Rebalancing Civ4: RtR Mod

[SevenSpirits]

For spies, I think the best improvement this mod could make is having "no espionage" actually remove the espionage stuff instead of converting it to culture. Sounds like this is on the right track and mostly just needs implementation. Note that nationhood currently gives a significant espionage point % bonus, so would be worsened. Probably it doesn't need compensation though.

I think T-hawk has the right idea for war weariness too (make it go away more quickly).

IMO balancing the leader traits will also be important. And the trickiest one here is financial, because it's too good but you can't just take off parts of it (it only does one thing). So the only options are to change what it does, or to strengthen every other trait (which IMO is out of the question). Other traits are easier to balance, though we do need consensus on their relative strengths. I know I've seen some good references about this before, anyone have a link (or just want to write it out again)?

[zakalwe]

An alternative or complementary way to buff serfdom could be to add +1 happy from granaries under serfdom. In a sense this would also buff protective slightly (but not really, because everybody will build granaries before they run into the happy cap anyway).

Just a random idea, throwing it out there, feel free to dismiss it out of hand.

[Amelia]

Well... +1 happy for granaries just doesn't make sense though... what about something like +2 Hammers from Granary under serfdom, or +2 Commerce, or even +1 food? It fits in line with granaries, rather than +1 happy.

[Cyneheard]

Traits:
I think on this one we can get a reasonable sense of what's been chosen where. Here's my "lurker beg": Can I get a list of traits chosen by in each game?
Like, you know how Sunrise posted for PB1 the traits chosen, where it was like all Cre civs with some Fin? Let's go through all 13 games, counting PBEM4 once, and making clear under what rules each one was chosen.
So, we would have something like:
PB1:
No Restrictions. 11 players.
Fin - X
Cre - Y
...
Phi - 0
Pro - 0

I think restrictions on leaders available and # of players are sufficient; we don't always know map types beforehand. Simply adding up the traits chosen won't be sufficient, because some had no Fin/Exp or other restrictions, and then there's the PBEM10 reverse draft (where both lists: The traits put into the draft, and the traits chosen could be helpful).

Goal: Have all 11 traits be viable, and while there can (and will!) be consensus "best" traits, I want to minimize the daylight between them and the other 8 or 9 traits. In the base game, the traits probably end up being:
Tied 1st: Fin/Exp
3rd: Creative
4-10th: All traits, varying viability. These seven traits should be fine.
11th: Protective. Utter junk.
But let's double-check the #s, and see what it looks like.

Re: Serfdom ideas: Have to think before I respond there.

[T-hawk]

So leveraging slavery effectively gives someone a very large advantage relative to other choices, made even worse by the fact that Slavery's the only emergency source of units until drafting.

If Slavery is meant to be used for emergency units, how about letting Slavery be good at that and less good at everything else? There is a modifier for hurry yield in the XML for each unit and each building. (actually hurry cost, but practically speaking it operates as hurry yield.) What if buildings and domestic units yielded 20H per whip but combat units yielded 30H? Then you might see players using the other options for building, swapping to Slavery only for wartime.

Another possible fix to Slavery is to scale the anger clock with population whipped as it did in Civ 3. Then you get rid of the silly micromanagement trick of 2-pop whipping, and every city has a firm cap on food->hammer conversion in the long run. The XML doesn't expose this but it's easy in the DLL.

Emancipation: This is a strange civic.

The happy penalty is driven by flavor. No nation in the modern real world really runs Slavery or Serfdom. It's unapologetically a blunt hammer to force use of Emancipation in the later game. It is not supposed to be balanced; it is supposed to be the one and only choice.

[T-hawk]

Replying to your PM about DLL coding for No Espionage - I'll take a shot. It would help to write out a full list of what changes to make, as compared to what you've done in the XML or that No Espionage already does (my knowledge of it is fairly limited.) Is this complete?

- Remove the espionage-to-culture conversion
- Lose the doubled culture thresholds
- Disable spy specialist slots
- Great Spy points become Merchant points instead
- Should I do anything with EP buildings? The EP will disappear anyway in not converting it to culture. AI might be dumb enough to build the buildings though.

[Cyneheard]

Slavery to be a per-population anger clock: Hm. Very interesting, that would make it much more unit-centered. If that was done, then Slavery could remain a 30h whip. I think leaving it at 10t per whipped population would work just fine.

Would this mean that a 2-pop whip is 2 anger for 20t and 1 anger for 10t, or 1 anger for 20t? I'm assuming the former is what you mean. I played all of 1 game of Civ3, so I never learned the happy mechanics there.

My guess is that disabling the EP-only buildings should be easy: Intelligence Agencies and Security Bureaus are the only ones that I can think of, and they should go in a no-EP game.

If the AI over-values courthouses and castles, that's a minor problem.

Jails, however, are going to become a lot less useful, but not completely useless. Especially since we're also weakening War Weariness, I think cutting the no-espionage price to something like 90h would be ok; if you want the Jail to cost less than the Mausoleum that would work, too (where 90h seems reasonable; India does not need its UB to be 100% awesome). If this can't be done, then it's not the end of the world.

[Cyneheard]

There is a modifier for hurry yield in the XML for each unit and each building. (actually hurry cost, but practically speaking it operates as hurry yield.) What if buildings and domestic units yielded 20H per whip but combat units yielded 30H? Then you might see players using the other options for building, swapping to Slavery only for wartime.

Some talking with Krill, and this idea is definitely not a good one in practice:
Players will then only whip units, and overflow into their granaries and such. It's like whipping into wonders (Moai wins the prize there), only something that players will want to do all the time. It makes slavery more complicated, without making it all that much less useful (I assume you're talking hurry costs on each individual unit, where workers and settlers couldn't be whipped for 30h/pop?). This will slow down the early-game whips, where overflow off of spears and chariots are very limited, but not so much off of Macemen and later units.

And on second thought, the early game happiness mechanics become very messy if we change Slavery's unhappiness penalty. I realized that when thinking about removing the unhappiness penalty while nerfing the number of hammers, and making Slavery more happy-intensive ends up with the same problem. The early game isn't the problem, options are going to be limited there, it's the mid-game, where the options that are opened up are, frankly, quite weak.

[scooter]

I've been following this thread, and I think this is a great idea. Seeing that Civ5 might just be a flop has sort of renewed my interest in Civ4, so I'd love to see something like this put together and then used in a PBEM/Pitboss here.

I don't have much to add on the topic of Slavery since you all have better ideas than anything I'd come up with, so i wanted to take a look at the traits. I'd like to see more balancing of the traits, and the Granary switch for Expansive sounds like a nice start. To be honest, trait balancing sounds like a bigger improvement than mechanics (to me anyways), so I'd like to get some more conversation flowing on the topic. It's mostly of interest to me since these PBEM games are fun, but (especially since the consensus seems to be no tech trading) it's not too exciting when everyone knows that Pacal, Willem, and Sury are the top picks. Some thoughts for the traits:

Financial - I liked regoarrar's idea of making the change that you only get the +1 commerce bonus at 3 commerce instead of 2. Perhaps this would be TOO heavy a nerf though? I think of the damage that would do to Financial water tiles, and suddenly it does seem like a really strong nerf. A possibility would be to include this nerf, but give it back some of its old bonuses, such as double build speed of banks. If it's still too weak, consider giving it double speed markets or something (which would fit well from a theme point of view).

Expansive - If we take away the Granary bonus, I do think we'd need to compensate by speeding up worker production a bit more. 33% instead of 25% maybe? I'd say 50%, but that might break the opening "worker first" build, giving Expansive a huge advantage. In general though, the granary bonus was probably stronger than the worker bonus anyways, so some sort of compensation might be necessary to make Expansive viable. Now that I look back at the original post, I see the 33% bonus was considered, and for what it's worth, I'd like to see that added so that Expansive is still pretty viable as a strong trait.

Creative - Maybe consider a really mild nerf, like removing the Theater bonus?

Protective - If anyone has ideas for a total rewrite of the Protective trait (coming up with a whole new trait), it could be worth considering. Adding the Granary bonus though is probably good enough to make Protective a viable trait.

Charasmatic - This trait was already weak, and it sounds like it might be weaker since we're talking about nerfing Slavery. Maybe consider giving it +1 happy on top of what it already gives? I'm just trying to think of something that would cause people to actually want to choose it.

Industrious - I'm actually thinking we might want to leave this one be. Since we're talking about using this mod for MP, the value of this trait is so variable. Considering most of the MP games are now 5-6 player PBEM's, the value of this trait is actually fairly solid, so we could leave this one alone.

Spiritual - We can probably leave this alone too. Most of the games are being played on Quick Speed where Spiritual is stronger anyways, so it's probably okay for now. Also bear in mind that these mid-tier traits "improve" automatically when the top traits are nerfed.

Organized - Probably just leave it be, it's fine

Aggressive - Probably let this one stay the same as well, though it's not picked very often, maybe consider double speed stables too? Or maybe it does that and I've just forgotten.

Philosophical - Hmm, this trait could probably use a mild tone-down (like Creative), but I'm not sure how to do it.

Imperialistic - I think it says a lot that I totally forgot about this trait until just now. I think this one probably needs a boost, most generally consider it to be the second or third weakest trait... Would it be too lame to copy the Organized courthouse bonus for Imperialistic? I think it'd fit well...

Also consider the possibilities if we make all these changes... Imp/Pro is generally considered to be one of the worst combos, if not THE worst combo in the game. With these changes, you could push out settlers rapidly, and each city could get cheap granaries and courthouses, not to mention get highly promoted archers and get a great general bonus for defending, so they can defend all this land that was grabbed much easier than most. Wouldn't that be fun to see - that the decision between Imp/Pro and Cre/Exp is now a serious consideration rather than a joke?

I'd like to throw out ideas for UU balancing, but this is getting long as is, so that'll wait a bit longer.

[Adlain]

Protective - If anyone has ideas for a total rewrite of the Protective trait (coming up with a whole new trait), it could be worth considering. Adding the Granary bonus though is probably good enough to make Protective a viable trait.

How about adding a +1 From building a Barracks, afterall building a barrack means you have better troops to protect your nation, so they should be happy about that . I dont know if it would interfeare with the +2 with Nationhood though.