Rebalancing Civ4: RtR Mod

[plako]

After rethought this sounds a very novel idea. Not just fixing the broken things, but rebalancing things to make alternatives for "best practices". It would be fun to see in real game, if your changes accomplish the goals. There is definately potential here.

The power of financial+cottages is not much affected, but they will be more vulnerable and specialist driven economy have better chances to fix their deficiencies via building wealth/science or you could even try to specialize mostly on hammers.

Transferring Granary bonus from Expansive to Protective sounds nice. Maybe give Expansive then bonus on something else e.g. Aqueduct or Grocer.

Have you considered nerfing/banning some of the most powerful wonders. e.g. Internet doesn't suit well for MP games.

[Cyneheard]

I'm still working on putting things together for the next release version, but some of the changes we've made:

Slavery now gives 20h per pop, but no longer gives anger. The other option I see is to do a straight nerf of slavery to 25h per pop, but leaving the anger as it is.

Serfdom, Windmills:
Windmills are back to a base +1/0/+1 improvement, and still get +1h at Rep Parts (Mine still get that boost, as well). However, Serfdom now gives +1h to Windmills and Watermills, and only gives a 75% worker speed bonus (which on Quick or Normal speed, acts more like a 50% bonus than a 100% bonus)

Feedback especially needed for:
1) War Weariness: Not sure whether to remove it from MP play completely, or simply to remove it from AW games. This would require rethinking the Jail and Mount Rushmore (see below about Rushmore), as well as Police State.

2) Espionage: It's possible, just from the XML, to remove Espionage and allow players to automatically see graphs. Would people support this change? The no-visibility spies MIGHT work, if and only if they don't get bonus visibility from hills.

If Espionage disappeared, then espionage-only buildings would be removed, as would spy spots and Espionage bonuses on the usual buildings. If both of these changes happened, then Jails would have to be removed or given a different bonus, and the Mausoleum could be kept as a cheap +2 happy UB (likely 80h? Not as good as a Ball Court, but it's India, who doesn't need much of a buff).
The WW and NW that give GSpy points would all have to be changed.
The easy changes:
Pentagon, West Point would now both give Great Merchant points. Defense contractors. 'Nuff said.
The Forbidden Palace would also give GM points (flavor and balance work well here: traveling caravans to and from the FP to the capital, and Great Artists are either a hit-or-miss Great Person, so adding extra GA points earlier in the game isn't always wise)
Kremlin: Great Artist. Flavor wins here. At this point, it doesn't matter all that much what GP points a wonder gives.
And, of course, the really hard one:
The Great Wall. One of the first wonders available, and quite cheap.
We went with...drumroll please...GREAT GENERAL points. Still need to test if this actually works mechanically. For balance, though, a GG is usually less useful than most other Great People, and that was the case for Great Spies as well 95% of the time. And what other types of Great People would the Great Wall be training?
But the other options aren't going to work:
Great Engineer points? Definitely not. The Great Wall becomes the guaranteed source of the Pyramids.
Great Merchant: 1500BC Trade Missions, or an easy Civil Service bulb. Neither are good choices.
Great Artist: 1500BC Culture Bomb. Um...no.
Great Scientist: This could almost work mechanically, but it's really awkward from a flavor standpoint (you get a Great Designer of the Wall?). It's not like GSci are all that difficult to make in the early game; for most players, they're the first specialist unlocked.
Great Prophet: We have that already in this era. With THREE different wonders.

Wonders:
Hadn't really thought about the world wonders (and I'm considering Internet and Manhattan those for balance purposes). The Internet may have to go. If WW disappeared, then SoZ needs a new purpose. Those are the only two that really seem to be a problem to me, though. The early wonders self-balance themselves a little: the faster one wants to race for a wonder, the more one has to spend in development/opportunity costs in getting the wonder. So the really good wonders tend to get more expensive wonder races.

National Wonders, however, have several that are junk or really weak:
Mount Rushmore could be turned into an expensive +2 civ-wide happy wonder (something like 700h, and since it requires Fascism, it's a lot later than ND). Only makes sense if WW is gone, though.
Red Cross: Cost reduced to 200h. There is no reason why this NW should be as expensive as it is. Still requires hospitals be built.

West Point: Reduce the requirement to build from a lvl 6 unit to a lvl 5 unit. So, 17XP for normal leaders, 13XP for Cha, instead of 26 and 20. For normal leaders, getting 17XP on a unit in an MP game is quite difficult short of using a GG. Essentially, if you want WP, you need to have used a Great General for a Super Medic or to buff a combat unit, without requiring that unit having gotten 6XP first. Even more importantly, West Point now gives SEVEN experience. WP really should be a guaranteed extra promotion, otherwise it isn't worth it: it's an expensive NW. And, yes, this means that Charismatic WP cities can easily get to 4 promotions. Especially with the Slavery nerf (an easy way to use Cha's happy cap boost), Cha could use a small buff.

Police State becomes a little more useless if there's no WW to cut in half. It's not used all that much to begin with (Pyramids in an AW situation, and Spi 'Midders on a military kick who somehow don't need happiness. Post-Fascism.) Suggestions?

And, Expansive:
I like the Grocer or Aqueduct idea.

[T-hawk]

Feedback especially needed for:
1) War Weariness: Not sure whether to remove it from MP play completely, or simply to remove it from AW games. This would require rethinking the Jail and Mount Rushmore (see below about Rushmore), as well as Police State.

How about keeping it, but drastically increasing the fade rate? Like to the point where it disappears after about 20 turns. So the WW modifiers still have a use, you'll still incur a penalty if you get a big stack killed in enemy lands, but the hit is only temporary and you won't suffer all game for one bad event.

[Cyneheard]

Hm. How about this:
WW now decays at 1% per turn DURING WARTIME and by 10% a turn outside of war. That war-time decay takes a little bit of the edge off, and during peacetime WW fades by about 2/3 every 10t at 10% a turn, and is down to 10% after 20t. I think 10%/turn during peacetime is about right.

I still think WW should disappear from AW games. EDIT: T-Hawk, or anyone else, do you know if the "peacetime" WW decay happens during AW games? If so, then the 10% fade would probably be sufficient.

[plako]

7 from WP feels too much. Giving e.g. aggresive leaders relatively easy access to Commando promos. Making it just cheaper would be better.

[Cyneheard]

Agg Commando (Ignoring Boudica) requires 17XP. So, Barracks + WP would be 10, 4 Easy XP from Vassalge and Theo, assume either 2 GG or Pentagon + 1 GG...Hm.

5XP and 500 or 600 hammers? That doesn't make getting to 17XP any easier, but it does make getting to 10 (or a drafted 5) a lot easier (just not automatic: you'd still need another 2XP somewhere).

[Ilios]

2) Espionage: It's possible, just from the XML, to remove Espionage and allow players to automatically see graphs. Would people support this change? The no-visibility spies MIGHT work, if and only if they don't get bonus visibility from hills.

I would support the complete removal of Espionage, with players automatically seeing graphs.

[plako]

5 from WP + discounted price sounds way better

Can you make it so that GG points from GW would go to normal Great Person pool and therefore work like any other points or are they bound to be on different pool?

[Cyneheard]

Can you make it so that GG points from GW would go to normal Great Person pool and therefore work like any other points or are they bound to be on different pool?

That is my intention. I haven't tested if it works yet, because I want to do all the Espionage work at once, and I'm not going to do that until it's clear that we're going the no-Espionage route. This would NOT be +2 free XP into the GG pool every turn. I don't know how that would even be done in the XML. It would be +2 Great General points into the Artist/Scientist/Merchant/etc. pool. As far as I can tell, the game treats Great Generals as being the same functional class as other Great People, so it should work that a Great General can spawn from the capital. It's possible to do so in FFH, but they may have done all sorts of things under the hood there.

[T-hawk]

T-Hawk, or anyone else, do you know if the "peacetime" WW decay happens during AW games? If so, then the 10% fade would probably be sufficient.

I don't think so. IIRC, the only modifier from Always War is that increases are halved.

That is my intention. I haven't tested if it works yet, because I want to do all the Espionage work at once, and I'm not going to do that until it's clear that we're going the no-Espionage route.

How about correctly fixing the No Espionage game setup option? Then you can go either way, spies or no. I see this list of changes:

- remove the silly espionage-to-culture conversion
- and remove the doubled culture thresholds
- make spies unbuildable (is this already true?)
- no Great Spy at Communism (is this already true?)
- no spy slots and EP from buildings (is this already true?)
- fix Great Spy points to produce a proper kind of GPP instead of those weird typeless points. I'd say Merchant, like your analysis of the Great Wall. Merchants are always useful but never broken.

The changes would most likely have to be done in the DLL code. I have the ability to code and compile that.