Caveman 2 Cosmos (ideas/discussions thread)

I'm sure government sanctioned gangs and druglords here would probably disagree.

Look into what the CIA was doing with the importation of Cocaine to pay for their guy to win the war in Columbia on our black market dollars during the 80's. It's still a very real phenomenon.

charlesb96 said:

But that is just what I am saying, it all takes place "out there" not here at home. Your HN unit is working in other countries, not roaming around outside Perth, or Los Angeles, well I was also going to say Moscow, but the state of the country there allows it now. But that is the point I am making, some civics should not allow your HN unit to engage in combat inside your own borders, just "out there".

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This is more or less reflected in the game already. When I play I always have all my HN units roaming enemy nations, because that is the only place they have a use. I don't attack the selected countries that I have open border with inside my own border because my HN units has way more important damage to cause elsewhere.

Toffer90 said:

I don't attack the selected countries that I have open border with inside my own border because my HN units has way more important damage to cause elsewhere.

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Unfortunately this is exactly what the AI does. It makes Open Borders and Right of Passage much less useful than they were.

Topkapi Palace needs to be redone. It gives you a 20% chance to build your vassals unique unit. Does this mean a chance to build one of the cultural units that your vassal can build? Instead you can just insist that your vassal trade you that culture so you can build them yourself, so the Topkapi bonus does not seem to make sense.

If you use the option of no ZOC then Strategic Command needs to be disabled as well, it becomes an empty GG promotion, but it is still a prerequisite for following promotions.

Still trying to come up with ideas to curb rampant money, can all promotions be made to cost money to be taken? Perhaps differing amounts for different ones? This represents the time and money required to train the unit in the new promotion. Even the "free" promotions buildings give. Base the cost on the era of the unit as well as the promotion. It would cost more to give combat 1 to a Medieval unit than to an Ancient one. After all, it costs to upgrade a unit, makes sense it would cost to promote them too. This can become VERY costly if you take the trait Charismatic and every one of your 500 unit army now has another promotion coming.

charlesb96 said:

Topkapi Palace needs to be redone. It gives you a 20% chance to build your vassals unique unit. Does this mean a chance to build one of the cultural units that your vassal can build? Instead you can just insist that your vassal trade you that culture so you can build them yourself, so the Topkapi bonus does not seem to make sense.

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It is supposed to give the base culture of your vassals but it doesn't. I figured out how to do that today, I think. Unfortunately I haven't figured out how to tell your vassals from your colonies. You can't trade base cultures. There is a late wonder that also gives you base cultures.

Dancing Hoskuld said:

It is supposed to give the base culture of your vassals but it doesn't. I figured out how to do that today, I think. Unfortunately I haven't figured out how to tell your vassals from your colonies. You can't trade base cultures. There is a late wonder that also gives you base cultures.

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By base culture, you mean North America, Europe, yes? So is this a 20% chance every turn to get this culture? Does this stay, or only for one turn? If it is permanent, then you will eventually get it, it is just a matter of time, if it is not permanent then how do you know when you get it for that turn, and is that long enough to start to build a lesser culture based on the Greater?

charlesb96 said:

Topkapi Palace needs to be redone. It gives you a 20% chance to build your vassals unique unit. Does this mean a chance to build one of the cultural units that your vassal can build? Instead you can just insist that your vassal trade you that culture so you can build them yourself, so the Topkapi bonus does not seem to make sense.

If you use the option of no ZOC then Strategic Command needs to be disabled as well, it becomes an empty GG promotion, but it is still a prerequisite for following promotions.

Still trying to come up with ideas to curb rampant money, can all promotions be made to cost money to be taken? Perhaps differing amounts for different ones? This represents the time and money required to train the unit in the new promotion. Even the "free" promotions buildings give. Base the cost on the era of the unit as well as the promotion. It would cost more to give combat 1 to a Medieval unit than to an Ancient one. After all, it costs to upgrade a unit, makes sense it would cost to promote them too. This can become VERY costly if you take the trait Charismatic and every one of your 500 unit army now has another promotion coming.

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Not a fan of penalizing a player for having more skilled units. I'll pause here soon and add what I believe will strongly help to compensate for gold glut soon.

What would disabling Strategic Command take away all access to?

Thunderbrd said:

Not a fan of penalizing a player for having more skilled units. I'll pause here soon and add what I believe will strongly help to compensate for gold glut soon.

What would disabling Strategic Command take away all access to?

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Strategic Command would take away access to the extended line of promotions that i designed. I wanted the extended line to need 2 different promotions to proceed and these, including SC I think were the only dead end high level promotions. General staff needs 2 other promotions, but Command needs Strategic Command, General Staff 5 needs Command 5 to progress.

Cost for promotions is not really penalizing, just being more realistic, retraining a unit should cost something, just paying the salary of the instructors even.

I dont remember if it was in this thread but there was a discussion about it being too easy to accumulate gold in later ages. As a way of countering this in a real world way I think this chart is interesting. Ir shows what a modern Western State spends by sector. As you can see Health and Education (and debt repayment) soak up huge amounts.

PS the country in the chart is Ireland so its a little distorted because almost every other State would have higher miltary spendiing

Please take a look at the new platy improvement

Platy tech tree new script approach
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=13506721&postcount=1705

It reduces tuurn times when new tech is discovered. In C2C it means near every turn.

Nimek said:

Please take a look at the new platy improvement

Platy tech tree new script approach
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=13506721&postcount=1705

It reduces tuurn times when new tech is discovered. In C2C it means near every turn.

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We already have it or something like it. It was done that way in BUG.

The largest imbalance I see right now isn't in the amount of gold produced, it is in the ridiculously fast advancement of techs. I'm at 5000 BC in my game and have tech of around 400 AD. I'm about 1/3rd of the way complete with my technology tree while only about 1/8th of the way finished with the game. I haven't even had that high of a scientific output compared to what is normal. At a minimum I think most of the techs should take twice as long to complete. The prehistoric age I think is mostly ok but as each age comes on it seems to get worse and worse. Stuff now only takes me 3-4 turns to research in Aon's setting, far less time than most buildings. I think the building times are ok though. Early ancient age seems to be about the right amount of an increase over Prehistoric but classical and medieval don't have nearly large enough of a jump. Maybe double the cost of classical techs and 2.5 times the cost in medieval. I'm not sure about stuff past medieval yet as I haven't reached it but I'm guessing the problem continues. Of course in reality I know that technology after around 1700 grew at a rapid pace and I don't have a problem with the idea of science coming as fast in that time frame as I'm seeing now in medieval. It just shouldn't be this fast in Medieval.

On the gold thing I think it is a simple fix that maintenance costs don't increase as much as they probably should. Larger cities should have a larger maintenance cost regardless. Military upkeep should be a bit higher, civics also to a lesser extent. It is a minor problem though compared to the larger problem of too much science.

Cyborgs Gaming said:

The largest imbalance I see right now isn't in the amount of gold produced, it is in the ridiculously fast advancement of techs. I'm at 5000 BC in my game and have tech of around 400 AD. I'm about 1/3rd of the way complete with my technology tree while only about 1/8th of the way finished with the game. I haven't even had that high of a scientific output compared to what is normal. At a minimum I think most of the techs should take twice as long to complete. The prehistoric age I think is mostly ok but as each age comes on it seems to get worse and worse. Stuff now only takes me 3-4 turns to research in Aon's setting, far less time than most buildings. I think the building times are ok though. Early ancient age seems to be about the right amount of an increase over Prehistoric but classical and medieval don't have nearly large enough of a jump. Maybe double the cost of classical techs and 2.5 times the cost in medieval. I'm not sure about stuff past medieval yet as I haven't reached it but I'm guessing the problem continues. Of course in reality I know that technology after around 1700 grew at a rapid pace and I don't have a problem with the idea of science coming as fast in that time frame as I'm seeing now in medieval. It just shouldn't be this fast in Medieval.

On the gold thing I think it is a simple fix that maintenance costs don't increase as much as they probably should. Larger cities should have a larger maintenance cost regardless. Military upkeep should be a bit higher, civics also to a lesser extent. It is a minor problem though compared to the larger problem of too much science.

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You whole problem lies in the red highlight. Eon is unbalanced and has been for ages. Move to Snail or Marathon for better balance. Even Epic is more balanced than Eon!

JosEPh

Indeed, the research lengths on snail are OK up to the end of ancient now. I am not completely convinced about the classical era ones but I have not played many games since they were redone.

I liberated a two-city island as a colony. They got all my techs, so they're 4th or something in score.

Trouble is, they got two atlatlists in each city - that's it!

As if that wasn't bad enough, they went straight into anarchy for their obligatory civic change. That would be fair enough of course, except that it made them hugely revolution-prone. A rev civ spawned with no cities, but with two dozen heavy crossbowmen! They even had a WWI Ambulance, which even I don't have yet. And both the colony's cities went into revolt!

Whenever I give away a city, the same thing happens: atlatlists.

Can I suggest:
- colonies spawn with at least a couple of up-to-date units in each city. I had a City Guard in each, and I wouldn't have minded too much if they had flipped.
- colonies either start in their favourite/preferred (only to the extent that they have the prereqs naturally) civics without anarchy (this of course would be ideal), or put up with what they've got if they are this unstable.

This is why I recon that colonies should get a two turn golden age when they are created. That lets them change their civics and religion with out any anarchy and no change of collapse from it. The only problem is figuring out when you are making a colony as opposed to accepting a vassal.

They get atlatlists because they are the most advanced units they can produce. They have no resources nor the resource chains of buildings needed to build more. That is unless you made sure the cities had all that before you made them colonies.

Dancing Hoskuld said:

This is why I recon that colonies should get a two turn golden age when they are created. That lets them change their civics and religion with out any anarchy and no change of collapse from it. The only problem is figuring out when you are making a colony as opposed to accepting a vassal.

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Yes that would work very well. Is it really that hard for the program to tell the difference between a colony (new civ) and a vassal (existing civ)?

Dancing Hoskuld said:

They get atlatlists because they are the most advanced units they can produce. They have no resources nor the resource chains of buildings needed to build more. That is unless you made sure the cities had all that before you made them colonies.

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I'm sure they could scrounge up a couple of muskets from somewhere. As discussed recently elsewhere, barb civs when spawning get unique units (including in my case the only llamas in the entire world). And the rebels against this colony have no cities, but still manage to train crossbows en masse (as well as balloons and a 20th-century diesel ambulance).

JosEPh_II said:

You whole problem lies in the red highlight. Eon is unbalanced and has been for ages. Move to Snail or Marathon for better balance. Even Epic is more balanced than Eon!

JosEPh

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I guess if I started over on Snail it would be finished in the same, or less time than finishing my current game. I'd assumed that Snail or faster would be too fast based on what I've seen on Eon's. My difficulty level (prince) seems to be a bit too low too anyway, so I'm going to take that advice and start a new game. I'm so far ahead of the AI that my current game just isn't interesting anymore. I guess I can make use of that increasing diffculty thing and start at prince and allow it to advance 2 or 3 times 1000 turns apart. I also have the GnK expansion to Civ5 I haven't even played yet.

Still I think what I had to say may be of interest to help balance Eons setting. I still think it would be the ideal speed to play at if it were set up right. I even thought about moving to Eternity.

How (un)balanced is eternity?

Yudishtira said:

Yes that would work very well. Is it really that hard for the program to tell the difference between a colony (new civ) and a vassal (existing civ)?

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As far as I can tell the "on event" triggered by them is the same onVassalState, so you would need to find out some other way. Unless there is an undocumented onFoundColony" or something.