Leaders

[Txurce]

In a patch, Firaxis changed in c++ how PlotCultureCostModifier attribute works, shared by both buildings. So now we're at:

• Krepost is a world wonder reducing border costs -50% in all cities, two stacking to -85%.
• Angkor Wat matches its tooltip.

Classic example of fixing a bug in one location causing more serious bugs in another!

OMG. Is there a way to negate that?

 

[Mentos]

Better too late than never requested: Any chance to give Suleiman/Ottomans their Barbary Corsairs feature back?

It’s a bit drastic to completely remove a feature where other mods can offer tweaks. A useless feature can be the motivation of someone else if you get my meaning.
That nation feature would work pretty well together with my Barbarians! mod which offers more ships to Barbarians until ironclads and submarines.

I’d also call that feature quite fundamental to the Ottomans.
Historically seen, this alliance was such big headache to many European coastal nations that even the US sent ships to finally get rid of all those corsairs.

"Pirates captured thousands of ships, and long stretches of coast in Spain and Italy were almost completely abandoned by their inhabitants, discouraging settlement until the 19th century. From the 16th to 19th century, pirates captured an estimated 800,000 to 1.25 million people as slaves."

Maybe reduce Governance to 25% and add Barbary Corsairs back.

More love to pirates!

 

[Describer]

Ottoman +33 to all great people seems very overpowered when combined with Babylonian only +50 only to great scientist. I'd say return +100 to Babylon, AI was never able to manage it properly anyway.

 

[Thalassicus]

@Mentos
The main reason I changed things is to move away from traits and uniques dependent upon map script selection and map generation luck. These are things decided before the game starts, meaning a leader who relies more on that than other leaders leaves less control to the player's strategic decisions throughout the course of the game.

@Describer
The Babylon trait gives a free great scientist, the main benefit now that early scientists are hard to come by.

 

[Ahriman]

Bablyon still feels weak relative to Ottomans. 1 great scientist isn't *that* valuable.
Bowmen are ok UU but not amazing, and the walls of Babylon are fairly blah. Whereas Janissiaries are still awesome, and Sipahis are decent.

 

[Txurce]

As long as the consensus isn't that the Ottomans are clearly the pick of the litter, then I don't see any need to nerf them or buff the Babs in order to equalize those two out of the entire bunch. The focus should be on any remaining civs that seem underpowered compared to the mean.

 

[Thalassicus]

I've been thinking about this a bit. Since there's fewer scientist slots in the early game now than before and lighbulbing has been nerfed with Alpaca/Seek's mod, it wouldn't hurt to increase Babylon's trait up to 67%. I've done so now.

 

[civcivv]

Somewhat unrelated to Leaders, but I find with the change to Libraries I seem to be producing Great Artists nonstop, especially once you got a Temple in each city.

Just way too many buildings giving artist slots I suppose, and majority of wonders giving artists too.

And yes, I do normally leave stuff on default unless I'm rushing a wonder with production focus.

 

[Thalassicus]

I reduced the slots in the temple from 2 to 1 for the next version, which should change things a bit.

 

[Ahriman]

I do worry that the AI is programmed to value culture very high, and so that with artists giving 2 culture, the AI will fill up every artist slot it can get, and spam landmarks.

The last game I played, the AI had 3 landmarks around its capital - though I'm guessing it was going for a culture victory.

 

[Thalassicus]

Looking at the GENERAL_ECONOMIC city specialization, you're absolutely right:

<Row>
  <CitySpecializationType>CITYSPECIALIZATION_GENERAL_ECONOMIC</CitySpecializationType>
  <FlavorType>FLAVOR_CULTURE</FlavorType>
  <Flavor>30</Flavor>
</Row>
<Row>
  <CitySpecializationType>CITYSPECIALIZATION_GENERAL_ECONOMIC</CitySpecializationType>
  <FlavorType>FLAVOR_PRODUCTION</FlavorType>
  <Flavor>20</Flavor>
</Row>
<Row>
  <CitySpecializationType>CITYSPECIALIZATION_GENERAL_ECONOMIC</CitySpecializationType>
  <FlavorType>FLAVOR_GOLD</FlavorType>
  <Flavor>20</Flavor>
</Row>
<Row>
  <CitySpecializationType>CITYSPECIALIZATION_GENERAL_ECONOMIC</CitySpecializationType>
  <FlavorType>FLAVOR_GROWTH</FlavorType>
  <Flavor>20</Flavor>
</Row>
<Row>
  <CitySpecializationType>CITYSPECIALIZATION_GENERAL_ECONOMIC</CitySpecializationType>
  <FlavorType>FLAVOR_SCIENCE</FlavorType>
  <Flavor>20</Flavor>
</Row>
<Row>
  <CitySpecializationType>CITYSPECIALIZATION_GENERAL_ECONOMIC</CitySpecializationType>
  <FlavorType>FLAVOR_HAPPINESS</FlavorType>
  <Flavor>20</Flavor>
</Row>
<Row>
  <CitySpecializationType>CITYSPECIALIZATION_GENERAL_ECONOMIC</CitySpecializationType>
  <FlavorType>FLAVOR_GREAT_PEOPLE</FlavorType>
  <Flavor>10</Flavor>
</Row>

One catch is with any military-related city specialization culture ceases entirely, so the risk of reducing their culture priority here might be the player could theoretically go to war to block policy progress of the AI, never intending to actually invade. Still, I think I can play with the numbers a bit in several city specializations to result in an overall reduction of culture priority.

 

[Sneaks]

Be really careful with those values. I tried lowering culture once before, and it lead to AI cities prioritizing a lot over monuments, and thus no border growth at all for a long time.

 

[Sneaks]

Big question:

Why did you give Ottomans a starting position in the desert? This does not make much sense at all historically or otherwise. While parts of their empire at its largest included desert, most of their most famous cities were either coastal or in Anatolia, neither of which qualify for the tag.

 

[Ahriman]

Agreed, that doesn't really make much sense.

 

[Thalassicus]

You're absolutely right. I mistakenly thought their empire overlapped more with the Islamic Caliphate from a millenia before, didn't realize the Ottomans never conquered Persia or the lower part of the Arabian peninsula.





Instead of a desert bias, how about a tundra exclusion? It'd place them in about the same region but without an actual desert requirement.

At the most fundamental gameplay level, a bias/exclusion determines the balance of resources-to-yields a civilization has access to. Favoring desert or tundra swings the balance towards regions with up to 3-4 times the resource density, while favoring away from those regions greatly increases yields at the cost of fewer resources. I think the mechanic is a potentially rather interesting and underutilized way to tweak balance of civs outside of direct bonuses.

 

[Txurce]

At the most fundamental gameplay level, a bias/exclusion determines the balance of resources-to-yields a civilization has access to. Favoring desert or tundra swings the balance towards regions with up to 3-4 times the resource density, while favoring away from those regions greatly increases yields at the cost of fewer resources. I think the mechanic is a potentially rather interesting and underutilized way to tweak balance of civs outside of direct bonuses.

This is very fertile territory, creating subtle differences and potentially more distinctiveness to the civs.

 

[Ahriman]

Instead of a desert bias, how about a tundra exclusion?

Sounds reasonable.
In general, I would say that Ottoman Empire was resource poor.
Alternatively, I'd give them a plains bias; most of their territory was arid, though not desert.

 

[Txurce]

Sounds reasonable.
In general, I would say that Ottoman Empire was resource poor.
Alternatively, I'd give them a plains bias; most of their territory was arid, though not desert.

Making any civ resource-poor is not a good idea, for obvious game-play reasons. A plains bias makes historical sense, and adds some distinctiveness.

 

[Ahriman]

Making any civ resource-poor is not a good idea, for obvious game-play reasons

I'm not proposing making them resource-poor, I'm just saying that being biased away from the resource-rich tundra zones fits with Ottomans, because their territory isn't exactly renowned for natural resources.

 

[Thalassicus]

Tundra, snow and desert have about 1 resource per 10 tiles, while grassland and plains are about 1 per 40 tiles. It's a rough approximation of some complicated resource/start location placement code and depends on features, but that's about the base values.

Being resource-poor is not a bad thing though, since grassland and plans are yield-rich.

Our choices are (these are mutually exclusive categories): ocean, river, terrain, avoid terrain. Here are the current settings, I've highlighted some thoughts of stuff to add in bold:

• America -
• Arabia - desert
• Aztecs - jungle
• Babylon - desert
• China -
• Egypt - avoid forest, avoid jungle
• England - ocean
• France -
• Germany - avoid ocean?
• Greece - avoid hills? avoid desert?
• Incas - hills (I suspect)
• India - grassland
• Iroquois - forest
• Japan -
• Mongolia - plains
• Ottomans - avoid tundra
• Persia -
• Rome - hills?
• Russia - tundra
• Siam - avoid forest
• Songhai - avoid tundra
• Spain - not sure

Some of the suggestions are considerations based on the civilization's traits, which would help reduce frustrating games where the traits are nearly unusable:

• Germany's trait relies on having access to lots of barbarian camps, which is unlikely if starting on a peninsula.
• Greece's CC requires horses but they don't favor terrain where horses are frequent.
• Rome is an iron unit but without a rough terrain priority (where iron is frequent).