer bonus alongside could make a difference, but I suggest it would be different from Caste bonus e.g. 10-20% for hammers.

Slavery could be nerfed, but I would still try to keep it useful without additional bonuses. Maybe hammer yield between 20-25 would work.

Protective was reasonable in BtS 3.17 with overflow "bug". Maybe giving Castles/walls more economic power could make Protective alright and still unique.