I've created a new menu at the top of the website, and all details of the mod components have been consolidated into that one place for easy reference.

Website: civmodding.wordpress.com (http://civmodding.wordpress.com/)

This thread is now just for feedback on the Terrain Improvements component.

I like it. :) Installed, I have to say I LOVE the new mod browser, sure it can be improved but its an excellent addition.

Btw, you set them to not be save game compatible, any reason. I manually changed both to be save game independant.

I've been somewhat puzzled about that, the guides recommend leaving it checked for anything that affects saves (all mods but maps and UI). It does seem to make more sense to use it as a warning "this mod breaks save games." I've unchecked this option and released updates.

I like these changes. Will the AI select worker improvements based on these new changes? Should I expect to see less trading post spam from them as a result? Thanks in advance

I too would like to know how this affects the AI. I'd download the mod just for that.

I love your various balance tweaks.

But there's one issue with this one i just noticed. Unimproved hills outside of cultural borders show a yield of 3, but once they are inside a border they show a yield of 2.

[edit] nevermind.. reloaded the save and it appears it was just a game glitch unrelated to the mod.

Does your AI still build tons of trading posts in the game? Thanks for the info.

Thanks Thalassicus for making all these Balance mods. I think its just the right thing that was missing.

My problem though is, the mod browswer is shite! It is only functional for 10 seconds before it goes blank. I managed to download 3 of your files, but i can't find the others (like building balance).. must be on a subsequent page, which i can't switch too or the browser goes blank. Crap system.


Would you mind uploading all your files here for a conventional download?



ALso, how do i change it so that these are save game compatible? All your mods still show as not compatible. At least the ones that i can see to download.

meh wrong forum.. ignore the post description. forgot i was still in this thead.

Hmm.. well that strange. I decided to turn the mod off and back on.. then reload my save and the yields outside of my borders appears to be correct now.

Go figure. :rolleyes:

I'll zip the folders together and put them up on the modpacks subforum.

The AI does seem to dynamically estimate the relative yield value of different possible improvements and plan accordingly. Once I finish the social policy adjustments (requires more effort, tooltips must be manually written), I'll do some testing to see if that can be tweaked further.

---

Some notes:

I've found the +:hammers: effect from mines sometimes does not retroactively apply to save games started before the mod was installed, but there's nothing that can really be done about that internal game issue. It always works in new games, however.

Also, check your mods folder to see if there's more than one version of mods in there. I've discovered older versions can sometimes still have an effect ingame, even if they don't show up on your installed mods list. This can result in odd behavior like the +1:hammers: showing up twice on Engineering on the tech tree.

On Windows 7 it's located here by default:

D:\<user>\Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 5\MODS\

I love your various balance tweaks.

But there's one issue with this one i just noticed. Unimproved hills outside of cultural borders show a yield of 3, but once they are inside a border they show a yield of 2.

This seems unrelated to the mod, which only affects mines, not hills. Anyway I've seen this happen before with no mod. I think it is related to golden ages. Maybe if you were in a golden age earlier it changed the tile yield display, and then it didn't change it back for some reason.

This seems unrelated to the mod, which only affects mines, not hills. Anyway I've seen this happen before with no mod. I think it is related to golden ages. Maybe if you were in a golden age earlier it changed the tile yield display, and then it didn't change it back for some reason.

Yeah its definately not related to the mod.

As for golden age.. i can't remember now. But that doesn't make sense anyway. Why would unimproved tiles outside of my borders get extra hammers in a golden age?

The reason i actually nocited it is because i had a resource next to my borders.. and i was like "Oh cool, that one gives a hammer.. i'll just buy that tile up thankyou" ;). But after i bought it the hammer disappeared. Then i looked around more closely and noticed the hills outside of my borders not matching the hills inside.

But, reloading seems to have fixed it !!!

I've uploaded a pack of these here for anyone having difficulties with the Mod Browser:

Balance - Combined (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=385737)

Thank you for the feedback by the way, I'm glad this change seems to have fit well into the game structure for some.

More hammers = more units. More units + 1UPT + AI = traffic jam.

Ironically, this would be the case if the AI's actually used their thousands of gold to purchase units, too, instead of sitting on vast treasuries in late game.

I've uploaded a pack of these here for anyone having difficulties with the Mod Browser:

Balance - Combined (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=385083)

Thank you for the feedback by the way, I'm glad this change seems to have fit well into the game structure for some.

You should put stuff in the first post, just a suggestion.:)


EDIT: Like the d/l.

Very nice! Hammers seem too scarce in Civ5. What would you think about setting mines as +2 hammers from the start instead of waiting for Engineering (in other words, make mines and lumbermills both add +2 hammers)?

I like the boost to lumbermills--it's a nice reward for not chopping those forests to boost early production.

@strategyonly
Good idea, I added a link to the main page in my signature. It seems like a concise place to cross-link without much clutter.

@Freezer-TPF-
Thank you! Engineering was sort of a "gut feeling," it seems like a good place to have a production upgrade. Here's my reasoning:

Too early, and a change to mines might throw off the progression of the game too far from what the developers intended. Mines are a very core fundamental aspect of the game, so we've gotta be cautious when changing them.

Engineering unifies several different military techs on the bottom of the tech tree, making a game opener there an interesting choice now when stacked up alongside the Stonehenge/Great Library to Civil Service game opener (food upgrade, two eras, and the valuable Pikeman). It's not too high up either, so it's feasible to work to in early game. Lumbermills were already at Engineering too, and that tech is otherwise a bit empty, with just forts. Engineering is also in a chain of several other improvement upgrades: mine/chop, quarry/clear, bridges, lumbermills, road speed.

Wouldn't a better 'balance' for mines and lumber mills have mines gain +1 production at dynamite, and lumber mills have a vanilla base production bonus of +1? Lumber mills still end up being better than mines with these changes, when they should really be equal.

One thing to consider is a mined hill gives 4:hammers: while a lumbermilled forest gives 1:food: 3:hammers: until Steam Power, which is a relatively late tech. Production is scare in this game, so it leaves mines at an advantage for pure production purposes in the first half of the game. Forests can also be chopped for immediate production, and early-game gains amplify to late-game advantages exponentially, which means you have an opportunity cost involved in leaving them as lumbermills.

In addition, mines are used to hook up most strategic resources and gold/silver/gems, so the benefit extends beyond just the features these two improvements can be built on.

There's also the advantages described above of having the bonus at Engineering, increasing the value of that path on the tech tree compared to alternatives. I agree Dynamite is a logical place for a mine bonus from realism, but is already a very powerful tech many beeline to as it gives Artillery, and probably doesn't need a further buff. An alternative might be to make Steam Power boost production on both tiles, instead of only on lumbermills. Or, putting a mine bonus on Railroads, a traditional place for that.

Or, putting a mine bonus on Railroads, a traditional place for that.

I think that's a fantastic idea, as it creates a lot of tension: do I want to add another production at the cost of two gold? For your military/wonder/space shuttle city, that would probably be the right choice.

I don't build lumber mills, choppy time and trade post seems to work fine for me. Hills and GAs provide all the golden ages I need, and the 30 bonus production is MASSIVE in the first era.

@Freezer-TPF-
Thank you! Engineering was sort of a "gut feeling," it seems like a good place to have a production upgrade. Here's my reasoning:

Too early, and a change to mines might throw off the progression of the game too far from what the developers intended. Mines are a very core fundamental aspect of the game, so we've gotta be cautious when changing them.

Engineering unifies several different military techs on the bottom of the tech tree, making a game opener there an interesting choice now when stacked up alongside the Stonehenge/Great Library to Civil Service game opener (food upgrade, two eras, and the valuable Pikeman). It's not too high up either, so it's feasible to work to in early game. Lumbermills were already at Engineering too, and that tech is otherwise a bit empty, with just forts. Engineering is also in a chain of several other improvement upgrades: mine/chop, quarry/clear, bridges, lumbermills, road speed.

For example, one possible opener I'm testing: Animal Husbandry, then if no horses are within a reasonable settling range beeline to Iron Working. Otherwise, can expand or build archers/chariot archers to defend or conquer a nearby civ, and press up the tree for the Engineering production upgrade, then backtrack slightly to get Horsemen. This takes longer than a stonehenge/GL/civil service beeline, but the significant advantage is you're not restricted to 1 city like a typical build order for the builder path, so you can more flexibly adapt to your map situation and train military or expand. The change to Engineering also makes the archer/horses route an interesting choice when contrasted to an Iron Working opener.

I see what you're saying, and Engineering is a logical choice for a technology to boost mine yields. But looking at your mod, I'd say that having the +2 hammer lumbermills available at Engineering is already a nice reward for going for Engineering and a potential boost for your production in general (if you made the long-term decision to save your trees!).

However, the opening of the game still really suffers because of the limited +1 hammer production of mines (vs. the +2 hammers they gave in Civ4). IMHO that's where the hammer scarcity of Civ5 hurts the gameplay the most. Later in the game, you at least have some options (better farms, maritime city-states, etc) that boost your food and therefore enable you to work more hammer tiles to compensate for the weakness of mines. But in the beginning, you have no options other than chopping trees, which will then hurt you later on when you can't take advantage of lumbermills. Mines adding +1 hammer just aren't good enough.

Having a later tech give mines +1 is a good idea--dynamite or railroads are both logical and traditional choices. Dynamite probably makes more logical sense. Railroad makes traditional sense based on Civ4, although in this case I guess you would just have to research the tech to get the bonus or would you actually have to build a road AND a railroad on the mine tile to get the boost? That's a heavy maintenance cost for an extra hammer.

In short, my thinking is this:

* Mines should add +2 hammers to start (early production is just too poor otherwise)
* Lumbermills should add +2 hammers (reward for not chopping)
* Lumbermill +1 boost with Steam Power is fine as is
* Mines should get a +1 boost at Dynamite (makes more logical sense) or maybe Railroad (but if you have to actually build a railroad on the mine tile to get the boost, that may be too costly in maintenance and worker time)

My only problem with this is that it diminishes the usefulness of the Iroquois unique building. +1 hammer in Forests is huge in the default game, while with this mod I think I might prefer having the normal Workshop for the multiplier.

My only problem with this is that it diminishes the usefulness of the Iroquois unique building. +1 hammer in Forests is huge in the default game, while with this mod I think I might prefer having the normal Workshop for the multiplier.

I'm not sure about that. The Workshop bonus only applies to buildings while the Longhouse hammers boost all production, and the Longhouse is cheaper to build. Better lumbermills also make it more worthwhile to preserve forests, feeding into all of the Iroquois strengths.

You've got a very good point Alien, I didn't think about it that way before.

Still, consider this. The UB is less useful, but forests overall are more useful. Since the Iroquois are favored for a forest-heavy start location, it seems this is an overall buff to the Iroquois - who were a little weak anyway. Their start location can now really be a production powerhouse.

@Freezer-TPF-
I'll think it over and see if I come up with any futher adjustments. I'd give a little more in-depth discussion, but rather exhausted from work today, and there's been requests for a tech-rate mod and some other things I'm going to prioritize for now. I'll think through your points in depth tomorrow, you do have valid logic behind them.

Playing with this mod (and a few of your others) and I love it. :goodjob:

One imbalancing effect that you may not have considered is that this makes gems, gold and silver by far more powerful resources. If you have a mint as well those become seriously super tiles. Not sure if this is a huge deal but they certainly make spices pale in comparison...

True about that, I've been thinking about it a while and might adjust the yields for gems/gold/silver specifically to keep them at their standard values.

Thalassicus, I hope you don't mind, but I just fixed your link in post 14, as it was referring to this thread rather than the intended.

Thank you PieceOfMind. When creating so many links it can be easy to miss-paste some here and there.

Could you make coasts worth 2 gold initially?

I've been thinking about a buff to the Harbor that could provide that, see here:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=9728924#post9728924

I've been cautious making changes that would be in effect at turn 1, as changes made in the early game can have an exponential impact on the game as a whole.

-----

I'm including a new change in this mod, instead of the Buildings&Wonders one, because it directly affects plot improvements and ties in with the other improvement changes. PieceOfMind suggested a good name for the Granary would be "Grocer", and it actually makes a lot of sense. I've detailed the reasons in the first post, in the "Details" spoiler.

I've been thinking about a buff to the Harbor that could provide that, see here:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=9728924#post9728924


Thal, registered to thank you for your great work. Been using all your mods for the last week (after a few runs on vanilla) and the experience has definitely improved.

Been happy to lurk but note that you're planning on buffing Harbors. Agree that they are pretty lacking during the era which you get them but they really shine once you get Railroads (and when that happens I think they are actually too cheap).

Building a Harbor not only establishes a trade route to the capital city via water tiles (coast/ocean), but also adds an instant railroad connection. i.e. for 3 maintenance you get both the benefit of trade as well as 50% bonus production. Basically it's a free factory once you get Railroads, without requiring Coal.

I've been playing games where I mostly settle coastal tiles and only build road networks to inland cities. Come Railroads I get a huge manufacturing boost with no additional maintenance drawbacks. Even on Emperor/Immortal I find I can skip Factories for all but my military cities.

My concern is that buffing Harbors further will make them OP. They may be meh when we originally get them but the payback later is tremendous so I don't think they need a boost.

I suggest that instead of tweaking the Harbor improvement itself we make the Harbor tech a more interesting choice e.g. give an additional +1 movement to military naval units (i.e. triremes but no bonus for embarked units). But that's outside the scope of this mod. I think the Harbor improvement is strong as it is.

Wow, I had no idea they provided the railroads connection! That dramatically changes their usefulness, and actually makes them very powerful... I would have never discovered that.

I'll include a change to the Harbor description in the "Unofficial Game Patch" mod so this is more clear ingame, and credit you. Thanks a ton for that tip!

No problem Thal. I'm not sure how you're going to amend the Harbor description but it might be a tad tricky. Due to poor documentation the way Harbor trade works is confusing for a lot of people.

e.g. The documentation does not clearly explain that for a functioning Harbor Trade Connection:

1a. There must also be a Harbor in the Capital; or
1b. There must exist a Harbor City on the same continent as the Capital and that also has a road or railroad connection to the Capital.
and
2. The game engine must be able to trace an unbroken (explored) line of water tiles (coast/ocean/lake) from the originating Harbor to the destination Harbor.
What this usually means is that both Harbors must be on the same body of water.

The corollary here is that a Harbor will only provide a railroad connection to the Capital if:

a. The Capital also has a Harbor, and is on the same body of water as your city.
or
b. The Capital has a railroad connection to a Harbor city on the same continent which is on the same body of water as your city.

So a simple sentence like "Harbors also provide railroad connections to the Capital if there is an existing trade connection" will break in scenario 1b. where there is only a road (but no railroad) connection.

I'm not sure how you're going to get all the nuances above into the description. Might be more trouble than it's worth :(

How about this:

A trade route requires an unbroken chain of roads, railroads, or water hexes to the Capital. Trade routes can only cross from water to land (or vice-versa) at cities with a Harbor.

How about this:

A trade route requires an unbroken chain of roads, railroads, or water hexes to the Capital. Trade routes can only cross from water to land (or vice-versa) at cities with a Harbor.

Pretty good. To that I'd add:

"If you have researched the Railroads technology and there is an unbroken chain of railroads or water hexes to the Capital, the Harbor also provides a Railroad connection (+50% production)."

So when combined:

A [ICON_CONNECTED] trade route can only cross between water and land at a Harbor. An unbroken [ICON_CONNECTED] route of roads, railroads, or water hexes to the [ICON_CAPITAL] Capital provides [ICON_GOLD], and +50% [ICON_PRODUCTION] with railroads or water hexes and the Railroads technology.

+25% [ICON_PRODUCTION] Production when building Naval Units.

City must be built on the coast.

There's something to the argument this could be put in a more detailed Civlopedia entry (the Harbor entry refers to a nonexistent "Water Routes" article) but this is such a critical piece of information I feel it should be presented up-front so the player cannot miss it.

My bad, I thought you were actually planning on changing the Civilopedia description, not the tooltip description. I agree that fixing the Civilopedia is required, but probably a separate effort.

Tooltip as proposed is potentially misleading - it implies that you get a separate 50% bonus from Railroads (i.e. if you have a Harbor and a land railroad connection you might get 100%). It also does not mention Railroads technology as a prerequisite so the implication is that you'd get the 50% bonus in an earlier era.

Perhaps:

"A [ICON_CONNECTED] Trade Route requires an unbroken chain of roads, railroads and/or water hexes from a city to the [ICON_CAPITAL] Capital. Trade Routes can only cross between water and land at a Harbor.

Provides [ICON_GOLD] with a [ICON_CONNECTED] connection.

With the Railroads technology researched, provides Railroad Connection (+50% [ICON_PRODUCTION]) if [ICON_CONNECTED] connection is through water and/or railroads."

Anyway, you get the idea. I don't know if there is a size limit to the tooltip but it's your mod so I leave the editorial decision to you :)

Ah, had reworded it as you were writing your post in fact, to somewhat solve that issue. This is revising the tooltip displayed in the Tech Tree. There's no size limit, but most of the other tooltips are a single line, so I'm trying to keep it as concise as possible.

Started a new game today and found something odd with a cow. I hope you can explain this.

The cow was on grass by the river, so had 3 food, 1 gold.
I built Grocer, which added 1 food, now 4 food, 1 gold.
I built Pasture, which oddly added 1 production, now 4 food, 1 prod, 1 gold.

I expected to get 5 food, 1 gold. What switched 1 food for 1 prod?

I prefer it this way since 1 prod lets me get 1 more prod during golden age. I am not saying there is a bug in the mod, but I like to understand what happened.

the pasture on cattle has always been +1:hammers:

What I don't know though is if it is intended to have the food bonus applied before improving the tile? I guess it does not really matter. May even be hard to implement otherwise.

Aha thats good to know. I wish the civilopedia was more complete.

Yes, there's no option for buildings to boost improved tiles only. For example, the Mint states it only works for mined gold and silver, but actually uses the same ResourceYieldChanges option I use here, and boosts gold and silver regardless of whether or not they're mined.

Could you maybe add wheat to the granary/grocer as well?

Also, why not keep the vanilla settings but add "farms spread irrigation" on civil service as in Civ4?

Spreading irrigation with farms would require access to the c++ part of the sdk. Civ V seems to be transitioned away from that sort of requirement, too... don't need a road to resources, for example. I think it represents the "non-federal" irrigation canals or country roads that would connect up those improvements.

I originally had wheat boosted too, but some people pointed out it already is a very strong improvement, and the bonus to the Fertilizer tech indirectly benefits wheat. An improved river wheat on plains is 5:food: 1:hammers: 1:commerce: with all the techs, and a similar one on flood plains is a whopping 6:food:, capable of supporting 3 population points.

Has any thoughts been put into making trading post only be buildable on flat land? The AI somehow seem to get confused and build them on hills in the early game. That was without the latest AI changes so you might have fixed that, but I dont see any issue with restricting trading posts to flat land.

I added this to the mod for myself.

<Improvements>
<Update>
<Set RequiresFlatlands="true" />
<Where Type="IMPROVEMENT_TRADING_POST" />
</Update>
</Improvements>

Well, trading posts on hills are valuable since both yields (:hammers::commerce:) are boosted by golden ages. The goal of this mod is to increase the choices players have and provide for more decision-making, so I'm hesitant to restrict existing strategies.

From the games I've played the AI seems to build a relatively healthy mix of improvements in logical locations, haven't seen as much trading post spam as in vanilla.

No problem Thal. I'm not sure how you're going to amend the Harbor description but it might be a tad tricky. Due to poor documentation the way Harbor trade works is confusing for a lot of people.

e.g. The documentation does not clearly explain that for a functioning Harbor Trade Connection:

1a. There must also be a Harbor in the Capital; or
1b. There must exist a Harbor City on the same continent as the Capital and that also has a road or railroad connection to the Capital.
and
2. The game engine must be able to trace an unbroken (explored) line of water tiles (coast/ocean/lake) from the originating Harbor to the destination Harbor.
What this usually means is that both Harbors must be on the same body of water.

The corollary here is that a Harbor will only provide a railroad connection to the Capital if:

a. The Capital also has a Harbor, and is on the same body of water as your city.
or
b. The Capital has a railroad connection to a Harbor city on the same continent which is on the same body of water as your city.

So a simple sentence like "Harbors also provide railroad connections to the Capital if there is an existing trade connection" will break in scenario 1b. where there is only a road (but no railroad) connection.

I'm not sure how you're going to get all the nuances above into the description. Might be more trouble than it's worth :(

Did you discover this yourself? This is very useful information, and before I read this I was really confused about how all these aspects interacted.

I mean, the documentation doesn't even make it clear that for a harbor city to make a connection with your capital the capital or a city connected to the capital needs to have a harbor too. And considering how streamlined the game is now, and how arbitrary the rules are in other parts of the game, it really was impossible to make an intelligent guess.

One thing that I still wonder, along similar lines as above, and which if you know it'd be great if you could explain, is how road maintenance is worked out. In particular when roads are conquered from the enemy (in enemy territory) yet they connect no cities, or enemy roads that are outside a captured city's borders, or even roads of an eliminated civ that are on the other side of the world. :s Pretty confusing stuff.

I worked on the Harbor clarification a bit more, it should all make sense in the version currently in the unofficial patch. :)

As for roads... I haven't ever tested it so I'm honestly not sure. I know this much:


You always pay for roads within your borders.
You pay for roads you built that are in no borders.


Therefore if you conquer someone, you now pay for any roads inside their borders, but I believe they still pay for ones outside the borders. I've often wondered if that could basically kill off a civ with only 1-2 cities left but dozens of borderless roads.

As for roads built by eliminated civs, I'm assuming no one pays for them anymore, though again I haven't tested it. Just seems logical from points #1 and #2, which I saw a Firaxis dev explain.

No problem Thal. I'm not sure how you're going to amend the Harbor description but it might be a tad tricky. Due to poor documentation the way Harbor trade works is confusing for a lot of people.

e.g. The documentation does not clearly explain that for a functioning Harbor Trade Connection:

1a. There must also be a Harbor in the Capital; or
1b. There must exist a Harbor City on the same continent as the Capital and that also has a road or railroad connection to the Capital.
and
2. The game engine must be able to trace an unbroken (explored) line of water tiles (coast/ocean/lake) from the originating Harbor to the destination Harbor.
What this usually means is that both Harbors must be on the same body of water.

The corollary here is that a Harbor will only provide a railroad connection to the Capital if:

a. The Capital also has a Harbor, and is on the same body of water as your city.
or
b. The Capital has a railroad connection to a Harbor city on the same continent which is on the same body of water as your city.

So a simple sentence like "Harbors also provide railroad connections to the Capital if there is an existing trade connection" will break in scenario 1b. where there is only a road (but no railroad) connection.

I'm not sure how you're going to get all the nuances above into the description. Might be more trouble than it's worth :(

Yeah this happened to me in my last game. Just to add another element of confusion I had this scenario:
1. My capital was inland
2. I had only one coastal city with a harbor, it was not connected by road to the capital and thus did not have a trade route as per what Lukeloh has told us.
3. I built a road between the harbor city and a coastal friendly city state which also wasn't connected by road to the capital (but may or may not have had a harbor) and THAT connected my coastal city to my capital somehow.

I am beyond confused now!:crazyeye:

Well, the civlopedia for the Harbor should now explain it clearly. Basically, your capital had a path of road and water tiles to the coastal city, transitioned at a city-state with a harbor.

While I like the Grocer building, I keep feeling the name is out of place. Archaeologists have found granaries as old as 11000 years, while grocers appeared during the industrial era, possibly the renaissance. Maybe we could come up with a more fitting historical name to replace Grocer? For example Food Storage, Food Pit or something along those lines.

Sounds reasonable. The problem is we know people bartering or selling food in cities have existed since cities themselves, but I don't know of any words for it in ancient times.

What about Provisioner?

Another idea that popped into my mind is move wheat's +1:food: bonus to the building. This would increase resource balance (since Wheat is the only resource that can be improved immediately) and consistency for the building: boosts yield of all land food sources. Thoughts?

Is it possible that the harbor tooltip does not reflect the change? I.e. there is no word mentioning the increased tile yield.


EDIT: I see now - the unofficial Patch fixing the harbor tooltip and this mod altering the harbor don't go together.

Is there some thing as a "load order" for mods? Meaning one mod will overwrite another one?

Thanks a lot for your mods, they make the game so much more enjoyable. I played around 5 full games in King difficulty so far with your mods (and probably move to emperor next), and even if i'm no civilization expert, i noticed that even the AI seems to benefit from the production bonus given by mines and other improvements as the field much larger armies than in a vanilla game, which is good.

On the other hand i very rarely see lumberyards in AI territory, i've not been looking for those actively, but usually, when i invade another empire the forest are either gone or covered in trading posts. That's probably because the forests get destroyed before the lumberyards get their production bonus from tech. Not a big deal anyway and i guess you can't do much about it anyway without dll access.

One thing that worries me a bit more, is that in the late game with all the various production bonus granted by the buildings, well placed cities can popup wonders and large buildings in a matter of turns as long as they have a hill or two and a river.

Of course, i understand that balancing beginning vs endgame is quite hard, especially with all those production boost buildings and changing the hammer cost of buildings leads to a whole lot of side effects that are hard to balance. But, maybe reducing the railroad bonus to 25% would help a bit on that matter.

Anyway, that's just my opinion, keep up the good work :)

edit: i was wrong on the lumberyard part, the AI definitively build some.

@Lazy_Knight
A priority system would be fantastic but is unfortunately not provided. Oblivion had a great and simple priority system: mods were loaded in order of last modified date, so mod manager programs could be used to alter this order. I don't believe Civ has anything... yet. Mods might be loaded in alphabetical order, but that's not very effective since the names are tied with their entries in the online Mod Browser.

The Harbor tooltip is indeed altered in both mods, there's not really any good way around that. I point this out in the readme for Terrain Improvements; if you use both just delete the Unofficial Patch - Harbors.xml file. The unofficial patch version is a "fixed" harbor tooltip that shows better information on what they do in regards to trade routes, while the Terrain Improvements version adds info about the +1:commerce: bonus.

I'll experiment and see if it's possible to concatenate the commerce bonus notification to the existing tooltip instead...


@SerialK
Glad you're having fun! I've seen the AI build lumbermills a lot in both the vanilla and modded games, I think it just depends on their priorities and map positioning, possibly factors such as map size and difficulty too. I had one game where China built a dozen of them.

One thing that can affect this is I weighted the AI to favor food slightly more, to try and combat this issue (http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showpost.php?p=2413588&postcount=3656):

[...] the AI tends to lag behind the human with regards to total population. It's not able to micromanage the numbers in the same way a person can, and also can't build up the REALLY large food surpluses humans like to. The lack of population tends to catch up to the AI in the later part of the game, where it tends to lacks technology and cities with really high production.


In regards to production, it depends a lot on a city's circumstances. Increasing mines from 3 to 4 is a 25% increase, or the same as a 20% decrease in costs, about what several other balance mods do that tweak production - just approaching it in a different way. Even after modifiers this is still only a maximum of 25% increase, as modifiers multiply by base value. In an optimal city, if a wonder could be built in 10 turns before, now it can be built in 8, so if it can build it in a few turns now it probably could in vanilla too. If you're seeing more of a drastic change, make sure you only have one production mod enabled (Economy Mod, Seven's tweaks, Terrain Improvements, etc)? Doing more than one at a time would have a multiplicative effect.

Point taken. And nope, i don't mix several 'economic' mods with each other, i understand how the engine works ;) Still it's not uncommon to get a 90:hammers:/turn (or way more) city in the late game which is kinda overpowered imho. Not that it's a big deal anyway as the AI get the same production power.

And yeah about the lumberyards i was wrong, i assumed there was forest in my enemy territory, but using a map reveal script i noticed they only had jungles instead. I came across China in another continent, and yes they built a large amount of those.

And yeah about the lumberyards i was wrong, i assumed there was forest in my enemy territory, but using a map reveal script i noticed they only had jungles instead. I came across China in another continent, and yes they built a large amount of those.Which is good enough reason to add Jungle to the Lumbermill's capabilities. I mean, seriously... They're trees! The amazon is getting cut down, whether we like it or not!;)

Meh, jungles already get a science bonus with whatever building i don't recall the name. Adding another production bonus over it is a bit too much for my taste :p

Hey Thal,

Your sweet Civ5 mods have prompted me to register on CivFanatics, so nicely done!

I had a thought--just a thought--about the Great Engineer's Manufactory. I find myself never wanting to plop one down because it always feels like the best spots for one are already occupied by a mine that's working on Iron or Coal or whatever, and i certainly wouldn't want to lose access to such important resources.

So my thought was that it would be cool if i could take my great engineer to my (ONLY!) Iron resource--let's say it only give out 2 Iron--have him build his Manufactory, and then not only would it give me the +4 :hammers: bonus that your mod allows, but it would also give me access to the 2 precious Iron, and maybe even increase the iron output from 2 to either 3 or 4.

Does that make sense? I haven't sat down to think everything through. I'm more just thinking broadly.

I'm trying to work it all out myself, but sifting through code isn't exactly a strong suit of mine. :-/

Either way, you're doing a lot of cool stuff with what I think is an already cool game. Thanks!!

Chucko

Glad you're enjoying the mods!

So basically what you're saying is the Manufactory should also act as a mine for connecting resources under it? That's an excellent idea and I'll see if it's possible. If I can't do it with just XML, I'll definitely add your change once we have access to the c++.

Glad you're enjoying the mods!

So basically what you're saying is the Manufactory should also act as a mine for connecting resources under it? That's an excellent idea and I'll see if it's possible. If I can't do it with just XML, I'll definitely add your change once we have access to the c++.

Awesome idea, since it's resource tiles your city will be working almost always, that's a nice boost to hammers that will be definitly used. Setting it so it also gives 1 additional resource might be a nice extra as well (might be hard to implement though).

Could possibly do the same for merchant's and luxury resources, making them more usefull as well.

Wealth still isn't working. See the attached pictures. When you do the math it is still only 10%.

Ah, that's a tooltip error. I changed Wealth to 25% (to match the upcoming official patch) but forgot to change the tooltip. Thank you for pointing it out, I'll fix that right away.

I did a test in a current game:

http://img820.imageshack.us/img820/7327/wealth1.jpg http://img543.imageshack.us/img543/3734/wealth2.jpg

8.75:commerce: + 25% * 18:hammers: = 13.25:commerce:

If you're getting values other than 25%, make sure you have the latest version of the unofficial patch mod, and test if it works with only that mod enabled. There might be another mod interfering.

Hi

I seem to be experiencing significant a slowdown of the game right now. It seems to be worst during save/load. When loading it takes e.g. 3 minuttes before it switches to the loading screen where it used to be instantaneous.

Only difference between this game and previously played is that I upgraded to newest version of unofficial patch and included the Random Events mod. I know the last one uses lua and that it may very well be because of this that i'm experiencing this slowdonwn, just wanted to check if anyone else is having the same problems.

Not trying to insult anyone here - you all do a great job of making the game fun to play! :)

\Skodkim

I installed this for the first time tonight (was running pieces of it for a while). I went to load an old saved game (created without this mod) to see the effects of the new grocer. Your description of the changes didn't make it clear whether you got rid of the vanilla +2 Food bonus or not. Since it's not part of the help text (it's added automagically), I initially thought you took that out, except it didn't make any sense that way. So I went to check it to be sure. Perhaps a slight edit to the mod description would help clear that up?

Anyway, the main point of this post. I had a city with connected cows and sheep, and a Granary / Grocer already built. But the cow/sheep tiles weren't giving me any extra +1 food bonus. I was confused for a while, redoing the yield logic several times in my head, but nope, it was definitely "not working". I then tried NEXT TURN to see if it would kick in then, just had to get to get recalculated. Nope, still nothing. Hmm. So I went & bought a new one in another city with cows that had no Granary before. And voila, instant extra food !

My conclusion: The Building_ResourceYieldChanges table seems to get processed only when a new building is built. I tested this and it's a fact. I saved it and reloaded - the cows with the new grocer were still making 1 more food. Then I went and disabled the mod, and reloaded again. Now I had the old granary back, but the cow tile was still making an extra food!

This means that the Grocer portion of the mod "Affects Saves". Now, I'm not suggesting you should suddenly slap the Affects Saves flag on this whole thing, Thal, but it's curious - I was wondering if you knew that it works like that. Perhaps it warrants some sort of documentation as well, so it doesn't confuse people who apply this mod mid-game.

As far as the "Grocer" name goes, too bad you don't Butcher a banana, then that would have worked!:)

Can I just mention Thal, the grocer building makes the game DRASTICALLY more fun for me :goodjob:. Makes city placement much more interesting (also reduces need to rely on maritime CS for food). Mint is great too as is, we definately need more buildings like this which give varied bonuses (i.e happiness and gold) as most buildings (+% to one thing) are just plain boring. Definately a building which improves the yields of dyes, silks, spices, furs etc. is needed (also maybe buff the seaport a bit, its a good idea but you never have enough resources in 1 city to make it worth it). Keep 'em coming!

@skodkim
Try disabling the mods and see if the loading times are the same. From what I've seen mods have relatively little effect on loading speeds... I found Civ V's loading times excessively long even without mods.


@Perkus
Good point, though one reason why the description is so short is there's a character limit on mod descriptions. I can't include all the details of every change there... but I'll put it in the readme file and see if I can cram another word or two into the description.

That's an interesting find about Building_ResourceYieldChanges... similar to something else I discovered. Apparently, Improvement_TechYieldChanges is similar (the +1:c5production: mines thing), doesn't update when a game is loaded. I don't want to block the mod's use in savegames entirely, but I'll put a note about this in the readme.

I like the Butcher name idea... and Bananas are somewhat rare. Here's a thought... I could move the +1:c5food: for Bananas to the improvement itself, then rename the building to Butcher. I think I'll do that, thanks for the idea.


@bobbyboy29
Improving some of the other luxury resource tiles seems like an idea I've seen in several places, you're right that a buff might be good. One reason I avoided buffing luxury resources is they're already useful for trade purposes. Here's some thoughts:

Butcher: 2:c5food: and +1:c5food: for each Cow, Deer and Sheep.
Stable: +1:c5production: +1:c5gold: to Horses.
Engineering: +1:c5production: to Quarries (since mines get this).
Fertilizer: +1:c5gold: to Plantations.
Gunpowder: +1:c5gold: to Camps.

Alternatively, the Windmill and/or Watermill could give +1:c5gold: to nearby Luxury resources (more effective processing of these resources). At the very least I'm planning on the first 3 changes.

In my (limited) experience, Luxury resources don't need any buffing, I find the Happiness bonus essential to keep the empire happy. I am still used to the old "rex" playstyle - expand & landgrab ASAP, and my biggest battle is constantly the Happiness. I pretty much don't settle a new city without having a least one new Happiness resource nearby, in fact.

One thing that I'm going to try in my local mod is having trading posts only be +1 gold until Printing Press (when they get back to +2). The previous thing I tried, +2 becoming +3 (with the +1 science policy) is just too much.

I've also made plantations (except sugar) +1 gold, pastures +1 food, and iron +1 hammer (I also have the GP improvements boosted during the Renaissance, mainly to liven up the tech tree). Overall, I found that having some 5-(F+P) tiles early made me want to actually purchase tiles a lot more, helped with slow early production, and the locations of cities 2 through 4 was more relevant. Of course, once "magical maritime food" kicks in, it doesn't really matter.

@Perkus
This is why I left luxury resources as-is until now, yet it's always worth revisiting for discussion.


@es4
Interesting idea, though there's the potential it could affect early-game gold quite a bit. I'll try it out.

I have a question about The Grocer building. Does the plus 1 food apply only once no matter how many you have of each resource? Or does it give a bonus for each one I have? If yes then does it give plus 2 bonus if I have two cattle?

@Zeppelin4
I'm pretty sure it gives a bonus for each one you have. Even if you have multiples. It raises the yield in the tile with the resource.

@zeppelin
it gives the bonus ON the actual tile... meaning you have to work it to get it... so yea... +1 for every since it's on the tile...

@thal
i don't know if anyone noticed this, but the harbor tooltip/civpedia doesn't say that it adds +1 gold to ocean tiles... i didn't build one for the longest until i read the desc of the mod and was like...

@lounahtic
If you also have the Unofficial Patch installed, they both alter the Harbor tooltip so you gotta delete the Unofficial Patch - Harbor.xml file from the Unofficial Patch folder. Details are in the "Compatibility" section of this thread and the readme. :)

Some thoughts:

1. Grocer -> Butcher is a wonderful idea! Moving the +1http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=269115 on bananas to the improvement would have a double effect. Bananas are currently always found on jungles which makes a 3http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=269115 tile. When improved by a grocer and a university it becomes a 4http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=269115 2http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=269118 tile without an improvement on it. This is pretty silly and is a large disincentive to build the actual tile improvement. Moving the +1http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=269115 to the improvement would solve this problem.

2. Generally speaking, the tile yield on luxury resources remains competitive with all other improvements throughout the game. Adding more commerce, while nice, is probably un-necessary as a balance change.

3. Although I am bias, I strongly support the stables improving horses change due to horses being one of the last inferior "resource" tiles in the game. (4 total yield compared to 5-6 for every other resource)

Plantations actually clear features (unlike camps) so it doesn't get a jungle science bonus. I think this is the yields, though would help to check my math:

1:c5food: 1:c5production: : Plains
+1:c5food: : Banana
+2:c5food: -1:c5production: : Banana Plantation
+1:c5food: : Mod

5:c5food: : Total for Bananas
5:c5food: : Max for floodplains wheat (with this mod, and not counting gold bonus that applies to anything)
4:c5food: 1:c5production: : Max for plains non-river wheat
5:c5food: 1:c5production: : Max for plains river wheat (with this mod)

It's available later than wheat (requires Masonry) but can be fully improved once that's researched, so overall is about a sidegrade or slightly weaker.

2. I agree, luxuries also give the happiness bonuses, so I'm hesitant to buff them any more... already quite useful. I've considered for a long time giving mined gold and silver -1:c5production: (to compensate for the Engineering bonus)... though still uncertain about it.

3. I moved the Stables change to the City Development (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=385148#post9684636) mod. There's some overlap between the two mods, but I decided to keep the parts separate since this mod primarily deals with worker or GP improvement orders (external unit-based development), and the other is concerned with buildings, wonders and specialists (internal city development).

I don't normally double post, but there's something in the latest version I just remembered and is worth emphasizing. GP improvements can now improve resources. You can check to Civlopedia to find out precisely which resources.


Citadel improves any resource it's built on (increases yield and provides resource access).
Landmark improves Luxury resources.
Customs House improves Luxury resources.
Academy improves none (gameplay: would further overpower Great Scientists, realism: wouldn't make much sense for a university to be heavily involved in production or trade)
Manufactory improves Strategic resources, or luxuries requiring a Mine or Quarry.


These provide the same benefit a plantation, mine, quarry, etc would plus their normal bonuses, so resource access and total cumulative yield are the same wherever you build them (or the normal improvements). In particular, this makes Citadels somewhat more useful since they can now be used for critical-resource defense like in Civ IV. It also allows you to instantly hook up resources with a Great Person, skipping the normal worker build time. It's sort of a niche use but might come in handy some time if you need that iron right away. If this makes GP improvements too powerful I might lower the base bonuses -1... so could use feedback if anyone gets a chance to play a few games with this enhancement.

Also, this was somewhat messy to code and I might have made a typo or two... so if you discover an improvement-resource combo might not be working properly, please point it out.

This mod working with new patch 1.0.0.62?

The building changes seems to have been lost in the latest build of the mod; I can't find them in your xml.

On a related note, have you tried Building_AreaYieldModifiers in CIV5Buildings.xml?
I wanted to drop all food yields by 1 in my mod, and have granary increase them by one, but it doesn't seem like the game uses that table :( There doesn't seem to be a way for buildings to alter improvements either.


<Building_AreaYieldModifiers>
<Row>
<BuildingType>BUILDING_GRANARY</BuildingType>
<YieldType>YIELD_FOOD</YieldType>
<Yield>1</Yield>
</Row>
</Building_AreaYieldModifiers>

@Azazell
I read over the patch notes carefully, and to my knowledge the mod should work perfectly fine with the latest patch.

@Tarkeel
Sorry for the confusion, just trying to organize things a bit.

The City Development (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=385148#post9684636) mod now focuses primarily on balancing internal city development of buildings, wonders and specialists. The Terrain Improvements mod balances external development (worker and GP tile improvements).

Some of the changes in recent weeks resulted in a lot of overlap and I sorted it out with these two categories, which is how I'll be organizing things from now on (internal vs external).

Version History
v. 8

Moved Butcher, Harbor, Research Lab, and Stable changes to the Balance – City Development mod (reason 1 (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=385737&page=12#post9805865) reason 2 (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=385737&page=13#post9812025)).
Several Great Person improvements can now access resources they’re built on.
Engineering now gives +1http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=269116 to Quarries.
+1http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=269116 +1http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=269117 for Natural Wonders.

going to try your mods , look good . More intresting than just changing production rates .

I definetly like how you are resisting suggestions that sound to OP , i like how these mods are to make the game more intresting and balanced rather than completely changing the game . Carry on resisting the OP suggestions , especially ones that affect the game from the very first turn.

Keep up the great work Thal!
I also love how your balance changes are only minor little tweaks, that nevertheless still have a significant and meaningful gameplay impact - for the good ofc! :)

Keep it this way, and I will keep downloading all your mods ;)

May I ask what your thoughts were on why you changed Iron to be revealed by Mining?

It seems this mod drastically alters the game balance and creates an abundance of resources. Is this true?

Great Mod as usual :)

One minor oddity: With your changes to the GP-Improvements, customs house, citadel and landmark now heavily favor being placed on a resource. Since trading posts are a universal improvement, the actual gold benefit of these on resourceless tiles is 5, 0 and 0 respectively, but on resource tiles you get the full 7/2/2 gold (compared to the normal resource improvement). Not really a big issue, I doubt anyone will run out of resource tiles to put GP-Improvements on ;)

Another tranlation finished ;) :


<Language_ES_ES>
<Update>
<Where Tag="TXT_KEY_BUILD_FORT_REC" />
<Set Text="Esto mejorará la Defensa [ICON_STRENGTH] de todas las unidades militares que se encuentren en esta casilla, y causará 1 de daño a enemigos adyacentes." />
</Update>
<Update>
<Where Tag="TXT_KEY_BUILD_FORT_HELP" />
<Set Text="[COLOR_NEGATIVE_TEXT]Cuesta[ENDCOLOR] 1 [ICON_GOLD] de Oro en mantenimiento por tuno.[NEWLINE][NEWLINE]+50% a la Fuerza defensiva [ICON_STRENGTH] para todas las unidades que se encuentren en esta casilla, realiza 1 de daño a los enemigos en casilla adyacentes." />
</Update>
<Update>
<Where Tag="TXT_KEY_CIV5_IMPROVEMENTS_FORT_TEXT" />
<Set Text="[COLOR_NEGATIVE_TEXT]Cuesta[ENDCOLOR] 1 [ICON_GOLD] de Oro en mantenimiento por turno.[NEWLINE][NEWLINE]Un fuerte es una mejora especial que le concede una bonificación defensiva al hexágono y daña a enemigos adyacentes a él. No obstante, no concede bonificaciones en territorio enemigo." />
</Update>
</Language_ES_ES>

May I ask what your thoughts were on why you changed Iron to be revealed by Mining?

I was wondering the same thing. It came from this thread: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=394976

It seems this mod drastically alters the game balance and creates an abundance of resources. Is this true?

If by resources you mean food/production/gold, then yes, it alters it, but I wouldn't say drastically. The biggest impact by far I think is the increased hammers from every mine & forest. It very noticeably increases overall production in all cities. But I think a lot of people felt this was appropriate because cities were fairly starved for production and I think in civ 5 we also had workshops, and mines produced more.

I think it may be a little too high right now, but since we can't add halves, it's tough to get it perfect. I am not sure how long SS components *should* take to build, but in my last game my most productive city was making boosters in 5 turns, and the other stuff in 8. My other oldest cities were making the non-boosters in about 10-14 turns.

I think it may be a little too high right now, but since we can't add halves, it's tough to get it perfect. I am not sure how long SS components *should* take to build, but in my last game my most productive city was making boosters in 5 turns, and the other stuff in 8. My other oldest cities were making the non-boosters in about 10-14 turns.

I guess the lumbermill bonus at steampower could be removed, at 2 hammers they already compare well with trading posts (especcially when factories and railroads come into play).

Also, shouldn't the tech costs for mining, iron working and engineering be changed to account for the changes in the mod? Engineering and mining are quite powerful techs now, while iron working doesn't really warrant its increased cost compared to other classical techs anymore.

@JuggernautOfWar
This mod does not affect resource abundance. Are you using any other mods?

Also, the changes are relatively small. Even in a city completely surrounded by 20 hills or forests, the build time of something that used to be 10 turns will now be 8 turns. This situation of a blanket of forests is rather rare... on average in most cities, the difference is even less.


@Zeppelin4
Like Perkus said it came from a discussion on the strategy forum on ways to balance horsemen vs swordsmen. After adding it I realized it might fit better in the Units balance mod, though it does have some cross-effect on Terrain Improvements (earlier production) Civilizations (Russia) so it's hard to figure out where to put it. The primary advantage of having Iron revealed earlier is going for Swords is less of a gamble if you know you'll be able to use them.


@Joneill
I realize what the problem is. I added +2:c5gold: to the citadel/landmark/customs house to compensate for the fact you're forgoing a trading post, so that shouldn't take effect when built on an improvement. Removing the +1:c5gold: bonus is an easy solution for the gold angle, though I'll have to figure out something different for the +1:c5production: of customs houses built on gems.

There's some other places GP improvements are advantageous too. Oasis (though rare) makes an excellent spot to put a GP building since you can't improve the tile with a worker. They can also turn otherwise-useless desert into a very valuable tile, which was useful on a game I had where my capital was on flood plains surrounded by desert.

This can be useful on non-desert too... for example, non-river grassland are normally rather useless for a production city, but dropping a Manufactory there makes it a very powerful 2:c5food:4:c5production:. This can be significant compared to placing it on a strategic resource elsewhere if your main production city doesn't have any strategic resources in its radius.


@juances19
Thanks, will include the translation right away! I've also started including the English localization in a separate file, so you can see all the stuff to translate in one place.


@Joneill
I think the primary reason for the cost of Iron Working is it unlocks both Swordsmen and Barracks. Revealing Iron probably isn't as big a big factor. I agree the cost might be excessive though, 50% more than Horseback Riding. I could reduce it to just 25% more, or increase the cost of Horseback Riding.

Engineering actually costs the same as other early-Medieval techs like Currency. My approach was to bring the value of Engineering up to the value of Currency since they cost the same. Civil Service costs more, but it does unlock three powerful benefits: +1:c5food: farm boost, +50%:c5goldenage: Chichen Itza, and resourceless Pikemen. I'm not sure the benefits of Engineering quite match that trio.

@JuggernautOfWar
There's some other places GP improvements are advantageous too. Oasis (though rare) makes an excellent spot to put a GP building since you can't improve the tile with a worker.
Unfortunately, my GP seem unable to build on oases, which would be great. I actually think oases could use a little boost, 3 food and 1 gold isn't really all that much even early in the game and the surrounding desert (usually with a few useless wheat-sources) certainly doesn't help ;).

Hm there's probably something blocking them, I'll look into it. Thanks for pointing that out.

Plantations actually clear features (unlike camps) so it doesn't get a jungle science bonus. I think this is the yields, though would help to check my math:

1:c5food: 1:c5production: : Plains
+1:c5food: : Banana
+2:c5food: -1:c5production: : Banana Plantation
+1:c5food: : Mod

5:c5food: : Total for Bananas
5:c5food: : Max for floodplains wheat (with this mod, and not counting gold bonus that applies to anything)
4:c5food: 1:c5production: : Max for plains non-river wheat
5:c5food: 1:c5production: : Max for plains river wheat (with this mod)

It's available later than wheat (requires Masonry) but can be fully improved once that's researched, so overall is about a sidegrade or slightly weaker.

2. I agree, luxuries also give the happiness bonuses, so I'm hesitant to buff them any more... already quite useful. I've considered for a long time giving mined gold and silver -1:c5production: (to compensate for the Engineering bonus)... though still uncertain about it.

1. Sorry if I was a bit unclear in my post about bananas; here is a more strait forward version of my point.

The "smokehouse/butcher/grocer/ect." building used to give each resource it effected +1:c5food: independent of the improvement on the resource tile. The effect this had was making bananas that were unimproved in a jungle superior to bananas that were improved (which removed the jungle).

"Unimproved" - 3:c5food: +2:c5science: (uni) +1:c5food: (smokehouse) = 4:c5food: 2:c5science: = 6 yield
"Improved" - 3:c5food: +1:c5food: (plantaion) +1:c5food: (smokehouse) = 5:c5food: = 5 yield

This problem is solved by shifting the +1:c5food: from the smokehouse to the plantation giving both a versions a total yield of 5.

2. I would fully support the inclusion of -1:c5production: to mined silver/gold due to their significantly higher yield over all other resource types.

3. Furthermore: I fully support the change to GP improvements counting as resource improvements. However I also feel that the current barrier to making GP improvements lies less with the improvement itself and more with the obscene power of great scientists. On higher difficulty levels, no matter how much you want to make any other type of GP, you are required to make GS's in order to compete technologically and every single one of them must be used to bulb techs. As it stands, on immortal/deity, there is no incentive what-so-ever to produce anything but GS's all game long.

It stands to note that I have used GG's, the only other GP ever produced, to improve resources while creating a stronger defensive line on a front I wasn't planning on pushing and was duly satisfied with the results. Your improvements have sufficiently moved the citadel into competitive efficiency with the corresponding golden age I could have had! Yay!

Ahh I see what you're saying now about Bananas... so it had a good unintended consequence of changing to to a Smokehouse!

A good point you make is although a nerf to GS lightbulbing will solve several balance issues, it'll make Deity much harder, so just keep that in mind for when I finally find a way to do it. :)

Of course, deity is meant to be nearly impossible, so it's probably not a bad thing.

Unfortunately, my GP seem unable to build on oases, which would be great. I actually think oases could use a little boost, 3 food and 1 gold isn't really all that much even early in the game and the surrounding desert (usually with a few useless wheat-sources) certainly doesn't help ;).

What'd be cool though not sure if it's implementable, a gold bonus based on the number of desert tiles around it. Idea being, if it's out in the middle of the desert, more caravans will be stopping by as it's the only choice and thus, more gold. It's right next to a flood plains? Less need to stop there and less gold.

That's an interesting idea MilkmanDan. I think it's possible with the current tools, too. I will put it on my "if I have time" todo list. :)

Great Mod as usual :)

One minor oddity: With your changes to the GP-Improvements, customs house, citadel and landmark now heavily favor being placed on a resource. Since trading posts are a universal improvement, the actual gold benefit of these on resourceless tiles is 5, 0 and 0 respectively, but on resource tiles you get the full 7/2/2 gold (compared to the normal resource improvement). Not really a big issue, I doubt anyone will run out of resource tiles to put GP-Improvements on ;)

Okay, so I've been thinking about this for several days now and finally realized where the odd part is. This is what confused me when I considered the fact you pointed out, yet couldn't figure out what was wrong on a per-improvement basis.


The difference between a mine and mined gold is +3:c5gold: (not counting other factors). The gold itself gives +2 and a mine on gold gives +1.
So logically, the difference between a Manufactory on a hill and one on a gold hill should also be +3:c5gold:. This is easy to do, I just duplicate the same mechanic with mines: improving gold gives +1 to the Manufactory. Same method also works for the other GP improvements on any hilltop resources.


However, an oddity comes into play with flatland resources like Ivory.


The difference between a normal tile and Ivory is +1:c5gold:. (TP is 2, plantation'd cotton is 3.)
A Customs House is 7:c5gold: on a normal tile. Therefore, it should be 8 on Ivory, right?
However, here's the oddity. I have to reduce the gold of a Customs House when it improves Ivory. Otherwise it's:

+2 (resource)
+7 (customs house)
+1 (improved)

Totaling 10:c5gold:, a net of +3 over building it on a normal tile, not +1.

This took me a while to fully understand, since it's counter-intuitive that to keep the value of 2 + 7 equal, it must add to 8!

Now, from a mathematical perspective this will retain perfect balance. The question is though... would this feel balanced? Perception is an important factor in a lot of things. I learned this years ago when doing the Balin's Tomb dungeon crawl mod for WC3... if I had a particular orb on the right side of a shop's window people wouldn't buy it and would think it's underpowered, yet if it was on the left side I saw multiple people buy it every single game, even with the same effect. The difference is the simple fact that people in many countries read from left to right, and unintentionally placed a higher value on things at the front of a list.

Still, in the long run I think it's better to actually have things equal, even if it's not intuitively obvious at first glance. Just don't be puzzled when 2 + 7 = 8. :lol:

It that makes more sense if you consider already-improved tiles. A TP is 2 and improved Ivory is 3. The Customs House should offer +5 over both, yielding 7 and 8.

While I'm reading through the xml files, I found something which seems weird. In GP Improvement.xml:

<Row>
<ImprovementType>IMPROVEMENT_QUARRY</ImprovementType>
<ResourceType>RESOURCE_MARBLE</ResourceType>
<YieldType>YIELD_GOLD</YieldType>
<Yield>1</Yield>
</Row>
<Row>
<ImprovementType>IMPROVEMENT_CUSTOMS_HOUSE</ImprovementType>
<ResourceType>RESOURCE_IVORY</ResourceType>
<YieldType>YIELD_GOLD</YieldType>
<Yield>1</Yield>
</Row>



<Row>
<ImprovementType>IMPROVEMENT_QUARRY</ImprovementType>
<ResourceType>RESOURCE_MARBLE</ResourceType>
<YieldType>YIELD_PRODUCTION</YieldType>
<Yield>2</Yield>
</Row>
<Row>
<ImprovementType>IMPROVEMENT_LANDMARK</ImprovementType>
<ResourceType>RESOURCE_GEMS</ResourceType>
<YieldType>YIELD_GOLD</YieldType>
<Yield>1</Yield>
</Row>


Not sure if it's a bug since I haven't checked that in game, but maybe worth some checking. ;)

Ooops. I got tired and forgot to finish the other GP improvements, just did manufactory and customs house. That xml file is 763 lines of code so it's a hassle to work through, not really any easy way to simplify it with SQL either since every resource and improvement must be individually specified. :(

I've uploaded v. 12, which should include proper GP improvements.

In all situations, the GP improvement should give a constant yield over the "normal" improvement you would otherwise build on the tile. In other words, pre-economics a Customs House should increase a TP tile from 2:c5gold: to 8:c5gold:, or a camped Ivory from 3:c5gold: to 9:c5gold:, always a +6 increase over the "normal improvement" wherever you put it.

If you find a circumstance where the yield does not appear to be constant, please point it out.

@Thalassicus:
I've been tracking down some curious side effects that I *believe* are being caused by this mod component. It concerns how the changes affect the yields of city center tiles. I'm not quite 100% sure it's coming from this mod, because it's hard to test it definitively. Here's what I've found so far:

Something increases the yields of all central city tiles from 2 Food to 3 Food during the game. It doesn't happen in vanilla. I'm pretty sure I've linked this to the change to Fertilizer tech which now gives added food yield to all farms, regardless of freshwater status. This in itself is not a bad or surprising thing - the assumption is that city center tiles are being farmed, I guess. What's curious is that without the mod, river cities do not get a +1 Food bonus post-Fertilizer as you might expect, despite having Freshwater access. Still, no big deal, although perhaps this could be documented in the readme.

Where it gets stranger: With the mod, all central city tiles get the +1 Food, EXCEPT the capital city! That's right, for some weird reason, the capital is treated differently that all the other cities. It isn't being "farmed". This "bug" (?) is what originally led me into this weird rabbit hole in the first place. I was trying to double check the mod's effect on maritime food bonuses, and noticed it wasn't adding up at the capital - it was off by 1 from what the tooltip seemed to imply. That's when I discovered the capital falls behind by 1 food somehow. Usually people wouldn't notice because the larger maritime bonus tends to obscure this small bonus.

I've tried removing the fertilizer code in the .xml, but this doesn't change the city center yields upon loading. I also tried adding the fertilizer food bonus into both "freshwater" and "non-freshwater" yield tables, with no effect. I assume it's because tech-triggered yield changes are only processed when the tech is discovered, as you once mentioned when we were discussing reloads with regards to the Butcher. I don't have a save handy that's just before discovering Fertilizer to test this with properly.

While testing the curious food bonus, I noticed there is also an unexplained +1 Production bonus being added to the center tile of all cities at some point during the game. Again, this doesn't happen in vanilla. In this case there is no difference between the capital and other cities. I'm not at all sure when & why it's happening, but I'm guessing it's from a tech being researched. I do not have the Republic Social Policy researched at any point during my test game (it gives +1 Prod to all cities). There are no wonders or other policies that account for this. The bonus is not there after Engineering, and is there after Steam Power. If I had to guess I'd think it's this mod's added Lumber Mill bonus that's triggering it for some reason. In any case it's something that happens in the Renaissance or early Industrial era. I would have thought it would be Mining tech, but it doesn't happen that early. Both this & the food bonus happen without Railroad having been researched.

I'm just curious if anyone can verify or explain my findings. It's not very big deal balance-wise, obviously. If it is this mod, I don't imagine anything reasonable can/will be done about this, except perhaps some additional documentation to explain the phenomenon.

Interesting observation. I looked through the files and couldn't find what precisely might be causing it. You're most likely right that it's the tech advances... that whole thing is actually slightly buggy, like how it doesn't retro-actively take effect if the mod is enabled after you research the tech. Since they don't use yield bonuses from tech in the vanilla game, I wouldn't be surprised if it got less testing and these bugs slipped through. It seems relatively minor though, so it shouldn't be much of a problem until we get c++ and can fix it properly.

New to the conversation, I haven't tried the mod but terrain and improvements are something that need significant change to balance the game.

I wonder if there's some value in tweaking the behaviour of trade routes overall? Obviously you want to avoid anything that further promotes ICS, so you can't award them on a per-connection basis (unless there's a cap). The way that gold is generated at the moment isn't too bad, though it would be nice to promote a bit more interconnection. The way that production is generated is pretty bland though. It would be nice if each connection to a city increased production a little. Diminishing returns, naturally. Something like 25% if linked to 1 city, 12.5% for 2, etc.. capping naturally at 50%. Or just 10% per connection capping at 50%. This would also reward non-capital connections and multiple harbours rather than 1 on each continent. Anyway, just some thoughts.

Also, is there a terrain flag for 'trade route' status? I wanted to test out the idea of trading posts starting at 1 gold, going to 2 gold on a trade route with currency and 2 everywhere with economics (to work similarly to farms currently).

I'm 99% sure I remember seeing an improvements attribute for if the improvement is built on a trade route. This was probably used for trading posts in an early alpha build of Civ V.

Changes to trade route calculations are something I'd like to do, anything complex like what you describe will require more tools than what we currently have though (need c++ access).

I'm 99% sure I remember seeing an improvements attribute for if the improvement is built on a trade route. This was probably used for trading posts in an early alpha build of Civ V.

I'm pretty sure that tag is just for plain ol' Routes like roads and rails, not actually Trade Routes.


<Table name="Improvement_RouteYieldChanges">
<Column name="ImprovementType" type="text" reference="Improvements(Type)"/>
<Column name="RouteType" type="text" reference="Routes(Type)"/>
<Column name="YieldType" type="text" reference="Yields(Type)"/>
<Column name="Yield" type="integer"/>
</Table>

There was a suggestion in another thread somewhere (ICS-related) to change the trade route formula to something like a base of -1 but +1.33 / pop. Currently I think it's 1 + 1.25 / pop, which makes it too cheap to spam roads to tiny, tightly packed cities.

I was wondering if Great Scientists Tech Popping ability could be changed to give tiles and specialists an extra beaker or two for X number of turns, basically a Scientific Golden Age, with the current tools?

I think that'd be the best way to nerf them besides making them give a fixed amount of research points per bulb.

Thal, in Valkrionn's economy mod, trading posts are allowed on all ressources. He explains it with the limited choice some city spots offer. And indeed, especially your capital often has some sort of ressource on almost every field, making terrain improvement somewhat automated. Have you thought about this?

On the other hand, trading posts are still ugly (hope Poncratias releases v2 soon...), so making them ebven more spammable is probably not appealing.

A scientific golden age would be great, things like that just aren't possible yet though.

I haven't done some things like the trading posts on resources because the AI wouldn't know how to deal with it (if I remember the discussion on that thread correctly). I've been prioritizing things the AI can handle properly. This is the same reason I haven't done anything like Active City Defense, the AI wouldn't "know" to move into the healing effect or avoid the damage effect.

And yet the citadel already does damage to nearby enemies, and medics heal nearby units. I wonder if the AI has any logic to try to handle that? If the AI was written properly (har har), it would automagically notice any new sources of such "radius" effects and react accordingly. Has anyone ever seen an AI medic? Their units rarely live long enough to earn deeper promotions, and if they do they'll usually have to blow it on an insta-heal!

It's different: each turn Afforess selects units and increases or decreases their health directly. The AI would have no way of knowing of this. Likewise, it's only coded to build plantations/camps/etc on resources.

I haven't seen a medic, but it's difficult to see enemy promotions... only shows up when you attack, and you can't actually read them. I doubt they coded for a medic since finding an optimal solution for arranging units to utilize the medic benefit would probably be NP-hard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem) (same reason AI doesn't use great generals in the field).

I've been prioritizing things the AI can handle properly.

I just love how you know everything and think about everything :king: :lol:.
Sadly, we have no "Most awesome community member of the month" vote.

One day I would really love to make a suggestion you didn't think about before, though :sad:

so from reading patch notes you just kept all natural wonders at 2h3g, or did you just remove the 3 crazy ones but keep the changes to "normal" natural wonders?

I haven't made any alterations to national wonders yet, they're set at vanilla patch 1.0.1.135 values. I'm going to work on those once I have everything working relatively well with patch compatibility and bugfixes.

I think you could rebalance natural wonders in a way that would improve balance while retaining the flavor of different kinds of bonuses for different wonders.

With a bit more testing, I'll propose some ideas for an alternative.

Sounds great! In addition to the obviously overpowered ones, some seem rather weak, such as Old Faithful. It's 2:c5science:, strictly worse than a scientist (even with the nerf to scientists in these mods).

The Fountain of Youth needs a serious nerf. I have it in my game, and I wasn't even close to the first to find it. Japan and Songhai were both settled nearby but never bothere to take it. When I got a settler nearby, it didn't even show a recommendation icon, so the AI obviously has no idea how good the +10 happy bonus is.

Even worse though, is the free promotion. Every single unit that passes by it gets double healing for the rest of the game. I of course spent the next 100 years after finding it sending all of my troops on a mass pilgrimage to get the promotion, and it's the first thing I do with any newly built unit. Again, the AI has no idea how to do this. Even civs with whom I have open borders won't send any units to the fountain to get the promotion.

Now any battle I fight is just ridiculous. I have my front-line units upgraded to march and medic, which means they can attack and still heal +5 per turn.

I'd suggest either removing the fountain entirely, or at least removing its promotion ability.

In addition to the obviously overpowered ones, some seem rather weak, such as Old Faithful. It's 2, strictly worse than a scientist (even with the nerf to scientists in these mods).

Well, Old Faithful gives +3 happy if its inside your border. So you never want to work it, but you still definitely want to be near it. I think that's ok. Maybe make it 4 science but only +2 happy when in your borders.

But yeah, all the new ones need a nerf.

As a simple start point, I'd leave the original wonders the same, but just make the Fountain of Youth a happiness booster (maybe +2 happy, 4 food tile yield) and remove the magical healing effect, make El Dorado bonus ~200 gold, and reduce the other one from 10 gold down to 5 gold.

I think the Natural Wonders should mainly provide yields. A bit more than normal tiles but nothing very exagerrated, total of 5 or 6 maybe. Fountain of Youth can provide a happiness bonus of 2 points maybe, which makes it about as good as a free Circus, and get some yield, too. El Dorado might be ok with 100 gold and maybe some generic yield.

Ahh I didn't notice the +3:c5happy: for Old Faithful. They really should have that in the hover tooltip...

Here's my thoughts when comparing them side-by-side:

5:c5science: - Krakatoa
2:c5science: 3:c5happy: - Old Faithful
2:c5science: 5:c5gold: - Barringer Crater (was 2, 3)
2:c5production: 3:c5gold: - Grand Mesa
2:c5food: 1:c5production: 1:c5gold: 2:c5science: - Great Barrier Reef
2:c5food: 3:c5happy: - Fountain of Youth (was 10 happy, plus healing promo)
2:c5food: 5:c5gold: - Rock of Gibraltar
4:c5culture: 1:c5gold: - Mt. Fuji (was 5, 1)
4:c5culture: 100:c5gold: discovery, - El Dorado (was 5, 500)
8:c5gold: - Cerro de Potosi (was 10)

I think with Fountain/Dorado they were going for mythically profound bonuses, but realism and balance would both make these more reasonable in the realm of a particularly healthy hot springs, and rich easily-conquered citystate, respectively.

(double post)

Aren't the "mythical" NWs less likely to appear than the others? While they are clearly OP in vanilla, they could be a bit stronger than the others.

Also, some of them are worth working (Gibraltar, C. de Potosi), others aren't (Fountain of Youth, Old Faithful). Maybe all should be equally work-worthy?

I'd agree that making every natural wonder roughly equally valuable is the right way to go, but I don't think each has to be individually equal for tile-yield, its ok to have non-yield-based bonuses, like first to discover, or happiness from within-borders.

The changes above seem OK, except Cerro de Potosi is still too much, I'd say ~7 gold at the most.

I should add though: the things that really stops me from using this mod are:
Forts deal 1 damage to adjacent enemies and cost 1/turn maintenance (same as roads).
The AI can't use forts effectively and it can't understand the tile risk threat, so this ends up being an exploit.

+1 on Mines and Lumbermills with Engineering.
This ends up providing too much production too early, and solidifies the advantage that lumbermills have over mines.
I'd say a mine yield increase at say dynamite is fine, but engineering is far too early for 4 yield.

+1 on freshwater farms with Fertilizer.
Too much late-game food, and makes river-farms too much of a no-brainer, and makes river-hill-farms far too powerful.

Without these, I'd use this mod, but these ones mess things up for me too much.

I agree completely with you about Cerro de Potosi, I had only compared that to the one above it and you're right that 10:c5gold: is too much. I'll change it to 7.

About forts, are you sure that's really the best reasoning? By the same rationale Citadels should be removed. I feel the better solution is for the AI to be fixed, because regardless of what's done with forts the AI still won't have a clue about Citadels. :)

Slow production has been a recurring community complaint about Civ V since the beginning, something many mods address, like the Economy Mod. Rather than just implement a flat production modifier though, I feel the bonus here is more interesting. Engineering is not an easy tech to get. It has a lot of prerequisites and unlocks no units, plus lumbermills do take a while to build, so you don't get the full effect for some time. Without a buff to this tech, I'd likely go for Civil Service / Chivalry every time instead, both of which unlock powerful units. Dynamite makes sense realistically, but from a gameplay perspective it would make the tech too powerful. It's already beelined to in every game due to Artillery's presence there.

The Fertilizer buff to farms, plus the buff to granaries, are both nerfs to Maritime city-states. The farm and mine buffs are also nerfs to trading posts. It's difficult to tackle these problems directly because of the low units of measure of the Maritime bonus and trading posts (Maritime can't provide half a food).

Considered independently of these cross-nerfs, riverside farms are only useful to a point: cities generally work a maximum of a dozen or so useful tiles when placed in efficient, close proximity. Since specialists have more limited usefulness in CiV than earlier versions in the series, increasing food past the level necessary to reach this population doesn't have much value, and it's better to replace excess farms at this point with trading posts or mines.

All this said... I've been thinking about giving trading posts a +1:c5gold: buff possibly at Economics, and might move the +1:c5production: buff for Lumbermills to Machinery.

About forts, are you sure that's really the best reasoning? By the same rationale Citadels should be removed.
Citadels are rare in practice, whereas forts can be spammed anywhere.
And the AI does a terrible job of dealing with Citadels too.

But an AI that can deal with Citadels ("go around") might still be really terrible with forts that can be spammed everywhere (you can't go around!).

The Fertilizer buff to farms, plus the buff to granaries, are both nerfs to Maritime city-states.
When MCS are a problem, the right solution is to fix them, not to change the tile yield of every freshwater farm. 5-yield tiles are too much in this game.
4 food is already a massive amount; by adding extra food to farms, you solidify the advantage that hills and plains have over grassland/flood plain even further, making these really bad tiles.

The only way to get grassland/floodplain to work is if food from other sources are *scarce*, and so the extra food from grassland is really actually meaningful in order to achieve decent city size.

I'm ok with the smokehouse boosting cows and deer and sheep, those were too weak, though I think the right solution would have come later in the game. The ancient and classical eras are far too early for 3 food/2 hammer/1 gold river-sheep.

Dynamite makes sense realistically, but from a gameplay perspective it would make the tech too powerful. It's already beelined to in every game due to Artillery's presence there.
This is true, but can be partly solved by a) Removing the ability to beeline (which is mostly done already), b) nerfing artillery (the fact that they're such a dominant no-brainer means they're not balanced right) and IMO ideally splitting dynamite into two techs, a civilian explosives tech and a military Indirect Fire or Breach-Loading Guns tech, or whatever.
But I can see that may be beyond the scope of this mod.

(Maritime can't provide half a food)
Are you sure?
MCS with Siam seem to be providing +1.5 food?

If its an interim solution until you can tweak MCS, I can understand that, but its not a very good solution IMO; you're fixing one problem with an even more radical change, one that can potentially allow a single tile to feed 3 specialists.

The right way to boost specialists is to boost Great People IMO, NOT to try to make specialist yields competitive with tile yields.
You should compare specialist yields to tile yields including the GPPs; GPPs should be the main reason to go for specialists. If thats not the case, then the problem is that the great people aren't valuable enough yet.

Considered independently of these cross-nerfs, riverside farms are only useful to a point: cities generally work a maximum of a dozen or so useful tiles when placed in efficient, close proximity
Again this is the wrong solution IMO.
You should not take for granted that placing cities in "efficient, close proximity" is desirable. You should try to make it so that cities can work a lot of tiles, and that super-mega cities are valuable.
If big cities aren't worth getting, the response should be to make them worth getting, not to say that its ok for tiles to have incredibly high tile yields.

The more you boost tiles, you keep also weakening the GP improvements.

I think the goal should be to try to make 1 gold ~= 1 hammer ~= 1 food, and then every tile can have a base yield of 2, an increase of 1 with an improvement, and an increase of 1 with a tech. And bonus tiles (wheat, sheep, etc.) should have a tile yield 1 greater than a normal one.
Or possibly have 2 techs that boost them, to a final yield of 5.
But the total yield from every "good" terrain type should end up being the same (in number of resources), the differentiation should be from when they get the bonuses (eg fresh water tiles before other tiles, lumbermills before mines so there is some reward for not chopping forest-hill, etc).

I would ideally increase the cost of research agreements, and if necessary increase the cost of city state gold-purchase.

The production boost from engineering is one of the best things this mod has achieved. Civil Service is no longer THE first medieval tech to take every time, now there are 2 main paths: CS and Engineering. Also, the added production is much desired by almost everyone here in the modding forum, and one of the first things Thal changed.

The smokehouse in its current form does wonders when trying to settle non-river, hilly regions early. Otherwise they'd be +/- useless.

The smokehouse in its current form does wonders when trying to settle non-river, hilly regions early
Why *should* non-river, hilly regions be desirable/valuable in the early game?
Grassland should be valuable, you should want to seek it out. The more available you make food from other sources, the weaker grassland becomes.

Why *should* non-river, hilly regions be desirable/valuable in the early game?
Grassland should be valuable, you should want to seek it out. The more available you make food from other sources, the weaker grassland becomes.

Because the buffed sheep & co still don't allow to build a huge metropolis in mountain regions. But if you have 3-4 sheep in a cluster of 20+ hills (without a river, of course), you're at least able to create a decent production city of size 5 or such, to fill gaps in your empire - and especially your road network.

Without the upgraded pasture tiles, you'd have to rely on MCS to have a chance of settling in such a region.

I still find riverside grassland very valuable for my science cities, and farmed non-riverside grassland is still the only non-ressource tile able to provide surplus food (which is needed after the MCS nerf in the latest patch).

I think you missed the point; the question wasn't why should you still be able to build a reasonable city in a hilly non-river region, its why you should be able to do so *early*.

Boosts should come at roughly the same time as those from other tiles - no earlier than civil service, definitely.
I'm fine for a sheep tile with pasture + smokehouse to give 3f/2h in the medieval era, but thats too high for the ancient era.

In the early game, tiles provide 2 yield, and 3 with an improvement.
Bonus tiles should provide 3 yield, 4 with an improvement.
They shouldn't be providing 5 yield in the early game.

In the early game, tiles provide 2 yield, and 3 with an improvement.
Bonus tiles should provide 3 yield, 4 with an improvement.
They shouldn't be providing 5 yield in the early game.

I have to admit I don't know all the ressource yields by heart, especially not vanilla compared to TBM*. But usually the +1 additional yield is a secondary effect of every ressource in vanilla, be that luxury, strategic or food.

The difference: While strat. and lux. ress. have very strong primary effects dominating city placement, food ressources have no primary function at all! They can very often be ignored completely when placing cities in vanilla.

Shouldn't the lack of a primary function justify a slighly higher yield, especially when you have to build a smokehouse first? Food ressources are still much weaker than the others.



*)"Thals's Balance Mods", we really need an abbreviation ;)

usually the +1 additional yield is a secondary effect of every ressource in vanilla, be that luxury, strategic or food
I'm talking about the bonus resources here; cows, wheat, sheep, bananas, deer.

Their initial bonus is fine, their problem is that they don't receive the scaling benefits from Civil Service, Fertilizer, Steam Power, etc. so they do not retain their superior yields.

There's a similar problem with some of the luxury and strategic resources, which IMO should also retain their superior yields (though I suppose there is an argument for some resources eventually becoming less relatively valuable).

I don't think the bonus resources (ie non-strategic, non-luxury) necessarily need to be hugely game changing, but they do need to always have a tile yield that is superior to a non-bonus tile.
I don't think the bonus resources should be as important as luxury or strategic resources, they should just have the slightly higher yields, but not radically higher yields.

I'm not sure if I understand you:

You think that food/bonus ressources are too strong in the early game but too weak in later eras (post fertilizer), because they lose their advantage over e.g. riverside tiles?

Also, we have another question of preference/philosophy here: Should food/bonus ressources be valuable?
__________________________

In vanilla, food/bonus ressources were considered too weak by many, they were largely unimportant for city placement and in some cases even weaker than standard tiles IIRC.

Thal added +1 with the smokehouse to them in the early game. Would you suggest moving this effect to a later building or would you prefer having the current smokehouse AND a lategame boost for food ressources (another building available somewhere around fertilizer maybe?)? There's not much inbetween that could be done due to the civ-typical small yield numbers.



Personally, I prefer meaningful food/bonus ressources like we have in TBM now, because I strongly believe a special tile should always be worthy. So there's no reason to change anything now, at least not in the first 3 eras, I'm not that experienced past renaissance.

Even better, though, would be a system where food ressources are treated like strat. ress., just that they allow the construction of growth-boosting buildings (similar to coal and factory). I suggested this some time ago, and some mods already implemented this.

I'm talking about the bonus resources here; cows, wheat, sheep, bananas, deer.

Their initial bonus is fine, their problem is that they don't receive the scaling benefits from Civil Service, Fertilizer, Steam Power, etc. so they do not retain their superior yields.

There's a similar problem with some of the luxury and strategic resources, which IMO should also retain their superior yields (though I suppose there is an argument for some resources eventually becoming less relatively valuable).

I don't think the bonus resources (ie non-strategic, non-luxury) necessarily need to be hugely game changing, but they do need to always have a tile yield that is superior to a non-bonus tile.
I don't think the bonus resources should be as important as luxury or strategic resources, they should just have the slightly higher yields, but not radically higher yields.

Isn't that (a slight boost for bonus resources) *exactly* what the Smokehouse provides?:confused:


I'm a little confused as to what you're arguing for here: Are you suggesting a mid-late game boost for some resources? For the Smokehouse to be moved back in the tech tree? Your earlier posts seem to contradict what you wrote here..

EDIT: Ninja'ed by Tomice:) - and much more eloquently I might add..

Sorry for the confusion.

You think that food/bonus ressources are too strong in the early game
I think they're too strong in the early game *with the smokehouse building*.
They're fine early game in vanilla.

In vanilla, grassland tile provides 2f, ->3f with farm, improved yield = 3.
In vanilla, cow tile provides 3f, -> 3f1h with pasture, improved yield = 4.
In vanilla, grassland farm gets boosted to 4f with civil service or fertilizer, -> yield =4.
At this point, the pasture is no longer superior, which is a problem.

So: solution should be to have the pasture get the bonus from civil service or fertilizer, or a similar era tech, to bring it to yield 5, but to only do so at the same tech needed to bring the farm to yield 4.

But in the mod:
Pasture cow goes to 4f1h in the ancient era with a smokehouse, for a yield of 5, long before the farm tile can even reach a yield of 3.

I think thats too much of a bonus. I think the bonus tiles should be 1 yield ahead, not 2 yield ahead at any point in the tech tree, particularly in the very early game when yields are so important, particularly food.

So what I'm suggesting is that the smokehouse boost is coming too early.
Remove the bonus from the smokehouse, and add this bonus instead to pasture tiles with civil service/fertilizer or similar era techs, to avoid tiles with a yield of 5 in the ancient/classical era.

Anyway, its not a huge deal, I don't think its game-breaking, but it can be very random; a Civ that happens to have 2 cows nearby can get a huge ancient era food boost.

As you said: It's doubtfully game-breaking.

I might underestimate the relevance of a bit extra yield during the classical era, but since granaries have to be researched and built first and CS is often beelined, it's not such a huge timeframe. Also, apart from sheep in clustered hills regions, in my experience most cities end up having 0-2 bonus food tiles (especially if we only count "meat" tiles actually boosted by the smokehouse). It is really rare that a smokehouse is really powerful with 3 or more boosted tiles, im my games so far at least.




Oh, and thx for the compliment, Seek! ;)

I haven't really explained my primary motivation behind all these mods clearly, so perhaps this will help. As Sid famously said a game is a series of interesting decisions, and conversely if those decisions aren't interesting the game isn't either.

The purpose of the smokehouse is to make bonus resources better than the surrounding terrain in the early game. :)

There's some notes from the developers in this file:
\Assets\Gameplay\Lua\AssignStartingPlots.lua

They designed bonus resources to equalize terrain. The problem is, once all luxury/strategic resources are claimed, carefully selecting city placement then becomes meaningless, and a lack of choice is boring. Why carefully decide where to put cities if it doesn't matter where the city goes?

Think of it like a curve:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=277224&stc=1&d=1293645360

This mod's primary goal is to move the game towards the peak of the scale. Sometimes this means moving right by equalizing overpowered/underpowered options, sometimes it means moving left by mixing things up. Firaxis recognizes it's important to have some things on the left side of the scale, like luxury and strategic resources, and they've gone this route with natural wonders too.

It's easy and does make the game very balanced to go to the right side... many games do this with a hard-counter system of units for example. Natural wonders originally were that way. I and many people find it more fun to move things a little leftwards though, making city placement an important decision based on luxury, strategic, AND bonus resources, plus natural wonders.

The AI already prioritizes bonus resources, so this helps them a bit too (as the player knows in vanilla not to).


Along these lines, I've been thinking about natural wonders the past few days. I found it rather fun to aggressively seek out and settle the more powerful natural wonders. Instead of making them all "meh", it might be fun to both nerf the overpowered ones and buff up some of the others too:

8:c5science: - Krakatoa (was 5)
3:c5science: 3:c5happy: - Old Faithful (was 2, 3)
3:c5science: 6:c5gold: - Barringer Crater (was 2, 3)
3:c5production: 5:c5gold: - Grand Mesa (was 2, 3)
2:c5food: 1:c5production: 2:c5gold: 3:c5science: - Great Barrier Reef (was 2, 1, 1, 2)
2:c5food: 1:c5production: 5:c5gold: - Rock of Gibraltar (was 2, 0, 5)
3:c5food: 3:c5happy: - Fountain of Youth (was 10 happy, plus healing promo)
4:c5culture: 2:c5gold: - Mt. Fuji (was 5, 1)
5:c5culture: 100:c5gold: discovery, - El Dorado (was 5, 500)
10:c5gold: - Cerro de Potosi

The reef, fountain, fuji, dorado, and cerra are all very desirable in vanilla... the others less-so. By fiddling around with the numbers a bit I think we can get them all roughly the same in value, and about equal to luxury resources.

Along these lines, I've been thinking about natural wonders the past few days. I found it rather fun to aggressively seek out and settle the more powerful natural wonders. Instead of making them all "meh", it might be fun to both nerf the overpowered ones and buff up some of the others too:

Thanks, I was hoping you'd go this route!

The real question is how should the yields be valued? This is what I've currently got... 4:c5food: = 6:c5gold: = 3:c5happy: etc:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=277226&stc=1&d=1293649470

"Worth" = 10 * SUMPRODUCT( inverse of weight row; quantity row )

Thx for the in-depth explanation, Thal, it's much appreciated.

Concerning food/bonus ressources I wanted to add that civ5 has the problem of only three types of regions in gameplay terms:

- Riverside (awesome because of +1 :c5gold: and :c5food:)
- Normal (2 base yield)
- Desert/Tundra/Snow (bad)

Cows, Fish, Sheep and such help to find "sweet" spots in the absence of rivers, at least in TBM.


All this said... I've been thinking about giving trading posts a +1:c5gold: buff possibly at Economics, and might move the +1:c5production: buff for Lumbermills to Machinery.

You could also buff trading post with a naval tech if they are coastal. Humanity settled on coasts usually for transport reasons, this is hardly represented in Civ5. Also, it might be a more interesting buff to TP. Finally, limiting the TP buff to a certain tile type might be weaker if you are in doubt about the OP-ness of a TP buff.

EDIT: While typing this, I just thought how the gameplay would change if rivers would only provide +1 :c5gold: if you build a trading post there? no more super-yield riverside farms with 5 yield total, but still better than no river. Trading posts would actually be where one would expect villages (coast/river and maybe lake, if we want that).


_______________________


Regarding natural wonders, what about the rarity? Are all NW equally common? If not, should the rare wonders be a bit stronger? (I know too much luck involved is bad for balancing, but a little bit?)

The real question is how should the yields be valued? This is what I've currently got... 4:c5food: = 6:c5gold: = 3:c5happy: etc:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=277226&stc=1&d=1293649233

"Worth" = 10 * SUMPRODUCT( inverse of weight row; quantity row )

I had just figured out what was going on there when you posted the edit.:lol:

I think the values aren't quite right there. One thing to keep in mind is giving multiple types of yields should weigh higher - the reef seems much stronger than old faithful, for example. Otherwise, I think happiness and culture are weighted a little too strongly, and production a little too weakly. (Note I am basing this on gut feeling, not numbers.)
I feel it's more like:
4:c5food:=3:c5production:=6:c5gold:= 5:c5science: (or maybe 4:c5science:) =4:c5culture: (or maybe 3.5:c5culture:)=4:c5happy:

The purpose of the smokehouse is to make bonus resources better than the surrounding terrain in the early game.
But they're already better than surrounding terrain. Why should they be *massively* better?
But I admit, my concern with the slaughterhouse is much less than my concern for the fresh-water farm boost with fertilizer.
River tiles are already massively superior to other tiles; they get the food boost earlier, and they get gold boost. City sites are already the best in the game, *particularly* in the midgame.
Why would you want to boost them further?

I'm fine with making interesting choices, but I don't think you're achieving this; you're reinforcing the superiority of river sites even more (so that they are utter-no-brainers).
I agree that bonus resources should be attracting you to sites, I just think that the appropriate way to do that is through boosts at techs, rather than just boosts at the very beginning of the game. I think one of the things missing from the Civ5 tree are passive boosts from techs, and I'd like to see cows and the like boosted through tech rather than at the very beginning of the game.

Instead of making them all "meh", it might be fun to both nerf the overpowered ones and buff up some of the others too:

I think these bonuses are far too high, game-breakingly so in some places.
What happens if you happen to start near Krakatoa or Cerro te Potosi? Your economy massively outstrips all the other players, and you race through in tech or buy up all the city state alliances. These things are doubling the size of your economy for the first 50 turns or so.
Those kinds of bonuses that early in the game snowball out of control. Think of how huge it is as an advantage when the AI starts with an extra worker.

The natural wonders are hit-or-miss randomness; its not fun when the game gets determined by whether you get manage to get a good natural wonder or not.
You're also making them no-brainers. If the best strategy is always just take all the natural wonders you can get, then you're on the far-left of your curve.

Its also horribly ahistoric to
Civ power already depends a lot on the terrain near where they happened to start; buffing natural wonders up exacerbates this problem to a really unfun level.

The near-universal response to the superior natural-wonders from the patch was that they were far too high, and needed massive nerfing - including +10 gold. People were ok with the changes to old wonders; I think you should balance around those.

I wanted to add that civ5 has the problem of only three types of regions in gameplay terms:
Actually 4; plains are better than grassland, because hammers are better than food.

Did you read the developers' notes I referenced? :)

The resources are added to make one zone of terrain equivalent to other zones of terrain. This is what I was trying to explain with the overpowered vs equal curve... in vanilla, bonus resources make all terrain equal. The Smokehouse makes bonus resources slightly better, and also boots an otherwise useless building.

Regarding the natural wonders, have you actually tried it? Cerro te Potosi might sound good in theory just looking at the numbers but is not overpowered. In vanilla, luxury resources earn 8g per turn. Therefore, you exchange 2g/turn + instant access for zero city growth. This is a significant tradeoff for one of your first cities to be stuck at size 1. From my experience I've found the 5:c5culture: from others is arguably better, it's a benefit not available elsewhere.

In case this got lost because I added it as edit and you guys have written smth in the meantime:

I'm really fascinated by the idea of removing the +1 gold from riverside tiles and instead make trading posts earn 1 additional gold next to rivers/coast (possibly after researching a naval tech).

This came in response to Thal's thought that trading posts could possible use a boost from a tech.

The main reason I'm so obsessed with it is that Civ5 fails horribly to simulate human settling patterns, TPs are rather weird in this regard, it's hard to imagine what they should represent in real life? Poncratias redesigned them as villages, but they aren't placed like villages would be.

Please check out my earlier post, too, and sorry if I'm annoying :)

In case this got lost because I added it as edit and you guys have written smth in the meantime:

I'm really fascinated by the idea of removing the +1 gold from riverside tiles and instead make trading posts earn 1 additional gold next to rivers/coast (possibly after researching a naval tech).

This came in response to Thal's thought that trading posts could possible use a boost from a tech.

The main reason I'm so obsessed with it is that Civ5 fails horribly to simulate human settling patterns, TPs are rather weird in this regard, it's hard to imagine what they should represent in real life? Poncratias redesigned them as villages, but they aren't placed like villages would be.

Please check out my earlier post, too, and sorry if I'm annoying :)

I like this idea, it would make gold more valuable. Maybe a passive tech buff later would be necessary, however. It would mean a pretty big gameshift, so it needs some serious thought before implementation of course.

in vanilla, bonus resources make all terrain equal.
No they don't. They are more present in zones of the map that have weaker yields from other specials. That is not the same as saying they have the same yield as any other terrain.

The bonus resource tile is still greater than that of a generic basic tile in the early game, and then the same after the tile boosts from techs (like civil service), because the bonus resources don't get tile boosts from techs.

But an individual worker can still only work 1 tile at a time, and they're generating higher yields working a bonus tile than others.
But the sheep/cow etc. isn't that big of a deal.

The far larger point is about the value of rivers, and the imbalance caused by the second food boost at fertilizer.

In vanilla, luxury resources earn 8g per turn
No they don't. You can get a lot of gold *if* there is a neighbor who has good relations with you, and has a lot of gold, and they don't have the luxury already, and its not just profit for you because it boosts your neighbor as well, giving them happiness.
And there is widespread agreement that the AI players pay too much for luxuries, particularly luxuries they don't need, and that they shouldn't be willing to pay so much gold unless they're near zero happiness or negative.

Therefore, you exchange 2g/turn + instant access for zero city growth
Pop 2 city with farmed grassland and Cerro te Posi = 5 food income - 4 food consumption = net food growth.
That's like saying that if you ever work a mine tile, you get zero city growth. Its just not true.

Add in the fact that you can use your ridiculous gold income to buy a MCS alliance, and it matters even less.

From my experience I've found the 5 from others is arguably better,
I agree that 5 culture from a tile is also overpowered.

I'm really fascinated by the idea of removing the +1 gold from riverside tiles and instead make trading posts earn 1 additional gold next to rivers/coast (possibly after researching a naval tech).
Its an interesting idea. But then, I worry that coastal start positions which tend to be loaded with fish would be overpowered relative to other starts.
I like the idea though about having real tension as to which improvement you build in your precious riverside tiles.

The main reason I'm so obsessed with it is that Civ5 fails horribly to simulate human settling patterns
It does fine in encouraging rivers, but I agree that it does a poor job in encouraging coastal settlement. Civ4 at least had trade route boosters only available in coastal cities, but that's gone now.
The big problem with coastal tiles is that you can't build improvements on them, which is why Civ has never really done a good job of making coasts desirable; it never wants tiles without improvements to be as good as tiles with improvements that you have to invest worker time in.

Buffing hilly non-river tiles with the smokehouse would also go rather against historic human settling patterns :-)

I like this idea, it would make gold more valuable. Maybe a passive tech buff later would be necessary, however. It would mean a pretty big gameshift, so it needs some serious thought before implementation of course.

@Thal - No luxury resources yield 8G in vanilla; did you mean they are 8 in total combined yield?

I think the overall gold income would stay the same. A bit less from riverside tiles, a bit more from coastal tiles, maybe lakes, too.

This is not about changing the gold amount available empire-wide, it is about slighly nerfing rivers, making riverside farms less of a no-brainer (by making TPs a equal choice riverside), and making coastal regions more valuable (as they are in real life).

____________


Maybe Thal thought about the income from selling luxuries repeatedly?

____________


@ Ahriman: with "human settling patterns" I didn't mean only cities. Civ5 has trading posts that don't exist in real life (at least not as spammable thing covering the landscape), but it has no representation of villages, suburbs, minor cities... I would really love to see TPs replaced with something that represents non-city human settlements. Poncratias' mod does this graphically to a certain extent, but not for placement. Humans settle near bodies of water most of the time, and next to mayor cities.

IIRC TPs were once designed to be position-dependent in their yields, but this was dropped in the development process.

Well, I don't want to reduce this to a realism and immersion discussion.
Trading posts are boring gameplay-wise, too, in that they always provide the same yield, no matter where, no matter when, no matter of techs.

I like the idea about trading posts and rivers, that would make for some interesting tradeoffs.

I was mistaken... resources sell for 450g in vanilla, which comes out to 10g/turn... so Cerro is slightly less income than a luxury resource (since working a luxury generates additional gold).

The only time you're unable to sell off luxuries at a decent price is if everyone's denounced you and/or gone to war with you... which has happened to me several times with too much early success.

Barring this, do you actually have trouble finding trading partners? It might depend on map settings... on immortal+pangaea the AIs always have tons of gold (due to the difficulty bonuses), and it's not a problem finding someone to trade with. Pangaea does make it easier to find trading partners, but since the AI deals with naval warfare so poorly I feel it makes the game much more challenging overall, which is why I use that setting.


Regarding bonus resources, rivers, and such, I'm a subconscious/intuitive thinker and sometimes have difficulty explaining my thoughts clearly...

Do you understand the main goal I'm trying to demonstrate with high vs low balance variance, if that makes any sense? The visual image of the graph is the easiest way I can think of it. The goal of the mod is not to just make everything is equivalent. This might be what you're thinking of. The goal of the mod is to make things more fun by "increasing the choices and interesting decision-making opportunities available to the player," which is why I put that line first in the mod description. Sometimes this means making things more equal (value of buildings), sometimes less (value of terrain). I aim for the middle of the graph where choices are most important. :)

This is one reason I disliked the handling of the policy/promotion issues in patch 1.135. Rather than fix the balance issues of instant heals and policy-cost-reduction, they removed the choice of saving vs spending these things entirely. It reduced player choice instead of improving it. :crazyeye:


--- Update ---
I've got the river thing working; this might be interesting to at least try out. Basically it would make riverside farms the same as lakeside farms.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=277250&stc=1&d=1293663096

We have lots of flexibility here, unlike other areas of the game (leader traits have very few options for example).


Mines we could go either way with... it'd make sense for mines to produce more income with access to a waterway (like in vanilla) and would limit the impact of this on gold income.
I could also add things like more gold to the palace to reduce the effect on the early game.
Could add a further +1g to trading posts adjacent to cities, to help offset the lost gold from rivers.
I can do this for certain technologies like the CS farm bonus. I could put some bonus on a tech like Currency, Machinery, Economics, etc.
There's unused attributes for city, coast, and mountain adjacency... it'd be interesting to remove the +1g/tile bonus of harbors and instead add a +1g bonus to coasts, like rivers.
However there's limitations... out of the various tables I've identified all work but one (or I'm not using it properly):

Improvement_RiverSideYields
Improvement_FreshWaterYields - No effect
Improvement_CoastalLandYields
Improvement_AdjacentCityYields
Improvement_AdjacentMountainYieldChanges
Improvement_RouteYieldChanges
Improvement_TechYieldChanges
Improvement_TechNoFreshWaterYieldChanges
Improvement_TechFreshWaterYieldChanges

So we can't have improvements innately boosted near lakes except with a tech. Placing bonuses on Agriculture might be able to work around that.


To be honest, I find improvements and such underwhelming in Civ V. There's not many of them, and not much decision-making is involved even with the enhancements from this mod. Throwing some more variables into the mix might spice things up a bit.

Also... @Seek regarding the reef. Remember it's a coastal wonder, therefore development options for it are more limited. In many games I play the reef appears in an inaccessible/bad spot for a city to be built. The desert wonders also suffer from this (like the mesa and crater).

Thx for trying the TP change out, Thal!

It is very interesting that those adjacency modifiers are possible :think:

Let's try to think this through systematically:


1) Is the current amount of available gold (empire-wide) ok?

I think there's a fine balance between making things like CS alliances to easy to get (too much gold) and reducing choices (only enough gold to pay upkeeps). Overall, the current overall amount of gold might be roughly ok.


2) Should TPs be buffed in general?

Much of Thal's modding was to make dumb trading post spam less viable, so buffing them could counteract this. Other improvements are buffed through lategame techs (fertilizer), but TPs are buffed through policies. Overall, again no need to buff them.

Conclusion 1: TPs should still have 2 yield on average.

3) What other problems are to be considered?

- Rivers/Lakes only boost farms, making them the ideal choice very (too?) often.
- Riverside tiles are extremely strong in vanilla.
- Coastal regions are not as valuable as they are in real life (or even inferior to landlocked regions).
- Trading posts are boring gap-fillers, because they are equally valuable everywhere, their placement doesn't matter.
- TPs are a weird abomination without RL counterpart. Seeing them as villages increases immersion (especially with a graphics mod)

4) Is there a desirable way to change TP yields?

Suggestion A - small change
TPs are still 2 base yield
Rivers don't give any boost from start.
Civil Service makes riverside farms more valuable (as before).
Currency makes riverside TPs better.
To compensate the lost gold from rivers, coastal adjacency could boost TPs, too.

Suggestion B - larger change
TPs get only one base yield
Rivers don't give any boost from start.
Civil Service makes riverside farms more valuable (+1 :c5food: as before).
Currency makes riverside TPs better (+1 :c5gold:).
To compensate the lost gold from rivers, coastal adjacency could boost TPs, too.
To compensate the 1 base yield, TPs adjacent to a city would give +1 :c5gold:.

5) Possible problems:

Suggestion A would probably mean a slight overall increase in available gold, Suggestion B would probably reduce the available gold somewhat. [EDIT: Thal showed that the yield boosts are cumulative. So in variant "B", TPs next to rivers AND cities would have 4 yield, probably resulting in vanilla yields - 2 average - overall)

The reduced yield from rivers in the very early game could mean it's tougher to get enough gold at this stage. [EDIT: Thal suggested boosting gold from the palace to compensate]

6) Advantages:

- Less river dominance
- Coastal regions buffed
- More interesting and realistic TP placement
- Probably understandable for the AI.

@Thal:

Regarding other improvements, riverside/coastal lumbermills would also be realistic to get a benefit. In fact, from a realism point of view many improvements connected to ship transport should be more valuable before combustion engines are invented. But this would make landlocked, riverless regions really bad. Very realistic but maybe ot good for gameplay?

Overall, I'd love to try this out, but it might be best to make this an optional part of Balance-Combined for the beginning.

Not if we add bonuses for city adjacency and such. :) In addition, remember food resources inherently spawn more in low-yield areas. Also, the AI would have no trouble dealing with this since it reads the actual yield values & possibilities. (The AI wasn't coded for the 'within in cultural borders' thing for natural wonder happiness though.)

The effects are also cumulative, as show by this Venn Diagram carved in the side of a planet.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=277253&stc=1&d=1293665325

Obviously we wouldn't want to have bonuses in every table like this, it's just demonstrating options. It works for any yield and improvement types. The possibilities created by the CiV programmers far exceed the simplistic final design in this case.

So you put a yield boost on city and mountain adjacency as well as a gold extra for roads under TPs? Nice

Yep, the only one we can't work with is an innate freshwater bonus... either it's not read by the game code, or it should be used differently than the others (and is undocumented).

This allows for some very complex possibilities. For example, TPs could have 1g base, and +1g from river, coast, and city adjacency. It'd double their maximum potential while halving it on "bland" terrain. This would likely result in an overall increase in gold supply, yet removing the gold from farms would in turn reduce gold...

I think it's something we can't effectively determine with numbers alone. It'll need playtesting! I'll put together a test dev version.

Also, just think of the complex choices route-boosted yields would create! Should I put a road here for a more direct route, or there for better trading post synergy... it'd make road placement more important than just how well you can solve a shortest-path algorithm between N cities. However incredibly fun that might be though, I doubt the AI could use it effectively so it's probably best to leave out.

for example, TPs could have 1g base, and +1g from river, coast, and city adjacency. It'd double their maximum potential while halving it on "bland" terrain. This would likely result in an overall increase in gold supply, yet removing the gold from farms would in turn reduce gold...

Also, just think of the complex choices route-boosted yields would create! Should I put a road here for a more direct route, or there for better trading post synergy... it'd make road placement more important than just how well you can solve a shortest-path algorithm between X cities. However incredibly fun that might be though, I doubt the AI could use it effectively so it's probably best to leave out.

I think it's something we can't effectively determine with numbers alone. It'll need playtesting! I'll put together a test dev version.

I'd be very happy to be the first test subject! Especially since I had similar ideas a month ago (the italic part) ;):

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9945184&postcount=472

I'm actually quite excited I might be able to play this soon thanks to your skills!

Yep, I first looked into all this stuff was after reading your post. I didn't explore it further at the time because I was busy with other things in life for a while. :)

So here's what I'm thinking...


2:c5gold: trading posts (vanilla).
1:c5gold: for riverside trading posts, mines and lumbermills (vanilla).
+1:c5gold: for cityside trading posts (was 0).
+1:c5gold: for coastal trading posts (was 0).
0:c5gold: for undeveloped rivers and riverside farms (was 1).
Delete +1:c5gold: per water tile bonus from Harbors (back to vanilla) (in City Development mod).
6:c5gold: Palace (was 2) to compensate for early game, as most start locations are on rivers.

I believe this should keep total gold income roughly the same. The coastal increase and harbor decrease will counterbalance one another somewhat... likewise with the cityside increase and riverside decrease. Overall it should 1) shift emphasis away from rivers 2) address concerns about buffed farms.

I've got to head off now, but here's a preliminary version:

I like how this would make all tile improvements equally viable next to rivers. It would break the dominance of riverside farms.

On the other hand, you actually weaken coastal regions, because the harbor bonus aplied to all water tiles, while the TP buff only applies if you choose to build a TP on a coast-adjacent tile. I might be wrong, but it seems more tiles were buffed previously.

Also, where do you compensate the city-adjacence bonus?

What about leaving the harbor bonus, but make TPs provide a base yield of one?

Countersuggestion:


6:c5gold: Palace (was 2) to compensate for early game, as most start locations are on rivers.
1:c5gold: trading posts (reduced from 2).
1:c5gold: for riverside trading posts, mines and lumbermills (vanilla).
+1:c5gold: for cityside trading posts (was 0).
+1:c5gold: for coastal trading posts (was 0).
0:c5gold: for undeveloped rivers and riverside farms (was 1).
Leave +1:c5gold: per water tile bonus from Harbors (in City Development mod).


This way, we'd get:

1 gold from bland TPs somewhere in the back of beyond
2 gold (vanilla value) from TPs next to city, river OR coast
3-4 gold if multiple of the above apply

Maybe the base city tile gold yield should follow the same rules, to not make it better to place a TP on a river delta tile than a city. The water tile buff from harbors was justified before IMO and should be left untouched.

Only playtesting can tell if too many tiles will be neither of the above and overall gold income will be to weak. I don't think so, but the optimal gold city might look vastly different from before. It would be close to a river mouth, or on an island/peninsula, which is much more realistic IMO.

Not sure what to do with roads, though. May they be a possibility to allow decent non-water trade/gold cities? But if we add 1 gold for TPs on roads, they become free, which is no good idea at all (road spam spaghetti!).

Otherwise, I think happiness and culture are weighted a little too strongly, and production a little too weakly. (Note I am basing this on gut feeling, not numbers.)

My gut feeling is that in most cases wonders should be happiness- and culture-centric, rather than production.

Wonders or natural wonders?

It seems my friend's still busy so I can stick around a while longer...

The cityside bonus is counterbalanced by reduced farm/undeveloped riverside gold. The reason I want to keep TP base yield the same is to minimize how many changes away from vanilla are necessary. Slight reduction to river gold, slight increase to cityside gold.

The harbor bonus can't be reached until midgame or so, and basic water tiles still provide only 2f2g with it. They're not really all that great even with the buff I added. In contrast, the coastal TP bonus is available earlier and allows TP tiles to reach a higher potential yield in the ideal circumstance of TP across a river from a city on the coast (rare but possible!). Concentrated effects are generally more valuable.

Over the past month or so, I've started thinking merchant slots make more sense as a harbor buff instead of yield bonuses. Harbors still get the +1 merchant specialist slot of the CD mod (0 in vanilla) like before. I could increase it to 2 slots if they feel underpowered again. It's somewhat more realistic since a coastal city is generally more prosperous than an island city... once you start becoming totally surrounded by water your odds of being an important place in the world drop. There's rare exceptions like Hawaii because of their military value.

No they don't. You can get a lot of gold *if* there is a neighbor who has good relations with you, and has a lot of gold, and they don't have the luxury already, and its not just profit for you because it boosts your neighbor as well, giving them happiness.
And there is widespread agreement that the AI players pay too much for luxuries, particularly luxuries they don't need, and that they shouldn't be willing to pay so much gold unless they're near zero happiness or negative.

I've had Cerro, and it did not transform my early game. In fact, it wasn't particularly noticeable, mainly because it paid off like a luxury.

From your first statement I would think lux trading is much more difficult than I know it to be. Also, that its relative value compared to Cerro is lessened by the AI receiving happiness from it. But then your second statement contradicts that, stressing that the AI is already OD'ing on happiness. Contradiction aside, I'm not sure what the AI paying too much for luxuries they don't need on higher levels has to do with the overall issue.

Wonders or natural wonders?

It seems my friend's still busy so I can stick around a while longer...

The harbor bonus can't be reached until midgame or so, and basic water tiles still provide only 2f2g with it. They're not really all that great even with the buff. In contrast, the coastal TP bonus is available earlier and allows TP tiles to reach a higher potential yield in the ideal circumstance of TP across a river from a city on the coast (rare but possible!). Concentrated effects are generally more valuable.

Over the past month or so, I've started thinking merchant slots make more sense as a harbor buff instead of yield bonuses. Harbors still get the +1 merchant specialist slot of the CD mod (0 in vanilla) like before. I could increase it to 2 slots if they feel underpowered again. It's somewhat more realistic since a coastal city is generally more prosperous than an island city... once you start becoming totally surrounded by water your odds of being an important place in the world drop. There's rare exceptions like Hawaii because of their military value.

The cityside bonus is counterbalanced by reduced farm/undeveloped riverside gold.

I meant natural wonders, since we were talking about yields.

Merchants being the buff to harbors makes intuitive sense.

Is the TP change being considered primarily as an indirect nerf of river starts? Again from an intuitive place, my sense is the goal should be what you stated: a tilt toward farms in the early game, replaced by trading posts in the later game. Whether or not this is achieved - in my case, getting off my butt and making the changes - strikes me as the core barometer.

PS - I still think raising the maintenance on workshops is the best way to balance them, as well as feeling right historically.

The problem with happiness bonuses for natural wonders is the AI hasn't been coded to recognize it. Might re-visit this if/when they code that in...

The TP change is aimed to both reduce the importance of rivers, and make all improvements about equally valuable next to rivers.

I agree shifting the value of improvements over time in the game is something good to pursue, makes planning more interesting. With this setup, TPs are the most valuable until civil service / engineering boosts to food and production, which brings all three yield types up to about equal importance.

This is why I'd like to put a +1g TP bonus at Economics, to coincide with the Fertilizer farm buff and Steam Engine production buff. The TP buff only exists in policies... which limits it somewhat.

I'm also going to move 1h of the Lumbermill to the Machinery tech, to delay their importance a bit. This would put mines as most valuable in the ancient, classical and medieval periods... both about equal in late medieval and renaissance... then lumbermills as more powerful in industrial/modern.

The problem with happiness bonuses for natural wonders is the AI hasn't been coded to recognize it. Might re-visit this if/when they code that in...

The TP change is aimed to both reduce the importance of rivers, and make all improvements about equally valuable next to rivers.

I agree shifting the value of improvements over time in the game is something good to pursue, makes planning more interesting. With this setup, TPs are the most valuable until civil service / engineering boosts to food and production, which brings all three yield types up to about equal value.

Along these lines, an idea I'd like to pursue is TPs -1g with +1 at Economics, to coincide with the Fertilizer farm buff. There's probably some way to find an early gold buff to counterbalance it...

Yes, I've noticed the AI seemingly ignoring the FOY.

With regard to balancing Fertilizer, keep in mind that the human population exploded at around this time. To some degree, I think techs like fertilizer and steam power should noticeably affect the game.

Oh I agree completely, not going to reduce their effects. Economics seems 'meh' in the game right now though. Basically all it gives is an underwhelming production building and Big Ben. The latter kind of reflects the impact the formation of modern economies had, but moderately so and only for one civ.

I thought about it before falling asleep and I agree your TP mod changes are better than making them 1 base :c5gold:.

Note that now a TP put on a river mouth next to a city yields whopping 5 :c5gold:! I still think it's ok, because it's mainly a coastal buff.

I think before someone says this is OP, think of it as seperate items:
- coastal regions were already buffed before for a good reason, this just changes
the HOW a bit
- River gold is reduced a bit. Instead you get more gold from a few tiles next to
your cities, improving river to non-river balance.

If we find that coasts are still underwhelming, we might add gold to mines and lumbermills next to the shoreline, like what they get when next to a river. This would again represent easier transport. Maybe even farms should get 1 gold whe next to a shore, not sure why it should be a particularily bad idea to farm coastal regions. All this could require an (early) naval tech, making it more appealing to go this route.

___________________


Regarding a lategame TP buff, I'm not sure if policy boosts aren't strong enough already. Isn't money already easy enough to get once you finished specializing your cities (markets and such)?

If you'd boost TPs at economics, would you boost all of them? As a compromise, you could only buff the ones adjacent to a city, representing suburbanization (overall +2 :c5gold: for city adjacency after economics).

___________________


EDIT:
In your dev version description you asked for ways to remove extra gold. Wasn't there a "city maintainance" mod somewhere, where every city costs a bit more than the previous? IIRC it was one gold for the second, 11 gold for the 10th, 16 gold for the 15th....

While this seems a bit much for my liking, something along these lines would be interesting. You could also create a science penalty that increases with number of cities, for the small vs. large empire balance.

Harbors still get the +1 merchant specialist slot of the CD mod (0 in vanilla) like before. I could increase it to 2 slots if they feel underpowered again.
I'd leave at 1 merchant. If you make too many specialist slots available, then they lose any value, because they no longer constrain the number of specialists you can have.

* * *

But then your second statement contradicts that, stressing that the AI is already OD'ing on happiness. Contradiction aside, I'm not sure what the AI paying too much for luxuries they don't need on higher levels has to do with the overall issue.
My point is that you shouldn't try to balance natural wonders by comparing them to luxury selling, because there is widespread agreement that luxury selling is not balanced.

The problem is not the AI ODing on happiness, its that they're willing to pay the human too much to do so.

So: reduce AI willingness to buy luxuries they don't need, *and* reduce the value of the natural wonder.
Don't balance against a broken mechanic.

* * *

This would put mines as most valuable in the ancient, classical and medieval periods... both about equal in late medieval and renaissance... then lumbermills as more powerful in industrial/modern.
I don't think this is a good design goal. I think the goal should be to keep them roughly equal in terms of total yield at every period, but lumbermills give less hammers and more food, and maybe they get their yield boost a tech or two ahead of mine boosts, to give some compensation for not chopping forest-hill tiles.

I'd be tempted to put lumbermill boost at machinery and steam power, with mine boosts at metallurgy and dynamite (or replaceable parts, or railroad, or something).

* * *
If you're set on keeping +1 food to fresh water farms at fertilizer, then I like the idea of combining that with a -1 gold to rivers and +1 gold to trading post with rivers.
This means that there is still some tension between what to build next to rivers: do I build farms or TPs?
However, I'd still try to make the boosts happen at roughly the same time, otherwise you have incentive to build TPs in the early game next to rivers, then pave over some of them with farms with CS.

Not sure about coast though. I think I'd prefer to boost the yield of coast tiles (probably though buildings, so they still require some kind of investment) to make them worth working rather than boosting TPs next to coast; if you do that, then you're back to a no-brainer situation where you TP every coastal tile.

If you did do it, I'd make it +1 gold if adjacent to river or coast, so the effects don't stack.
We don't want to make people deliberately not found their city on a coastal rivermouth tile so as to preserve an extra high-yield tile.

As a compromise, you could only buff the ones adjacent to a city, representing suburbanization (overall +2 for city adjacency after economics)
My other big worry with changes like this, or TP adjacent to coast, is that you're going to severely mess up the AI.
I think one of the big reasons why they made improvements so simple in Civ5 was to try to reduce the ability of the human player to perform better solely through improvement placement.

You risk making TPs next to cities a no-brainer for the human, but something that the AI won't understand. It might understand once you have the Economics tech and observes the higher yield, but that would require to pave over and reoptimize all its existing improvement layout, whereas the human player can anticipate the yield and pre-place their TPs in the right place.

You also risk encouraging ICS; with more spammed cities, more tiles are adjacent to cities, and so its easy for even a weak city to pay for itself and its happiness buildings.

To recap:

Trying to keep as many of the design decisions you've already made (even the ones I'm not so keen on) in a relatively balanced way, I'd consider something like:

Farm gives +1 food, +1 food with fresh water and Civil Service, +1 food with fertilizer
Mine gives +1 hammer, +1 hammer with Metallurgy, +1 hammer with Railroad (or Dynamite).
Lumbermill gives +1 hammer, +1 hammer with machinery, +1 hammer with steam power.
Trading post gives +2 gold, +1 gold with fresh water and (Engineering or Metal Casting or Compass?), +1 gold with economics.

Whoa, a lot happened here! I pretty much agree with Ahriman's posts above. My thoughts:

*Coastal tiles getting +1G tied to a building sounds like the right way to go - maybe change the Harbor to this instead of all water tiles (and for all coastal tiles, not just TPs). Could give the seaport all water tiles 1G instead, that building is very situational and could use a buff imo. Also, there are only three coastal buildings and one of the goals here is to increase the desirability of coastal cities, so buffing another one could help here.
*City adjacency for TPs should be removed I think, or only implemented at a tech in the modern era - I'd suggest Combustion, it could use the buff and it's justifiable.

Otherwise, looks great!




@Seek regarding the reef. Remember it's a coastal wonder, therefore development options for it are more limited. In many games I play the reef appears in an inaccessible/bad spot for a city to be built. The desert wonders also suffer from this (like the mesa and crater).

Good points.

I like the coastal buffs, as I've always thought a coastal city should be at least equivalent in commerce to a river city (if not more so). In addition to buffing the land along the coast, is it possible to bring back the civ4 behavior of +1 gold in coastal waters? I really loved this, since it made bays and seas extremely beneficial for settling, compared to some random arctic coastline.

To recap:

Trying to keep as many of the design decisions you've already made (even the ones I'm not so keen on) in a relatively balanced way, I'd consider something like:

Farm gives +1 food, +1 food with fresh water and Civil Service, +1 food with fertilizer
Mine gives +1 hammer, +1 hammer with Metallurgy, +1 hammer with Railroad (or Dynamite).
Lumbermill gives +1 hammer, +1 hammer with machinery, +1 hammer with steam power.
Trading post gives +2 gold, +1 gold with fresh water and (Engineering or Metal Casting or Compass?), +1 gold with economics.

This makes sense to me, and in a manner that synchs with the traditional Civ improvement mechanics. The earlier point about the danger of buffing ICS is also a good one.

I agree with +1 to every coastal tile if you have a seaport, because it actually forces you to build the city on the coast, too. Maybe an earlier building would be better, though, coasts were always valuable.

I think we agree the change to rivers is appropiate as Thal made it yesterday?



Regarding +1:c5gold: for city adjacency:

We always wanted to give this to every TP from start, because it counterbalances the reduced river gold. Another + 1:c5gold: with adjacency was my suggestion for a boost after economics, if a boost for all TPs is too much. None of this would be a problem for the AI.

The point about ICS boosting is valid, but the concept is not automatically bad because of this. An adjustment to the trade route calculation could counter it, for example. We just have to make sure big cities are still valid gold producers.

Happy new year, folks! ;)

I'm somewhat sober again and wanted to give you some feedback on the "adjacency" topic. I've played a few hours with the new dev build.

As you might imagine, there have been some issues. Like so often, it is not a question of better or worse, but of which gameplay we want to achieve. I'll admit it right here: the way the current dev build handles tile yields (especially TPs) doesn't work that well. Let me explain why and make some suggestions:


There are 2 basic principles for balancing tile yields:

1) Improvements are equally strong, no matter where you build them (a feature that buffs all improvements equally doesn't count).

2) Improvements are clearly better when built in certain positions, then making them a clear favorite in this position.

Oddly, in vanilla ONLY farms are position-dependent. For all other improvements, the position doesn't matter at all (as long as they are allowed).

We have done 2 very different different things with the changes in the dev build. First we nerfed the position-dependancy of farms by making each improvement equally valuable next to rivers (which then no longer counts).

But then, we have added buffs to TPs for coast and city adjacency, without giving anything similar to the other improvements. Logically, TPs were a clear favourite in these positions now, just like riverside farms were before. TPs are so much stronger in quite a few positions now (when certain boosters stack) that building anything else there would be plain foolish. They also don't need any tech to get so strong, unlike mines/farms. We created a mechanic for TPs that we wanted to get rid of for farms.


The question is: What do we want?

Balancing the game around the first of the two design principles above is rather easy, but less interesting. We could just say that a river (and possibly a shore) provides +1 yield to ANY improvement. So rivers/shores would be "better" terrain, but all improvents would be equally viable there -> Simple balance!

First, the issue with the above way of balancing: All the improvements should get their buff around the same time/era! In the dev version, there was a huge problem with farms only being improved by rivers midgame after civil service, but trading posts had the bonus from turn 1!!! This has to be considered either way.


Secondly:
Is there a way to use adjacency for added fun/complexity while still being balanced?

I think there is! We only need to buff each improvement in a certain terrain. This could mean that farms profit from fresh water, mines profit from vicinity to a mountain and trading posts (=villages) profit from being next to a major city.
These are only examples, but what would we achieve?

- Certain regions favor certain city specializations
- A tile could be epecially suitable for multiple improvements, offering choice (*)
- Possibly more natural/realistic settling patterns
- More strategic choices
- More regional differences, not only river/non-river
- The AI should understand it quite well (it can count yields after all)


I have to think this through in detail, and I have to check the vanilla and TBM techtree for good timepoints to put these yield buffs. I'll provide details later!

In the meantime, feel free to state your thoughts! ;)



(*) EDIT: That's actually the core element why I think this mechanic is better than the one we currently have in the dev build (and vanilla): If multiple improvements have areas where they are better AND those areas overlap, we have an interesting and varied choice very often. Some spots would buff no improvement, some a single one, some would even buff all improvements. But a huge amount of the tiles on a map would buff some, but not all improvements.

The combinations could be city+mountain vicinity, coast+river, river+mountain, city+coast, river+mountain+city, river+mountain+coast, ... The player would have an always different selection of boosted improvements - or he could decide to build an suboptimal/not boosted improvement for a certain reason.

Happy new year, folks! ;)

I'm somewhat sober again and wanted to give you some feedback on the "adjacency" topic. I've played a few hours with the new dev build.

As you might imagine, there have been some issues. Like so often, it is not a question of better or worse, but of which gameplay we want to achieve.

There are 2 basic principles for balancing tile yields:

1) Improvements are equally strong, no matter where you build them (a feature that buffs all improvements equally doesn't count).

2) Improvements are clearly better when built in certain positions, then making them a clear favorite in this position.

Oddly, in vanilla ONLY farms are position-dependent. For all other improvements, the position doesn't matter at all (as long as they are allowed).

We have done 2 very different different things with the changes in the dev build. First we nerfed the position-dependancy of farms by making each improvement equally valuable next to rivers (which then no longer counts).
But then, we have added buffs to TPs for coast and city adjacency, without giving anything similar to the other improvements. Logically, TPs were a clear favourite in these positions now, just like riverside farms were before.

The question is: What do we want?

Balancing the game around the first design principle is rather easy, but less interesting. We could just say that a river (and possibly a shore) provides +1 yield to ANY improvement. So rivers/shores would be "better" terrain, but all improvents would be equally viable there -> Simple balance!


Option 2 and an issue I haven't mentioned yet after my lunch break - stay tuned ;)

EDIT: Here we go:

First, the issue with the above way of balancing: All the improvements should get their buff around the same time/era! In the dev version, there was a huge problem with farms only being improved by rivers midgame after civil service, but trading posts had the bonus from turn 1!!! This has to be considered either way.

Secondly:
Is there a way to use adjacency for added fun/complexity while still being balanced?

I think there is! We only need to buff each improvement in a certain terrain. This could mean that farms profit from fresh water, mines profit from vicinity to a mountain and trading posts (=villages) profit from being next to a major city.
These are only examples, but what would we achieve?

- Certain regions favor certain city specializations
- A tile can be both next to a river AND next to a mountain, offering choice.
- Possibly more natural/realistic settling patterns
- More strategic choices
- More regional differences, not only river/non-river
- The AI should understand it quite well (it can count yields after all)

I have to think this through in detail, and I have to check the vanilla and TBM techtree for good timepoints to put these yield buffs. I'll provide details later!

In the meantime, feel free to state your thoughts! ;)

My main concern with all of this is simplicity. An improvement gives x, and x+1 on a single specific location makes for interesting, but easily absorbed gameplay. The idea of TPs providing +1 on multiple but not all locations is suboptimal, in my opinion.

Current state: Vanilla

All improvements have +1 yield (except trading posts and GP improvements).

Farms get +1 with fresh water after CS and +1 for the others after fertilizer.

The only other improvement getting a buff is the lumbermill (+1 with steam power).



Current state: TBM

Farms get the CS bonus as usual and ALL farms get 1 additional yield after fertilizer.

Lumbermills and Mines get +1 yield after engineering/machinery. In addition, the LM retains its bonus with steam power.

Trading posts get +1 with economy.


Please correct me if there's a mistake!



Analysis:

In vanilla, tile yields don't change much. During the midgame (from civil service to fertilizer) rivers are even stronger than usual, at least when farming them. The additional yield for lumbermills might mean the devs regarded 3:c5production: a bit stronger than 2:c5production:1:c5food:, so the lategame boost to LMs balances this, making them somewhat equal in average.

I'm not going to explain Thal's motivation for changes, that's best left to him ;) In general, a production boost is a much requested feature, though there have been doubts recently that the current state might be a bit much. Trading posts mostly receive a boost in the lategame because every other improvement does, too.


Suggestions for "adjacency" concept implementation:

The goal is to make the game more interesting regarding terrain improvements, while keeping Thal's proven balance concepts to a large extent.

1) Rivers and Shores

Rivers in vanilla give 1:c5gold: for every adjacent tile, regardless of the improvement. I suggest keeping this and expanding it to shorelines.

Historically, both rivers and coasts have been trade routes and preferred settling areas. I see no reason to make a huge difference between them. Also gameplay-wise, especially in vanilla coastal cities are weak, while river cities are awesome. Making coasts similar in terms of extra gold balances the game for civs not starting next to rivers.

In short: River=coast regarding gold (not food, of course!)

This could require sailing, to force players to take at least 1 naval tech, which get little attention usually.


2) Boosts for adjacency

Only farms next to fresh water get a boost for their position usually. I suggest expanding this to ALL other (major) improvements, approximately at the same time (around medieval era).

The only logical thing that could boost nearby mines is a mountain. I suggest changing the buff for all mines Thal implemented to mines near a mountain. This would make mountains more than just impassable terrain, they would become highly interesting. Production cities would be much better if close to mountain, and civs starting between many mountains wouldn't have a disadvantage any more. The lost yield (compared to TBM, not vanilla) might be a thing to consider, though.

Trading posts and lumbermills are a bit more difficult.

Lumbermills could be more profitable were the lumber can be transported by sea, meaning next to shores and rivers. Lumbermills at shores could also represent ship construction. I'm no expert, but I guess this is historically justifiable.

I tend to see trading posts as villages, so thinking historically they should be around major cities, along rivers and coastlines, maybe also around lakes. Associating them with roads is problematic, though, because we don't want to make roads free again.

Overall, the question is if boosted TPs can be allowed on more spots than the other improvements? IMHO yes, but only if they get 1 base yield like all other imrovements. So basically only TPs in "sweet" spots would get the vanilla yield, although, as I've said, there could be many spots boosting TPs, more than for any other improvement, so 2 yield would be very common. This would also make it more justified to boost them later with economy.

Actually, the number of tiles/areas where an improvement would get added yield could be a way to balance them. Gold is less worthy per unit than production, food being somewhere in between. So logically, boosted production improvements should be less common than boosted TPs.

Other boosts in the lategame (from fertilizer, steam power, economics etc.) could be added in addition to this system, if necessary.


Questions:

The AI: Since the location specific boosts come rather early, I think the AI can handle it, the benefit the player has because he knows of the added yield earlier should be limited. I'm no AI expert, though.

Automatism: Txurce has mentioned the problem that improvement strategies might be very automated if some tiles give benefits to certain improvements. I think that on the one hand the vanilla improvements are not overly complex, either. On the other hand, since there are many overlaps, you often have a lot of choice. Also, more locations on the map would play a special role, in vanilla mountains and shores have little meaning.

From my experience with Thal's dev version, I strongly believe there would be overlaps where multiple boosted improvents are possible all the time. E.g. a hill 1) between mountain and shore, or 2) city and river: In the first case you have the choice between a boosted mine or a TP, while in the second situation it would be between a hill with boosted TP, or a hill with boosted farm. If the hill is forested, there is even more choice: in both cases the forest would be boosted (through river or coast). As I said above: Those overlaps make the system interesting!

Technologies:
When should the boosts come?

I usually take naval techs very late if I don't really need them, so I think a non-naval benefit from sailing would make the tech an interesting very early choice. If the gold from river/shoreside tiles would be unlocked with sailing, civs would have to choose it early and would be able to build ships as early as they really came in history. Ships might be important for exploration through this change, too. No longer would remote inland locations be visited by scouts long before the first naval unit explores the coastline!

Civil Service and Engineering/Machinery are fine for food and production boosts.

The TP boost should maybe be on an earlier tech, since TPs are 2 in vanilla and wouldn't be any more until the right tech is researched -> possible lack of gold? Maybe mathematics would be appropiate? If you don't want to crush cities early, this tech is of little use. An useful non-military effect would make archery also more likely to be chosen early.

Multi-Buffs:

If multiple reasons why a TP or other improvement should get added yield apply, the should NOT stack. A TP that's next to coast, river, lake and city should only get 1 extra yield, not 4! Otherwise the choice would be gone again and the whole system gets to complex.

Wouldn't this favor ICS?

There have been concerns about the buff for city adjacency, since more cities would increase the number of "good" tiles for TP construction. This concern is justified. Still, there are ways to counter this.

E.g. a building that gives +1:c5gold: to TPs but costs 5 upkeep: It would only make sense in cities with more than 5 TPs, and would REDUCE the output of smaller cities. It would only be really useful in cities with 10 or more TPs. This could replace one of the percentage-based economy buildings.

Overall amount of gold and other yields

As I've said, the overall amount of gold should stay roughly the same. The TPs in "bad" positions (no coast/river/lake/city nearby) with only 1 yield would be countered by the additional gold yield for all coastal tiles.

Food would stay the same as in TBM anyway.

Regarding production improvements, while you could build "double" mines and LMs in TBM on every hill/forest, there shouldn't be much less production with my suggestions. You'd only have to make sure you build LMs next to water (for transport) and mines next to mountains, meaning you'd be able to get "double" yield on quite a lot of tiles. This would be a bit less than in TBM now, but I'm sure there are ways to compensate this (lategame buffs?), if even desired.

Summary:

Base yield of every tile is 2:c5food: or 2 :c5production: (or one of each, like in vanilla)
Riverside and shoreside tiles would get +1:c5gold: (after sailing, not cumulative)

Every improvement would add 1 yield (including TPs)
Midgame techs would unlock a boost of 1 yield for improvements built in special postitions (like riverside farms do after CS in vanilla)
TPs get boosted to 2:c5gold: in many situations, other improvements less often
There might be situations were more than 1 improvement would profit from a tile (quite often actually, which makes it interesting)
Buffs shouldn't be able to stack! No TP should yield more than +2:c5gold:, no mine more than +2:c5production: (at least before possible lategame buffs apply)

Lategame techs might add another yield to certain inprovements if desired/necessary (e.g. fertilizer or steam power in vanilla)

Sorry for putting yet another post here, but I've rewritten the last 3 posts to make the ideas better understandable and cohesive.

I'd love to hear your feedback :)

Sorry for putting yet another post here, but I've rewritten the last 3 posts to make the ideas better understandable and cohesive.

I'd love to hear your feedback :)

I've already given my opinion. I feel that the TP changes in total needlessly complicate the game. There are much bigger fish to fry in Civ 5.

I've already given my opinion. I feel that the TP changes in total needlessly complicate the game. There are much bigger fish to fry in Civ 5.

It' not that complicated, actually, I was just overly motivated to explain my ideas in detail ;) The summary says it all.

I admit that the ideas are less intended to fix bugs than to improve the gameplay, and to bring the broken and unfinished tile yield system of civ5 in a logical and cohesive form.
It is also focused on realism, because TPs in their current form are not only ugly, but have no real counterpart at all. The new system would encourage placing them in meaningful positions.

I agree with Tomice on this, I think the terrain improvements are rather dull now and adding things like adjacency requirements would help make city placement all the more interesting and important. Also I like the idea of tying some of the improvements to techs or buildings like sailing thus making your tech choices all the more important. In response to txruce's argument that it makes the terrain improvement decisions a no brainer, besides not really agreeing (i think it would be more interesting as vanilla terrain improvements are boring as is), these changes can also make decisions in other aspects more important, and thus more fun and strategic. Not really sure if that came out like i wanted it too, but in summary I think tomice is spot on.

In response to txruce's argument that it makes the terrain improvement decisions a no brainer, besides not really agreeing (i think it would be more interesting as vanilla terrain improvements are boring as is), these changes can also make decisions in other aspects more important, and thus more fun and strategic.

Were did I "argue" this? Or say anything remotely like what you're claiming? I didn't - my basic complaint with this entire direction is, if anything, the opposite.

You're jumping in midstream and paraphrasing Tomice (who misread what I wrote), rather than bothering to directly refer to the (non-existent) position you claim I took.

@ Txurce
Sorry if i misunderstood your position or complaint, chill. I was just trying to show my support for Tomice's Ideas as I think they would make terrain improvments less simple then they are currently and more interesting. I was under the opinion that you believed his method is too simple...see quote below


My main concern with all of this is simplicity.

I disagree, I may not have expressed it clearly in my post above, I think that the mechanics of civ should work so that your city placement is a huge decision and what tiles you can work. I dont want the option to settle a city by the river and place a mine there and have it be as viable an option as a farm. (and this is not an attack on anyone's position, im just explaining why i think tomice's idea would be a benefit). I would rather be able to look at the land and let the land determine what sort of improvements i can build then to have the flexibility to make any city whatever i want just by building different improvements. Again I dont think im making much sense so ill stop but I just wanted to make myself clear and say that im in no way attacking your position, i was just disagreeing that i dont think this makes things simpler. If thats not your opinion then im sorry.

No problem.

I'm in favor of balance and choice. In the case of some of the TP discussion, I think the choices are muddying the clarity game waters need.

To clarify a few limitations of the current tools, these options are not possible:


Non-stacking bonuses (+1 to rivers or coasts, but not both)
Building/tech bonuses to coastal water tiles (only option is "water" tiles, which includes coasts, oceans, and lakes)
Inherent bonuses of fresh water or coast adjacency (only can boost near rivers, or boost coasts with specific improvements)
Tech bonuses near coasts (only can boost fresh water with a tech)
City/mountain/coast adjacency bonuses with tech (only can be from turn 1)

One thing to remember is AI considerations will be irrelevant when we get full sdk access - we can code it to recognize things.

I think the improvement habits city/river/coast adjacency encourage are super awesome and result in really realistic-looking development patterns, but unfortunately, it seems the AI isn't currently coded to read the per-improvement adjacency tables. When a worker is actually on a tile it does recognize the +4:c5gold: potential from a trading post is more valuable than the +1:c5food:, but it doesn't seem to properly "scan" tiles for where to send the worker. As such, when it needs food it sends it to a likely tile where it can get food without reading those tables.

For these reasons and the ICS concern (I also realized in my first test game the on-cost vs one-tile-away city issue Ahriman pointed out), I think it might be best to leave it with just river modifiers and the original harbor bonus. Still, thanks for the discussion and playtesting everyone! City/route/etc adjacency is an idea we can revisit once we have more tools.

Happy new year, folks! ;)

I'm somewhat sober again and wanted to give you some feedback on the "adjacency" topic. I've played a few hours with the new dev build.

As you might imagine, there have been some issues. Like so often, it is not a question of better or worse, but of which gameplay we want to achieve. I'll admit it right here: the way the current dev build handles tile yields (especially TPs) doesn't work that well. Let me explain why and make some suggestions:


There are 2 basic principles for balancing tile yields:

1) Improvements are equally strong, no matter where you build them (a feature that buffs all improvements equally doesn't count).

2) Improvements are clearly better when built in certain positions, then making them a clear favorite in this position.

Oddly, in vanilla ONLY farms are position-dependent. For all other improvements, the position doesn't matter at all (as long as they are allowed).

We have done 2 very different different things with the changes in the dev build. First we nerfed the position-dependancy of farms by making each improvement equally valuable next to rivers (which then no longer counts).

But then, we have added buffs to TPs for coast and city adjacency, without giving anything similar to the other improvements. Logically, TPs were a clear favourite in these positions now, just like riverside farms were before. TPs are so much stronger in quite a few positions now (when certain boosters stack) that building anything else there would be plain foolish. They also don't need any tech to get so strong, unlike mines/farms. We created a mechanic for TPs that we wanted to get rid of for farms.


The question is: What do we want?

Balancing the game around the first of the two design principles above is rather easy, but less interesting. We could just say that a river (and possibly a shore) provides +1 yield to ANY improvement. So rivers/shores would be "better" terrain, but all improvents would be equally viable there -> Simple balance!

First, the issue with the above way of balancing: All the improvements should get their buff around the same time/era! In the dev version, there was a huge problem with farms only being improved by rivers midgame after civil service, but trading posts had the bonus from turn 1!!! This has to be considered either way.


Secondly:
Is there a way to use adjacency for added fun/complexity while still being balanced?

I think there is! We only need to buff each improvement in a certain terrain. This could mean that farms profit from fresh water, mines profit from vicinity to a mountain and trading posts (=villages) profit from being next to a major city.
These are only examples, but what would we achieve?

- Certain regions favor certain city specializations
- A tile could be epecially suitable for multiple improvements, offering choice (*)
- Possibly more natural/realistic settling patterns
- More strategic choices
- More regional differences, not only river/non-river
- The AI should understand it quite well (it can count yields after all)


I have to think this through in detail, and I have to check the vanilla and TBM techtree for good timepoints to put these yield buffs. I'll provide details later!

In the meantime, feel free to state your thoughts! ;)



(*) EDIT: That's actually the core element why I think this mechanic is better than the one we currently have in the dev build (and vanilla): If multiple improvements have areas where they are better AND those areas overlap, we have an interesting and varied choice very often. Some spots would buff no improvement, some a single one, some would even buff all improvements. But a huge amount of the tiles on a map would buff some, but not all improvements.

The combinations could be city+mountain vicinity, coast+river, river+mountain, city+coast, river+mountain+city, river+mountain+coast, ... The player would have an always different selection of boosted improvements - or he could decide to build an suboptimal/not boosted improvement for a certain reason.



I agree wholeheartedly with the design goals discussed by Tomice in his happy new year post, spoiler'd above.

However, for the same reasons discussed earlier in this post (only can do stacking bonuses, AI concerns) I think we'll have to hold off on adding much depth to the (way too simplistic IMO) improvement mechanics.

It's tough to decide on -1:c5gold: for riverside farms vs +1:c5gold: for other improvements, I'm still trying to figure out which might be a better solution. They're not strictly converses of one another.

I like the idea of giving coastal tiles an inherent +1:c5gold: like river tiles, that would even affect city centers (so as to not discourage building cities on the coast). I'll research this further when I have time.

If you do this, I would do it with a tech trigger like Sailing, rather than right off the top as you indicate later in your post.

Yeah, I did some research and discovered neither option is available to us, so I revised the post. It looks like coastal adjacency is a cool idea we just don't have the tools for yet. :)

I had a fear that the non-stacking bonus would be impossible but the AI issue surprised me. Well, a pity that it doesn't work! :sad: I was really fascinated by the concept, as you guys have surely realized. :lol:

Nice that you like it, though!



It's tough to decide on


-1:c5gold: on riverside farms?
This works out more cleanly than 0 river base yields with +1 on non-farm improvements, and I think the AI isn't coded to recognize the importance of rivers if they don't have a yield bonus. The question is, should this -1 be inherent or at Civil Service? I'm not sure it makes sense for a tech to reduce your gold income, so I'm thinking perhaps it should be an inherent part of farms next to rivers... until you get civil service, you'd be trading 1g for 1f. This exchange has precedent: clearing jungles and forests to build improvements trades one yield type for another.
+1:c5gold: base yield on coast-adjacent land, like river-adjacent land.
+1:c5gold: on TPs at economics.
+1:c5production: on mines and lumbermills moved to Machinery.
This would delay the production boost somewhat, and also indirectly buff Crossbowmen (which are somewhat less-desirable than the knight, treb, or longsword techs right now). I do feel Metallurgy is too late though, and would improve an already-desirable beeline (Riflemen). Ideally we want to put bonuses like this on weak techs.
+1:c5production: on mines at Combustion.
This would have the desirable side-effect of buffing tanks, which several people (including myself) feel are still underpowered compared to mech infantry, even with the combat mod buffs.


I don't understand your thoughts about farms. -1:c5gold: with civil service would be ok, but if you make it from start, farms would be weaker than any other improvement there before Civil Service.

I strongly support +1:c5gold: on shoreside land tiles. Every vanilla guide tells you to stay away from coast. This makes no sense at all, flavor/realismwise.
Unlocking this (and maybe the river bonus) with sailing would have the benefit of making sailing an attractive very early tech, and making early naval scouting, fighting and settling more attractive.

I don't really think the production boost is too early with construction. It is a nice pair with CS. I might be a bad player, but I mostly beeline one of them, then the other, they are both important.

I'm also unsure about the other topics, can't help you there.



EDIT: The impossibility of buffing coasts like rivers is a huge disappointment! :(

The problem with putting it on civil service is, say you have 10 riverside farms when you research the tech. It'll increase your food +10 and gold -10. That might seem sorta weird for your gold income to drop, which could be a problem if you were at or near 0 from trades.

Didn't realize anyone was reading the post as I was revising it, so I've deleted my old thoughts and copied them here. :)


0:c5gold: base river yield
+1:c5gold: riverside resource improvements (like plantations, unchanged from vanilla).
+4:c5gold: palace
+1:c5gold: riverside non-farms at engineering. This would make riverside improvements be:

Farms: +2:c5food:
TPs: +3:c5gold:
Mines: +1:c5production:+1:c5gold:

+1:c5production: mines and lumbermills moved to Machinery.
This would delay the production boost somewhat, and also indirectly buff Crossbowmen (which are somewhat less-desirable than the knight, treb, or longsword techs right now). I do feel Metallurgy is too late though, and would improve an already-desirable beeline (Riflemen). Ideally we want to put bonuses like this on weak techs.
+1:c5gold: TPs at economics.
+1:c5production: mines at Combustion.
This would have the desirable side-effect of buffing tanks, which several people (including myself) feel are still underpowered compared to mech infantry, even with the combat mod buffs.

The problem with putting it on civil service is, say you have 10 riverside farms when you research the tech. It'll increase your food +10 and gold -10. That might seem sorta weird for your gold income to drop, which could be a problem if you were at or near 0 from trades.

Didn't realize anyone was reading the post as I was revising it, so I've deleted my old thoughts and copied them here. :)


0:c5gold: base river yield
+1:c5gold: riverside resource improvements (like plantations, unchanged from vanilla).
+4:c5gold: palace
+1:c5gold: riverside non-farms at engineering. This would make riverside improvements be:

Farms: +2:c5food:
TPs: +3:c5gold:
Mines: +1:c5production:+1:c5gold:

+1:c5production: mines and lumbermills moved to Machinery.
This would delay the production boost somewhat, and also indirectly buff Crossbowmen (which are somewhat less-desirable than the knight, treb, or longsword techs right now). I do feel Metallurgy is too late though, and would improve an already-desirable beeline (Riflemen). Ideally we want to put bonuses like this on weak techs.
+1:c5gold: TPs at economics.
+1:c5production: mines at Combustion.
This would have the desirable side-effect of buffing tanks, which several people (including myself) feel are still underpowered compared to mech infantry, even with the combat mod buffs.


This all sounds good. It's extensive enough to make sure it makes these notes make it into the readme!

I agree that a drop of several GPT might be a hard-to-understand mechanic, also very hard to cope with if you suddenly drop deep into red numbers!

I needed some time to understand your countersuggestion: Rivers would only buff RESSOURCE improvements before medieval era - CS would then add food to farms, while Engineering would add gold to all other standard improvements (mines, LMs, TPs).

It might work, although I can hardly find any enthusiasm for the idea after the disappointment about coastlines - I really thought this idea would work :( This has so little to do with natural settling patterns.

The really good thing about it: It would make all improvements equally viable next to rivers, without timing issues.

On the other hand, I'm not sure if Engineering is the best tech to put such a massive boost on, the path is strong enough with most units on it, happiness buildings, mines, lumbermills and much more. It would also lead to machenery with it's production boost, making CS an unattractive alternative.

I think a naval tech would be better. While sailing is to early and the next one (compass IIRC?) would still be faster to get than CS or Engineering, I see strong benefits from putting a general boost on a naval tech. It would encourage shipbuilding and island-settling very early, which is historic (e.g. phoenicians). A river boost with a naval tech makes sense thematically, too.

Another thing: didn't you say rivers should have the bonus on the tile, not on the improvement? Else the AI wouldn't recognize river worth?


EDIT: I just thought about my current game with 1.09.3 dev, and didn't you have a TP boost for building it on a coastal tile? Is there really no way to make coastlines similar to rivers regarding gold? The above changes should work for coastal land tiles just like they work for rivers, shouldn't they?

The reason for having an innate resource-improvement buff is UI limitations. Each individual improvement buffed by a tech is listed separately, therefore any tech which provides the +1g to resource improvements would be overwhelmed. I'm honestly not sure one way or another about the AI thing... they seem to ignore rivers in vanilla anyway, so I'm uncertain if the change to yields makes a difference.

The naval techs are sailing > optics > compass > astronomy. Optics might be an interesting place to put the gold boost. You still have to have trapping/mining to actually build the improvements, and going for optics + those techs means you have to delay calendar and the iron/horse reveals.

It's possible to put coastal bonuses on improvements, but not terrain. Basically I'd list every single improvement type in the coastal bonus table. This would be slightly different effects... 1) wouldn't affect the city center tile 2) undeveloped terrain wouldn't have the extra value. I can work around the first limitation by reducing Harbor maintenance.

Also, what I was saying about the -1:c5gold: for riverside farms is you'd trade -1g +1f pre-CS. This is similar to clearing a jungle: -1f +1p. Still, I figure it's probably best to go a different route.


Something else I've been considering is instead of adding a bonus to mines in the industrial era, remove the bonus to lumber mills. Basically the net effect of the B-TI mod would be to move this lumbermill bonus earlier in the tech tree (from Steam Power to Machinery) and include one for mines there too.

Also, this interestingly ties in with Druin's suggestion a long time ago (in private messages), way back in September:

Tech: Fertilizer
Additional Effect: Freshwater farms +1 :commerce:
In Game Reason: currently, there is no incentive to research this tech when your empire has even relatively few rivers because it is so easy to allow multiple cities access to those riverside farms.
Real Life Reason: fertilizer is not a substitute for a source of fresh water in farming. Presumably it allows "low water yield" farms to produce slightly better crops and thus +1 :food:. However, it would also allow high water yield farms to produce superior QUALITY crops that would demand a higher price on an international market. Therefore: more commerce.
This is what originally started thoughts of a Fertilizer buff. Since that time I've added the Aqueduct building to enhance city growth, and patch 1.135 also boosted growth. The original +1:c5food: vs +1:c5gold: I discussed with him has a slightly different perspective now, therefore it's reasonable to reassess this change. Basically, we could use his original suggestion of a gold bonus (which would be a nerf, since gold is the least valuable yield per-unit) but move it to a different improvement class, and concurrent with the Civil Service tech (slight buff due to earlier availability).


To sum it all up and simplify, the new mod details would be like:


+1:c5production: on Mines with Machinery.
+1:c5production: on Lumbermills moved from Steam Power to Machinery.
+1:c5gold: on coastal improvements.
+1:c5gold: on riverside Trading Posts with Optics.
Farming a desert now requires fresh water.
Forts deal 1 damage to adjacent enemies and cost 1:c5gold:/turn maintenance (same as roads).
Net yield of mining gold, silver, and gems is the same as vanilla, post-Machinery (basically, the 1:c5production: for resources is moved from the mine itself to Machinery)
(GP improvement changes)


To put it another way, improvements would be like this (on top of normal terrain yields):

http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=277758&stc=1&d=1294112370

The mod would partially simulate the riverside trading post emphasis Tomice was trying for, while keeping the changes relatively minimalistic, along the goals of the mods. This would also solve concerns of relative mine vs lumbermill value that have been brought up several times in the past. I'd keep the +1:c5gold: on water tiles for the Harbor to encourage settling on the coast instead of adjacent to it, and possibly buff the Seaport as well (perhaps with a +2:c5production: bonus for the city itself, like the Smokehouse's and Monastery's city+resource bonuses).

When we have full sdk access, I'd like to pursue the idea of adjacency-based improvement bonuses similar to the detailed ideas previously posted by Tomice, as an independent mod completely reworking CiV's overly-simplistic improvement mechanics.

On a terrain side note, did you ever nerf the large horse and especially iron yields, while increasing the frequency of those tiles?

To clarify a few limitations of the current tools, these options are not possible:


Non-stacking bonuses (+1 to rivers or coasts, but not both)
Building/tech bonuses to coastal water tiles (only option is "water" tiles, which includes coasts, oceans, and lakes)
Inherent bonuses of fresh water or coast adjacency (only can boost near rivers, or boost coasts with specific improvements)
Tech bonuses near coasts (only can boost fresh water with a tech)
City/mountain/coast adjacency bonuses with tech (only can be from turn 1)

One thing to remember is AI considerations will be irrelevant when we get full sdk access - we can code it to recognize things.

So a coastal land bonus is possible for buildings? I still think that a sea building would be a better way to go here, to enforce city placement on water. Since all the sea buildings are pretty weak imo, I'd suggest:

Lighthouse - Limit to +1:c5food: on sea resource tiles *only* and add +1:c5gold: on coastal tiles. Representing local fishing and transportation of goods.
Harbor - Add +1:c5food: on all water tiles. Representing more efficient fishing techniques overall.
Seaport - Add +1:c5gold: on all water tiles. Representing int'l trade.



Re: Other TP changes; I played a game with the dev build, and honestly it didn't feel too different. There were a few cases of a "sweet tile, which improvement should I put here?" feeling - but not as frequently as I would have liked. The most noticeable changes were slower gold growth at the beginning of the game, and overall less AI gold throughout the game. I think if tile yield changes are tied to buildings, the AI is much more trainable and will take greater advantage of the changes.


+1:c5gold: on riverside Trading Posts with Optics.

How does optics justifiably boost river trading? Sorry, but it doesn't make sense to me.. I understand that sailing may be too early for this from a gameplay perspective, but it's much more logical.

@Txurce: The quantity of strategic resources have been lowered, but I have not noticed any increase of nodes. If anything, my last few games have been quite iron- and horse-poor.:(

On a terrain side note, did you ever nerf the large horse and especially iron yields, while increasing the frequency of those tiles?

Yes he did, and I like it! Although the recent dev build reduces per-tile amounts of iron more than Thal said in his readme.

In vanilla, an iron tile gives you either 2 or 6 units. Thal said to halve it (which would be 1 or 3) while putting it on 50% more tiles, which would result in a 25% overall reduction. But I only found 1 or 2 iron per tile (standard ressource settings), which is a bit harsh.

I think 2 iron for every tile would be best. Still an overall reduction of 25%, but more reliable availability. Those single iron tiles are a bit underwhelming, nothing I'd settle in a desert for.

The recent game was very peaceful, I was friendly with most AIs and they were friends often with each other. I was in the situation very early that I'd piss of 5+ AIs when attacking any of my neighbours, so I decided to conquer the new world instead. What I wanted to say: I can't say much about actual warfare with fewer ressource units, or about other ressources than iron in general.

When we have full sdk access, I'd like to pursue the idea of adjacency-based improvement bonuses similar to the detailed ideas previously posted by Tomice, as an independent mod completely reworking CiV's overly-simplistic improvement mechanics.

I'm glad to hear this, although it's a pity we'll have to wait for months! I'll think a bit more about your suggestions for the current possibilities, there's much to be considered. Guess you're sleeping now anyway ;)

How does optics justifiably boost river trading? Sorry, but it doesn't make sense to me.. I understand that sailing may be too early for this from a gameplay perspective, but it's much more logical.

@Txurce: The quantity of strategic resources have been lowered, but I have not noticed any increase of nodes. If anything, my last few games have been quite iron- and horse-poor.:(

Renaming the tech is the smallest concern here. The first working telescope wasn't invented before 1608 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_telescope), so optics is in a weird place anyway! Even the compass was invented a few hundred years earlier... Just call the tech "transport ships" or whatever and it's fine. The real concern is gameplay here.

I do think ressource nodes are more common now, but it's probably hard to estimate. I guess one would have to generate a few duel maps in worldbuilder and count the number of iron to get a proof for the change (or is the amount displayed somewhere?).

Sorry, double post.

I do think ressource nodes are more common now, but it's probably hard to estimate. I guess one would have to generate a few duel maps in worldbuilder and count the number of iron to get a proof for the change (or is the amount displayed somewhere?).

I almost always play with custom mapscripts so that might have something to do with it. I took a quick look in the lua file at one point to make sure Thal didn't accidentally lower the nodes, but if it's the one I think it is, it's dozens of pages long! I'll give it another go tomorrow.

Btw, thanks for all the work you did on the last couple pages!:goodjob:

Btw, thanks for all the work you did on the last couple pages!:goodjob:

You mean me? Oh, that's just crazy procrastination activity keeping me from doing some more useful stuff I planned ;)

Also, I'm a realism freak, and TPs in their current form are annoying me big time! I'm using poncratias TP-redesigned mod, which helps a lot, but sadly he abandoned it. I gotta remove those spaghetti paths one day myself!


EDIT:

@Thal: About your current suggestions:

The plans for production improvements are good. I don't know if the steam power buff for LMs is necessary, little lategame experience, but it all sounds reasonable.
___

The plans for riverside/coastal improvements are a bit harder to understand. Do you mean that farmed, mined or lumbermilled tiles next to rivers shouldn't yield gold at all? That riverside gold would only come from TPs?

On the other hand, ALL land improvements next to coast would get +1:c5gold:?

Well, this would mean rivers would be nothing special at all until CS/Optics, when the TP and farm buffs for river adjacency would be unlocked. But coasts should have the +1:c5gold: from start?

This would mean ("+" means like, "-" means dislike):

+ Coasts would be very valuable
- Rivers would be only valuable after significant time
? unlocking the coast-based bonus with a naval tech, too, could be a good alternative (*)
? CS might be too expensive after the nerf


+ 2 improvements boosted instead of one near rivers -> more choice
- log transport in rivers was historically very common, lumbermills often riverside (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log_driving) (**)

+ overall gold income would be similar for most of the game (less riverside, more coastal gold)
+ the reinstated water tile buff from harbor is good IMO (otherwise those tiles are truly worthless)


(*) further strenghtening naval tech route and naval gameplay while also reducing the river/coast difference

(**) buffing all improvements except mines next to rivers makes no sense, though, at least not without mines being buffed somewhere else, like next to hills. But you could give gold to ALL riverside improvements with optics, to make riverside farms the only exception?


Summary:

I'd put both riverside and coastside gold buffs on compass (possibly renaming it and ev. making it a bit more expensive). Making it an essential tech for everyone would make naval gameplay common in the early game, like it should be (e.g. Phoenicians, Greeks). Islands would be a realistic option to settle on before midgame and empires centered around a body of water (Greek colonization, Roman empire) more likely - see picture below!

Giving all improvements +1 gold next to rivers (except farms) with a tech that comes around the same time as CS would be another option to consider.

CS should be cheaper (beaker cost like all other medieval techs) since it's nerfed, and to keep the "TPs are better than farms on rivers" period as short as possible.

I'm still sthinking about putting a non-military thing on mathematics, to buff archery, the whole path tends to be delayed too long IMO if you don't need siege for offensive actions. Only one gold from TPs before mathematics would be too harsh I guess? Coastal bonus on Optics, river bonus on Mathematics? Currency would be more logic, but might come to late. ALso, the whole path to machinery might be too strong then, compared the CS path.


http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/d/dc/Ancient_colonies.PNG/800px-Ancient_colonies.PNG

So a coastal land bonus is possible for buildings?

That's not possible either... I was just listing the specific suggestions people made I'd checked to see if it was an option. :)

I took a closer look at the resource placement code. It turns out it's set up rather strangely: food resources and small strategic nodes read the abundant/normal/sparse setting, but not large-quantity strategic nodes. Also, I realized larger numbers mean fewer nodes (the variable indicates tiles per node). So I was accidentally decreasing food and small-node strategics by -33%. I've now revised it to the proper behavior, increasing quantity of all strategic nodes +50%.

And yes, the AssignStartingPlots.lua file is over 10,000 lines of code. I mark code segments I work on with the "combat mod" comment.

Thanks for pointing out iron was set to 2. The reason this error happened was the the other resources around it are all the same value... Iron's a bit higher (likely due to siege using it).

Something I'd like to figure out is how to scale the graphics as well... all horse nodes for example visually display 2 horses walking around, which is the "small" graphic. I'd like it to show two for 1-per nodes and four for 2-per nodes, if anyone has a tip on where to change that.

The plans for riverside/coastal improvements are a bit harder to understand. Do you mean that farmed, mined or lumbermilled tiles next to rivers shouldn't yield gold at all? That riverside gold would only come from TPs?
Improvement yields are in the table, not terrain yields. The bulleted list is the new totality of the mod, rivers are unchanged from vanilla:

To sum it all up and simplify, the new mod details would be like:


+1:c5production: on Mines with Machinery.
+1:c5production: on Lumbermills moved from Steam Power to Machinery.
+1:c5gold: on coastal improvements.
+1:c5gold: on riverside Trading Posts with Optics.
Farming a desert now requires fresh water.
Forts deal 1 damage to adjacent enemies and cost 2:c5gold:/turn maintenance.
Net yield of mining gold, silver, and gems is the same as vanilla, post-Machinery (basically, the 1:c5production: for resources is moved from the mine itself to Machinery)
(GP improvement changes)



Can't put anything more on Currency due to UI limitations (if we did it'd be invisible to the player). It's the only tech in vanilla that uses all 5 slots on the UI.

If someone knows an easy way to make these UI elements have 6 slots it'd be a tremendous help...

Ok, I understand - finally ;)
I guess then my last post is useless due to misunderstanding yours...

Yes, I like your changes and will test them when you have a dev build ready. Thanks for your much appreciated effort!

On another topic, it's always irked me that oil improvements are so terrible. What do people think about a gold buff?

After playing a lot of post-pach vanilla games I'm hesitant to install this mod again. Not because it's bad but because it might be making terrain a bit too strong.

Lets take, for example, a simple non-riverside hill.
2:c5production: without improvement
3:c5production: with a mine
4.5:c5production: with a factory
6:c5production: if you add railroad

Making it +1 with Engineering it becomes 8:c5production: @ industrial. And that's excluding bonuses like Hiawatha, Augustus or even simple Armory or Workshop.

My point being: there are significant modifiers to base production in this game. Upping base production can have a nasty sideffect of tiles becoming too strong.

On another topic, it's always irked me that oil improvements are so terrible. What do people think about a gold buff?

Given how few uses there are for oil, that could be a decent way to balance the value of the resource.

Given how few uses there are for oil, that could be a decent way to balance the value of the resource.

Exactly.

Do you mean... on the tile itself? That seems reasonable.

Lighthouse - Limit to +1 on sea resource tiles *only* and add +1 on coastal tiles. Representing local fishing and transportation of goods.
Harbor - Add +1 on all water tiles. Representing more efficient fishing techniques overall.
Seaport - Add +1 on all water tiles. Representing int'l trade.
I like this stuff much more than I like giving tile yield bonuses for land tiles adjacent to coasts. If you want coast tiles to matter, boost the coasts, don't boost the regular land tiles.

Something else I've been considering is instead of adding a bonus to mines in the industrial era, remove the bonus to lumber mills. Basically the net effect of the B-TI mod would be to move this lumbermill bonus earlier in the tech tree (from Steam Power to Machinery) and include one for mines there too.

I like this. Say for example, +1 hammers for lumbermills at machinery, +1 hammers for mines at steam power is much better than having these improvements get boosted twice.
So, mines still get a boost, but the much earlier lumbermill boost still provides an incentive not to chop.

it's always irked me that oil improvements are so terrible. What do people think about a gold buff?
Gold boost to refinery improvement makes sense. Its so late that this could be quite high with no particular balance problems.

My point being: there are significant modifiers to base production in this game. Upping base production can have a nasty sideffect of tiles becoming too strong.
Agree with this very strongly, which is why I think the lumbermill/mine change above is a good one.

Do you mean... on the tile itself? That seems reasonable.

Yes, especially since Oil appears predominantly (always?) on Tundra, Desert or Ocean: all extremely weak tiles.

About the various coastal buffs:

It's not so much the "how", but the fact that coasts should be made really attractive. It is a pattern that was true for Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans as well as much later for the US. The Europeans settled in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, ..., not somewhere in the middle of the continent, avoiding coastlines.

Having a similar effect (in terms of gold) for both rivers and coasts is just logical, because they are both natural transport routes -> more trade -> more gold.

Boosts placed on coastal buildings also take a very long time to kick in (research multiple techs, build several buildings, aquire sea tiles), while the +1 gold on coastal land tiles is available very early.

It is a pattern that was true for Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans as well as much later for the US. The Europeans settled in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, ..., not somewhere in the middle of the continent, avoiding coastlines.
Well yes, but there's some selection bias there. Plenty of civs and empires weren't particularly coastal. Germany, France, Russia, China, India, Inca, Aztec, Maya, Mali, Zulu, Songhai, Siam, Egypt...

Boosts placed on coastal buildings also take a very long time to kick in
Yes, but this is the only way to compensate for the fact that workers don't work on water, so you can't build improvements on coastal tiles.
Unless we want to try to get workboats to build things, but I doubt the AI would be very good at that.

Having a similar effect (in terms of gold) for both rivers and coasts is just logical
I think we can agree that rivers in vanilla are OP, and there are a limited number of river tiles, whereas there are a huge number of land tiles adjacent to coasts.
I'd also argue rivers are far more valuable historically than coasts, because they also provide fresh water (which is the biggest reason for building near rivers) and they aren't vulnerable to storms, waves, getting lost, etc. so are much easier and more profitable to navigate - and you can do so even in a fairly basic boat. Sea-going vessels are much more expensive, and sea-trade much more dangerous.
I don't see why these need to be equivalent.

while the +1 gold on coastal land tiles is available very early
True, but why is this desirable?
And what are the gameplay effects of a massive increase in gold income?
And why do we want to make golden ages even more powerful (+ gold on every gold producing tile)?

Its already worth working a land tile adjacent to coast, just like any other, but its not really worth working coast tiles. So the solution seems to me to buff coastal cities, by boosting coast tiles, rather than boosting decent tiles already even for landlocked cities.

Well yes, but there's some selection bias there. Plenty of civs and empires weren't particularly coastal. Germany, France, Russia, China, India, Inca, Aztec, Maya, Mali, Zulu, Songhai, Siam, Egypt...


Yes, but this is the only way to compensate for the fact that workers don't work on water, so you can't build improvements on coastal tiles.
Unless we want to try to get workboats to build things, but I doubt the AI would be very good at that.


I think we can agree that rivers in vanilla are OP, and there are a limited number of river tiles, whereas there are a huge number of land tiles adjacent to coasts.
I'd also argue rivers are far more valuable historically than coasts, because they also provide fresh water (which is the biggest reason for building near rivers) and they aren't vulnerable to storms, waves, getting lost, etc. so are much easier and more profitable to navigate - and you can do so even in a fairly basic boat. Sea-going vessels are much more expensive, and sea-trade much more dangerous.
I don't see why these need to be equivalent.


True, but why is this desirable?
And what are the gameplay effects of a massive increase in gold income?
And why do we want to make golden ages even more powerful (+ gold on every gold producing tile)?

Its already worth working a land tile adjacent to coast, just like any other, but its not really worth working coast tiles. So the solution seems to me to buff coastal cities, by boosting coast tiles, rather than boosting decent tiles already even for landlocked cities.

I think there may be some confusion here. Unfortunately, all water tiles are deemed equal in the code, and therefore unmoddable. All "coastal tile" references are to *land* tiles along the ocean. Also unfortunate is the fact that my Lighthouse idea you quoted above is not possible either: Improvement bonuses cannot be tied to buildings.

Still no problem, just code ocean tiles to have lower yield (zero if necessary) without any buildings, and then have all the buildings boost all water tiles. So ocean tiles still aren't great, but coastal tiles can be very good with enough infrastructure.

So for example, we could have:
Ocean: 1 food
Coast: 1 food 2 gold
Fish (bonus): 1 food, 1 extra gold 1 extra food with fishing boats.
Pearls (bonus): 1 gold, 2 extra gold with fishing boats
Whales (bonus): 1 food, 1 production 1 gold with fishing boats

Lighthouse: boosts all water tiles by 1 food
Harbor: boost all water tiles by 1 gold, adds trade route access
Seaport: boost all water tiles by 1 food, boost fishing boats by 2 hammers.

So:
Early game with just a lighthouse, coast tiles give 2 food 2 gold, same as a trading post on grassland.
Early-midgame with lighthouse and harbor, they give 2 food 2 gold, as good as grassland trading post next to river
Late-game with lighthouse/harbor/seaport, a regular coastal tile gives 3 food 3 gold.

Still no problem, just code ocean tiles to have lower yield (zero if necessary) without any buildings, and then have all the buildings boost all water tiles. So ocean tiles still aren't great, but coastal tiles can be very good with enough infrastructure.

So for example, we could have:
Ocean: 1 food
Coast: 1 food 2 gold
Fish (bonus): 1 food, 1 extra gold 1 extra food with fishing boats.
Pearls (bonus): 1 gold, 2 extra gold with fishing boats
Whales (bonus): 1 food, 1 production 1 gold with fishing boats

Lighthouse: boosts all water tiles by 1 food
Harbor: boost all water tiles by 1 gold, adds trade route access
Seaport: boost all water tiles by 1 food, boost fishing boats by 2 hammers.

So:
Early game with just a lighthouse, coast tiles give 2 food 2 gold, same as a trading post on grassland.
Early-midgame with lighthouse and harbor, they give 2 food 2 gold, as good as grassland trading post next to river
Late-game with lighthouse/harbor/seaport, a regular coastal tile gives 3 food 3 gold.

But there is nothing in the code that allows the differentiation between coastal water tiles and ocean water tiles! All water tiles - including lakes - are the same from it's point of view, so coastal waters are unmoddable. It's absurd, but true.

Well, the game must recognize lakes - they have one more food IIRC?

But even if coast and ocean are the same, would buffing all water tiles to 2 gold 1 food without any building be overpowered? Remember how the tile aquiring automatic hardly ever takes water tiles - it will take quite a while until ocean tiles are even within your borders...

But there is nothing in the code that allows the differentiation between coastal water tiles and ocean water tiles
Huh, I misunderstood; I thought you were saying just that buildings could only give a bonus to all water tiles (ie you couldn't have a lighthouse that gave +1 food to coasts but not oceans), not that there is no longer such a thing as a coast terrain type and an ocean terrain type that could have different base tile yields.
So how does trireme-type restrictions work, if there is no Ocean terrain vs Coast terrain?

Well, the game must recognize lakes - they have one more food IIRC?
Agreed - lakes at least must be different?

But even if coast and ocean are the same, would buffing all water tiles to 2 gold 1 food without any building be overpowered?
Right, I don't see a huge problem here. And its easy to tweak the maintenance cost for the ocean buildings.

Huh, I misunderstood; I thought you were saying just that buildings could only give a bonus to all water tiles (ie you couldn't have a lighthouse that gave +1 food to coasts but not oceans), not that there is no longer such a thing as a coast terrain type and an ocean terrain type that could have different base tile yields.
So how does trireme-type restrictions work, if there is no Ocean terrain vs Coast terrain?


To clarify a few limitations of the current tools, these options are not possible:


Non-stacking bonuses (+1 to rivers or coasts, but not both)
Building/tech bonuses to coastal water tiles (only option is "water" tiles, which includes coasts, oceans, and lakes)
Inherent bonuses of fresh water or coast adjacency (only can boost near rivers, or boost coasts with specific improvements)
Tech bonuses near coasts (only can boost fresh water with a tech)
City/mountain/coast adjacency bonuses with tech (only can be from turn 1)



I remembered the second part, but not the first.:p It looks like coastal water tiles can indeed be given from turn 1, just not boosted later. Returning to your earlier post, Ahriman, essentially what you're proposing is a +1G on coastal water from the get-go and +1F with Seaport. Seems like a good starting place.

Returning to your earlier post, Ahriman, essentially what you're proposing is a +1G on coastal water from the get-go and +1F with Seaport
Yes, except that the fishing boat reduction is reduced, so fish tiles with boats still only give 3 gold.

I remembered the second part, but not the first.:p It looks like coastal water tiles can indeed be given from turn 1, just not boosted later. Returning to your earlier post, Ahriman, essentially what you're proposing is a +1G on coastal water from the get-go and +1F with Seaport. Seems like a good starting place.

I agree, that would be an alternative to the river-like boost. Not that I think a coast-adjacency boost is a bad concept...

Ahriman suggested no gold on ocean tiles from start, I'd leave it as 1 gold, though. Ocean tiles would hardly ever be useful otherwise.

Not sure about the +1 food from seaport. Coast/ocean water tiles have always been designed to have enough food to feed themselves with lighhouse, even in Civ4. A food surplus from every water tile might be too much. I suggested one food on the lighthouse building in another thread, to allow a small surplus from plain water tiles. We could so this and add another 1 or 2 food on seaport.

Ahriman suggested no gold on ocean tiles from start, I'd leave it as 1 gold, though
Maybe, but I think its fine for ocean tiles to be inferior to non-desert/tundra land tiles, unless they have a bonus resource.

Coast/ocean water tiles have always been designed to have enough food to feed themselves with lighhouse, even in Civ4
They do in this proposal.

A food surplus from every water tile might be too much
Well, it depends on what the other improvement yields are going to be.
If a river-farm is producing 5 food with no buildings, it doesn't seem unreasonable for a coastline to give 3 food 3 gold with 3 expensive buildings that collectively have significant maintenance costs. The whole point was to make coast tiles better than non-river land tiles. If they're capped out at 2 food 3 gold (compared to 2 food 3 gold non-river grassland trading post), and even that requires 2 buildings, then I'm not sure they're desirable.

You have a point about the 5-food farms and about the other stuff.

I agree coastal cities should be better than an inland city without river nearby, and maybe a bit weaker than cities with many river tiles. We should also consider yield changes from different eras, to not have the significance of water tiles shift too much from era to era (except there'd be a reason for it historically).

Ocean tiles may be weaker than grassland or not, i don't have a strong preference here. As long as coastal regions are an attractive place to settle and no longer best avoided, I'm fine.

This wiki article may be of interest, just in case anybody doubts the coast/inland balance in vanilla civ5 is broken:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landlocked

"Historically, being landlocked was regarded as a disadvantageous position."
"Coastal regions tended to be wealthier and more heavily populated than inland ones."

I've been thinking about something in my latest game . . .

Once we have enough luxuries to trade with partners and strategics to supply our army, what incentive do we really have to build at one location over another? High city-tile yields and low terrain yields are one factor that contributes to ICS-like casual city spam. There's not really much reason to settle at one location over another. How can we make this more interesting?


Improve luxury/strategic yields?
Add some benefit to additional resources, like Civ IV Corporations?
?
?
?

Smaller amount of happiness (1-2 instead of 5) from surplus ressources maybe?

In my last game I had the oddity that 10 of 12 civs turned from firendly to guarded in three turns time without much provocation. Maybe it was a self-sustaining chain of "your friends found reason to denounce you?

Anyway, ressource trading and RA's can be a non-option quite suddenly... :rolleyes: Maybe there should be some way to get extra happiness without willing trade partners?

Hmm... sounds like it might be an interesting idea for a new policy! Perhaps something in the Commerce tree that interacts with major civ trade relations? The +1:c5happy:/luxury doesn't really affect the value of excess resources much, just lets us possibly trade away one we previously needed.

I've been thinking about something in my latest game . . .

Once we have enough luxuries to trade with partners and strategics to supply our army, what incentive do we really have to build at one location over another? High city-tile yields and low terrain yields are one factor that contributes to ICS-like casual city spam. There's not really much reason to settle at one location over another. How can we make this more interesting?


Improve luxury/strategic yields?
Add some benefit to additional resources, like Civ IV Corporations?
?
?
?


Well, some sites are still clearly better than others from a purely city-development perspective, I think. Would you agree with this assessment?
1) Freshwater trumps non-freshwater, quite substantially. Particularly when rivers are involved.
2) The smokehouse changes have made food specials something to get moderately excited about, I think. Though perhaps food specials need another kick in the pants at some tech or another.
3) There's no workshop improvements, so a site with plenty of hills/forests is imperative for a production city
4) A mountain is great for a science city
5) Coastal slightly trumps non-coastal, as long as there aren't too many sea tiles. Think this mod is moving in the right direction to get this balance right.
6) Certain resources get a nice bonus from buildings
7) Plains vs grassland still provides an interesting distinction
8) Natural wonders are really worth settling near
9) Maybe it's just that I play mostly large maps, but I find it's rare that I have as many copies of resources as I would like for trading. So I think extra copies are still an incentive.

I think the design rationale behind relatively weak tile outputs from resources is that it avoids too much luck of the draw with capital sites and those crucial early turns; as well as avoiding an ICS where you settle lots of deliberately small cities where just about every citizen is working a special tile. Powerful resource tiles do sort of favour small cities

That's why I really like what you've done with the smokehouse; it gives you a bit of a bonus at the outset for a good site, but really rewards you when you start actually investing in it. Likewise buildings like the Monastery, Mint and Forge - and for me it just really feels like a rewarding mechanic when you get these special bonuses from buildings. They promote picking a "perfect" site to maximise the number of those resources you can get in a particular city's radius, since the one copy of the building pays off more. And I think it helps empower special resources while still promoting well-developed cities.

So I'd perhaps suggest a few more bonuses like that, though I'd be inclined to add the bonuses to existing buildings. To throw out a few ideas off the top of my head:
The market seems like an obvious place to add gold from whatever (luxury resources, probably, or even livestock and bananas); perhaps the harbour to add gold for sea resources. Watermill could add an extra food from wheat resources, perhaps?
Marble seems like an obvious candidate to add culture somewhere (though it's already quite powerful, I guess). Perhaps the museum?
Theatre could add additional happiness for worked dye and silk
No idea if this is even possible, but if you really wanted to empower resources, you could perhaps even have a building that makes worked resources produce GPPs.

The Monastery is good, but there's currently no culture modifier building before the Hermitage and then Broadcast Towers; to better promote a focused culture city, if it gave e.g. 2 culture +25% culture in the city per wine or incense, that could really make it very very worthwhile.
Likewise the mint might give e.g. +25% gold output per gold or silver resource; that's powerful, but gold and silver should be powerful

And yeah maybe a few more bonuses to resources with tech too? So that as time goes on, resource specials stay powerful
e.g iron with Steel or Metallurgy
Livestock with Refrigeration
Furs and Ivory with Rifling
Gold with Electronics
Oil just needs a tile boost
etc

Beyond that, I don't know if it's worth it to maybe bring some of the tiles back in line with Civ IV yields?
Grassland hills->1f1h (though this is then entirely better than a flat plain, by virtue of versatility)
Plains hills->0f2h
Desert hills (which are currently far better than flat desert)->1h
Floodplains->3f (I know there's no health in play, but it's maybe balanced by the worse desert hills)
Somehow weaken jungle a bit - perhaps require that trading posts chop it down (so you don't get the gold and the university science bonus)

Thank you for the thoughtful comments, I agree with everything you've said and I'm glad city placement feels more meaningful with the mod.

To be honest, I didn't realize how much I'm taking for granted by now! :lol:

The smokehouse for example... wasn't even really thinking of it. Your analysis of how it affects city placement convinced me of your point about the Harbor, I really like the idea of it interacting with resources!

What I could do is instead of harbor as +1:c5gold: on all water tiles, do +2:c5gold: on sea resources.


Rewards optimal city placement.
Precedent with the Seaport.
More powerful when resources are available, due to concentrated effect.
I recently added Ahriman's suggestion of +1:c5gold: on the coast terrain type. It makes sense to rather than simply have that as a pure addition, make it a move away from the harbor.
Overall the move is a slight buff to coastal regions compared to balance-combined v1.08, since it's the same bonus but available sooner.
This gives room to buff the Harbor again without overpowering it, with a bonus on sea resources.
Previously I'd avoided resource-specific buffs for the Harbor because most sea resources are luxuries, and luxuries didn't seem to need much of a buff. It's been a few months however, and with my new mindset on city placement decisions, I'm starting to feel an extra +1 here or there wouldn't hurt. It's halfway through the tech tree, after all.

I like the idea of watermill improving wheat too!


It's an otherwise unaltered resource.
The reason I'd left it alone until now is wheat was already the most powerful bonus resource in vanilla. It does feel a little bland nowadays though, now that I've had time to let everything really sink in.
1:c5gold: is generally less valuable than 1:c5food: so perhaps adding 1:c5gold: on wheat would make sense, limiting the effect of the buff.
Logically speaking, the smokehouse improves food supply, while the watermill might let the farmer produce more grain than needed and sell the excess for a profit. Wheat also does tend to appear near water sources, like rivers.


So to break it down by resource... these already exist:


Incense, Wine
2:c5culture: Monastery
Gold, Silver
3:c5gold: Mint
Fish, Pearls, Whales
2:c5production: Seaport
Cow, Deer, Sheep, Fish
1:c5food: Smokehouse
Bananas
1:c5food: (resource itself is better)
Horses
1:c5production:1:c5gold: Stable
Iron, Coal, Aluminum, Uranium
1:c5production: with Machinery (improvement)

And we could add more!


Wheat, Spices, Sugar
1:c5gold: Watermill
1:c5gold: Windmill
(Split in two because these are situational)
Pearls, Whales
2:c5gold: Harbor
Furs, Ivory, Gems
2:c5gold: Market
Cotton, Silk, Dye
1:c5culture: Opera House (chose this since Theater's already quite good)
Marble
2:c5culture: Museum
Oil
4:c5gold: Combustion (improvement)

These seem minor enough they should have a limited impact on a grand scale, but add a lot of variety to landscape-based build orders on a small scale.

I understand the reasons behind altering base terrain too, I like your resource idea more though since it will have a smaller, but interesting effect.

Beyond that, I don't know if it's worth it to maybe bring some of the tiles back in line with Civ IV yields?
Grassland hills->1f1h (though this is then entirely better than a flat plain, by virtue of versatility)
Plains hills->0f2h
Desert hills (which are currently far better than flat desert)->1h
Floodplains->3f (I know there's no health in play, but it's maybe balanced by the worse desert hills)
I once advocated some of these, but now I'm not sure. With flavor mapscripts, these kinds of things can severely mess up balance. Some civs seem more likely to start near deserts, others near plains, etc.
And other times it will just happen randomly.
Do we really want to mess up the balance like this?
I fear we may be solving a non-existent problem in a way that may cause significant side effects, particularly given existing terrain improvement AI and the like.

Somehow weaken jungle a bit - perhaps require that trading posts chop it down (so you don't get the gold and the university science bonus)
I'd do this. Jungle shouldn't be a superior terrain type.

If a river-farm is producing 5 food with no buildings, it doesn't seem unreasonable for a coastline to give 3 food 3 gold with 3 expensive buildings that collectively have significant maintenance costs. The whole point was to make coast tiles better than non-river land tiles. If they're capped out at 2 food 3 gold (compared to 2 food 3 gold non-river grassland trading post), and even that requires 2 buildings, then I'm not sure they're desirable.

Hard to argue with this.

Hard to argue with this.

I'd balance it by upping the maintenance cost on the seaport (and harbor if necessary).

Once we have enough luxuries to trade with partners and strategics to supply our army, what incentive do we really have to build at one location over another? High city-tile yields and low terrain yields are one factor that contributes to ICS-like casual city spam. There's not really much reason to settle at one location over another. How can we make this more interesting?

Continuing to reward developing food resources is one way to do this, as subsequent posts point out. But speaking more broadly, once a civ has all the resources it wants, where to settle a new city becomes a strategic choice, like filling in gaps for combined-city defense. Beyond this, I'm not sure it should matter. To me, we are speaking of a civ that basically wants to spread like a weed as a way to dominate the earth. A weed doesn't care where it grows, and it doesn't need to.

Incense, Wine
2:c5culture: Monastery
Gold, Silver, Gems
3:c5gold: Mint
Cow, Deer, Sheep, Fish
1:c5food: Smokehouse
Horses
1:c5production:1:c5gold: Stable
Aluminum, Iron, Coal, Uranium
1:c5production: with Machinery (improvement)

And we could add more!


Wheat, Spices, Sugar
1:c5gold: Watermill
1:c5gold: Windmill
(Split in two because these are situational)
Pearls, Whales
2:c5gold: Harbor
Furs, Ivory, Banana
2:c5gold: Market
Cotton, Silk, Dye
1:c5culture: Opera House (chose this since Theater's already quite good)
Marble
2:c5culture: Museum
Oil
4:c5gold: Combustion (improvement)


That's funny. I've had almost the exact same ideas for my own mod.

New
• Prison: req 1 iron. Gives +2:c5happy:.
• Police: req 1 horse. Gives +2:c5happy:.
• Airport: req 1 oil, gives 1:c5gold: per 4 pop.
• Auction House: +2:c5gold: +2:c5culture: to pearls/gems/marble
• Abattoir: +1:c5food:, +1:c5food: cow/sheep/deer
Changed
• Broadcast tower: req 1 iron.
• Theatre: +2:c5culture: for silk/cotton/dye.
• Stable: +2:c5production: to horses
• Barracks: +1:c5production: to fur
• Reseach lab: +5:c5science: to uranium, aluminum, whales
• Granary: +1:c5food: wheat
• Forge: +2:c5production: iron
• Market: +1:c5food: spices/sugar/banana

... Among other tweaks. The idea is that every resource has a relationship with a building and ancient resources stay relevant. Somehow it just feels really right and gives you extra incentive to consider city pacement and development.

I think you should definitely implement your initial take on it and see how it goes.

Thank you for the thoughtful comments, I agree with everything you've said and I'm glad city placement feels more meaningful with the mod.

To be honest, I didn't realize how much I'm taking for granted by now! :lol:

The smokehouse for example... wasn't even really thinking of it. Your analysis of how it affects city placement convinced me of your point about the Harbor, I really like the idea of it interacting with resources!

What I could do is instead of harbor as +1:c5gold: on all water tiles, do +2:c5gold: on sea resources.


Rewards optimal city placement.
Precedent with the Seaport.
More powerful when resources are available, due to concentrated effect.
I recently added Ahriman's suggestion of +1:c5gold: on the coast terrain type. It makes sense to rather than simply have that as a pure addition, make it a move away from the harbor.
Overall the move is a slight buff to coastal regions compared to balance-combined v1.08, since it's the same bonus but available sooner.
This gives room to buff the Harbor again without overpowering it, with a bonus on sea resources.
Previously I'd avoided resource-specific buffs for the Harbor because most sea resources are luxuries, and luxuries didn't seem to need much of a buff. It's been a few months however, and with my new mindset on city placement decisions, I'm starting to feel an extra +1 here or there wouldn't hurt. It's halfway through the tech tree, after all.

I like the idea of watermill improving wheat too!


It's an otherwise unaltered resource.
The reason I'd left it alone until now is wheat was already the most powerful bonus resource in vanilla. It does feel a little bland nowadays though, now that I've had time to let everything really sink in.
1:c5gold: is generally less valuable than 1:c5food: so perhaps adding 1:c5gold: on wheat would make sense, limiting the effect of the buff.
Logically speaking, the smokehouse improves food supply, while the watermill might let the farmer produce more grain than needed and sell the excess for a profit. Wheat also does tend to appear near water sources, like rivers.


So to break it down by resource... these already exist:


Incense, Wine
2:c5culture: Monastery
Gold, Silver, Gems
3:c5gold: Mint
Cow, Deer, Sheep, Fish
1:c5food: Smokehouse
Horses
1:c5production:1:c5gold: Stable
Aluminum, Iron, Coal, Uranium
1:c5production: with Machinery (improvement)

And we could add more!


Wheat, Spices, Sugar
1:c5gold: Watermill
1:c5gold: Windmill
(Split in two because these are situational)
Pearls, Whales
2:c5gold: Harbor
Furs, Ivory, Banana
2:c5gold: Market
Cotton, Silk, Dye
1:c5culture: Opera House (chose this since Theater's already quite good)
Marble
2:c5culture: Museum
Oil
4:c5gold: Combustion (improvement)

These seem minor enough they should have a limited impact on a grand scale, but add a lot of variety to landscape-based build orders on a small scale.

I understand the reasons behind altering base terrain too, I like your resource idea more though since it will have a smaller, but interesting effect.

Excellent, these proposals look great. I'm a big fan of dynamic buildings - aside from being more fun, they're a good incentive for more city specialization.

Re: Wheat - What if the Watermill gave a small % bonus (say 20%) to growth with wheat, and the Aqueduct had a non-freshwater requirement? So you couldn't build them both in the same city. This would mess with the Baths NW and I'm not sure how to reconcile it - I don't suppose NWs have an option for either/or building reqs so that it could be built after Aqueducts *or* Watermills were built in all cities?

Re: Jungles - why not remove the (kind of preposterous) science bonus from the Uni and move it to Penicillin? At that point you could add it to the base terrain without worry that it'd be OP, since Unis will already be built in most all cities anyway. Could also buff them to more than 2:c5science: to give incentive not to chop jungle tiles at the beginning. As it is of course Unis usually come so quickly there is almost never a reason to chop jungles, and this way you'd be forced to live with them for most of the game.

Note - ATM, Mint does not affect Gems. Should it, or should another building? Market could become too powerful with them as well, but maybe Ivory could be buffed by the Circus instead.

Re: Jungles - why not remove the (kind of preposterous) science bonus from the Uni and move it to Penicillin? At that point you could add it to the base terrain without worry that it'd be OP, since Unis will already be built in most all cities anyway. Could also buff them to more than 2:c5science: to give incentive not to chop jungle tiles at the beginning. As it is of course Unis usually come so quickly there is almost never a reason to chop jungles, and this way you'd be forced to live with them for most of the game.


This is fantastic.

Re: Wheat - What if the Watermill gave a small % bonus (say 20%) to growth with wheat, and the Aqueduct had a non-freshwater requirement? So you couldn't build them both in the same city.
I'd prefer to keep them separate. The aqueduct is important in establishing large cities, a river city should still be able to grow large even if it doesn't have wheat.
I'm a bit nervous about watermill and wheat synergy too.
Rivers are already good. Wheat is sometimes placed in areas not near rivers, to make those zones more attractive. I don't think we need to buff rivers more.

Re: Jungles - why not remove the (kind of preposterous) science bonus from the Uni and move it to Penicillin? At that point you could add it to the base terrain without worry that it'd be OP, since Unis will already be built in most all cities anyway. Could also buff them to more than 2 to give incentive not to chop jungle tiles at the beginning.
Very good idea.

I'd prefer to keep them separate. The aqueduct is important in establishing large cities, a river city should still be able to grow large even if it doesn't have wheat.
I'm a bit nervous about watermill and wheat synergy too.
Rivers are already good. Wheat is sometimes placed in areas not near rivers, to make those zones more attractive. I don't think we need to buff rivers more.


I feel the same.

I also agree the power of jungle trading posts is weird. The positive thing is that at least a few of them are left by the modern age, unlike civ4. Seek's suggestion might be very good if it leaves enough reason not to chop every jungle to get potentially more valuable plains.

Slightly off-topic, but I thought I'd put it here sice Thal uses/recommends "TP-redesigned"

I created an alpha-stage TP graphics mod in addition to Poncratias' "TP-redesigned". I'd be happy if you tell me what you think! :)

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=10106144#post10106144

Looks great Tomice! I look forward to using it. :)

I've been revising improvement bonuses now that some of the intended goals (such as boosting growth and production) have been helped in other ways (like the Aqueduct and Workshop). Some people have said these improvement bonuses are too early, others have said they're too late. To reach a compromise, and following the precedent of the farm tech split, I've completed this for the next version:


Access to water for irrigation, trade, or water-powered machinery benefits improvements in the Medieval era.


+1:c5food: on freshwater Farms with Civil Service.
+1:c5gold: on freshwater Trading Posts with Compass.
+1:c5production: on freshwater Mines and Lumbermills with Machinery.

Improvements without water access advance at the start of the Industrial Revolution.

+1:c5food: on non-freshwater Farms with Fertilizer.
+1:c5gold: on non-freshwater Trading Posts with Economics.
+1:c5production: on non-freshwater Mines with Dynamite.
+1:c5production: on non-freshwater Lumbermills with Steam Power.


This also ensures individual improvement types stay relatively balanced between one another, and rivers are only advantageous for a short time period (the Compass and Economics techs in particular are very close).

It's not possible to do stuff like this for river/non river, so I feel freshwater/non-freshwater is a reasonably close compromise. It does make sense realistically. Most lakes have small river networks leading into them, even if not indicated on big maps, and these smaller rivers can be used for irrigation/trade/power. Also, since lakes are relatively rare on most map scripts it shouldn't have a significance difference in gameplay.

Seems like a reasonable design. You're losing any advantage of lumbermills over mines, but I'm not sure its that big a deal.

Lets test it.

Thal. Resource yield changes linked to buildings look great. Just one small note, you don't seem to take into account the +25% that marble gives to wonder production in a nearby city, so that resource probably doesn't need to be buffed. Otherwise great job! :goodjob:

That's a very clear design, though I found the old version regarding rivers (only TPs and farms are better next to fresh water) good as well, maybe even better. But I'm open to testing stuff.

I do admit rivers were very important for log driving historically, so this makes perfect sense. I don't think mines profited a lot from freshwater access, but I'm not sure?

_______________________

On the topic of coast vs. inland vs. riverside balance:

I do admit the coastal adjacency mechanic had bad results, thanks to Ahriman for finding the problem. But as of dev 10911, coasts are very underwhelming again.

Coastal water without ressource has a maximum output of 2:civ5gold: 2:civ5food: (already with the lighthouse, no further improvement), making it equal to river-less grassland TPs. That's somewhat useful, but far from good terrain.

I believe normal water tiles should either get 1 additional food or gold with the harbor. The harbor itself has an questionable effect (the trade route might often not be needed, since you need roads for unit movement anyway, and the 25% ship production is rarely necessary), so buffing it would not be unreasonable.

This way, water tiles would either be a very good way to earn money or a good alternative to get a food surplus if no river is nearby.

The ratio behind it is that coastal cities should be a bit stronger than inland cities without rivers, but still a bit weaker than river-dominated cities, as it was historically AFAIK.




When I look for a spot to build a city, I look for LRs and SRs first, of course. Then for rivers, lakes and food ressources, assuring that the city can grow. Next for enough pruduction to build the necessary buildings. Finally also for the possibility to build a lot of stuff that depends on terrain (ships, watermills, parks, observatories,...).

Grassland and 1.09.11 water tiles don't help much in any of these points. Their only advantage is that they can feed themselves. Now that you boost non-river TPs with astronomy, water tiles really leave a lot to be desired. Also, grassland is more versatile since it can be used to give a food surplus (especially after fertilizer).

Personally, I think 3 food with harbor would be best, as there's already a lot of ways to earn money.

That's a very clear design, though I found the old version regarding rivers (only TPs and farms are better next to fresh water) good as well, maybe even better.
Yeah, I tend to lean this way, I thought the buff for lumbermills at machinery and mines at steam power was good design.
I'd rather that hill-mines capped out at 4 production, not 5.

I believe normal water tiles should either get 1 additional food or gold with the harbor
I agree that harbor should give +1 gold to water tiles, so a lighthouse + harbor coast tile gives 2 food 3 gold.
+1 food instead of gold for the harbor also seems feasible.

If necessary, boost harbor maintenance up to 4 gold.

Then again, a four-maintaince harbor would possibly mean -1:civ5gold: on every coastal tile in practice, since a city might not work more than 4 water tiles.

If the trade route is not necessary, the harbor has a lot of maintainance for no effect.

Do you think that people would avoid building roads if harbors had less than 3 maintainance? To me, thy have a lot of military benefit, so I usually still build them as long as the distance is not too big.
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About improvement effects, I meant I was happy with the way 1.09.5 handled them (except coastal gold, which was wrong). I guess you mean another version?

Then again, a four-maintaince harbor would possibly mean -1:civ5gold: on every coastal tile in practice, since a city might not work more than 4 water tiles.
I think you should pay something for the trade route value and the naval production bonus.

Do you think that people would avoid building roads if harbors had less than 3 maintainance?
I think people will often connect a city with a harbor rather than roads, if its far enough away, if they were going to build the harbor anyway, if they were never likely to move units too or from that city, etc.

About improvement effects, I meant I was happy with the way 1.09.5 handled them (except coastal gold, which was wrong). I guess you mean another version?
Sorry, I've lost track of which version was which.
I quite liked the version where mine was +1 hammer, +1 hammer with steam power while lumber mill was +1 hammer, +1 hammer at machinery. And no extra hammer bonus for fresh water.

@bobbyboy29
The culture buff for marble occurs so late in the game I don't think it matters whether it's there or not. I just added it for consistency: all resources have an effect somewhere.


@Tomice
Mining with water has been common in history when rock in mineral veins is too loose to safely tunnel. A method of flood-driven mining called hushing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hushing) had large-scale use by the Romans, and there's also placer mining (the use of sluices, made famous from gold prospecting during gold rushes).

The harbor does give 1 merchant slot, and now +2:c5gold: on pearls+whales as well. With any of these criteria met the harbor pays for its maintenance:


Pearl/whale resource and market+bank.
Two pearl/whale resources and no market+bank.
Specialist economy policies acquired.
>3 tiles to next city and no military need for a road.
Railroad tech researched... instant +50%:c5production: from all harbors! Railroads are very expensive at 2:c5gold:/tile.

In addition, a city can build a single lighthouse/harbor/etc and work an indefinite number of water tiles without the need for workers to build trading posts. That either saves time because the worker can be doing other things, or saves money because the empire needs one less worker.

Water resources also have extremely high yields. Fish caps at 5:c5food:2:c5production:4:c5gold:2:c5science:, which I think is more than anything else. Sea resources just take longer to max out than land resources. While non-resource water is inferior to many land tiles, resource-water is much higher, and concentrated yields are typically more valuable.

The reason I like the harbor with specialized bonuses is 1) makes sense, as major harbors are typically built where the landscape favors it 2) keeps the distinction between the generalist-Lighthouse and specialist-Harbor separate. I had +1:c5gold: from water tiles on the harbor for a few months but find the new incarnation more fun. If we were to add flat bonuses to water tiles, I'd rather put them somewhere else.


@Ahriman (http://forums.civfanatics.com/member.php?u=144506)
I might have made a typo, but mines follow this progression:


2:c5production: base
+1:c5production: improvement
+1:c5production: from tech (machinery or dynamite, depending on wet/dry, respectively)

If you're thinking about things with different numbers (mines at 5 max), that might have been why your statement about lumbermills puzzled me. Mines cap at 4:c5production:, while lumbermills are 1:c5food:3:c5production:. I think the value of 1:c5production: vs 1:c5food: is close enough it'd depend on what the city has access to on other tiles. A city surrounded by rough terrain and few bonus resources will probably value the 1:c5food: higher.

The place lumbermills really shine, however, is due to the fact forests can appear on flatland or hills. When a city's surrounded by flatland, those forests become an invaluable source of production.

Fish caps at 5242,
That is way too high, I'd take some of those out.
If you boost the base coast gold yield, I'd reduce the fish yield to compensate.

And I don't see why they should get science?

The reason I like the harbor with specialized bonuses is 1) makes more sense, as major harbors are typically built where the landscape favors it 2) keeps the distinction between the generalist-Lighthouse and specialist-Harbor separate.
This seems like a reasonable option, but I thought the general idea was to make coasts everywhere more valuable, so that with the appropriate infrastructure coast tiles were 2 food 3 gold. If coasts are only good where they have bonus tiles, then we aren't really making coasts much more valuable; coasts are already good when they have bonus tiles. I thought the goal was to make all coastal settlement slightly more valuable.

I might have made a typo, but mines follow this progression:
2 base
+1 improvement
+1 from tech (machinery or dynamite, depending on wet/dry, respectively)
Ok, I misunderstood, I thought the bonuses at machinery and dynamite stacked.
My bad; reading comprehension fail.

I still like the design a little where lumbermills get boosted before mines, to give you an incentive not to chop forest-hills, but its not a big deal.

That is way too high, I'd take some of those out.
If you boost the base coast gold yield, I'd reduce the fish yield to compensate.

And I don't see why they should get science?

Keep in mind "coast" tiles have a max yield of 2:c5food:2:c5gold:2:c5science:, with the lighthouse and lab. The fish itself adds +3:c5food:2:c5production:2:c5gold: (with a fishing boat, smokehouse, and seaport). The numbers are all detailed in the TI/CD readmes. The resources are generally understood to be part of the discussion because they're so common almost any coastal city can get one. There's been many comments over the weeks that coastal cities are still underwhelming, even when built next to resources. That's sorta been the point of doing all these coastal experiments lately. :)

There was a long discussion about coastal cities... I'll try and find it, though it was back in October I think, and I don't remember if it was in this thread or the combined one...

Edit: Ahh here it is (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=9728924#post9728924)... goes on for a page or few.

In particular though, equalizing early yields between land/water isn't a terribly thrilling idea because it would make island cities more powerful than land, since none of those tiles would actually need to have a worker improve them... can just buy a lighthouse+harbor in a brand new city and poof! Everything fully developed. :lol:

This is one reason why I put the final bonus on a very high-tier building, the research lab.

There's also the issue of city placement boredom I described earlier, and water's just about the most monotonous terrain we can get. :D Putting good bonuses on the resources keeps things interesting.

Keep in mind "coast" tiles have a max yield of 222, with the lighthouse and lab
Ah, the science is from research lab. I guess that isn't so unreasonable, its so incredibly late game, and otherwise weak.

since none of those tiles would actually need to have a worker improve them... can just buy a lighthouse+harbor in a brand new city and poof! Everything fully developed.
Yes, but there's the infrastructure cost and maintenance cost, which can be increased if need be.

I don't see a problem with coast tiles with buildings being as good as land tiles with improvement.
If you don't have that, then coast cities are going to remain undesirable.

And I don't see a problem with being able to buy your infrastructure with gold for the sea. Its not that overpowered, and its the only way I can see sea tiles being useful, and coasts *should* be good in the early game, that was the whole design purpose I thought.

Hi Thalassicus,

I like your proposals for improving special resources!

That division of base tile improvement with rivers/is a very clear, focused design; I do wonder if it's maybe introducing too many resources into the world, with all the follow-on effects that it might have. Gold in particular; I sort of wonder whether all these gold boosts then increases to costs (eg city state bribes and research agreements) is not maybe chasing our tails a bit. It also might have the minor negative of making the tech tree look very messy. Worth trying though!

Thought I'd throw this out there as a counter-idea: rivers are already very powerful, and there seems to be an awful lot of gold around in the very early game (I can build scout/worker/warrior/settler and then often buy a second worker, which just feels wrong, balance-wise). And this mod is also adding a fair amount of extra gold. I wonder whether it might be worth limiting the riverside gold bonus to only trading posts (and plantations). That way, there's a genuine question of what to do with the valuable riverside tiles - do you take the +1 gold or the +1 food? I guess the trade-off with production is that it's relatively rarer anyway - so the choice of whether to use that valuable tile for more production or a bit of production+trade is still a meaningful one. It also makes coastal cities relatively more powerful without adding enormous gold yields to them.

Just a thought, and I know it goes against all civ tradition, but I think it could perhaps be interesting.

I've now played most of a game with the latest dev mods, including Free Research and WWGD. I've commented on the latter two in their own threads. With the caveat that I built more TP's than usual, I felt that I had more gold than usual... enough to invest in R.A.'s eventually despite the nerf (which amazingly enough feels about right).

Earlier in this thread's discussion I advocated raising upgrade rather than unit purchase costs. I felt the goal was to encourage building new units instead of upgrading, more than it was to encourage building over purchasing. As such it was a nerf to the warmonger with the large standing army.

After playing I feel more strongly that purchase costs should not have gone up. The reason is that it hurts the builder, who is sometimes forced to rush-buy units when attacked by a much bigger neighbor. This happened to me, and even with more gold in the till than usual, I was very limited as to how many new units I could produce quickly. Given Civ 5's slow build times and the absence of a draft, I think having an emergency lever like rush-buying should be more affordable than it is in the dev mod.

I do wonder if it's maybe introducing too many resources into the world, with all the follow-on effects that it might have.

It's something I've been keeping in mind, for sure. This is one reason I went for consistency in the recent additions: all the gold boosts are the same +2 for example, all improvement bonuses are on logical techs with equivalence between the buffs.

To put it in a straightforward manner, I feel that combat in Civ V is more complex than Civ IV: flanking, ranged units, multiple units instead of a stack acting as a single unit, and so on. Conversely, I feel improvement and city development was dumbed down - all corruption/unhealthiness/happiness rolled into a single global value, happiness/gold/science chains simplified, windmills and watermills removed as a terrain improvement, bonus resources not tradeable.

Basically, the build aspect was made so very simple I don't think it'll be confusing to have some extra complexity. I understand the importance of making it accessible and easy to comprehend though, which is why I'm putting lots of work into making clear, concise tooltips. :)

One thing I've been thinking about is consolidating some of them. While it makes sense to give culture for some and gold for others, for consistency's sake I might combine a few things.

I do feel the gold buffs are small enough they shouldn't have much impact on overall income. I agree removing the +1g from rivers would be ideal, but unfortunately we tried that and it didn't work out -- the code that analyzes terrain value for placing resources and choosing start locations doesn't check yields improved through other sources.

I agree with you about unit purchasing Txurce that 50% was too high. Can't know till we try though. :D

I agree with you about unit purchasing Txurce that 50% was too high. Can't know till we try though. :D

I'm happy to be the guinea pig who's rolling in gold but gets no influence with the CS and can't afford to buy two infantrymen!

Basically, the build aspect was made so very simple I don't think it'll be confusing to have some extra complexity. I understand the importance of making it accessible and easy to comprehend though, which is why I'm putting lots of work into making clear, concise tooltips. :)
Sorry, I wasn't expressing myself very well. I'm not really fussed by adding more complex bonuses here and there, particularly to buildings/special resources.
I just think the danger is more an inflationary one; the total amount of gold in the world is rising and at the same time we're looking at how much to increase the costs of upgrading/city states/research agreements/building maintenance, etc. Suddenly there's a whole bunch more things that need to be balanced against each other, I guess.
I guess I'm just more reflecting that another way to think about things (or hopefully a complementary way to go) is to make the effects of these bonuses more special by virtue of their yields being exceptional.
Talking about the granary and watermill got me thinking; from the start I’ve always had the feeling that those (and a few other things, like the original Tradition +1 food bonus) were relics from a period in the design when excess food was intended to relatively scarce, so that these really would be extremely worthwhile buildings on the level of previous games’ granaries. The watermill actually feels like it was designed with the idea that +4 excess food was so exceptional that it was worth paying an excess marginal cost to stack it on top of the granary. Obviously the game moved away from this food scarcity, leaving food resources and these buildings behind, but I think it’s an intriguing concept (in an abstract sense - I'm not suggesting you actually ought to nerf excess food, which I think is pretty good at the moment).

But extending this concept to gold; by making gold more abundant from everywhere (rivers, trading posts, cheaper markets etc), it’s then more necessary to jack up the gold bonuses of special resources etc and then really rebalance everything that relies on gold.
At the moment, settling riverside gives you buckets of gold without you needing to really do anything – and you can build a lot of infrastructure etc without worrying about going into the red, just from riverside tiles. I think you could possibly make gold a bit more special, and something you have to put a little work into, by removing this river gold for everything but plantations and trading posts. So if you want money, you have to settle luxuries, build trading posts (and possibly even instead of riverside farms), and settle next to the sea. Rivers still give you extra gold, but less so - and they have other very powerful advantages. Coastal cities and luxuries (with the tamer end of boosts already canvassed) become more important because they’re providing a comparatively larger percentage of your gold income (which hopefully remains similar overall, or a bit lower, particularly early). Just seems like it might be a neater, more parsimonious way to balance things out without going for ever-increasing yields. Also seems to me like it might favour a more focused approach to city development, which I think would make that side of the game more interesting.

Anyway it might be a spectacular failure of an idea, I just think it might be food for thought. I'm planning to try it myself as soon as I can properly figure out the Civ V modding system...

I see what you're saying, the issue is simply that if rivers don't have a basic yield bonus the resource placement / start location choosing engine doesn't know they're there, and balances resources accordingly. :)

However, I've done some work learning how this placement system works, so when I have some time I'll figure out if there's a way to deal with this. I do like the idea of making rivers special only once improvements are built nearby.

I see what you're saying, the issue is simply that if rivers don't have a basic yield bonus the resource placement / start location choosing engine doesn't know they're there, and balances resources accordingly. :)

However, I've done some work learning how this placement system works, so when I have some time I'll figure out if there's a way to deal with this. I do like the idea of making rivers special only once improvements are built nearby.

So it would mess with map generation? Or starting site placement? I knew there'd be a catch!
The AI already seems to make a stubborn point of placing all its cities one tile away from rivers anyway, so it probably can't hurt city placement too much :p

I do feel the gold buffs are small enough they shouldn't have much impact on overall income.
I don't think this is the case.

The important thing to remember, is that a lot of gold is going to building and unit and road maintenance costs.

So if in vanilla you had 100 gold income and 60 gold of costs, a 20% increase in gold revenue (to 120) is actually a 50% increase in gold profit per turn (120 - 60, rather than 100 - 60).

And its *excess* gold that gives us gold to buy stuff with.

So the buff for trading post gold and coast gold and building gold from special resources and cheaper buildings and buffed merchant specialists, combined, is non-trivial.
This is why I suggested reducing city trade yields (a la Alpaca's mod) to partially compensate.
I'd also consider increasing maintenance costs for some of the most powerful buildings; buildings with large % yields but significant upkeep costs are a great way to fight ICS and lead to "tall" developed cities.

I think Polycrates has a strong point about the risks here.