Patch notes for 'Fall 2016' update have been released

[el_robino]

Still pretty new here (must lurk moar) so not sure whether this kind of thing is usually posted! Either way, it looks as though the first balance patch has been released, you can read about it here: http://steamcommunity.com/games/289070/a...7742411203

There are a lot of changes so didn't want to quote the whole post here, seems a bit redundant, but I was sad about this one: 

• Fixed an exploit that allowed ranged and bombard units to gain experience when attacking a district with 0 hit points. 

I've been exploiting the game apparently  

[Ruff_Hi]

As have others in some SG games I have been following ...

[BALANCE CHANGES]
• Deleting a unit no longer provides gold.

... but some good stuff there too ...

[GAMEPLAY UPDATES]
• Added the ability to rename cities.
• Added a visual cue for Barbarian Scouts that are alerted to your city.

[Ruined Everything]

[GAMEPLAY UPDATES]
•  Added UI to show the next tile a city will grow to. 

Yay! (Now if we could only *choose the next tile*, that would be awesome.) 

[BALANCE CHANGES] 
•  Units may no longer remove features from tiles that are not owned by that player. 

Welp. Better I guess. But it does mean (with the schizo cultural spread) that chopping is mostly off the table. I guess that offers interesting choices - is it worth buying a tile and chopping for a production boost?

[BALANCE CHANGES] 
• Reduced Warmonger penalties in most instances, and adjusted how this reacts to returning versus keeping a city. The last city conquered from a player now provides a heavy warmonger penalty, even if you have a Casus Belli against this player, because you are wiping out a civilization. 
• Reduced border incursion warnings if the troops are within their own borders. 
• Players will no longer receive any warmongering penalties from a joint war partner for actions in that joint war. 

This might make the AI less schizo? 

[VISUALS] 
• Buildings on snow will now have snow on them. 

How lovely.

[pindicator]

Thanks for posting that! I'm excited to see them making changes before the first expansion

[yuris125]

[GAMEPLAY UPDATES]
•  Added UI to show the next tile a city will grow to. 

Yay! (Now if we could only *choose the next tile*, that would be awesome.) 

I believe the issue comes back to the now classic luddite's post (don't have a link to the actual post, but it's quoted in this Sulla's article) whi talks, amongst other things, about how 1upt system forces the game to find ways to limit production (because there's simply not enough space for units on the map if they're produced in the same volumes as in Civ4). As a result, Civ5 tile picker absolutely hates hills; this seems to be less of an issue in 6, but still an issue. That being said, giving the user an option to spend gold to acquire the tile they want is not the worst solution

One change I really hope for (didn't have a chance to play post-patch game, so don't know if they actually went for it) is making the tile picker deterministic. In Civ5, if there are several tiles the picker considers of equal priority, it highlights all those tiles, and randomly determines which one to pick only when you get enough culture. This can be very annoying - for example, in my current game, there's a city which has a deer and a luxury in the second ring, it's a coinflip which one will be acquired next, and its outcome makes a huge difference to decisions I already need to make. If the picker made this random choice before starting to accumulate culture, and the player could know in advance which tile was going to be next, it would be much less frustrating

[BALANCE CHANGES] 
•  Units may no longer remove features from tiles that are not owned by that player. 

Welp. Better I guess. But it does mean (with the schizo cultural spread) that chopping is mostly off the table. I guess that offers interesting choices - is it worth buying a tile and chopping for a production boost?

I don't understand why they couldn't just add distance-dependent modifier for chops outside the border, the way it works in 4 (and I think 5 as well)

[Sareln]

[BALANCE CHANGES] 
•  Units may no longer remove features from tiles that are not owned by that player. 

Welp. Better I guess. But it does mean (with the schizo cultural spread) that chopping is mostly off the table. I guess that offers interesting choices - is it worth buying a tile and chopping for a production boost?

I don't understand why they couldn't just add distance-dependent modifier for chops outside the border, the way it works in 4 (and I think 5 as well)

One of those is also a much bigger code-change.  I'm guessing they went with that b/c they already check if you're inside your borders for tile improvements and can just add that check for feature removal as well (one line change).  If scaling by distance hasn't been implemented and tested for another part of the game (and I don't think it has?), then you would need to do all of that work as well (multiple lines changed, in multiple places in the code base).

[HansLemurson]

Any idea why the patch took 2.1 Gigabytes to contain the listed fixes?

[Molach]

They added 2.09 Gigs of AI.

[Sareln]

Any idea why the patch took 2.1 Gigabytes to contain the listed fixes?

Art Assets of Awesome?

Are you sure that wasn't the patch that went out earlier that added the music to the collectors edition keys?

[el_robino]

Any idea why the patch took 2.1 Gigabytes to contain the listed fixes?

There were new Nvidea drivers released for this patch so I dare say there were some further changes made that don't affect gameplay and so are not listed. Who knows though?