FfH2 0.16 Balance Recommendations

Hmm... I wonder if I shouldn't make it so it can only be done in cities below a certain culture rating? So you could use it to quickly push out some early borders, but not start combating real cities with it.

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I'd take a slightly different route. Let me explain why.

At first I was skeptical of the mini-culture bomb technique. But anyone that's been paying attention to American politics or the creation v. evolution wars lately will see an apt analogy. (For you older folks, think back on the old communism vs. capitalism cold war.) It seems like every day, some new book or movie is released with the carefully considered purpose of affecting cultural opinions. Red state versus blue state. Societies are polarized and transformed. In some cases, thinking again of the Cold War, whole countries
are "won over".

I see FFH's "prophets" not as actual people, but instead to the works produced by them. They are produced by the notable, and in some cases, notorious, artists and politicians of today. They are the great speakers and leaders and propagandists. They are the Ann Coulters, Richard Dawkins, the *shudder* Bushes and Rumsfelds. They are the various treaties: NAFTAs, GATTs, and Kyoto. When these things are disseminated to the public, opinions change.


In FFH, this technique can sometimes--but not often--be preferable to out and out war. At first it seemed like a major exploit, but I gradually changed my mind about that. It could do with a bit of nerfing perhaps.

On the plus side
-it doesn't take a lot of micromanagement of unit creation and shuffling around. You set any city you want producing prophets and steer them all to your border city.
-No war weariness. Its a peaceful expansion strategy.


On the down side:
-Just getting one city to flip can take dozens of turns. And some cities never seem to flip at all.
-It takes a lot longer to acquire an opponents city than out and out war. Often by the time I've flipped one or two cities, I could have militarily conquered most if not all of the opponents turf.
-The AI has no clue on how to deal with it.


My recommendations:

Rather than install a numerical ceiling beyond which prophet bombs are ineffective, I'd prefer to see a limit on how far you can push your borders.

For example, let's imagine an all too common scenario. You're at war with someone, and take a "heartland" city. For one reason or another, peace is declared. But due to its proximity to other heartland cities, this newly acquired territory is submerged within the enemy's borders. Its only a matter of time before it flips back.

In FFH, a dozen or so prophet bombs can push the enemy's borders back a square or two. Enough so that you can effectively work your new city. If it had to be nerfed, I'd like to see prophet bombs stop working here.

This next part is where it starts to become exploitive.

If you use another forty or fifty prophet bombs, you can extend your borders another ring and start to encroach deeper. That huge, culturally powerful city next door starts to shrink due to lack of workable tiles. Forty or fifty more and what was once a major enemy stronghold right next door is now down to 15 pop or less. Forty or fifty more and it just might flip to you.

My second recommendation would be to require full blown Great Artists to expand borders beyond the second layer. Or perhaps a new unit could be created with a similar but weakened GA ability. Only civs with the spiritual, creative, or philosopical traits could make them.

So personally, I think there is room in FFH for these mini bombs. Perhaps, for the sake of game balance, we could limit their effect. But I like what they represent.

POSSIBLE BUG:

One last thing I noticed recently. I'm not sure the border calculation works right. If there is a problem with this expansion technique, then this could be the heart of it.

The scenario is described as above. The Sheim declared war on me. I took about half his cities and we made peace. One of my new border cities was separated from his capital by four tiles. I didn't keep count of how many prophets I used, but about 50 prophets later I had pushed my borders so that his capital was just within them.

I had a spy looking at his city, and found an odd situation. His city had a cutural value of about 26,000. Whereas mine was about 5,000. I couldn't help but think that something was messed up here. I don't know how the calculations are made, but with his culture being over 5 times mine, borders shouldn't have been as far as they were.

Another option for the prophets would be to make them hidden nationality units but without the ability to declare nationality. Kind of a seperate church and state thing. The computer knows what to do to hidden nationality units, kill them. This would also enable religions to possibly spread beyond cultural borders which would be more realistic also.

I very much like this idea, Black Atilla. Historically, a new religion was never quite encouraged by leaders, even if they had open relations with the other country. Prophets, preachers, teachers, and all other sorts of religion spreaders were persecuted even if the country they came from wasn't. They would also be able to get into places that maybe their home country wouldn't.

Making the religion spreading units have hidden nationality would make a lot of sense. Even in peacetime they wouldn't be wanted, and they can come even during war. The problem that I see though, is how would they then spread the religion? In order to spread it, you have to stand on top of the city. If you have hidden nationality, then you probably can't just walk right up to a city (since how often do you see an undefended city, really?). Could it possibly be changed so that you can convert a city just by being in the eight tile surrounding area?

make it a one-hex castable spell-like ability???

Sorry I'm not familiar with the terminology, but assuming you mean a spell that can be cast on any adjacant tile, then yes. That would work great. What are the chances of having some change like this put into FfH?

One problem with that is you couldn't safely send prophets into friendly territory. You could share the same religion and have open borders with an AI, but the AI would still kill your prophets. That problem could be fixed (units under a state religion can't attack any units with that religion's promotion unless at war), but that seems like a lot of extra coding.

For the mini-culture bomb, are the prophets expanding the borders like a Great Bard would, or do they only expand the borders when they push the culture value beyond certain points?

Big, because there are alredy a lot of spells like the that, the only problem is that the AI doesn´t know how to use them yet. (I think)

For the mini-culture bomb, are the prophets expanding the borders like a Great Bard would, or do they only expand the borders when they push the culture value beyond certain points?

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it only expands the borders after certain culture value points are acheived. i.e. 10/100/500/5000 the first two are easily attainable with the help of the prophet mini-bombs but the next two levels take a heck of a lot of prophets to achieve.

it only expands the borders after certain culture value points are acheived. i.e. 10/100/500/5000 the first two are easily attainable with the help of the prophet mini-bombs but the next two levels take a heck of a lot of prophets to achieve.were.

Click to expand...

This is true to some extent. The borders expand once you meet the culture platform, prophet bomb or otherwise.

But in areas of overlap, things are weird. As I described above, I had pushed my border up to and to either side of a city. My cities culture was ~5000. The Sheim's city was ~26,000.

I'd like to see the code, because something seems out of whack there.

Perhaps 20 culture is added to the city itself, but the effects of 4000 culture (great artist bomb) to the surrounding terrain?

Perhaps 20 culture is added to the city itself, but the effects of 4000 culture (great artist bomb) to the surrounding terrain?

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I was thinking that too. It'd be an easy thing to overlook. Modder borrows the code of a Great Artist, reasonably assuming that tile ownership values are calculated only from the culture value of the city. He pokes through the borrowed code, changing 4000 to 20. To test this out, he use a prophet bomb, city culture goes up 20, it expands to two rings, and voila. Job complete.

But if we're right, then there could be another step someplace in the calculation where 4,000 is still in effect. Curious. Maybe there are different calculating procedures for ring expansion and overlap? It would be in the overlap calculator where the 4000 figure is operating.

Is Guardian of Nature too powerful with the Ljosalfar? I haven't played too far into a current game where I'm trying to be the proto-typical elven nation with a forested country and Fellowship of Leaves... I switchde to Guardian of Nature and with my forested start (thanks to the FFH Tectonics map generator with civ-linked start locs) almost all my cities have enough forest to provide them with over 30 happy and health. My capital has the capacity to eventually reach beyond 40 pop easily and having tons of farms doesn't mean I'll lose production either... My priests have been running around planting forests like mad. It really seems like a little too much... Plus, Ygrdassil is almost done and I have barely begun trading resources with other civs, that's even more happiness and health to look forward to.

The Ljosalfar with Leaves are certainly much more powerful than the Ljosalfar alone. Perhaps even a greater synergy than the Khazad with Runes. There has been a lot of discussion over whether or not they're too powerful in those circumstances.

Jay Ray said:

I was thinking that too. It'd be an easy thing to overlook. Modder borrows the code of a Great Artist, reasonably assuming that tile ownership values are calculated only from the culture value of the city. He pokes through the borrowed code, changing 4000 to 20. To test this out, he use a prophet bomb, city culture goes up 20, it expands to two rings, and voila. Job complete.

But if we're right, then there could be another step someplace in the calculation where 4,000 is still in effect. Curious. Maybe there are different calculating procedures for ring expansion and overlap? It would be in the overlap calculator where the 4000 figure is operating.

Click to expand...

I'm not sure. The 4000 and the 20 value are both only changed in the unit's XML entry.

Jay Ray said:

This is true to some extent. The borders expand once you meet the culture platform, prophet bomb or otherwise.

But in areas of overlap, things are weird. As I described above, I had pushed my border up to and to either side of a city. My cities culture was ~5000. The Sheim's city was ~26,000.

I'd like to see the code, because something seems out of whack there.

Click to expand...

This was my experience too. It wasn't taking 100 prophets to take cities. It wasn't hard at all. And I wasn't just picking off a few border cities, I was eliminating entire civs. Their major cities, their capitol, everything. I never investigated, but I'd wager that the cities I was taking had more culture than some of my culture outposts.

Jay Ray said:

I was thinking that too. It'd be an easy thing to overlook. Modder borrows the code of a Great Artist, reasonably assuming that tile ownership values are calculated only from the culture value of the city. He pokes through the borrowed code, changing 4000 to 20. To test this out, he use a prophet bomb, city culture goes up 20, it expands to two rings, and voila. Job complete.

But if we're right, then there could be another step someplace in the calculation where 4,000 is still in effect. Curious. Maybe there are different calculating procedures for ring expansion and overlap? It would be in the overlap calculator where the 4000 figure is operating.

Click to expand...

Thats an interesting thought. Its actually just a setting for the unit in XML (setting iGreatWorkCulture to 20 instead of the great artists 4000) and we havent changed anything in the code. But I will look through the source and see if I can see how that is being applied to border expansion.

If I'm reading the code right, the problem is that the culture given is not directly proportional to the Great Work Culture amount.

Summary: The city is updated correctly, although the minimum value of the great work is 20. Each plot, however, gains:
((the culture level - the range) * 20 + the Culture commerce rate of the city + 1) 20 times, one for each 1/20 of the Great work. Given a high Culture Commerce rate, this could presumably give far higher culture than you'd expect from the Great Work Culture amount. As he was in the late game, trying for a cultural victory, and had nothing else useful to research, this may be exactly what happened.

Detail
1.0 The Great work code is governed by CvUnit::greatWork()
1.1 This calls CvUnit::getGreatWorkCulture().
CvUnit::getGreatWorkCulture() gets the unit's great work number, and multiplies it by a number depending on the game speed.
1.2 CvUnit::greatWork() next will divide the number garnered on step 1.1 by 20 (granting a minimum of 1), and apply the culture in 20 small increments via the function CvCity::changeCulture
1.2.1 CvCity::changeCulture calls CvCity::setCulture, taking the current culture and incrementing it by the passed in amount.
1.2.1.1 CvCity::setCulture actually sets the city's culture to the new value, calls CvCity::updateCultureLevel, then calls CvCity::doPlotCulture.
1.2.1.1.1 CvCity::updateCultureLevel verifies if there is a level change, and if so, it calls CvCity::setCultureLevel.
1.2.1.1.1.1 CvCity::setCultureLevel handles anything off of the Culture level increasing.
1.2.1.1.2 CvCity::doPlotCulture calls CvPlot::changeCulture for each plot within the level, using (the culture level - the range) * 20 + the commerce rate + 1 as the modifier.
1.2.1.1.2.1 CvPlot::changeCulture calls CvPlot::setCulture with the update + the current culture.
1.2.1.1.2.1.1 CvPlot::setCulture calls CvPlot::updateCulture
1.2.1.1.2.1.1.1 CvPlot::updateCulture sets the correct cultural owner.

Zuul said:

Make the river defence higher, maybe up to 40% from 25%. This will make the amphibious promotion useful but also makes rivers more strategic.

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Thoughts on this?

I like this idea. I normally never take the amphibious promotion right now, because it is so very negligable. Normally (at the difficulty that I play) I can just move to a different area to attack from, or wait for the ai to attack me (from across the river). Doing this would make rivers mean a bit more, I think.

Jay Ray said:

This is true to some extent. The borders expand once you meet the culture platform, prophet bomb or otherwise.

But in areas of overlap, things are weird. As I described above, I had pushed my border up to and to either side of a city. My cities culture was ~5000. The Sheim's city was ~26,000.

I'd like to see the code, because something seems out of whack there.

Click to expand...

each tile of culture further away from a citie has 10% of the culture of previous tiles(last time i checked)
was there a revolt chance for the city?