Armies

What I'm saying is I think the quantity of both tiles are roughly equal on most maps, which is why total gold income shouldn't be much different than the previous method. It's just a difference between favoring peninsulas (old method) or bays (new method).

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Its not, because not every tile gets worked.

In vanilla, coast tiles are never worked.
If you boost coast tiles (Peninsula method) then you have two decent options; medium strength land tile, medium strength water tile.
If you boost land tiles (bay method) then you have one weak option (the water tile, which never gets worked) and one strong option (the land tile, which always gets worked).

Situation A:
4x : 2f2g

is not the same as situation B:
2x 2f3g, 2x 2f1g.

I agree meaningful tradeoffs are important, and this is the one I'm working on: the relative success of builders vs warmongers.

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Ok, but its very important to be careful what you mean here.
Its not about "do I fight wars or not", its about "do I try to conquer enemy cities or not".

The difference between a builder vs warmonger is the builder has a relatively smaller, defensively oriented military. They're still going to have to fight wars defensively, and to prevent an enemy superpower from forming (which will then conquer and crush them eventually).
Whereas the conqueror goes out and captures cities.

It should never be a good strategy to try to ignore war, or to build a very small military.

And it should never be a good strategy to be able to basically ignore the other players. War, and the threat of war, is how the human interacts with the AIs. Its basically the only real challenge the AI poses to the player, and its the balancing of making sure you don't go overboard on infrastructure vs military that defines a successful builder strategy.

To use a Starcraft analogy; the possibility of a rush is what makes a teching strategy meaningful. If there's a "no rush" rule, then the game is less interesting and everyone can tech in peace.

Having said that, adding lots of gold to cities doesn't favor a Builder strategy over a Conqueror strategy. Lots of gold is good for everyone.
You've boosted Builder strats in the mod by boosting the value of infrastructure (ie buildings have larger yields, so they're relatively more valuable than in vanilla).
But I don't think tile yields particularly favor one or the other (Builder vs Conqueror); lots of gold just means that the warmonger can still have the key buildings they need, because they can just buy them with gold.
I agree that upgrade units hurts conquerors slightly more, which is why I'm fine with doing that.
My original argument was that the increase of the total level of gold in the game (most especially from the boost to coast-adjacent land tiles) doesn't favor builders over conquerors, and isn't good from a design perspective unless you make everything more expensive.

One thing to consider is also the Merchant Navy policy, +3 for coastal cities. I originally buffed it... but dropped it back to normal after some feedback in the Policies thread. It's another way we could improve coastal cities, for people who choose to specialize in that.

On the topic of coasts, I've reverted coastal mechanics of the dev build back to the last release version, and added +1 to the coast terrain type.

@Ahriman
You're absolutely right about a difference between simply fighting in wars and being a conqueror. I just use 'warmonger' as a synonym for 'conqueror'. Trying to understand your last few sentences... incomplete revising?

Basically, my logic is:

• Conquerors typically fight more, therefore have higher-XP units.
• Higher XP units are more valuable to upgrade than replace.
• Increasing upgrade costs therefore impacts conquerors more than builders.
• I'd like to reduce this impact on conqueror income, while also improving builder economies.

I've also been thinking about adjusting unit maintenance costs. If we can think of a good reason builders might have higher XP units than conquerors, however, I'll take a different approach to equalizing builder vs conqueror economies than upgrade costs.

Sorry, revised above.

Ahriman said:

Its not, because not every tile gets worked.

In vanilla, coast tiles are never worked.
If you boost coast tiles (Peninsula method) then you have two decent options; medium strength land tile, medium strength water tile.
If you boost land tiles (bay method) then you have one weak option (the water tile, which never gets worked) and one strong option (the land tile, which always gets worked).

Situation A:
4x : 2f2g

is not the same as situation B:
2x 2f3g, 2x 2f1g.

Click to expand...

I'm afraid you're right with that, thanks for pointing it out!

What I'm experimenting with currently in the dev version is +50% military unit purchase costs as well. I think conquerors are typically more likely to rush-buy things as soon as a tech is available, to hurry off against some opponent. Since builders are playing more defensively they have a little more time to get units out, assuming equal tech pace.

Speaking of which that's something else I want to address: tech pace. I'm not really sure how to though in a way that would favor builders. This is where I dislike the removal of war weariness. We can have an endless war of constant expansion and research faster as a result of the improved population, so there's not really a tradeoff.

Research is currently at a base of 2/2, if I'm not mistaken. Maybe shift 1/2 away from base population and to the Library? This wouldn't delay it significantly for builders, puppet states have a low priority for science buildings, and those are usually destroyed when a city is captured. This would nerf puppet states, and also help with tall/broad empire expansion balance in general (ICS vs high pop). I could add a little more science to the Palace to ensure this change doesn't have an effect in the first-few-cities phase.

Thalassicus said:

What I'm experimenting with currently in the dev version is +50% military unit purchase costs as well. I think conquerors are typically more likely to rush-buy things as soon as a tech is available, to hurry off against some opponent. Since builders are playing more defensively they have a little more time to get units out, assuming equal tech pace.

Speaking of which that's something else I want to address: tech pace. I'm not really sure how to though in a way that would favor builders. This is where I dislike the removal of war weariness. We can have an endless war of constant expansion and research faster as a result of the improved population, so there's not really a tradeoff. Research is currently at a base of 2/2. Maybe shift 1/2 away from base population and to the Library? This wouldn't delay it significantly for most cities, BUT those are usually destroyed when a city is captured, AND puppet states have a low priority for science buildings! This would also help with tall/broad empire expansion balance in general.

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Your reasoning on military purchase costs makes sense, and is consistent with a general tendency to slow down big spenders, human and AI. The Free-Research mod also seems to address this in theory, even if you don't agree with its setting. But wouldn't shifting science from population to the library take us right back to the old ICS mode? Or do you think that's been nerfed enough elsewhere that you can afford to? At first glance I would think that using pop encourages tall civs, which is what one would expect from a builder.

Since builders are playing more defensively they have a little more time to get units out, assuming equal tech pace.

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Actually I find the opposite. Conquerors have a large standing army at all times. Builders have a small army and a gold reserve, and buy units if they get attacked.

Maybe shift 1/2 away from base population and to the Library?

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I think this would be a mistake. That would mean that a library effectively triples the tech output (0.5 per pop without library, 1.5 per pop with library), making a beeline for Writing and fast-library strat too much of a no-brainer.

One way to slow conquest: increase the time a city spends in unrest after it is conquered.
A very direct nerf.

Thalassicus said:

Speaking of which that's something else I want to address: tech pace. I'm not really sure how to though in a way that would favor builders. This is where I dislike the removal of war weariness. We can have an endless war of constant expansion and research faster as a result of the improved population, so there's not really a tradeoff.

Research is currently at a base of 2/2, if I'm not mistaken. Maybe shift 1/2 away from base population and to the Library? This wouldn't delay it significantly for builders, but those are usually destroyed when a city is captured, and puppet states have a low priority for science buildings. This would also help with tall/broad empire expansion balance in general. I could add a little more science to the Palace to ensure this change doesn't have an effect in the first-few-cities phase.

Click to expand...

I think the current tech model actually works quite well for this already, since there are a LOT of buildings to modify research, and I've always found in my games that 1 or 2 specialised cities are providing the lion's share of research even in very large empires. 1 research per pop really only holds true in the very early game, and it can get multiplied by buildings far in excess of gold or culture or production.
Library+National College alone (with your building balances) more than triples base science output per pop; as does library/university/observatory. On top of that you have science specialists now producing effectively 4 base science each plus gpp (which, more than anything else, favour heavy focus). Public school and research lab are admittedly fairly late, but boost research per pop stratospherically. With all the buildings (including National college) and the rationalism bonus, you're getting 10 research per pop plus an additional 16 research each from up to six science specialists, plus 8 research from any other specialists you might be running, plus the very large but less quantifiable amount of extra research you're getting from great scientists (who pop out at a great rate with that many focused specialists).

And to get the most out of them, you also want the city to have food buildings (smokehouse/watermill/aqueduct) to get all this population and maximise your expensive science buildings. So that's a lot of investment in buildings in a city that also wants to focus heavily on food to the detriment of all else.


The problem with more research to the palace is that the current model already heavily favours the capital as your super science city (Tradition policy and maritime food), which is particularly limiting since you can't move your palace.
Could puppets perhaps only give half science output?
I've also seen a suggestion that extra cities (including puppets) should increase your science costs by a smaller amount (eg 10%), a la Europa Universalis 3. Not sure if I agree with this or not, but it has the added advantage of helping civs who have lost a war from getting completely stuck in the dark ages.

@Txurce
I think it'd be a nerf to ICS since we wouldn't have the bonus as soon as we build a new city (the bonus is delayed), though I might be overlooking some aspect of this.


@Ahriman
Hmm that does make sense to some extent about unit purchasing, however consider this: a builder has a fixed-size empire to defend, while a conqueror's army typically scales upwards in size. The conqueror would likely therefore spend more on units overall. In addition, my point is a matter of travel time. If a builder builds units normally while the conqueror purchases them (and then moves them to the builder) they'll both have the unit on the battlefield around the same time. The attacker is at a time disadvantage in wars of attrition.


-----------

About the topic of puppet states, it might help to explain a bit about my development style for software in general:

• When brainstorming, it's usually general ideas that are important to discuss, rather than getting the details right.
• Once something's implemented and being tested, the focus is more on fiddling with numbers to get balance right.

Obviously there's some crossover between the two phases, but when brainstorming try not to dismiss an idea immediately due to specific details. The idea is to nerf puppet states. What are merits or disadvantages of this, and how might it be adapted to work?

Reducing the effectiveness of puppet states affects conquerors more than builders. In particular, what if the economy/research of puppets was less effective, through some method? Libraries are one way to accomplish this, there are others. Moving 0.5/pop of science to the library would probably be too much of a change to this one area (I prefer smaller changes over many areas), but it's the general idea I'd like to discuss.

I'll look and see if there's a way to adjust time spent in unrest.

I agree the current tech method works rather well, but I want to consider all avenues of potential changes, and altering puppet states is an aspect of the game I've not yet explored.

Thalassicus said:

Basically, the concept is to nerf puppet states. This would affect conquerors more than builders. In particular, what if puppets got 10-25% less, through some method? Obviously reducing it by half would probably be too much of a change to this one area (I prefer smaller changes over many areas), but it's the general idea I'd like to discuss.

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Speaking conceptually, why focus on limiting the puppets' science, as opposed to everything they contribute? Of course I see that a large puppet-centric empire is going to shoot ahead in science... but puppets are OP and exploited in cultural victories, or simply for gold. Could they be nerfed with a single filter that dilutes their contributions?

Hmm that does make sense to some extent about unit purchasing, however consider this: a builder has a fixed-size empire to defend, while a conqueror's army typically scales upwards in size. The conqueror would likely therefore spend more on units overall. In addition, my point is a matter of travel time. If a builder builds units normally while the conqueror purchases them (and then moves them to the builder) they'll both have the unit on the battlefield around the same time. The attacker is at a time disadvantage in wars of attrition.

Click to expand...

I don't think I quite understand your point here.
And I disagree that conquerors purchase units while builders buy them.
If anything, I find conquerors are normally constantly building units with hammers in their cities, and then buy buildings in particular cities when they need them, while builders are constantly building structures in their cities with hammers, and buy units in a single barracks/armory city when they need them.

So I don't think that increasing military unit purchase costs will tend to harm conquerors rather than builders much. Having said that, I don't have any particular objection to it, I'm just not sure it will achieve what you want it to achieve.

If the problem with Conquerors is that the rewards for conquest are too high, then try addressing that directly.

Obviously there's some crossover between the two phases, but try not to dismiss an idea immediately due to specific details when brainstorming. Instead, consider ways it could be adapted to work.

Click to expand...

I disagree, I think its important to make sure that the problem is the right kind, and is solving a real problem before you start worrying about balance tweaking.
I don't think its the right solution to try to nerf research without a library. I think the library already gives a good bonus, as do the university and public school. The right way to reward builders is to give them good things to build, and we have that already.
I don't think that cities without buildings give too much research.

I would definitely go in the direction of nerfing puppets, if possible. That's one of the biggest balance issues that isn't contained in your mods at all. Puppets are almost costless; they let you expand without much consequence, and have very few downsides, such that its almost never worth it to annex.

I would love to see puppets get ~-30% penalties to gold, science and culture.
This would be a large conquest nerf and would be a big buff to annex + courthouse, which is underpowered at the moment relative to leaving things as puppets.

This would also be an indirect buff to Police State policy, since it could make it worthwhile to annex all your puppets in the late-game.

Txurce said:

Speaking conceptually, why focus on limiting the puppets' science, as opposed to everything they contribute? Of course I see that a large puppet-centric empire is going to shoot ahead in science... but puppets are OP and exploited in cultural victories, or simply for gold. Could they be nerfed with a single filter that dilutes their contributions?

Click to expand...

Puppets seem to be a bit of a problem...in every strategy thread about what to do with conquered cities, the advice always seems to be to raze crummy ones, puppet good ones, and only very rarely annex. There's also plenty of strategies around just building only a couple of cities ever, and then just puppeting like mad.
Clearly there's something off with the balance there.

Puppets give you almost as much gold as a regular gold-focused city, especially if you surround them with trading posts (edit: they also give the full trade bonus from population if they're connected to the capital); they give a decent amount of research; they don't cost culture; they don't use terribly much happiness; and they hold onto territory for you. That's a pretty good deal, really. And my guess is that puppet is supposed to approximate "vassal", who wouldn't really contribute quite so much to the master civ - more to the extent of providing resources, control over land and free use of their territory (but a need for you to protect it), and a reduced amount of tribute.

Unfortunately, a problem with balancing annex/puppet/raze is that if you make puppeting too unattractive, you favour razing for civs that have warmongered past their "natural" limits.

Just to toss out a few random ideas (regarding raze/puppet/annex)
1) I don't want to buff warmongering, but I think giving the courthouse an expiry (eg 60 turns after it's built?) could help, to make annexing not a totally rotten choice, and to help prevent raze-n-rebuild, which feels exploitative. It also promotes the idea of eventual assimilation. Kind of like the EU3 concept of "gaining a core".

2) A diplomatic penalty for razing with the civ whose city it is; and perhaps a more worldwide penalty with everyone if you start razing beyond a certain threshold number of cities. Burning entire cities to the ground should make people really really angry with you. Perhaps limited to cities above a certain size just so you can get rid of those particularly awful cities the AI builds everywhere. But razing (and nuking, for that matter) seem like they should be more last-resort things, or something you do just out of malicious spite, rather than just the norm with essentially no consequences.

3) Captured cities lose culturally-acquired tiles - you have to start again from a 1-tile radius (and maybe 0-tile until it's out of revolt). This might have other issues, but it seems odd that you automatically flip and gain another civ's hard-earned cultural expansion. Again, this promotes razing though.

4) Perhaps an additional unhappiness-per-person while you're razing, so that it's more of a real speedhump to conquest. Helps favour that Autocracy policy as well if you're the salt-the-earth type.

5) Perhaps an increasing happiness cost with every additional puppet (eg +1). I think of happiness as also being "stability", and having a large proportion of your population as effectively permanently second-rate citizens who are kept in only minor autonomy with no attempt to integrate to the dominant society can only be disastrously unstable.

6) This is more whole-new-mod/expansion-pack territory, but having a chance (when the empire is unhappy) for partisans to appear around puppets, who either return it to its former owner or form a new city-state if they capture it; or even for a whole group of puppet cities to break off into a new nation.

@Txurce
No need to limit it to science, the reason I'm considering it first is that's the most significant difference between Civ IV and Civ V.

In IV, small peaceful empires usually researched faster than large warring empires... this is the primary advantage peaceful empires had. Large empires had larger armies, but small empires were able to defend due to their big tech lead. Korea was a fantastic example of this - they always got far ahead of the others in tech. Mansa Musa was also an example, though his traits didn't help him survive as well and he often got squashed by neighbors.

Part of this is due to the disconnect between science and gold... rapid conquering was expensive in IV, so we had to reduce our research rate to avoid going into deficit. Now there's nothing holding us back.

Ahriman said:

I would love to see puppets get ~-30% penalties to gold, science and culture.

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That's the point. How can we do this?

Ahriman said:

I don't think that cities without buildings give too much research.

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If I'm following your logic...

1. City conquered
2. Pop and buildings lost
3. Research okay
4. Pop grows
5. Builds library
6. Research too high

Are you asking if there's a way to block #5? I'm not certain I can do this, but I can try. I've looked in the buildings.xml file and didn't find anything controlling if a building can be built by puppets, but there might be another file somewhere.

The reason I suggested modding #4 first is I know it can be done. Sometimes a solution might not be ideal, but suggestions I make I know are possible from experience looking through the files.



The point about army size is consider two players: one defending five cities, and another conquering the planet. If combat is well-balanced (I'm thinking ahead for when when attrition and strategic resources matter), the second player will lose a few units to attrition and need replacements. In vanilla we basically have an army that never dies and is cheap to upgrade, so replacements are unnecessary. Builders are capable of using policies like Oligarchy and fortified terrain / citadels to hold off with fewer losses, so will likely require much fewer unit replacements. Part of the reason for increased upgrade costs is to increase this conquest attrition economically... right now there's not much reason to replace a unit instead of upgrading it, even if it has no experience.

Addressing rewards directly is advantageous, but as I said, I want to consider all avenues of potential changes.

Ahriman said:

I don't think I quite understand your point here.
And I disagree that conquerors purchase units while builders buy them...

I don't think that increasing military unit purchase costs will tend to harm conquerors rather than builders much. Having said that, I don't have any particular objection to it, I'm just not sure it will achieve what you want it to achieve...

I disagree, I think its important to make sure that the problem is the right kind, and is solving a real problem before you start worrying about balance tweaking.

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The first statement's wording makes it hard to follow. Do you mean "rather than" instead of "while"?

With regard to warmongers' unit costs, I would propose raising the cost of upgrading units. This should hurt the big army more than the smaller civ's smaller army, since the difference in units is probably greater than the difference in civ size.

In the last statement it seems that you disagree with how Thal defines conceptualizing... or his choice of what to focus on. "Making sure the problem is the right kind and is solving a real problem" sounds like an intermediate step to me.

Polycrates said:

...And my guess is that puppet is supposed to approximate "vassal", who wouldn't really contribute quite so much to the master civ - more to the extent of providing resources, control over land and free use of their territory (but a need for you to protect it), and a reduced amount of tribute....

Unfortunately, a problem with balancing annex/puppet/raze is that if you make puppeting too unattractive, you favour razing for civs that have warmongered past their "natural" limits.

Just to toss out a few random ideas (regarding raze/puppet/annex)

A diplomatic penalty for razing with the civ whose city it is; and perhaps a more worldwide penalty with everyone if you start razing beyond a certain threshold number of cities...

Perhaps an additional unhappiness-per-person while you're razing, so that it's more of a real speedhump to conquest. Helps favour that Autocracy policy as well if you're the salt-the-earth type...

Perhaps an increasing happiness cost with every additional puppet (eg +1)...

Click to expand...

I think puppets are definitely vassal substitutes, and as you say, should deliver roughly similar benefits and costs, or the Civ 5 equivalents. Making puppeting too unattractive would not be a good idea (if only because it's part of the core design), but I think this falls into the second stage Thal mentioned, where we get into the numbers of what's just right, and what isn't.

Some of your proposals probably are beyond the thread of Thal's mods, but the ones I quote above strike me as good ideas worth exploring. A diplomatic penalty for razing should be doable, given what Sneaks has done in his WWGD mod. And I think Ahriman has already mentioned an increased happiness penalty for razing.

Some thoughts from my current test game with version 1.09.11dev:

Citystates appear to be stronger now that they can build siege units, which are perfect for defending a fixed position. This seems to be balanced by higher upgrade costs, so their units tend to be a little out of date.


I had about 10 horses in the area of two civs (conquered a neighbor) which was very high, but on the other hand I only had 2 iron. Seemed to be a good mix... worked out well since I was Greece.


Hoplite doesn't feel too great, primarily because its bonus (higher strength) doesn't carry over like most other UUs. Since horses, maritime CSs, and early conquest have received such strong nerfs, I think it's alright to leave the ranged penalty off hoplites. Compared to swords they're 100%:c5cost: -1% +50% vs horses, and resourceless. While this would be too close between strat/nonstrat for a regular unit, they are a unique unit so I feel they'll be alright. My reasoning is he can be the 1 leader capable of conquest with spearmen.

If anyone's play-tested a game as Alexander and tried very early conquest with Hoplites+Cats (or Hoplites+CC+Cats), please post your thoughts.

unfortunately, a problem with balancing annex/puppet/raze is that if you make puppeting too unattractive, you favour razing for civs that have warmongered past their "natural" limits.

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I don't see why this is a problem. If they raze a city, they get nothing, they only harm their enemies. I think its *good* that once you are past what you can hold, you have incentive to raze. If you could still get benefits from puppets even once you'd expanded past what you could handle, then I would think *that* would be a problem.

I don't think courthouses could expire, but I wouldn't mind reducing their maintenance cost slightly; its important that annex and courthouse be a better strat than raze-and-resettle for non-small cities, at least past the early game.

I don't think captured cities should lose their culture. This would do weird things to the map, and it would be lame if I lost all my culture in a city if I lost it for a turn and then recaptured it.

I'd be fine with increasing unhappiness-while-razing.

I think I'd rather make puppets less efficient-per-population-point than just make them cause more unhappiness. But its not a bad way to go if the former isn't possible.

How can we do this?

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Ideally through hardcode. Just a modifier for "being a puppet". No special mechanism needed.
I hadn't suggested it for these mods before because I didn't think it was possible code-wise yet.
But when you talked about giving puppets a science penalty, I interpreted that as meaning it was possible.

Alternatively, is there a way you can create a building (through lua if necessary?) that gets instantly created when a city is puppeted, gives -yield% to gold, science, culture, and is auto-destroyed if the city is annexed?

If I'm following your logic...
City conquered
Pop and buildings lost
Research okay
Pop grows
Builds library
Research too high

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I don't think the research with a large pop and a library is too high.
If techs go too fast, then the approrpriate fix is to change beaker costs further.
I think the buildings are well-balanced now.

I don't want to mess around with buildings, I only want to mess around with *puppets*.

The first statement's wording makes it hard to follow. Do you mean "rather than" instead of "while"?

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I meant: in practice I observe that:
a) Conquerors mostly construct their units with hammers
b) Builders mostly purchase their units with gold.

But I'm ok with tweaking upgrade costs higher as a way of making large armies more expensive over the course of the game. I don't see that increasing gold purchase costs would do anything helpful.

What I worry about, is that the AI has an army even larger than a human Conqueror. So increasing gold upgrade costs will hurt the AI more than the human, which makes the game easier.

"Making sure the solution is the right kind and is solving a real problem" sounds like an intermediate step to me.

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To me it sounds like a core basic primary step. I don't see the point of brainstorming lots of different mechanisms for solving something that isn't a problem. You have to carefully define the problem before you can arrive at an efficient solution for solving it.
What is the precise problem that increasing unit gold-purchase costs is intended to fix, that isn't better addressed through other mechanisms?

In general I think what we want to be optimal is:
a) Medium or Large, valuable enemy city in good position -> puppet in short term, annex, courthouse
b) Low value, low-pop city in good position -> puppet forever (to keep position and culture and resource gains, but with little income)
c) Small enemy city in poor position, early game -> raze, resettle
d) Small enemy city in poor position, late game -> raze.

Hoplite doesn't feel too great, primarily because its bonus (higher strength) doesn't carry over like most other UUs.

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An alternative possibility then; rather than starting with higher strength, have it start with Shock 1 and Drill1.

Wow, a lot of activity today!

@ Rush-Buy:
I doubt we can exactly say who rush-buys and who builds with hammers, players are different. I really think the only problem was buying cheaper units (warrior) and upgrading them immediately (swordman) for a super-discount compared to rush-buying directly. We said that could be solved by making warriors obsolete when swordmen are available (with spearmen/archers as buffed low-cost alternative) and by increasing upgrade costs (which you did already). I'd rather not mess with this any further before we evaluated the effect of +50% upgrade cost.

Culture radius after city conquest:
I strongly feel this is a point where civ5 is better than civ4 was and I'd really love keeping it this way. Loss of culture had weird effects like a third civ uninvolved in the conflict being the one that profits most.

Puppet states:
I really think this is the core issue to adress. The disadvantages of puppeting are to small, and they tend to build more or less useful stuff since an early patch. Why should I annex? The only reason is if they build some really stupid buildings, but in TBM almost every building is useful, and I'd have to pay for the useless courthouse anyway, so I'm not really saving upkeep before the puppet AI built quite a few useless things.

I find the courthouse expiry idea interesting. It led me to the question: Why should the courthouse have upkeep at all? Wasn't it meant to represent the assimilation process? Why should an annexed city have a stain forever? The sheer fact that a courthouse has upkeep is a bad idea IMO. It should rather have a higher cost than upkeep. This would be a good place to buff the annexing mechanic IMO.

In addition, the idea of the auto-created building with negative modifiers would be nice. We could call it "puppet government" or "puppet regime", and it'd represent the corruption usually spreading in such situations.

Changing science in it's principle would be a very risky, indirect nerf I don't think would be ideal.

Razing:
I had some discussion about razing back in Civ4 BtS days. I hated the often stupid AI city placement, so I created a mod changing minimal city distance to 3 and lowering the razing diplo penalty. For me, it was essential to be able to raze a city that was placed extremely bad, crippling itself and other cities around.
Others hated the changed diplo penalty, though. They talked about realism mostly. I'm all for realism usually, but in this case gameplay was way more important for me.

So, if a diplo hit for cruel acts is introduced, I'd love it not to be too harsh, until the AI gets better at city placement.

Another thing I suggested in the "Emigration" mod thread: A part of the population of razed cities should flee to other friendly cities. This would buff the defender and it would be realistic, too. This could be applied to the population that "disappears" when a city is captured, too.

@Ahriman
The AI can be adjusted on a basic level at least to deal with economic changes, so don't worry about that.

Very true that the Hoplite starting with some promo like shock or drill would buff them. Since Samurai already start with Shock though, and Minutemen with Drill, I feel keeping their vanilla better-through-strength is appropriate. They aren't the best at any one role (slightly worse than spears vs horses, slightly worse than swords vs cities), but are superb "generalists" on the open battlefield, and this flexibility has been their strength in the games I've been testing. Halving their bonus against mounted seems to be a sufficient penalty to keep them from being overpowered. Babylon is an example of precedent for taking a resourceless unit and making quite good through a strength bonus, so it seems to fit for the Hoplite.

Alright... you've got me confused now about conquering puppet cities.

Thalassicus said:

If I'm following your logic...

1. City conquered
2. Pop and buildings lost
3. Research okay
4. Pop grows
5. Builds library
6. Research too high

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These correspond with your statements (I'm just trying to piece together the logic):

Ahriman said:

3. "I don't think that cities without buildings give too much research."
4. "I think [less beakers/pop] would be a mistake."
5. "I don't want to mess around with buildings."
6. "I would love to see puppets get ~-30% penalties to gold, science and culture."

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I don't see how to implement your last goal while remaining logically consistent with your first three . . . am I overlooking a phase between steps 1 and 6?


@Tomice
I like the idea of making the courthouse cost more up-front but less later on. I suspect up-front costs feel like less of a penalty to most people than paying for something the rest of the game, so even if it ends up being about equal in the long run it should improve the "fun factor."

The idea of buildings created through lua scripts is indeed an option, though not a preferable one. Changing a number takes a few seconds, figuring out how all the conquest/puppet/annex code works and programming a solution would be a very heavy time investment. Figuring out things like bonuses upon city-state capture, promotion swapping, that sort of stuff took days. It's been on my todo list for some time, but lower priority than other things.

If anyone out there feels inspired though . . . would be a great standalone mod!

I agree with what you say Ahriman that razing already has implicit costs, and agree with you Tomice that it does let the human player decide if the AI just made a plain bad placement decision or not. I don't think I'll be altering the razing mechanic. Might do that population-escape though... would help prevent steamrolling.

I don't think its unreasonable for a courthouse to have some maintenance cost, but I don't feel strongly. I'd be ok with removing maintenance cost if you increased the contruction/gold purchase cost, and maybe increased the time that cities stayed in unrest (so you can't assimilate too fast).
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I'm ok with the hoplite as being a high strength unit, though I do worry that strength 10 with no bonuses might be too strong, relative to the swordsman. But its testable.
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Now you've got *me* confused. Your list of 1-6 isn't a list of goals, its a list of 5 things that might happen, in order, and then a conclusion that I don't agree with.

I think, in general, that research, gold and culture from puppets is too high. Puppeting makes expansion easy, at low cost.

I don't think research is too high from regular cities.

Your proposal was to reduce science from population - for *every* city, puppet or no - and move it to the library.

I think this would be a mistake. The problem here is with puppets. Normal cities don't have any research problem. So why mess with science-from-pop and library yields in normal cities?

My preferred solution is a flat yield nerf for puppets, as long as they remain puppets.
Possibly through a dummy building.
[Though; something to check, you can't sell buildings in a puppet, right? Through the View City option?]
But leave the regular buildings unchanged.

Thalassicus said:

1. City conquered
2. Pop and buildings lost
3. Research okay
4. Pop grows
5. Builds library
6. Research too high

The reason I suggested modding #4 first is I know it can be done. Sometimes a solution might not be ideal, but suggestions I make I know are possible from experience looking through the files.

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There has to be a solution for affecting puppets only. If you can create a partisan unit when a city is captured, can't you create a building that has the desired effect?

Is it hard to create a building that only exists in puppeted cities?
Or is it impossible to create a building with negative modifiers?

Adressing the issue using point #4 seems very indirect to me, and opens a huge can of worms. We'll surely get problems in other fields that have to be fixed again.


EDIT: Forget it, I haven't seen your edit before. If it's very time-consuming, there might be other ways. But I think a fundamental change to science would be work-intensive to get right, too.