- Moved 1
from Colosseum to Stadium.
This change makes no sense. Large(r) cities that invest into infrastructure should not be penalized for investing into infrastructure.
If you want to fix the ICS problem make "the next city" be worth 3
.
Nerf the Forbidden Palace and the Order policy to give 33% each (reducing
by 1 and 1 but never to zero).
If a player wants to play "1 pop city ICS" he has to pay around 600
for the Colloseum for his new city to become happiness-neutral at size 1. If he wants to pay further 800
for building the Theatre, well my hat is off to him. That is seriously some expensive research-boosting 1-pop city he has there.
This also indirectly boosts
Autocracy, and Piety works only for cities that reach population 5 and 10.
***
Another solution is to make both
Colloseum and
Theatre work exactly like the Library or Piety policy: adds 1
per every 3 citizens. Also increase the
by 1 per new city as I suggested in the previous part (and nerf FP and Order accordingly).
At pop 3 it will be worth +1
At pop 6 it will be worth +2
At pop 9 it will be worth +3
At pop 12 it will be worth its current +4
At pop 15 it will become better than it is now (thus mitigating the effect of the 1
it gained from the new "per city" penalty).
At pop 15 the Theatre's extra +1
will negate the reduced potency FP and Order policy.
This makes much more sense, especially since it works in line with your growth-boosting new Aqueduct.
A small ICS pop 4 city will (in comparison), gain 3
from simply being there, 1
from Colloseum, 1
from a Theatre and the remaining 1
point would need to be found in other sources. The total upkeep cost is 7
for these buildings, so the 4-pop city will be hard-pressed to pay for its own expenses - no more science-specialist-research-boosting nonsese.
What this means is that any new city that wants to become fully happiness-neutral will have to reach size 10 (-3 from new city, +6 from Colloseum&Theatre, +2 from Piety or +1 from Liberty and +1/2 from Specialist policies). The only way to get to this before Renaissance is to have horses in radius for Circus.
Abundant happiness resources won't be able to pay for both large core cities and small ICS cities - the player will have to choose whether he invests the surplus happiness into keeping the small ones alive or to let the large cities grow.
This also makes puppeting cities more difficult. As a rule of thumb, you won't be able to pay the
requirements for obitaining them without dipping into your resource happiness pool. Which means it will be very hard (if not simply impossible) to zerg the whole continent before Printing Press. At which point, conquests are relieved of the happiness issue and massive empires may start becoming reality.
Except investment into units, players will be forced to invest into wonders (FP), buildings and especially
policies if they want their conquests to mean something positive. Those "ludicrous" amounts of cash gained by puppets will be fueled into purchasing Theatres and cultural city-states, puppets will be converted by a 1:1 ratio into annexes just to rush-buy the happiness buildings.
cost. It's really, really good at what it does (turning all flatlands into marshes for combat purposes).
reduction to science specialist strength in this mod. I think the root problem is the instant-tech ability of GSs, which got a HUGE buff from earlier versions of civ and really does feel overpowered.
Scientist Specialist from Library to the University.
