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Sulla wrote:
Quote:Unfortunately, you came across several of the unbalanced features in Warlords: the Great Lighthouse/Temple of Artemis combo (it's disgustingly powerful with Hannibal's Financial trait and harbor unique building), and the trebuchet unit. Just wait until you try playing as Cyrus and begin making use of features like the Medic III promotion, and vassal states.
So, what things do people think need rebalancing in Warlords? This is the list so far:
- Trebuchet (4 +100% city attack)
- Temple of Artimis (+100% trade route yield)
- Cothon (Harbor UB) (+1 trade route)
- Medic III (too much healing??)
- Vassal States? (dont know whats unbalanced here)
What do you think would fix these problems?
Seems like the Trebuchet fix is the easiest, make it weaker. 3 + 100%? 4 + 70%?
Why exactly do you think the Temple of Artimis (only combined with Great Lighthouse?) is so unbalanced? Is it only the mid-early game? In other words, would pushing it off to higher up the tech chain rebalance it? Make it more expensive? Or make it weaker? Perhaps +75% trade route yield and change the free priest to a free merchant?
-Iustus
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Well, with the Great Lighthouse you get +2 trade routes, and with the Cothon you get +1 trade routes, so if you built the Great Lighthouse and Cothon in all cities and then built the Temple of Artimis, you'd be getting equal to 6 trade routes in all cities, I think you can see why that's over powered.
This could definately be solved by nerfing the Temple, +70% or even +50% would be the answer, they should also find some other bonus for the Cothon, another trade route seems a bit much.
As for trebuchets, they are definately overpowered. It's not as clear in my first Warlords game (report is further down the page), but they were immensly overpowered for both bombarding cities and causing colateral damage. There usefulness rivalled that of cannons (indeed, I wasn't in a rush to upgrade most of them). They should probably be moved up the tech tree, to where, however, I don't knowl.
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Warlords is out 1 week and we want to balance it already? Let's have a bit more time to enjoy and explore. If any civ builds the great lighthouse and temple of artimis near me they're going to get a few swordsmen their way 
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Actually you'd get +3 routes in all coastal cities and +100% yield in the city with the Temple. It's still a bit much in that city, though.
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Too Much Coffee Man
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BeefontheBone Wrote:Actually you'd get +3 routes in all coastal cities and +100% yield in the city with the Temple. It's still a bit much in that city, though. It's just in the city with the temple? I stand corrected, then.
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Yes, it gives +100% in that one city, and 1 free priest in that one city. I am not a fan of the free priest, because it means that you get +2 great merchant points from the wonder itself, and +3 great prophet points from the free priest, so you will always have a 'poluted' great person pool in the city you build this. Perhaps not a big deal, but I found it annoying.
Neither the Temple of Artimis, nor the Cothon is giving as much of a boost as the Great Lighthouse does. If you are going to argue that the Cothon is unbalancing (+1 trade route in each city you build it), then why is the Great Lighthouse (+2 trade routes in every city) not unbalanced?
Even if the temple was generating 40/commerce per turn in the late game, thats 5 trade routes over 20 each (8 natural, 8 temple, 4 harbor), more than shown in this game, that is a lot less than even one shrine can generate.
Perhaps I am missing something, but it seems to me that the only time this might be unbalanced is in the early game. But even then, I need to be convinced. The Great Lighthouse seems to me to be much more powerful than the Temple of Artimis, and I have never seen anyone complain it is too powerful.
-Iustus
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Of that list I find the balance of Medic III most questionable, it's the only GG Promotion which is risk-free to use, and the effect is huge - in enemy territory you heal as quickly as you would in a friendly city.
The Temple of Artimis... well... it's costly and it requires other costly wonders to synergize with. Good it may be, but as long as the player pays for the advantages...
Look at it this way, which is more useful, the Temple, or the Pyramids (Rep) acting on 4 specialists? I'd say it's pretty equal.
Vassal stats are a chaotic force, stirring up world wars and such. If anything I think they favor the human because the human can run circles diplomatically around the AI's.
I don't get the big deal with Trebuchets, to me they seem fine. They don't seem more powerful than Catapults or Cannons anyway. If they need to be nerfed, I think it should be dropped bombard rate to 20% (same as Cannon) rather than the 25% of artillery, then you'd need to bring an extra treb alone to bombard down defenses in one turn.
Something not listed is Build Culture, this is now generally twice as effective as before (as are wealth and research, but I don't have issue with them). Using build culture you can easily pack 10+ culture in a fresh-out-of-revolt city and this seems highly effective at pushing back borders, especially when combined with poprushing theatres and other cultural stuff, and it's even better with a captured forge. This seems to make winning border struggles a fair bit easier (Altough I don't think it effects cultural victory, since build culture now uses the production multipliers rather than culture multipliers, so build culture is still quite pathetic compared with the output of cottages via slider).
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Blake Wrote:I don't get the big deal with Trebuchets, to me they seem fine. They don't seem more powerful than Catapults or Cannons anyway. If they need to be nerfed, I think it should be dropped bombard rate to 20% (same as Cannon) rather than the 25% of artillery, then you'd need to bring an extra treb alone to bombard down defenses in one turn.
That was my thought too. I did some Math to get a feel for the Trebuchet. In my opinion the feeling of the Trebuchet being overpowered has nothing to do with the unit itself - it is a feature of all siege units. You could easily say that it's not the Trebuchet that is overpowered but siege units are in general. And it all comes from one source: siege units being allowed to have City Raider Promotions. If you look at SGs like RB13 Collateral Carnage or RB15 Taking the Long View you'll easily get the point. Siege units with City Raider Promotions can mow down entire armies even if they're consisting of Infantry. The Trebuchet is in no way more overpowered than Cannons or Artillery are. The point is that the AI seems to find no intelligent way to defend against 'em. But that is too true for Cannons and Artillery too.
If anything is to be done it should be getting rid of the CR Promotions for siege units. After all it's a weird imagination that a Trebuchet, a Cannon or an Artillery is attacking a city directly like Infantry units. Of course you could imagine that they would just shell the people in there - with City Raider then working like the Accuracy Promotion, just on the people rather than on the cultural/physical defense.
After all I'm glad that the Trebuchet came along - it makes Engineering a much more valuable tech and it provides some counter to those Longbows. Longbows on a hill ? Nightmare. Now at least there are some chances.
Imhotep
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Hi,
Imhotep Wrote:You could easily say that it's not the Trebuchet that is overpowered but siege units are in general. And it all comes from one source: siege units being allowed to have City Raider Promotions. I fully agree with that statement. They should either remove the city raider option for siege units, or nerf collateral damage by including relative power into the damage equation. In addition to RB13 which you've already mentioned, I'd like also to point at my experience in my private 'no research' game (found on my site), where I overrun cities heavily garrisoned with infantry by lots of catapults(!), taking advantage of the fact the collateral damage is always the same regardless of the power of the unit suffering it.
I haven't seen the trebuchet in action, but from its stats I think it's fine. It's like you said, that the siege units in general are misdesigned.
-Kylearan
There are two kinds of fools. One says, "This is old, and therefore good." And one says, "This is new, and therefore better." - John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider
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I think it's collateral damage that is out of balance by not scaling to the defenders' power, rather than city raider. Catapults can still really maul rifle stacks in open field fighting, which I don't think is appropriate. You should really need cannons to do the job of softening up gunpowder age stacks.
(It's also silly that I can run a bunch of accuracy cats around with the tech tree completed, taking out the defences of cities for my modern armour.)
I don't think there's anything wrong with the treb, it's in fact designed in such a way as to make city raider less effective on it.
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