Game balance and AI

Town Watchmen can help reduce your crime rate though. Archers cannot. Also Archer are Archery units and Town Watchmen are Melee units.

having both in a city not only helps reduce crime but helps counter enemy units that specialize in either Archers or Melee units.

Of course town watchmen are good for defending cities. I keep them myself (well, i usually wait to grab Shaolin and put monks with riot control 1-5 in cities).

I am worried about AI bringing to war deep into enemy territory stacks of dozens wardogs and watchmen as main attack force. With a few light swordsmen, and no siege. And thrashes them against city defences without reducing defence. And wardogs against hunter promotion = deadmeat. That doesn't happen always, i have seen decent AI stacks, but still happens pretty often.

p.s. Chariots-War wagons-Siege Wagon line are way overpowered imho. I would tone them down a bit, either by reducing their str or melee bonus.

Talin2009 said:

But for that AI should be taught to spread every religion possible then switch between them and build according cathedrals/wonders.

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No, what should happen is that all buildings that require a state religion to be built stop working if you switch out of that religion, negating the current optimal playstyle of going through every single religion as a state religion to get the maximum benefit.

((deleted))

Talin2009 said:

Of course town watchmen are good for defending cities. I keep them myself (well, i usually wait to grab Shaolin and put monks with riot control 1-5 in cities).

I am worried about AI bringing to war deep into enemy territory stacks of dozens wardogs and watchmen as main attack force. With a few light swordsmen, and no siege. And thrashes them against city defences without reducing defence. And wardogs against hunter promotion = deadmeat. That doesn't happen always, i have seen decent AI stacks, but still happens pretty often.

p.s. Chariots-War wagons-Siege Wagon line are way overpowered imho. I would tone them down a bit, either by reducing their str or melee bonus.

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I'm not sure on this, but I'll bet the main reason the AI makes lots and lots of Town Watchmen is that they have crime reduction on them, which the AI is very keenly aware of. That and the obvious fact that they are good at City Defense.

Talin2009 said:

9) Slaves and Patricianism - this is clearly broken. Either slave should be -1 gp and +1 hammer (so with patricianism you will get +hammers and 0 gp), OR remove ability to settle in cities as citizens, only leaving ability to hurry up things, OR give them -1 food (as slaves currently are if you using them as citizen), OR reduce 10 times probability of capturing one. In every my game i have military city and capital several hundred of them by medieval.

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I have been able to define a settled slave with the same stats as the normal slave specialists ie -food and +hammers. I just need to change the code to have slaves settle as slaves not citizens.

@AIAndy or Thunderbrd can tags be added to the specialist definition for civics. Basically can we have slaves give -1 gold with Patrarchy?

Dancing Hoskuld said:

I have been able to define a settled slave with the same stats as the normal slave specialists ie -food and +hammers. I just need to change the code to have slaves settle as slaves not citizens.

@AIAndy or Thunderbrd can tags be added to the specialist definition for civics. Basically can we have slaves give -1 gold with Patrarchy?

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Can't you already do that in the civic XML?

AIAndy said:

Can't you already do that in the civic XML?

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No, it is an all specialists or nothing not individual types. The problem is that currently Patrician gives +gold to all specialists but we don't want it to do so for slaves since

1) is does not make sense

3) it unbalances the game.

I don't want to give -1 gold to slave specialists as that would cause other problems elsewhere.

I have the Slave unit settling as a Settled Slave specialist which has the same stats as the Slave specialist ie -1 +3 rather than a (Settled) Citizen at +1.

Should I put this on the SVN or wait until I can get the code to turn them into citizens when the slavery civic is not active?

Dancing Hoskuld said:

No, it is an all specialists or nothing not individual types. The problem is that currently Patrician gives +gold to all specialists but we don't want it to do so for slaves since

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In my v23 at least, patrician is listed as giving +1 gold for all specialists and an extra +1 gold for merchants. So it looks like the code is there.

MaXimillionZero said:

In my v23 at least, patrician is listed as giving +1 gold for all specialists and an extra +1 gold for merchants. So it looks like the code is there.

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Thanks. There is a AND/C2C tag SpecialistCommercePercentChanges, so I will need to figure out how it works.

Dancing Hoskuld said:

Thanks. There is a AND/C2C tag SpecialistCommercePercentChanges, so I will need to figure out how it works.

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Try setting it to -100. I have the suspicion from the code that this does not actually do what it claims but instead just adds or removes the given value divided by 100.

AIAndy said:

Try setting it to -100. I have the suspicion from the code that this does not actually do what it claims but instead just adds or removes the given value divided by 100.

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That is what it seems to do. The only problem is that in the description in the civic is that it says

So I have all that working but people will now complain that Settled Slaves are better than Settled Citizens. They will also complain, rightly, that Settled Citizens should be the first to be assigned to buildings that use people rather than the general population.

@Talin and MaX and anyone else,

See screenie.
Current game, current turn, Noble level( for testing religion changes) Fractal Map 8 AI.

Classical Era (just entered a short time ago), Treasury 856 Gold -16 gold/turn Mathematics in 2 turns. Research Slider @30%. Esp slider at 0%.

Just swimmin' in the gold!

JosEPh

Dancing Hoskuld said:

I have the Slave unit settling as a Settled Slave specialist which has the same stats as the Slave specialist ie -1 +3 rather than a (Settled) Citizen at +1.

Should I put this on the SVN or wait until I can get the code to turn them into citizens when the slavery civic is not active?

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Are settled slaves what toy are le with when you switch out of slavery? If so what justifies them being better than regular citizens (after they have been emancipated)?

MaXimillionZero said:

In my v23 at least, patrician is listed as giving +1 gold for all specialists and an extra +1 gold for merchants. So it looks like the code is there.

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So since it gives the +1 gold for merchants, it could be told to give -1 gold per slave to counterbalance the +1 for all. This would have to be a tag in the civic definition itself somewhere. Look for the other +1 gold being applied to the merchant. I guess that could've been the tag AIAndy brought up.

If its saying +- then what its doing is actually subtracting a gold on a tag where the text file assumes it will always be positive and thus puts the "+" in the text. If you don't put the + in the text, it won't put it there for you so that works great for textualizing - since the - will show up on a negative integer naturally. Positive is assumed to just be a number rather than a modifier so the plus won't show automatically.

It's actually taking away 1 gold but that's probably still just effectively countering the mention that ALL specialists are adding one. The text methods get kinda funny that way sometimes. It would be the same reason you wouldn't see the pedia explaining that the merchant INSTEAD gives +2 gold. I'm not sure I can even think of a workaround (without some really complex textual programming) except to put some text explanation in the description of the civic to guide a player in reading it properly.

In otherwords, if you've got it showing +-1 on a slave citizen, its showing correctly for game effect.

Koshling said:

Are settled slaves what toy are le with when you switch out of slavery? If so what justifies them being better than regular citizens (after they have been emancipated)?

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This was posted while I was writing the previous... and I've been finding edits to be easily missed. So otherwise, sorry for the double post.

But I wanted to agree with this to an extent. I think Slaves and Citizens alike should be put at +2 :Hammers: with slaves having the -1 :Food:. That's what seems more balanced to me. Besides, currently in the early stage of the game, aside from the food loss, slaves out-evaluate engineers and priests too much by having +3 production!

Similar experience Joseph in my first real V24 game,

Monarch level, large big_small map, Eternity speed, minor civs + city limits ; I just managed to switch to patrician and monarchy and even then im barely 55% tech. Infact I was the last person in my game to go monarchist

Thunderbrd said:

This was posted while I was writing the previous... and I've been finding edits to be easily missed. So otherwise, sorry for the double post.

But I wanted to agree with this to an extent. I think Slaves and Citizens alike should be put at +2 :Hammers: with slaves having the -1 :Food:. That's what seems more balanced to me. Besides, currently in the early stage of the game, aside from the food loss, slaves out-evaluate engineers and priests too much by having +3 production!

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Agree 100%, I was a bit shocked when I read they were getting changed to -1 food +3 hammers, I thought the idea was to nerf them.
I also would like to see them popping up less frequently. A bit more of a pleasant surprise now and again rather than a routinely gotten benefit that you can exploit.

Sgtslick said:

Agree 100%, I was a bit shocked when I read they were getting changed to -1 food +3 hammers, I thought the idea was to nerf them.
I also would like to see them popping up less frequently. A bit more of a pleasant surprise now and again rather than a routinely gotten benefit that you can exploit.

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They are not getting changed to anything they are already -1 and +3 and have been for ever. I was just making them get -1 with Pratician and making a Settled Slave version which you would get instead of a settled (Great) Citizen. (I was also going to change the settled Great merchant act the same as the merchant specialist for Pratician civic.)

I must be playing the wrong game as I usually only get about 3 slaves (as settled Citizen) in each of my cities.