v131.15 Beta

I figured I'd post the next patch notes for early discussion. I'm currently unable to access the game to do alpha testing, which delays the beta release, but can update you on progress.


Cities

• Increased income from Great Scientists to match other science scaling done in v131.1.
• Reduced the culture border expansion exponent to 1.3 (was 1.4).
• Reduced the cost increase per tile purchased to 8 (was 10).
• Returned the National Epic to +50% great person generation and 0% culture (was 25%, 25%).
• Citystate borders expand 50% faster.

Diplomacy

• Capitals are no longer favored for citystate yield distribution (was 200% weight).

Leaders
Based on results of the Fun Leaders poll.

• Bismark: Captures land barbarians with any attacker (previously was land or sea, but required land vs land, sea vs sea).
• Darius: +1 and +50% during Golden Ages (was +1 moves and +10% combat strength). Starts with an Immortal.
• Harald: Embarked units move faster, ships get an extra attack, and melee units can pillage for free (was only first and last).
• Hiawatha: +20% cost of Longhouse, and +10% modifier (cost & mod now equal to the Workshop it replaces).
• Hiawatha: Starts with a Mohawk Warrior instead of a Warrior.
• Isabella: Starts with a Scout instead of a Warrior, then gains a Caravel at Compass (was Scout+Trireme start).
• Kame: 3 Moai Statues (was 2).
• Nebu: Starts with a Bowman instead of a Warrior.
• Nobunaga: +2 Samurai.
• Sejong: Starts with a Worker. +2 from Specialists, and gains science from each scientific building/wonder built in the capital. (was +2 sci for Great Improvements)
• Suleiman: Starts with a Trireme, and captures sea barbarians (was a specialist bonus).
• Wu Zetain: Great Generals see +2 tiles farther and provide extra strength. Starts with a Great General. (was 200% spawn rate)

Policies

• Adjusted policies so Freedom focuses on large cities, and Autocracy on anger reduction. Click for details.
• Halved the effect of Landed Elite's bonus to border expansion.
• Policies which increase specialist yields now provide a +2 bonus (was +1).

Research

• Increased cost of early-game research agreements, and reduced cost in late-game.
  (200 classical, 400, 800, 1500, 3000 modern)

WWGD

• Designed a system for the AI to intelligently spend excess gold. Click for details.
• AIs start with an extra archer for rush defense.

CiVUP

• (Internal) Sorted functions in ThalsUtilities by base class (player/unit/city/etc).
• Extra Diplomacy Text: renamed Declaration of Friendship to Alliance.

Misc

• Compass and Archaeology now have the correct cost for techs of their columns.
• Peace treaty text now correctly states the 20 turn duration.
• Mandate of Heaven gives +1 to culture buildings, as intended.
• The Freedom finisher no longer incorrectly raises the culture of landmarks.
• Library tooltips show the correct yield from population.
• Research Agreements now show cost and duration on the tooltip before placing it in the trade area.
• The Pioneer Fort now correctly provides an engineer slot.
• Fixed a tooltip bug for trade routes on the economic overview screen.
• Aztec Jaguar healing promotion tooltip now indicates the correct value.

Sounds great! Perhaps I'll try Hiawatha for my next game.

I'm guessing you can't deal with the Landmark Culture yield bug until Steam un-borks itself for you?

#4 on the Misc list

The Freedom finisher no longer incorrectly raises the culture of landmarks.

Click to expand...

Derp!

As you said, most of this is what we've discussed: a higher target than ever with some subsequent adjustment likely. I do have a question about the % shift in city-state yield, in that it seems to take away choice. Since it seemingly doesn't affect the total, what was the reason for this change?

My guess is that the changes are to reduce the benefits to be had from stacking everything in the Capital, which was boring because at present, it's so often the best thing to do, especially in tall games. Consider, for example, the new Capital-specific per-Happiness % Science bonus in the context of a Science victory game: the larger the standard Capital % and the available "focus" % (both previously 200%, now 150%), the more incentive there is to funnel as much CS-imported Science through the Capital's modifiers as possible. Or even more obviously, consider Culture victory games and Wonder-specific Culture modifiers.

Personally, I support making tall games more challenging: I think the difficulty of managing a wide empire (which I have trouble with) should be rewarded.

As wobuffet pointed out the capital could get a 400% weight for citystate yields. Now it's 225%. That's still more than other cities (150% with focus), but not so extreme. Alternatively... I could keep the city-focus effect at 200% while removing the inherent capital bonus. Either approach would get it in the 200% range.

wobuffet said:

My guess is that the changes are to reduce the benefits to be had from stacking everything in the Capital, which was boring because at present, it's so often the best thing to do, especially in tall games.

Personally, I support making tall games more challenging: I think the difficulty of managing a wide empire (which I have trouble with) should be rewarded.

Click to expand...

I don't find it boring when playing a tall game, since it's supposed to be built around a strong capital.

I've also had the opposite experience in playing wide vs tall science games, where the issue at hand - population is a big factor. I found it significantly easier to win science games with a wide empire (particularly with early-culture civs).

My recollection is that the disparity between tall and wide performance in science was one reason why Thal made some pro-tall adjustments prior to the recent tsunami of changes. That said, there are so many changes coming that a small one like this is worth trying out, and see how it works in the radically altered scheme of things.

Thalassicus said:

As wobuffet pointed out the capital could get a 400% weight for citystate yields. Now it's 225%. That's still more than other cities (150% with focus), but not so extreme. Alternatively... I could keep the city-focus effect at 200% while removing the inherent capital bonus. Either approach would get it in the 200% range.

Click to expand...

I prefer removing the inherent capital bonus, for my original reason: greater choice in which cities to buff. I don't automatically put all my extra food into the capital. I often apply it to cities not growing as quickly as I'd like.

Yeah, I've never had much trouble with a wide empire, either. Since the AI always goes wide, if I stay tall I end up holding off a ridiculously-sized army, often with better tech. I'm glad Thal added all the bonuses recently.

Anyways, I want to try darius out, the 50% culture bonus sounds exiting. It also gives me a reason try try out the new freedom finisher.

Great change for Danes. Danes ships might become too powerful against English. An alternative could be that Dane ships do greater damage Vs land units & cities. So Ottomans would be the one with BIG navy, English will have strong navy while Danes navy will be great in supporting their berserks in attacking coastal cities.
Darius looks good now. Atleast Persia can go for fast expansion now instead of early warmongering which was previously the only viable option.
I am a bit skeptical about Moai, that could be a bit OP early on, may be it would be better to add after researching some tech (like terrace & farms). Moai can already get about 4 , so adding +1 culture a bit late won't hurt balance while making their up to maintain the rate of getting SPs.

All culture costs and income were recently scaled up 200%. The change to Moai is to ensure they stay approximately as valuable as before the scaling. However, I want to favor single tiles more. I feel the adjacency bonus depends too much on luck, and is not recognized by the AI .



1 Moai is stronger, but 3 adjacent to one another are weaker. I suspect this balances out since early yields are more important than late ones, and small coastlines are more common than large ones.

It's not feasible to add culture with a tech because Firaxis programmed culture in a cumbersome way. This is why Landmarks get gold with a tech instead of culture.

This all looks good, with the exception of so many civs getting free / replaced units. I can understand why Suleiman, with a naval-based UA, would get a free trireme, and it's nice to see Neb get some flavour, but why do Hiawatha and Darius get a free military unit, and an especially strong unit at that? Neither are militaristic Civs, neither are geared around earlygame war. All this does is give these two leaders a chance to spend their hammers on a building instead of a second warrior. It seems to me that Bismarck, Genghis and Monty are the only leaders who would make sense with a free military unit, and then they would be quite OP.

Sejong's free worker also seems odd. Korea is already quite a powerful civ, and a free worker is a very good bonus, especially for a civ based around tall empires. Most importantly though this means that they do not have to use hammers on one, which is always the case, giving them a headstart on buildings / wonders.

Finally, China's GG seems kinda useless. You get a GG anyway, from the Honour policy, and it's unlikely that you'll be using it for a while.

Regardless, all it does is make these leaders able to skip building a unit and instead use the hammers on an extra building / progress on a wonder. I understand it might make them more fun, but this fun seems much more gimmicky and short-term than other extremely fun changes such as Spain's new UA.

Regarding the Moai Statues, don't forget that to have 3 all next to each other requires a triangular 3-tile island, a thing I didn't see on a random large Archipelago map I recently played. And your city would have to be 1 tile away from it.

More likely you'll have a peninsula where the tile on the tip is 3 with the two tiles to which it connects receiving 2 each. If you're lucky, you'll get a string of 3 tiles between the 2 pair.

Rather than boost the initial value, I would prefer to see a tech that comes before Flight and provides a 1 boost, perhaps Archaeology or even sooner.

@EmperorFool
Here's a visual representation of the table:

Pre-Scaling Moai Statues



After-Scaling Moai Statues


Culture costs scaled to 200% between the two versions. For income to provide the same value, it must also increase to 200%. This is why the middle row is equal to before, isolated statues are 50% stronger (3/2-1), and the bottom row is 17% weaker (5/6-1).

We build a lone statue before a row of them (and early game is more important than late game) so I feel the bonus & penalty cancel out for stretches of coastline like the third row. The change mainly buffs isolated statues that can't get an adjacent statue, and nerfs patches with lots of clustered statues.

EmperorFool said:

I would prefer to see a tech that comes before Flight and provides a 1 boost

Click to expand...

It's not feasible to add culture with a tech because Firaxis programmed culture in a cumbersome way. This is why Landmarks and Moai Statues gain gold from techs instead of culture. I estimate creating a system to give culture to improvements with techs would take 3-5 hours. It would be nice to have, but a low priority, because gold is a reasonable bonus and works okay.



@albie_123
I'm open to suggestions if you have ideas for how to improve the leaders who fared poorly in the poll.

Hiawatha and Darius are fantastic militaristic civs for early war. Conquest starts in the classical era, and both these leaders have strong classical UUs. Hiawatha is one of the best military civs: extra speed and strength in vegetation, resource-free swordsmen, and extra production later on. Darius gets movement bonuses, an incredible UU, and gold/production from frequent GAs.

Starting with a Chinese Great General gives our initial warrior +30% strength and 4-tile sight (compare that to Washington's trait). Even if we're lucky and get a cultural ruin, the GG from Honor cannot be acquired for at least 30-40 turns (on normal speed). I suspect more people beeline for Professional Army before the Warrior Code general. When we do get a second Chinese general later on, it's now a free Golden Age.

A free worker fits the peaceful scientific development theme of Korea. I shifted to this universally appealing bonus because feedback indicates specialist bonuses are unpopular, and Korea ranked poorly.

Granted I only played the one game with Kame, but I found it difficult to get long strings of coastline. Any place I could I had to build something else to provide food for the city to grow to be able to work the statues. This was with Vanilla so food was more scarce.

It's strange that Firaxis made culture so much different from gold. I would have hoped they learned their lesson from Civ4 and implemented all yields with the same mechanism.

I really enjoy Kame and have played several games with that leader. Long stretches of coastline are rare, but statues with 2 adjacent statues are quite common. The middle statue in such a circumstance is 17% weaker. I feel that balances out the bonus a lone statue gets. It's a slight overall buff to Kame, which is intended, because he fared poorly in the poll.

I completely agree about culture and yields. Over the past year I've been gradually adding culture to the same functions used for other yields. It does take a lot of time, because the API documentation is sparse, so I only do it when necessary.

On the other hand, I don't have much else to do while I'm unable to access the game right now, so I could implement your suggestion. It would be nice for landmarks/statues to get a culture bonus in the renaissance (instead of gold). Some of the basic events appear to be in place: detecting when an improvement is created, destroyed, or changes ownership. However, these things Firaxis creates often do not work the way you'd expect, and dealing with unexpected problems is the most time consuming part.

By the way, I might need your help debugging this patch, if my time without vanilla access goes much longer. I want to release it but this version needs at least alpha testing to weed out any obvious bugs. I reorganized a few files, and a 1-letter typo when doing that can make a whole mod fail to load.

Sure, I'll help test it out, and I expect many others would as well.

I think Thal may be differentiating between your diagnostic skills and my... reportorial ones. But if he wasn't, absolutely - I'm ready to start testing b15.

Right, in the intial alpha stage lua code diagnostic work is required, more in EmperorFool's area of experience. This usually involves lots of quick code fixes. Once it reaches a playable beta stage I'll release it on the website for broader testing.

I like adding unit to Persia & Iroqious. Persia will thus get faster GA & some gold by killing barbs at a faster rate by immortals. About Korea, aren't they already quite powerful, even their UU Turtleship is great for attacking coastal cites which is available quite early compared to vanilla. Regarding China I think we need to overhaul the UA to make them fun, their UA is boring for my taste. Quite powerful but still boring.