City Development

I dropped everything back to the vanilla values, but you're right. It's one reason why merchants, customs houses, and trading posts have such low importance in vanilla. They want food-gold-prod to be 1:1:1 in value... but it's not.

In theory we could get everything that ratio. The problem is to scale down all gold values... we'd have to reduce building maintenance... and the numbers are already so low there's not much wiggle room. It's easier to work with higher values. We can't make everything 2:2:2 either since food consumption values are so fixed in to Civ's basic principles. It's easier to just do it as 2 food = 2 production = 3 gold.
 
It's easier to just do it as 2 food = 2 production = 3 gold.
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This is fine, but surely it means that the Customhouse should be 6 gold, with larger boosts from it from techs (and the Freedom finisher).
 
Re: 8.6.3
What was the justification for:
+1 gold Market, Bank, and Stock Exchange (were 0).
+2 gold city-center tiles (were 1).
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The cost reductions and the bank and SE seemed reasonable, but I'm not sure I see a need for the extra gold too.

I do think
Reduced early game purchase costs.
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is probably a good idea, I think gold purchase costs had become too punitive particularly in the early game, making it too much of a no brainer to buy either a worker or a city state alliance.

I do worry a little that
Changed the Honor finisher back to 25% of the defeated unit’s cost
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might be too high.
I think the free Finisher bonuses should, like the unlock bonuses, be less valuable than an actual policy. The 25% already felt quite high.
 
Production tends to be dominant in early game, and gold in late game. I want to balance this out a bit, which led to several things:

  • Purchase cost changes to favor early game.
  • A small amount of gold on the gold buildings helps increase gold supply in less-developed cities.
  • Cost scales slower than strength in the late game, so a cost-based Honor finisher favors the early game, the time when it's unlocked. At its present value, the Honor finisher provides the same average gold per turn as the Commerce opener. If necessary though I can drop it lower than Commerce - the scaling is more important than the magnitude.
 
Production tends to be dominant in early game, and gold in late game. I want to balance this out (hence the purchase cost changes too). A small amount of gold on the gold buildings helps increase gold supply a bit.
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I find that Markets and Banks are more midgame than early game, and they are already zero maintenance cost buildings, so I think they're fine as straight % modifiers, but the extra difference from +1 gold is obviously tiny. I'm not so sure about the extra gold per city, what I worry is that this will tend at the margin to drive the player away from working gold-yielding tiles in the early game towards focusing on food and production. But the overall effect is minor (though it is a mild boost to wide strategies, and the short-term payoff of wide-Liberty policies are already higher than the short-term payoff of the Tradition policies)).

So, no big deal.

15 or 20% seems reasonable, but testing will be needed. I have no objection to it being a % of unit cost, that seems right to me, its just the value tweaking.
 
That difference in short-term payoff between Tradition and Liberty is why I added great people to the Tradition tree. Hmm... perhaps instead some fixed yield bonuses to the capital? The reason I liked great people is we could settle them anywhere, so it doesn't force a capital-centric strategy.
 
A % bonus to excess food that was accessible early on was a big short-term help for Tradition in previous versions of TBC.
 
I'm curious, again: what's the point of the significantly earlier reveal?

It certainly makes strategic planning a lot easier, but I'm not sure that's a good idea.

Coal wasn't in Civ 5-style demand until the British started using it 1000 years later. The fact that China used it in 1100 AD strikes me as an interesting asterisk. Following this line of thinking, the Compass should arguably be available in the Classical era! Some Mediterranean seafarers developed a compass in the BC era. One was found on a sunken vessel in the last year.
 
Your point is accurate for metamorphosed coal but not charcoal, which was in use in blast furnaces much earlier - widespread by the time of China's warring states period in 500-200 BCE. A transition to bituminous coal was made by the 11th century. I'm generalizing the resource to represent all types of coal: charcoal, bituminous, anthracite, etc.

The idea is from a few weeks ago in the suggestions thread:

jacktannery said:
I never get: I rarely build walls/castles/arsenal, but these are great for the AI. I probably would if I played at Deity (I’m still battling through Emperor). Forge is very rarely worth it but I am glad that it is in the game. This building does NOT encourage carefully placing and specializing cities as coal is revealed so late. If coal were revealed with iron but not workable til the modern age, then this building would reward specializing cities and placing them well.
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It has a nice gameplay benefit and fits historically. If you can think of any downsides, point them out. :)
 
Thalassicus said:
It's from a few weeks ago in the suggestions thread:


It's good reasoning, fits historically, and I don't see a downside.
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That's certainly better reasoning than your Chinese factoid!

More seriously, I'm not sure how much it will improve production specialization (which is basically about hills) that late in the game; and I do think it gives the human player an edge in targeting coal deposits. The latter is the only one that's worrisome, but not in a major way.
 
Well, the AI can see all resources on the map from turn 1, so they have an advantage anyway.

There's a difference between a few isolated incidents of a technology (such as the compass), and that technology being widespread. All the people and civilizations in the region of China have used coal in blast furnaces for over two thousand years... that's a big and influential region, so it's widespread enough for me.

Everything in the mod has both a historical and gameplay rationale. I gave the historical reason in the patch notes because it's the less obvious of the two. Without researching metallurgy, I doubt anyone would know the history of blast furnaces offhand. :)
 
Thalassicus said:
Well, the AI can see all resources on the map from turn 1, so they have an advantage anyway.
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That was clearly an issue with earlier versions of Civ, and I've wondered whether the AI "cheats" in its build sites that way. It's not blatant, so I can't be sure. But I have seen an occasional build in the middle of nowhere that pays off... and recently the game expanded the borders of an AI civ behind my border to a single unclaimed tile - which proved to have aluminum!
 
I saw a definitive example of the AI's knowledge a year ago when it placed a city in the middle of desert with no resources, hills, or rivers nearby. This was in the Medieval era. I used the tuner to reveal the map, which showed there was a 4-size oil deposit directly under the city.

That's why the Starcraft AI article was so fascinating... that AI was tremendously good without any "real" cheats like map reveals.
 
Thalassicus said:
I saw a definitive example of the AI's knowledge a year ago when it placed a city in the middle of desert with no resources, hills, or rivers nearby. This was in the Medieval era. I used the tuner to reveal the map, which showed there was a 4-size oil deposit directly under the city.

That's why the Starcraft AI article was so fascinating... that AI was tremendously good without any "real" cheats like map reveals.
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I'll read the article. Yeah, the one suspicious build I recall was much like yours. This is perhaps the best reason for TBC's modding of resource placement.
 
I had a look at Civ5Yields.xml.

Why did you modify the AIWeightPercent of Gold from 80 to 100? If you're aiming for a hammer-gold exchange rate of 3h=2g and want the AI to adapt accordingly, shouldn't the AIWeightPercent of Gold be 72, which is 66% of the weight for hammers: 110?

Of course that is assuming those weight percentages actually mean something? Hard to say without access to the C++ code.

Edit: It might also lead to smarter auto-assignment of citizens.
 
The problem is the human can plan ahead for the village-improving technologies in Commerce and Rationalism, while the AI cannot, so I favor gold a little higher to compensate. The weights do affect which improvements the AI builds.
 
Yes. It's basically like the Monastery. Same cost, same passive yield amount, slightly higher yield on resources. I've found that 1 point of culture seems more valuable than 1 point of gold, which is why I gave it a little more than the Monastery. I might drop both of them to lower values, however, since most other resources get lower bonuses. I haven't decided either way yet.

120:c5production: Cost
+2:c5gold:
+3:c5gold: on Gold, Silver, Gems
 
Hi, I'd like to discuss about the courthouse. It's a building important for all the game but its cost is of a medieval building. In the classic era on marathon for me it's very difficult to annex even the smallest city, it's too expensive (both with hammers or gold). In the classic era i don't conquest any city even if i'm at war and i have the chance to take a capital. Puppet city are inferior and worthless if you have only 2/3 core cities. In civ4 i haven't that problem. I could conquest a enemy city and use it as my 3 city (for example) without so much problem. In the industrial era instead courthouse are too cheap. What do you think of makind the cost of courthouse depending on the size fo the conquest city? That will make easier on the beginning and harder in the end
 
Hm... I could add a % modifier while it's building that depends on population. (We can't directly alter the base cost with our current modding tools.)
 
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