GEM Stage 4: Cities & Policies

Update: Thank you for the help everyone! I should have this stage of the project released within the next few days.






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The improvements to cities and policies are the biggest and oldest parts of the Vanilla Enhanced Mod. This stage of the G&K Enhanced Mod will dramatically strengthen gameplay when complete. I'm doing both the City & Policy sections at once because many of these effects are connected. The plans for GEM start identical to VEM. We need to adapt it to work with G&K. Next Monday or Tuesday I will finish up and release this stage of the GEM beta.

This is an opportunity to improve the game you love, and take part in the creation of the community-made expansion pack!

(Note: this version of GEM is an alpha test and will probably not work ingame. It needs modding to make it playable. This is what the thread is for!)

Well,first of all,I think it's worthy to discuss about Piety tree . Some of the changes that I proposed for this tree are:

Opener: 25% discount on all purchases of religious units and buildings with . +1 for cities with a religion .

Mandate of Heaven: +20% of excess added each turn to the amount of .

Theocracy: Allow using to acquire Missionaries and Inquisitors .

Religious Tolerance: The free social policy can be moved to the Finisher and the discount on Social policies can be moved here . Plus,receive +1 for every religious minority in the city;

Finisher: 1 Free Social policy,along with the buff on Holy site(+3 and +3) ,as made on G&K;

What GenjiKhan said!

But I'm not sure about the Liberty-tree... I always felt that 1 for every city is a little weak. How about 2?

So you want us to change things directly into the game? Might get confusing, but well, worth a try. The changes I did so far to XML I did all with the normal notepad of windows (Actually only changed the name of city states, because I dislike one city and I dislike using modern names for old cities, namely la venta). Totally off topic now, but would it be possible to merge some mods already with GEM? I do think the UI ones can wait this stage out, but I feel like f.e. the More Mercantile would fit

Maybe it's better to concentrate the piety discussion in the thread already existing on it. After all, it's quite a big topic, while most of the proposed changes are "more confined". That said, I'm not totally happy with Thal's Piety Tree as well

Wow, I actually already like those policy changes. Should be an interesting alternative to the main game

I think Freedom Opener is a bit too powerful boost for food, maybe make it +1 on farms & food buildings. And constitution policy should get less unhappiness from specialists as well (instead of nationalism policy). A conqueror does not really require to run specialists so that policy would be a bit of waste for them.
And replace the privileged elite with something like 25% bonus for all fighting units for 20 turns. That coupled with an early policy in the branch would help the player to push other civs on backfoot, very similar to what Nazi Germany achieved in earlier part of WWII.

Freedom finisher might be an overkill considering how powerful cities would become with already huge size they would have due to opener, return it to 8 free maintenace units. So that they can maintain a decent army & have a fair fight. I believe that even defender should deploy respectable size of army, just giving insane bonuses to city defences or handicapping ur foe isn't much fun.

Regarding Piety I think cheaper faith purchases should be included in the tree, another idea could be shifting organized religion bonus to opener & change organized religion to '-25% cost for purchases and missionaries & prophets have +1'.

So a thread about buildings and policies goes straight to policies...I can see what we're all missing most is the vem trees.

One thing I note immediately is that copper was proposed as modded by both mints and forges and that isn't listed (actually you took down the resource-building modifiers list from the forums, which would be quite useful for modders). I will compose a list of heavily modified wonders in gk, but there doesn't appear to be much acknowledgement of those changes in the plans yet (hagia?). Actually most gk changes aren't in play yet. Of things needing debate it's probably what to do about terracotta or police stations versus adding +1 to colosseums or stadiums.

Whatever we do, let's keep universal appeal in the early parts of Piety. It fared very well in the poll with that combination of 2 happiness policies and 6 specialized culture/goldenage policies for peaceful players. What if we keep the 2 early happiness policies, and redesign later ones to focus more on piety like GenjiKhan's suggestions? We could move some of the culture effects to other trees like Tradition (I moved one there already).

To put it in a broader perspective, players should get 1-2 policies in every tree, and all the policies in 1-2 trees. If all-or-nothing investment is usually a better choice than partial investment, we're on the low left side of the scale:



@mitsho
Several people asked how we get the stages of Gem out faster, or how they could help, so I want to try opening up the editing to more people than myself. My current priority is to get all of Vem activated in Gem in a decently playable state. Lots of people testing and tweaking stuff is a great way to speed that up. If you can merge that mod into this one I'll gladly add the code, but I need to focus my own time on getting what's already here working.

@ThePsyborg
The liberty opener starts weak and gets stronger, which balances the 2nd tier policies which start strong and get weaker.

@Babri
Villages are the main improvement in the mod, so farms are uncommon, and farm bonuses have low power. Happiness also limits farms, since an unhappy empire gets no benefit from additional points of food.

Tall empire growth is traditionally limited by food, while wide empire growth is limited by happiness. The freedom tree helps tall empires by giving food, and the nationalism tree helps conquerors by giving happiness. Those roles work well and I want to keep that focus. Nationalism's current wide empire focus has more universal appeal than the old war focus, since wide empires include both peace and war.

On policies
1) Is Order/Freedom/Nationalism retaining its diplomatic schism from GK such that these are mutually exclusive trees? (I vote yes). If so, Order/Freedom will eventually need some sort of espionage advantage. Extra spy, offensive potential, something. Even if that diplomatic change doesn't stick, using policies to boost espionage (and faith) in a unique way would be ideal.

2) Liberty doesn't need a free city defence building in all cities. Those are already more powerful by adding HP to cities such that it's probably OP to give walls for free everywhere in a wide empire. +2 and could stay in theory on them, though I'm ambivalent. Free GP isn't terrible as a finisher since so many VEM policies provide a free GP. I also think the settler rush change in GK was at least marginally popular, though needed to be teamed with some other advantage since it was now less powerful. Reverting it back doesn't seem warranted as yet.

3) Second privileged elite change. I don't think that one makes sense in the Nationalism tree. Or at least, even if it does, it loses some of the focus of the tree on conquest and military power to give it a specialist advantage.

4) +2 is extremely powerful. I would go with +1 on farms and granaries, maybe hospitals or skyscapers (if we add them) as well instead. Cities could still get quite a lot of extra food that way if its farmed intensively and has growth focused buildings. +2 is overkill. I have plenty of farms for wheat and hill heavy cities in my experience.

5) Is this retaining GK's faith-based purchasing of GPs? (Freedom buys artists, commerce merchants, nationalism admirals and generals, order engineers, rationalism scientists)

6) As far as us modding things to help out, it might be useful for us to break up into "teams" like for what we're changing such that the work isn't being duplicated (by Thal especially). A wonders team or a policy team, something like that? Personally I'm content to do xml changes that are proposed, seem endorsed or announced, but don't make it into the released version since that's stuff that's getting overlooked while other (larger) changes are made and speeds up the finalising of the mod into a full GK conversion. I'm good at catching details like that and there are a lot of details to work out yet. Plus help out with documentation.

Thalassicus said:

@mitsho

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Challenge Accepted

I do get what you are saying about none/all and some selection, but Mandate of Heaven sounds really overpowered right now. That's at maximum 5 per city, right? (I assume Pagodas, Cathedrals and Mosques don't count as faith buildings?).

Also duplicating the culture bonus at the end of the piety tree seems redundant, I'd rather have a cost reduction on faith units/building giving you the opportunity cost of when to take that policy. Spreading the culture bonusses around might also create a less linear culture victory game.

I also feel that there should be espionage policies spread around the last three trees. And how will the diplomacy points of the last trees be affected if they're not exclusive?

Challenge Accepted

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Suit up!

mystikx21 said:

As far as us modding things to help out, it might be useful for us to break up into "teams" like for what we're changing such that the work isn't being duplicated (by Thal especially).

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Sure, try out anything you're interested in.

mystikx21 said:

mutually exclusive trees

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If a policy trees need work, we should do everything possible improve the tree while keeping options open to the player. Open-ended games like Skyrim and Minecraft are hugely popular because they give players freedom to explore many interesting options. Even successful companies like Bioware mess up and get negative feedback for decisions like the limited Dragon Age 2 maps, or the restrictive options for Mass Effect 3's ending. Official Civ patches tend to remove lots of player choices:

• Early villages
• Early specialists
• Policy saving
• Promotion saving
• Close-spaced cities
• RAs independent of DoFs
• Mutually inclusive policy trees
• etc...

With mutually inclusive trees we can still choose to take an all-or-nothing approach, but we also have the choice to invest partially in each tree, opening up new strategies. Sure they might not be ideal strategies, but whenever possible we should let the player decide that for themselves - game designers like me shouldn't make these choices for players in advance. Let's find ways to improve the game while keeping it open ended.

mystikx21 said:

3) Second privileged elite change. I don't think that one makes sense in the Nationalism tree. Or at least, even if it does, it loses some of the focus of the tree on conquest and military power to give it a specialist advantage.

4) +2 is extremely powerful. I would go with +1 on farms and granaries, maybe hospitals or skyscapers (if we add them) as well instead. Cities could still get quite a lot of extra food that way if its farmed intensively and has growth focused buildings. +2 is overkill. I have plenty of farms for wheat and hill heavy cities in my experience.

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Here comes another vote for my suggestion.

Thalassicus said:

@Babri
Villages are the main improvement in the mod, so farms are uncommon, and farm bonuses have low power.

Tall peaceful empires are limited by food, while wide conquest empires are limited by happiness. The freedom tree helps tall empires by giving food, and the nationalsm tree helps conquerors by giving happiness. Those roles work well and I want to keep that focus. The design strategy of focusing nationalism on military bonuses was unsuccessful.

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Last time I played VEM, farms were super powerful, 2+2+1+2=7 on every grassland river tile as Gandhi+freedom & my cities became so huge that I could churn out most things in 3-4 turns. Thats why I said that would make farms too powerful. Maybe spread out the food boost, for example both mines & farms give +1food or something. Because putting too much boost to farms as a tall empire means that u'll simply spam more & more farms and thus devaluing other improvements.

Regarding nationalism I agree that it has to have happiness boosts to aid conquerors but boost on specialists doesn't usually help a conqueror much. On the other hand an early combat boost would be more suitable, the reason people did not like nationalism before was that the combat boost was in the end of the tree by which the combat has already been decided. Making u choose combat boost right after the opener as well as the longer lasting battles in G&K means that it would be much more useful.

I would like to consider rebalancing happiness if we can build a city like you describe without running into happiness problems. What areas of the game would you recommend reducing happiness?

How might we make specialists more attractive to warmongers, if getting no specialists is clearly the best choice (left side of the complexity scale)?

Thalassicus said:

If a policy tree needs balancing, we should improve that balance instead of restricting the player. Games like Skyrim and Minecraft are hugely popular because they give players freedom to explore many interesting options. Even successful companies like Bioware mess up and get negative feedback for decisions like the limited Dragon Age 2 maps, or the restrictive options for Mass Effect 3's ending. Official civ patches tend to take that approach by remove player choices to hide problems:

With mutually inclusive trees we can still choose to take an all-or-nothing approach, but we also have the choice to invest partially in each tree, opening up new strategies. Sure they might not be ideal strategies, but whenever possible we should let the player decide that for themselves - game designers like me shouldn't make these choices for players in advance. Let's find ways to improve the game while keeping options open to people.

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The purpose of the exclusivity in this case isn't balance, it was diplomacy. I find that an interesting concept and it could be explored more without eliminating it (partial bonuses or penalties for civic specialising?). In the sense of having mixed economies or "autocratic free markets", it's not a terrible concept to allow cherry-picking, no.

Even without that however, I do think some espionage bonuses/changes are appropriate in those three trees and those don't appear to be reflected as yet (and the nationalism benefit is not listed).

(Off-topic, I very much liked one of the ME3 endings, one of the harder ones to get, and my only objection to its endings overall was more that they didn't fill out the ending cinematic with more flesh on the bones to make sense of what was happening. I'm not sure what the fuss is over as a result).

I completely agree that I'd like to see espionage bonuses in these policies. Could you go into more detail about the diplomacy effects of the late trees? I've been so busy with family and civup I haven't had much time to play lategame G&K. These are exactly the kind of topics we need to discuss for adjusting these parts of VEM to GEM.

(From what I could tell the main fuss about ME3 was the developers specifically said "we will not do a simple A-B-C choice ending"... then turned around and did it. Misleading customers is never a good idea! )

Thalassicus said:

If we can surround a city with 7 tiles and use them all without running into happiness problems, then I would like to consider rebalancing happiness. What areas of the game would you recommend reducing happiness?

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I think that might be very difficult to balance happiness for tall empires. Currently there are many sources of happiness including buildings, wonders, unique attributes of civs, religion, luxuries & so on. If u try tweaking them they might adversely effect wide empires. The only areas viable would be CS & religion. IMO religion has too many happiness boosts & mercantile CS should give less happiness but with some gpt.

What limits the tall empire is food NOT happiness. If u give them too many food boosts then they would become OP. That is why I said nerf it back to +1 & to compensate give another less powerful boost like +1 on food buildings.

Thalassicus said:

If specialists are not appealing to conquerors, how can we make them more attractive to a warmonger?

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That is a tricky question. Specialists are generally less useful for wide empires because wide ones have small pops per city so they would prefer working on nearby city tiles as specialists aren't so useful in smaller cities. IIRC many VEM players here reported that nationalism had too many happiness boosts. That is why I suggest change it to combat boost.

I am sure people would like a combat boost earlier in the tree. That might even help AI to beat the human where the specialist happiness boost won't help it.

Changes to buildings in GK (to discuss) (part 1)
New Buildings

Amphitheater is pretty straight forward, just move the Temple culture resource bonuses over and its a "temple". Shrine has beliefs and piety to improve it. Cathedrals/Mosque/Pagoda could find some wonders to grant them for free as Djenne does but otherwise fine. Possibly they need to be balanced themselves.

Police and Constabularies look like they need the most help. In Civ4, espionage buildings mostly provided happiness through anti-war weariness mechanics as I recall. That could be a policy advantage for freedom or built into the buildings as constructed in non-occupied/puppet cities to provide happiness?

Bomb Shelters look fine as a cheap alternative to building the entire defensive building chain in a late-game with nuclear potential to protect cores. I think Recycling is (usually) useless in default GK, but could have potential in GEM with lower resource counts.

@mystikx21
That made me realize I'm so tired I forgot to copy the table of building resource bonuses to the wiki. I'm doing that now.

Here's the table for reference:

Babri said:

I think that might be very difficult to balance happiness for tall empires. If u try tweaking them they might adversely effect wide empires. [...] IIRC many VEM players here reported that nationalism had too many happiness boosts.

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This seems to indicate tall and wide empires both have too much happiness. If that's the case, we could lower the cost and happiness of happy buildings and solve all four issues (tall growth, wide growth, nationalism, and freedom). Alternatively, we could raise per-city or per-pop unhappiness.

Babri said:

Specialists are generally less useful for wide empires because wide ones have small pops per city so they would prefer working on nearby city tiles as specialists aren't so useful in smaller cities.

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The basic yields on specialists mainly benefit wide empires, and the points benefit tall empires, so we could raise the basic yields of specialists to make them more desirable for wide empires.

Thalassicus said:

Could you go into more detail about the diplomacy effects of the late trees? I've been so busy with family and civup I haven't had much time to play lategame G&K. These are exactly the kind of topics we need to discuss for adjusting these parts of VEM to GEM.

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Diplomatic effects work similar to "you have a different religion than us!" to modify AI hostility or friendliness. So civs that share "Freedom" are more apt to be allied, and more apt to be hostile to civs that share "order", as an example. I'm not sure how well this could be scaled or modified to allow for partial adoptions/cherry picks, but it seems like a useful mechanic to have "ideological blocs" cold-war style. Civ4 as I recall had a "you have chosen your civics well" diplomacy modifier and this is similar.

Part of the problem with it right now is the AI has a bonkers warmongering diplomatic style that doesn't synergize well with this idea but if it is more loyal and protective if you are aligned and a trade-off being that it can become hostile and aggressive if you oppose it, it could make the later game more interesting (sometimes).

Thalassicus said:

@mystikx21
That made me realize I'm so tired I forgot to copy the table of building resource bonuses to the wiki. I'm doing that now.

{snip}...so we could raise the basic yields of specialists to make them more desirable for wide empires.

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Actually you had it on there last night. It was a good addition to the wiki and I was wondering why you chopped it.

I second specialist improvement, but it shouldn't be "base". Should be later game tech/wonders or policy driven.

As far as happiness reduction, mandate of heaven (or the piety tree in general) doesn't need or shouldn't have happiness for both religious and culture buildings. Just religious buildings ideally. Some other tree could add to culture-type buildings if we must improve those.