10 Fixes Needed for the Fall Patch

5. And Lake Victoria actually needs to be a lake.

I hate that CS road thing too.

Sorry, I need to kill your unit so I can finish the road. Make Peace. Finish Road. Oh wait my relations are worse now than before :lol:
 
How is getting a second pantheon belief not a godly policy? Human player doesn't always get desert folklore you know.

The problem is getting that religion to your city. I would probably change it so that the policy immediately allows you to pick another religion to co-exist with. I.E. you pick this policy and you can choose any founded religion/pantheon and you then end up with influence from that religion in your cities. Or maybe just let you buy missionaries of both faiths so that you can spread it yourself. Obviously having religious tolerance should have diplo boosts for those following the tenants you are tolerant of(though smaller than shared religion for sure).
 
These are the ten fixes needed for the Fall Patch. Period.

You're starting off with a lot of bluster. Your list includes some things that would require a lot of work for the first post-release patch (new mechanics and new art for new resources). Your list doesn't include a couple of fixes that I think are incontrovertible no-brainers, like:
  • changing the "+1 gold from trade routes with city states" social policy to do something not so completely absolutely laughably trivial (how this one made it to release, I have no idea)
  • tweaking the balance of merchants vs. the other two great leader types some more.
  • AI should value lump sum gold more than gold per turn, and not agree to give the player a zero-interest loan

10. Piety Opener Should Provide Culture - Tradition, Liberty, and Honor openers all provide culture. Piety opener should also provide culture making it a more useful tree to open early in the game.

I agree that the Piety opener could use a buff so that it's actually plausible that you might choose it first. I would say "free Shrine or Temple in first 4 cities" would work nicely. I don't have a strong opinion over whether the Piety opener provides culture directly, because many Pantheons do, but it might be nice to add a bit of culture to one of the first-tier Piety policies.

9. Improve Denmark - The Denmark unique unit "Ski Infantry" is useless, stupid, and a complete waste. It should be replaced with a "Viking Longboat" melee naval unit that has a bonus vs. cities and a bonus with amount of gold generated from attacking a city. Coastal cities should be terrified of Viking invasions.

Don't care. I haven't played with Ski Infantry but the concept amuses me.

8. Lower City Attack Strength When No Melee Units Are Garrisoned - Cities should be easier to conquer if they have no defenders or have only ranged defenders. This will increase early warfare and buff the Honor policy.

I like it. My gut tells me that cities are annoyingly strong. I think it's weird that I plan my entire invasion of a country around trying to minimize how many of my opponent's cities will have a unit to shoot at on their turn. I consider it more than fortification and flanking. Those cities take huge chunks out of an attacker's HP every turn.

Maybe the attack should be stronger in adjacent tiles than in distance-2 tiles?

On the other hand, I think one of the late-game improvements (Military Base or maybe even Arsenal) should extend the city's attack range to 3.

7. Add New Luxuries and New Bonuses - Civs should be encouraged to settle far flung colonies for new luxuries and bonuses. Where are Tea, Coffee, Apples, Mangos, Rice, and Corn? More luxuries and bonuses will buff Wide players.

Don't care. The game has a million luxuries already.

6. Make AI Calculate 1 to 1 Luxury Trades for "We Love The King Day" Bonuses - I have Pearl but I need Silk for a WLTKD. Alex has Silk but needs Pearl for a WLTKD. Even trade is clearly reasonable if we are Friendly with each other.

Don't care. This isn't even in the top 5 things that is broken or annoying about trading with the AI.

5. Lake Victoria Is Not A Mountain - Seriously. C'mon. This is just ...

Ha, yea, I guess so, but I don't care very much.

4. Ending Unit Turn On Top of Enemy Caravan Should Auto Plunder - I shouldn't be required to station a unit one hex in front of the caravan or land on a caravan with an extra movement point to plunder the trade route. If the trade route auto plunders when a caravan runs into a unit, it should auto plunder if I end a unit's turn on top of an enemy caravan.

I agree. But then, the mechanics of plunder are weird and annoying and I'd actually like to see a bigger change there (like giving a trade unit some HP so it takes 2 hits to destroy).

3. Archeological Digs Shouldn't Destroy Great Person Improvements - Wonderful. My Academy was unknowingly built on an ancient artifact. Now I have to keep an Archeologist perma placed on top of my Academy or the AI will destroy it.

I agree. Also, probably more importantly, if I don't yet have a place to store an artifact, I shouldn't be forced to create a landmark, I should be able to hold the artifact in storage, or AT LEAST the Archaeologist should be able to pause his dig until my next Museum finishes building.

2. Add More World Congress Abilities - We need more interesting choices with the World Congress. How about forcing the liberation of a City State or dead civ city? How about banning a certain unit type? How about buffs to trade routes, unit abilities, or buildings?

I agree that some more World Congress action and mechanics would be great.

1. Improve Diplomats and Improve Spies - Diplomats should boost trade offers beyond World Congress voting. You should be able to trade tech, buy defensive agreements, and trade resource bonuses. Also, the AI should understand how to use Diplomats to buy World Congress votes. All foreign diplomat locations should be visible to the player. Spies should be able to assassinate Diplomats, conduct attacks on cities, and give bonuses to military units attacking the city.

I agree that Diplomats and Spies could use a bit of work -- I would still love at least one kind of "sabotage" operation, even if it was weak -- but this might be a lot to ask for the "fall patch." At least I'd like to make Diplomat hopping a little more feasible. Right now it just seems like the opportunity cost of Diplomats is too high (unless going for Tourism victory).
 
1. Fix this broken pile of crap.

I think that's what they need to do by the fall patch.
 
While the trade route system sounds like it would encourage development of roads, I think that needs to be enhanced. Caravan routes should be increased in income if the cities are fully connected by a road, or so.
 
I agree with everything you just said! You read my mind! Things I want are
-the ability to trade great works in diplomacy
-an option in the set for a nukes to level entire cities
 
Great ideas, one thing though: number 7 should have chocolate too. Also, some luxuries should be restricted to 1 area of the world.
 
I agree with everything you just said! You read my mind! Things I want are
-the ability to take or trade great works
-an option in the set for a nukes to level entire cities

I wish you could trade for Great Works through the normal diplomacy screen. Or at least have it so that if you put a Great Work available for trade, it would notify you if someone else is interested in trading, instead of having to always check the Great Works window. Or a notification, "A(n) [Civ]ian Great [Artist/Musician/Writer] has [Painted/Composed/Published] [Great Work]! so you know if there is something you can check on for trading.
 
I really like almost all of those changes you came up with, OP. However, and I know I've probably said this a lot, I think the primary focus (other than things that are straight up not working like the Siam wat jesuit education bug) should be improving outdated vanilla civs. I see you mentioned improving Denmark, which is great, because they need to be fixed, but to me there are so many more who desperately need fixing. Germany cries itself to sleep when it sees the Zulu's unique ability, and Japan is (come at me) practically worthless. I think priority number 1 needs to be balancing these grossly outdated civs, with those three I listed being the ones most in need of an update. After that, I suspect we may or may not see changes to America or India.
 
I really like almost all of those changes you came up with, OP. However, and I know I've probably said this a lot, I think the primary focus (other than things that are straight up not working like the Siam wat jesuit education bug) should be improving outdated vanilla civs. I see you mentioned improving Denmark, which is great, because they need to be fixed, but to me there are so many more who desperately need fixing. Germany cries itself to sleep when it sees the Zulu's unique ability, and Japan is (come at me) practically worthless. I think priority number 1 needs to be balancing these grossly outdated civs, with those three I listed being the ones most in need of an update. After that, I suspect we may or may not see changes to America or India.

Yep, I agree with this post. Vanilla civs (beyond Germany and Japan) need to be changed because with all of the new game mechanics since the vanilla game, many of the original civs are just now boring and don't correspond to the game like they should. America needs some sort of influence or ideology bonus, and I think Russia could use one as well.
 
Yes.

Also, removing this problem would be nice:
"La Venta wants a road!"
Me: ok, La Venta, I'll give you a road.
(sees 2 military units on the only 2 land hexes La Venta owns)
Me: Well... La Venta, we have a problem.

yeah, I agree... make it such as the road need only lead from your capitol to their borders.

I would make WC proposals more frequent (every 30 turns is too slow) at earlier eras. As of right now, you can hardly sabotage any AI by banning their luxes (the game usually ends before they start to feel the effect... to effectively screw them you need to ban almost all their luxes); and the criteria to propose some game-breaking projects such as world fair, international games, etc. should be more stringent (such as requiring a certain flat number of votes as world leader, or having twice as many yeas than nays etc) Otherwise it makes no sense; doubling your culture or tourism for 20 turns should not be as easy as inflicting a mere -4 happiness on some civs. Maybe have different levels of stringency for different proposals, in addition from just having more yeas then nays. Ban luxury should be easiest (say at least 10-20% of total votes), followed by great people generation/scholars in residence, then cultural/natural sites, then embargos, then international projects, and finally world religion/ideology.

And then giving diplomatic bonuses/penalties for voting up or down a certain proposal which is not directly the one that civ proposed? A civ SHOULD get mad at you if you helped pass a vote to embargo them for example.
 
Thank you for the feedback. Glad to see my thread has over 1,000 views.

You're starting off with a lot of bluster.

I find bluster works best on the Internet. Walk into a forum, tell the crowd of strangers that your a straight up boss, and then get down to business.

Why buff Piety, and not nerf Tradition or buff Honor? I think Tradition can be nerfed without actually changing any of the Tradition, Liberty, or Honor social policies. Tradition is overpowered because Tall cities are overpowered. Not only do Tall cities get a mega-boost to City Defense, but they have a smaller footprint requiring less units for defense.

Simply adding new luxuries and trade-able bonus resources would buff Liberty enough to compete with Tradition. If city defense is lowered, there will be pressure to create more units to defend your cities. You can make more units with more cities. Liberty is buffed when city defense is lowered.

If City defense is lessened or altered, Honor gets buffed by default.

Buffing Piety would really make it a first policy option. You really can't buff a religious game without finding a way to make Piety players get more Piety policies faster. Maybe allow Faith to buy Piety policies?

Thanks for the responses. Just so you know, my bluster is all just in jest. There are literally a million tweaks that would improve the game with the Fall Patch.
 
I agree that Piety should have some culture in the beginning, just like the other ancient trees. As it stands, opening Piety will put you behind in culture unless you take a culture-related pantheon/belief, in which case you'll merely catch up to the culture that the other civs are already getting from the other policy branches... but then you're missing out on the other benefits that you could've gotten out of your religion... in which case, what was the point?

Piety did after all start out as THE culture tree. +1 culture from shrines/temples makes sense. Maybe getting some happiness from Free Religion would be nice too since it needs a major nuff.

I do think most of the OP suggestions are sensible, except possibly for the last one for diplomates/spies, which seems like it'd have changes commensurate more with an expansion than a patch.

Redwings has some great ideas, especially World Congress hosting and Diplomatic Victory delaying. Unfortunately those changes might also be too drastic to include program into a mere "patch". I wish instead that the developers had read those ideas before publishing BNW.
 
Agree on Denmark, but I'd give them Motte and Bailey as a trading post that gives +2 gold, that can be built on river/coast tiles that also provides 50 percent defense. Further, you can't have two touching each other, so you can't line both sides of your rivers or your whole cost with them, and they don't provide luxuries.

Also improvements to Germany, Japan, America and a few others are needed. For America I'd have settler units have a wagon train promotion that gives +1 movement and the ability to defend from Barbarian attacks.
 
10. I disagree that Piety needs a buff. I find that when I combine it with Tradition, I can pop a religion just fine. I think your issue is the culture hit from NOT taking Tradition or Liberty. A simpler solution would be to make Legalism works similarly to the Piety opener - reduces cost of constructing monuments by 1/2. Right now, the instant (and free) monument is better than the +1 culture you get from Liberty, and Liberty's supposed to be the fast-expand tree.

9. Denmark does need a buff. It's not alone (Germany and Japan are notable additions). But, adding another Medieval Age UU isn't the answer. Viking Fury is helpful and Berserkers are certainly good. They need help in another age which is why the Ski Infantry are there. They could be more interesting if they could move onto mountains with no penalty (unlike the Carthaginian bonus), to give them a hand up assaulting mountain cities.

8. Already in the game. Ungarrisoned cities do have lower attack.

7. I'm always a fan of more luxuries. Happiness is the biggest killjoy in the early game. It sucks, especially for warmongers who get the added pain of occupation unhappiness, Courthouse costs when expanding. More luxuries would help defray this.

6. Doesn't really matter for me. My issue is that they don't improve their darn luxury tiles for centuries, when, if they did, they'd be able to trade and profit.

5. All Natural Wonders are mountains to make them impassable - even the Great Barrier Reef. I'm willing to bet the coding to change it to accommodate Lake Victoria and GBR is simply not worth the work. Side note: More Natural Wonders, please. And make it so they spawn farther from CSs. They're for players to use, dang it. And that one's a single line fix.

4. The auto-plunder would take place at the beginning of the next turn. Low priority fix.

3. Yes! They're generating the things mid-game. There is no reason why they can't check for placement of a settled GP and avoid those tiles. I should NEVER have to get rid of an Academy, Manufactory, or Custom House to take a chance at the Indiana Jones lottery.

2. More World Congress abilities absolutely need to be added. I do practically the same ones every time. The AI does too (ban luxury!). There are lots of elements of the game that can be considered.

1. I'm indifferent on this. I dislike the mechanic already, but not sure how to fix it.

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A few I'd like to see:
-Separate the counters for GM, GS, and GEs. I think the only justification for keeping it this way is to slow the science game down. If that's needed, adjust the scale for getting new ones to accelerate faster (+150 more each for each one, instead of +100 if that's what's needed).

-Fix the AI so that if it's afraid and is retreating its army, it doesn't retreat it into the sea where it loses it's defensive modifiers and dies even faster.

-Warmonger penalty seriously needs adjustment. Perma-hate if you take one city in a defensive war has got to stop. Further, give the player a hint in-game that he has to denounce before going to war. I shouldn't have to come to a fan forum to learn how to exploit the wonky hidden in-game mechanics.

-Would like to see auto-paths be more resilient. Right now, they'll stop if any unit stops on the end-point and if you're sending more than one unit, they'll trip over themselves. Would like UI to show projected path from current location to endpoint and remember the endpoint if auto-interrupted until cancelled by user.

-Support caps on flying units in any one city. Have military bases and airports increase this cap as game goes on.

-Please generate key strategic resources in the starting area of civs with dependent UUs. Quite annoying to play Rome or Denmark with no Iron in my starting area or my nearest frenemy's land. Have you ever tried to play Archipelago with no Iron on 2/3s of the map? I have. It's not fun. Adding coal to this list. I've been on fractal maps, controlling 2/3s of the map and had no coal on researching Industrialization. It's not distributed well enough and it's a key resource for Factories and Ideologies. Ditto for oil and aluminum since you can't run a modern military without it. This isn't just whining because it was hard. It's a complaint because it's not fun. It's not enjoyable to be fundamentally gimped with no recourse to fix it by allying w/ CSs or warmongering because of bad map scripts.
 
These are the ten fixes needed for the Fall Patch. Period.

10. May work, but then again, we've got to consider that it might be that Tradition and Liberty are too powerful rather than Piety being too weak.

9. Personally I like the idea of having Ski Infantry because they extend the timeframe outside the Viking era. I'd love to see something like a Coastal Raider-esque bonus to embarked units attacking cities by sea as another part of Denmark's UA, as Civ 4's Berserkers were very fun to use and it seems a little of that's been lost.

8. Certainly there should be some sort of reason for having melee units defending, so this makes sense.

7. I feel like happiness management is a fairly important part of building wide, and we have to be careful not to have excessive numbers of luxuries. On the other hand, rising science costs in BNW is an incentive not to over-extend, so maybe more luxuries could work.

6. That makes sense.

5. Of course. It should count as a lake for purposes of buildings (and maybe the +2 food from Aztec Floating Gardens?)

4. Makes sense.

3. Certainly. Antiquity sites should be calculated to avoid Great Tile Improvements altogether in my opinion.

2. I do feel like the World Congress needs more choices; it's easy to run out of useful and/or uncontroversial choices. But remember that you'll be mostly playing into the hands of diplomatic players, who already have benefits from City-State allies. I wouldn't have banning specific units though, that seems like too much of a nerf to late-game warmongering.

1. Tech trading is a bad mechanic throughout the Civ series, and I'm glad it's gone in Civ 5 as it's too abusable (particularly in larger maps with more Civs.) Other more advanced diplomacy options could be interesting, it depends what they entail. AI buying World Congress votes is alright, they'd just have to make sure the AI wouldn't be too willing to accept a vote they'd completely oppose. Revealing all diplomat locations is a good idea. Spies assassinating Diplomats could work, attacks on cities not so much - it seems unfun to me. I wouldn't have bonuses to military units due to the nature of how removing enemy Spies from your lands works - they'd essentially have a bonus you could do next to nothing about.


Now, here's what I want to see, in no particular order.

a) Look at Siam. Since the changes to culture, their previous clear route now isn't the case. Maybe let the Wat provide some tourism late in the game or something?

b) Remove the ability for Civs other than Venice to buy City-States with the Merchant of Venice (they can still use the double Trade Mission yield.) This is so you always know when someone can pernamently take a City-State out the game.

c) Prevent Indonesian cities displacing resources - one way could be for the city to knock back the resource a tile, or when you're about to build a city, it gives you a warning (that'd have to include undiscovered strategic resources, but it doesn't have to specify which one is there.) An alternative is simply to allow two resources on the same tile. After all, the city can't be razed.

d) Tweak Indonesia's UA so those cities can be on the same continent as your capital but must be far enough away. Now, it's viable on Pangea! Spanish Conquistadors could work on the same logic too.

e) Make the Kris Swordsman obselete at Gunpowder (like the other Swordsman UUs.) The reason for this is to allow synergy with the Candi and the Holy Warriors Pantheon.

f) Prevent Great Admirals spawning in lake cities or those next to small, enclosed bodies of water. AI shouldn't be building huge navies in such areas.

g) Have more priorities for start-bias placement (currently, there's only the Venetian place-first bias.) England should have a higher priority for a coastal start than Korea, for example (which only has a coastal startbias for their UU.)

There's more, but I'd be here all day.
 
^

Siam typically always ends up as a global superpower, they're easily one of the most potent civs in the game. Culture is still useful for the culture game, particularly for Aesthetics and Piety. Really, they're best suited for a diplo-powered culture game with lots of religion. Get Consulates and Siam basically wins, you're getting truckloads of Faith and Culture and Food in your capital (meaning more Great Work specialists), meaning you can spread your religion effectively (and with all those city-state allies you should be getting, getting World Religion passed in the WC is a very likely possibility), and those boatloads of Culture mean you can handily fill out Tradition, Piety, Patronage, and Aesthetics (or Rationalism if you so choose) before you even need to deal with Ideologies. The Wat means you're getting even more Culture, and Stampy is a solid enough UU. Siam really doesn't need a bonus, they're awesome as is.
 
I'm not sure if more luxuries are needed (this is a careful balance to be struck as not to make happiness too easy), but more "bonus" resources would be nice - I still find it a bit strange that there's a wheat tile, but no rice, and the like. It's doubtful anything like this will happen in the fall patch, though.

Also, suddenly a lot of people defending Denmark? Denmark is a civ that's regularly placed among the worst out there, with a mediocre UA and fairly uninteresting UUs. I'd love for them to be cooler.

Indonesia also needs a little tweaking, as interesting as they are - you can almost never use the uniques in unison: good luck finding a new continent with a lake or river city tile. Making the Candi not require fresh water (like the Coffee House doesn't require flat land) would alleviate a lot and would make the civ a lot better in an easy way.
 
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