Rebalancing Civ4: RtR Mod

[regoarrarr]

What about changing Financial to an extra commerce on tiles with 3 commerce (so 3->4 instead of 2->3). Still keeps the basic late game, but slows things down in the early game, so no 3 commerce on coast or a just placed river cottage.

Probably not an XML change but just a thought

[Serdoa]

I would think about if you really want to get rid of Spies completely. I do understand the issues with them, but taking away spies means you also take away the possibility of a espionage-economy. And that is something that I really hoped to see sometimes again.

[novice]

I like this initiative. Just some random thoughts:

Adding production bonuses to serfdom seems a bit athematical, typically civics focus on specific aspects of empire management, in this case workers. Maybe add a worker/settler production bonus to serfdom?

If the target of the Slavery change is the cottage economy, slavery could give -1 commerce to cottages/hamlets/villages/towns. I'm not sure I like that idea myself, just throwing it out there in case someone does.

Rebalancing the civics is going to make spiritual more powerful, I guess that's okay though.

[Krill]

I'll post later, after I've showered, but look at the first word of the thread title.

As nice as it is to add in realism when it fits, the aim that Cyneheard and myself have always had (and I'd hazard a guess that most of the community feels the same way) is that balance comes first. Note that that doesn't mean a mechanic can't be both realisitic and balanced.

Also, I agree with T-hawks windmill/mine commerce change. IIRC, we went through several ideas of the Windmill bonus, and one of them was that Serfdom gave a bonus hammer to windmills and watermills, and Caste had just the workshop bonus. Since we've all been focusing on other activities recently, this one might have fell through the cracks.

[Jowy]

Makes navys cheaper to encourage naval warfare.

[Krill]

That's not quite how balancing works Jowy...if you make navies cheaper, they just get bigger for both sides. It makes exploring easier.

Warfare for warfares sake is a n00bs game.

[Dicorion]

Interesting idea. If you want to nerf a slavery a bit, you could (if it is possible) make every city becoming unhappy to revolt under slavery (for certain turns?). This is a drastic change though.

[Krill]

[snip]

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.)

Just as a preface, remember that you need to keep in mind the changes to slavery, caste, serfdom, Exp/Pro, and that there is currently no reason to build workshops prior to Chemistry.

Basically, workshops need a boost, not a nerf, and cottages need a nerf. Cottages aren't easy to nerf though, without really altering the game balance so you need to nerf them by providing them with a competitor. The methods chosen were to limit the production potential by decreasing the effectiveness of slavery, and increased the production capabilities of workshops just before an era where most armies are produced via drafting, which has been weakened. Now you have to decide if you want to start investing in those cottages earlier, pushing you on towards Democracy and Lib for US and Emancipation, or go with the simple workshop/farm option and build research/wealth in cities (and don't forget that you really need CS to make a go of farms therefore workshops are going to be food limited in growth anyway).

The workshop option opens up a lot of decisions about what to build and where, and city specialization. Especially when you can't whip out a defensive army that easily any more. Even archers are 2 pop whips, Longbows are 3 pop whips, spears are 2 pop whips that won't overflow to a second spear...

Windmills, yeah, they have been changed (along with Serfdom IIRC). FWIW, giving mines a 1 commerce boost kinda makes them awesome for Fin, which isn't the best decision when you just nerfed Fins' greatest competitor and not Fin. Mines+slavery also means that other cities get a hammer bonus, so while comparing tile yields means that workshops are better, that isn't look at the big picture.

I think another idea is to just remove the production and unhappiness penalties from slavery, and while I think the latter makes sense now the conversion is more balanced, I'm still not sure about the former because it provides a few interesting quirks.

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.)

See, I feel the exact opposite. If you always put workshops on plains, and always put farms on grassland, and mines on hills, then the game isn't balanced because there isn't any choice. Hills and flats is a necessity when production has just been slowed drastically. There needs to be a way to keep production moving along without falling into the pitfalls that Civ 5 has, for instance.

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!

It is there to make Slavery viable longer term, so instead of the decision being: "I'll swap to Caste or Serfdom as soon as I can", it's "Hmm, I could use the production bonus for a few more turns, I don't have that many workshops atm". Long term, yeah, it can't compete, but then it wasn't meant to.

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.

I think Cyneheard has sorted it...

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.

You're missing a rather large nuance of Pro atm: it just isn't economical to rush them, and a cheap granary means that they can recover from whips a lot faster. And whips no longer make any real sense without investing in a granary, because you are trading 1 food for less than 1 hammer without it. That granary also costs so little, plus all your enemies will know you are Pro and so they aren't going to make much head way, that the new Pro might be one of the faster expanding traits. While defending in cities is generally noob, planting an aggressive city on a hill with 2CG2/drill archers in it generally means that you have the upper hand. You just need to be aggressive and think outside the box about how to use it IMO.

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.

Swords have a niche as stack defenders, and for using to defend tiles, and battering cat stacks when you don't have horses.

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.

Espionage and Corps are currently being looked at. I'm not sure what Cyneheard has come up with though...put ink me in with the "remove spies" crowd.

[Sofis]

One could prevent spy based sentry nets by reducing their sight range so that they can only see the tile they are standing on.

[SevenSpirits]

The methods chosen were to limit the production potential by decreasing the effectiveness of slavery, and increased the production capabilities of workshops just before an era where most armies are produced via drafting, which has been weakened.

I see that. A lot of this post is explaining why you think those changes are good, but that's obvious and not up for debate anyway. However, you're not at all replying to why I think some of them are bad.

FWIW, giving mines a 1 commerce boost kinda makes them awesome for Fin, which isn't the best decision when you just nerfed Fins' greatest competitor and not Fin.

I was assuming I didn't have to say that in this case and possibly regardless, you'd want to weaken fin. I can be more explicit in the future.

I think another idea is to just remove the production and unhappiness penalties from slavery, and while I think the latter makes sense now the conversion is more balanced, I'm still not sure about the former because it provides a few interesting quirks.

Can you explain this? I can't tell what you mean.

It is there to make Slavery viable longer term, so instead of the decision being: "I'll swap to Caste or Serfdom as soon as I can", it's "Hmm, I could use the production bonus for a few more turns, I don't have that many workshops atm". Long term, yeah, it can't compete, but then it wasn't meant to.

Or you could just balance Serfdom and Caste with a non-+10% slavery instead.

You're missing a rather large nuance of Pro atm:

Man, I just said I viscerally dislike it, I didn't even say it was bad! actually my point, if anything, was that using the data from that game where just about everyone chose a protective leader didn't necessarily mean it was particularly problematic compared to other traits, it just means people don't like it.