Rebalancing Civ4: RtR Mod

[Selrahc]

The Internet was built for defense purposes, so maybe NASA took it over?

I think the free labs thing makes sense. The internet was an academic research tool for much of its early existence, and that kind of represents that.

It might be worth noting a misconception I had about the internet project, that prevented me from building it in games where I was winning for quite a while. I thought it wasn't civ exclusive. That the free technology would be given out to all civilizations, essentially putting most of the world on an even keel technologically. Kind of like the Manhattan project meant "Nuke building" mode on I thought the Internet turned "Free technology for stragglers" mode on.

[zakalwe]

Re: Financial. Maybe just keep boosting the other traits until you would seriously consider swapping out financial for any one of them?

Financial may still be powerful, but it's kind of boring since it only does one thing. The other traits generally bring a bit more variety.

It's ok if financial is generally very strong as long as it isn't overwhelmingly so, and as long as there are relatively common scenarios where other traits are better.

[Gold Ergo Sum]

It might be worth noting a misconception I had about the internet project, that prevented me from building it in games where I was winning for quite a while. I thought it wasn't civ exclusive. That the free technology would be given out to all civilizations, essentially putting most of the world on an even keel technologically. Kind of like the Manhattan project meant "Nuke building" mode on I thought the Internet turned "Free technology for stragglers" mode on.

I am glad I wasn't the only person who thought that when they first played Civ IV.

[antisocialmunky]

I don't like the Financial nerf to 3+ commerce. I think it's very explicitly meant to work on sea tiles. For pretty much all of human history, financial center cities have been seaside ports. If Financial needs a nerf because it's impractical to bring all the other traits up to its level, give Financial a small penalty somewhere else. Something like -1 unit XP or +10% cost to barracks (bankers aren't good fighters) or -10% GPP (bankers think only short-term profits).

As for units, I don't think any are really out of line. Praetorians are OK as-is; of course they're strong, but there exists a countermeasure unit. And the Rome UB is one of the weakest. 10% city penalty sounds silly to me, making a UU the opposite of its base unit is very counterintuitive.

I think elephants are a worse problem, but not sure how to adjust them well. The problem for balance is the narrow resource requirement. But that's actually accurate: historically, elephants were very good for armies that had them available, and Wiki says they were used up until the 1800's and the introduction of the cannon. So Civ 4 got that right. 7 strength seems reasonable, and perhaps some small boost to spearmen's ability to counter it.

I'll try to get to some DLL coding over the weekend.

If cottages are the problem, why not make workers more expensive for them? Even if they get a production nerf to military, they still get the +1 cottages at a similar time. Slower worker production means slower cottages because you have tension with food and production tiles due to fewer workers. As for elephants, maybe you can do ranged units. Elephants historically have been countered by archer units and gunpowder..?

[Cyneheard]

Re: Making the Internet into free labs:

This will take some work to switch it around to a wonder, but I believe it's something I'll be able to do. Not soon, though.

Financial:

Things that can be changed under the TraitInfos XML file (i.e., where the traits are defined directly. I know that Health, Happiness and GPP penalties do work (Dan Quayle mod). Not sure about any of the others, but my guess is that most of them do work as penalties):
Civilization Health
Civilization Happiness
Civic Upkeep
% increase or decrease in XP required to level up
Great People Rate
Great General Rate
Great General Rate inside one's territory
Wonder production bonus (separable boosts for Global (i.e., World), Team (not sure which ones these cover) and Player (National) Wonders)
Extra Yield modifiers: How much Food, Hammers, or Commerce must I earn on a tile to get +1 to it?
Trade Yield Modifiers (not sure how this works)
Commerce Changes: Free Gold, Beakers, Culture or Espionage per city
Commerce Modifiers: %age changes to Gold, Beakers, Culture and EP.
Free Promotions: Can choose the promotion, and what unittypes to give it to.

[Amelia]

What about keeping Financial's commercial bonus as it is, but giving it -1 to happiness or -2 to health, with the logic that bankers are misers and don't really care about their citizens?

[plako]

It might be best to keep Financial as is after all. If negative adjustment is the way to go then maybe minor increase (~10%) in civic upkeep could work.

[scooter]

I've seen a few people who are against removing corporations, and it's usually said for sake of balance... I'm a little confused why - we didn't have corporations before BtS and things were just fine..? Let's just revert it back to the way it was...

Keeping Financial as it is would sort of defeat the purpose of using a mod like this... I'm still in favor of nerfing it down to 3+ commerce, and honestly historical reasons for keeping it at 2 doesn't mean anything to me, shouldn't balance take heavy precedent over history? Give it a build bonus to banks and markets, that's fine... But let's keep it from remaining the "one right choice" for picking traits, especially in a no tech trading game (which as you notice has become and probably will remain the community choice for MP games here).

I guess what I'm saying is I don't like the idea of making as minimal a balance change as possible (like a 10+ increase in Financial civics or something) because that's not really balance... That's just an artificial penalty that'll have almost zero effect on the game... The fact that the Roman sword is strength 8 and the Aztec sword is strength 5 is horribly imbalanced, and there's a reason nobody picks Aztecs in these MP games but Rome is picked in every game. Who cares if the Roman UB sucks, 2/3rds of the UB's in this game suck. Inca is the only civ that is worth picking on the basis of UB alone.

If we make a big huge balance mod but everyone still picks the same leaders/civs every time, then the mod would be a failure in my mind.

[plako]

Fair enough. I'm just cautious. Definately one could remove corporations and nerf Financial big way. I'm just favoring minor tweaks since effects of bigger changes are not easy to predict. But this is probably part of the fun i.e. finding new best ways to play.

If Corporations are removed, maybe 10% hammer bonus from state property could be removed also since I think it wasn't there before Corporations.

[Krill]

Hmm, what about changing Financial to a percentage modifier for gold and removing the per tile bonus?

Also, I think that if we can make Corps into small wonders, then that is the best way to go with balance. We will have to adjust the late game beaker, hammer and gold costs for pretty much everything though to take into account the inflated economies, but that should have been done in the base game and wasn't...