Balance patch discussion and goals

I've advised starting to put suggestions for changes (balance or even mechanical) in a separate thread so they aren't lost in the shuffle and mayhem and are easier to keep track of. So I'll put one up now that this is off in its own forum.

Really we would want to break down changes into individual threads from there.

Some thoughts that I've had in talking with Gazebo and should be shared and discussed more broadly.

First off, I come out of the VEM-CEP community. CEP did some good things and some bad things over its lifetime and is at present an incomplete modification. I have done some work over the last month or so to bring about a more complete and polished version, but I am not Thal and can't release that to the broader public easily (nor am I a strong coder to do some fun things, I just used what material was already available). The purpose of announcing that is as follows. I have my own ideas formed from years of debate about the basic game balance and flow and they've been tested in debate and in some cases used, and in some cases pushed and changed by suggestions and adjustments.

As a result, I believe we should probably err toward drawing from the experience of that modding community in making balance adjustments here. We have made changes there to most every facet of the base game that we could without a dll modification and have a pretty good idea that a particular suggestion would or would not be balanced, would or would not fix a particular problem, and so on.

That said, I would not advise just porting over everything CEP did wholesale. We should discuss it as an option and be aware that there's a lot of value there that we don't have to reinvent the wheel in making balance adjustments. If CEP did something a lot better, and there's general agreement that it often did, use it. If it did something terrible, do something else (or :shudder: leave it alone as is!). There are other major modifications like CSD that should be in the same boat (indeed, I would argue for having CSD be a major portion of the balance modification as CEP always tried to make it an option, for good reason).

This post will include links to discussions on the possible changes and areas in need of addressing.
Wide vs tall balance
Army/promotion changes
Culture victories and tourism
Gold!
Buildings
Tile and yield balance.
Wonders

Some basic goals for this part of the project should be laid out. Feel free to add or detract from these points.

1) Identify clearly which things are most broken or boring in the base game and set out to change these things while avoiding things that are most clearly working.

This is most tricky when making any change to the game economy as it has a very big whack-a-mole tendency once changes are made in one area over another. There are a ton of ripple effects in changing how gold or culture works or is available. These can be very easily overlooked or ignored or dismissed. Achieving a good balance is a very complicated trick involving maths and game play and player psychology. Not everyone will be satisfied at all times with what is changed, or how it was changed. Accept that as given but where possible, make our changes modular and easy to season to taste.

2) Try to avoid nerfs in favor of changing weaker things to be better or more exciting. Things that feel powerful are a fun aspect of the game (that's why wonders are usually something we will try to horde). Our choices should feel like they had consequence and impact and should feel like choices. We should want to have to decide what to do next rather than have things we want to ignore entirely and always or things we do always and every time.

This was the intended or stated goal for CEP but it never quite got there in some areas, or overextended itself in others. In some areas I would argue it did very, very well though (armies/navies, many building values and in general policies are much superior to the base game, at least I find they are now). Say Tradition is too powerful. Then liberty/honor/piety should be made more interesting alternatives first, or Tradition's features reorganised to make it less obviously powerful, before hitting it with the nerf hammer. Indeed, Tradition in CEP is probably more powerful and flexible overall than in default because Liberty became a more attractive alternative to use.

3) Avoid "MOAR" as a process of just adding stuff or changing stuff just to do it. Other mods can add goofier stuff if they want. In order for a community of people to agree on it it has to be fairly modest in changes overall so that it feels more like a polished refreshing version of the base game.

We can and should seek to add or change things for historical or flavor reasons that may be of interest. Civ is partly a historical game and possibly learning about cool things around the world should be part of the effect of playing it. CEP added a number of wonders from less regarded portions of the world (Banuae, Laibela, etc) or changed leaders effects to fulfill less-well known but nevertheless essential historical elements of a particular civilization. As an example, the most recent official change to Germany with the Hanse building was in line with the direction we wanted to go with them but worked much better overall.

As an example of something we shouldn't want to do, GEM added an entire line of units (vanguards) which was eventually removed in CEP because they fulfilled no obvious function that couldn't be left to the existing unit lines. These kinds of experiments have their place, but at this later stage, they can be left to mods building off the dll work and if they are successful, they can be introduced.

4) Avoid removing existing game features without a compelling reason of obsolescence. Renaming or rebranding things is easier (as an example, changing those silly "Great War" names takes about 5 seconds and is much better for immersion as you may not have a "Great War" around that time).

CEP only removed and replaced a couple of wonders and units and removed a couple of buildings despite being a very broad modification. Changing the existing features to make them work well or better is the point. Removing them entirely is not ideal.

The frustration in the thread that was expressed with say, exploration, is not something that I share with the exploration tree that I'm using now in CEP (thal's version was terribly imbalanced and I blew that up and replaced it a couple weeks ago). Make it into a naval/coastal+colonization style tree and it feels interesting. Assuming navies and new cities are something important to have and use, it becomes a good tree to have around to enhance that role. In the same way that Patronage is a good tree to have around that enhances and makes easier relationships with city states.

Our goal here should be mostly to buff and polish rather than completely remove things we don't like about the base game.

5) Avoid making many UI based adjustments for compatibility with EUI. - this may fall under the "don't break things" principle, but the UI is different from actual game play mechanics.

6) Avoid making too many lua based adjustments for speed.

Re-posting this:

Wodhann said:

Some thoughts on the "statistics" offered by the survey:

- It's clear that even though people want to play Tall (4 to less highly populated cities), the game rewards playing Wide (5+). This to me is the biggest flaw with Civ5 when it comes to game design, and I elaborated why early in this thread.

- Although domination victory is still probably the main circumstance the game ends, science victory is still far too safe of a way to go considering how important tech is for everything. It's the no-brainer for non-aggressive civs, since getting science means you can defend better against bullies, and it makes yourself a more dangerous opponent who can potentially rise up and go for domination. As such, going for culture or diplomacy just adds an unnecessary extra step when you can just continue getting techs and go for the spaceship.
As for the other victory types, diplomation victory is way too boring (it usually ends with you waiting for the leader voting screen to come up sitting on a mountain of gold for like the past 100 turns, usually playing as Venice), and culture victory is way too hard currently - basically, Brazil is the only civ with a viable way to win a tourism victory. And, it's also pretty boring. The whole theming bonus and swapping works thing gives such a minute change in tourism that often you don't even have to bother with that.

- Policies are all over the place. Some of them are inherently better than others to the point where they become no-brainers (tradition, rationalism), others are inherently weak (honor, exploration) and others are niche picks (piety, aesthetics).
Now I'm ok with the niche picks, it's just that the niche picks we have aren't even good in doing what they propose to do. Piety only helps you get more of your religion, it doesn't give you anything to actually make picking a religion more advantageous in the long run. Exploration is mostly useless, my least favorite in the game. Aesthetics is ok if you're going for culture, but you usually don't even finish it.
If I were to change policies I would nerf Tradition, make Honor more relevant, change Piety into something that gives you solid gameplay advantages for having a popular religion, merge Exploration with Aesthetics and add a whole new social policy. What I would add, I don't know.
Also, on the topic of ideologies, Autocracy needs a slight buff.

- I already stressed this but there is a clear need to be an overall balance of Civs.


This is all for the survey, but I did name a few other changes and additions to the game in this post.

Click to expand...

To those points. There's some wide-tall balance (still probably too far in the "wide" direction) so that expansion is viable as an interest in the mid-late game and is easier to do for both player or AI. The main thing there is that we (the CEP community) believed the obstacle to playing wider for people is largely psychological, that it becomes tedious or pointless to manage a larger empire than 4-6 cities even though going wider equals profit in most cases. It's less obviously profitable in CEP but not substantially so. Without altering the major mechanic for expansion (happiness), there's not much that can be done to make going wider less obviously beneficial (I think CEP made cities cost more unhappiness and made happiness buildings a bit better but cost more upkeep, but that's about it). There can be work to reward the player/AI for doing expanding that doesn't make going wide overpoweringly strong, mostly by making it faster to do some of the tedious micromanagement work, and there can be work to reward players for staying smaller, such as by improving some of the weaker national wonders (East India, National Visitor Center, Iron Works, as examples). The National College is one of the few things I flat out would insist be nerfed. Not Tradition but that, yes.

Policies (and now ideologies) as a whole I think CEP did a fair job with as part of that topic on which to draw ideas from. There is some need to juice Honor and Autocracy still, and Piety and Religion overall need a huge facelift, but I found Exploration fine there with these kinds of changes to it as having a coherent niche.



That may not sound appealing either, but that's the kind of work that's available on policies at least. Aesthetics gets a facelift also, though not as much of one, such as by moving the hidden antiquity effect to it and giving a bonus to archaeologist production (there were a couple of ideas I couldn't get to work correctly on my own that would make it better still).

I will be updating the wiki page for CEP over the week/weekend (it's badly in need of it as it was) so that it can be referenced easier and mined for ideas to use or blow up. Other mod ideas should be welcome here too.

As far as the rest of your list.

Some of those other suggestions are pretty easy. Consolidating military promotions and making some more valuable by changing the innate bonuses of unit classes. That's been done for a long, long time going back to VEM/GEM. We can add new units, but there are not many spots in the game that we should. I could see adding 2-3 ships to smooth out the unit strengths and fill a couple of empty role gaps, but anything more than that and I don't know what they are needed for or would have to be UUs (or diplomatic units from CSD). I could however see adding new promotions as others are taken out or changed. Quite frankly there's one or two units I'd rather remove than add new ones (ATG should just be a promotion and amphibious can be a better promotion and marines removed or have it granted to say, Denmark and many of the existing UUs are boring, or too late, or poor flavor/synergy).

I'd like to see tourism do more over time as well. Firaxis at least put in some stuff that rewards you along the way. More of that could be help the culture victory be more engaging in the same way that having more resolutions available is an improvement to the diplomatic victory/mini-game.

Leaders are a whole separate issue on balance. There's a lot of work that was done on that area already too which can be drawn from for ideas.

Let's divide these topics up into individual threads, shall we? It'll make discussion much easier, and help integrate new users into the sub-forum.

Also, let's post announcements in the CEP forum and the modpacks forum as to where our conversation has moved.

Cheers,
G

We would need then at least these threads (I should think).

1) Leaders changes - this always gets long and contentious. CEP can probably short circuit some of the debate, but there's some lamer changes in CEP that can easily replaced or amended.
2) Policies, probably divided into early-middle-ideologies each with their own thread so each gets some room to breathe.
3) Army-navy balance/promotions changes
4) Wide-tall balance suggestions (not covered by changes elsewhere, such as national wonders or happiness adjustments or more elaborate changes)
5) Culture victory enhancements
6) Diplomatic victory enhancement + CSD
7) Religion/Piety thread - this really needs to be its own thread as it wasn't getting anywhere in CEP with what was tried there and many good suggestions were shot down with a "we need a dll mod to do this".
8) Mechanical enhancements now available via dll/whoward that we would like to see, which could then be incorporated by other threads.
9) Tech tree adjustments (move items around, move paths around, add some effects?)
10) General economic changes (buildings values or tile values, etc)
11) Wonders
12) Anything else we would want to add or preserve from other mod packs.

13) As any topic is worked on, tested, and completed, decide whether to include all or parts of these changes in a major modification pack.

mystikx21 said:

1) Identify clearly which things are most broken or boring in the base game and set out to change these things while avoiding things that are most clearly working.

Click to expand...

Regarding this, I think it would be a good idea to post queries in the Multiplayer and Strategy (and GotM?) forums, since many of the more competitive players could have the best idea of what is actually in need of adjustment than the average player. Their input could be invaluable. Some of the opinions I read here are somewhat counter to the "meta" that seems common thereabouts, and it would further increase the justification of the term "community" for the mod. Just my 2¢.

The MP part would make more sense if this was going to be an MP mod. I'm not sure if that will be the case as yet. Strategy I agree could be worth the look.

I would say some of the issue with what's been identified is that taking a survey asking what civ you play as is not the same as saying "these other civs are weak and this civ is strong!". It could simply suggest people play civs they are familiar with and which feel powerful or unique and fun to play as. Venice is often pretty weak in the AIs hands say but it's a lot of fun to play as. Similarly, asking whether people prefer to play tall or wide is not the same as asking if tall is too strong and wide is too weak. Strategic input puts a lot of this in the "not broken" category. Psychological input is probably more at issue in these categories.

That said, there are some poor synergies in design for many leaders or boring effects, similar with policies, and some buildings/units are poorly balanced (some are basically useless). These I don't think are in dispute as factors, the question just becomes which ones and what to do about it.

mystikx21 said:

The MP part would make more sense if this was going to be an MP mod. I'm not sure if that will be the case as yet.

Click to expand...

We should try and balance this with MP in mind, especially considering it's likely this patch will come out as a "DLC" mod in it's final version.

CEP already addressed issues keeping single player in mind, let's do this with more of a focus in making it more balanced competitively while also making it more fun and diverse for single player/casual multiplayer.

I'm not sure CEP did all that well on balance for single player.

But yes, addressing MP imbalances could be part of the process as well on the assumption that it could one day be MP.

Should we just post a thread in the strategy forum asking for their opinion? I fear that the mods will just move it back to the customization forum for thinking it doesn't belong there though. Mods there seem pretty strict about the boundary between discussing "what should have been" and "what could be modded".

How about ask for some of them to come post here with opinions.

mystikx21 said:

How about ask for some of them to come post here with opinions.

Click to expand...

Be my guest, I don't know any personally.

I'm mining it where I can for points of obvious contention that look settled as agreed upon. Leaders ratings for example comes back similar to the fun to play (babylon, poland, korea, mayans on the top, iroquois, byzantium, denmark on the low end). This wasn't exactly a revelation that those were the top and bottom ranked civs in BNW.

I'll go through it some more for a day or two before putting up some balance topics, but also try to contact a couple of them to see if they will assist here with suggestions and ideas.

Since this thread is stickied, can it get a rename? Right now it sounds... rushed. I think it deserves a more official name now like "Balance Patch Discussion" or something.

Done. I will link to major balance change threads in one of the OPs once we start up on those.

Already created one
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=13276074

Mystikx,

In reading over your goals, I agree with all of them but for one exception:

We can and should seek to add or change things for historical or flavor reasons that may be of interest.

I have no problem with changing names and the like, but I think adding content should not be the purpose of this patch unless the addition specifically addresses a balance concern. For example, the additional wonders you mentioned from CEP I believe should not be an addition to this patch.

I will be posting my local copy of CEP broken up into sections for Gazebo and others to help integrate useful bits, and especially to debate and rip apart things (I will also put up some threads and links to those effects for them to be more easily and concisely ripped apart)

@stalker, I'm actually much happier with the wonders changes in CEP in part because the specific effects are designed to deal with balance concerns on top of the flavor/historical effects of putting in interesting things. But that's something we can certainly discuss. I don't know that there was great objection to that aspect of the project in GEM/CEP but whether there should be an objection to this project may be more debate-able than there. I certainly found it one of the more enjoyable ideas which is why I included it here as a possible goal (presumably it has a similar impact on leaders discussions).

We can perhaps make it an optional mod addition that is strongly recommended to swap out/in some "cool" things at worst. As with many things within this project, for now a lot of things need to be fairly modular effects that are to be considered for a larger assembly, but can be easily stripped out or seasoned for flavor.

For me, I have a few Tiers of balance issues. Tier 1 is offenders that weaken key core aspects of the game. Tier 2's are ones that are significant but often have workarounds. Tier 3's are nice to haves but I wouldn't have any issues leaving them out.

Note my list is a lot smaller than many people's

Tier 1

1) Gold Imbalance: Gold to me is a fundamentally weak resource in the core game, especially compared to hammers. Buying things with gold is extremely expensive, tile buying is useful only once in a while, and it takes a lot of gold to buy off a CS. Its not that I don't use gold, its simply that I will never focus attention on it in comparison to other resources. The issue is made worse by the CSD portion of the mod, as it takes away Gold's role in gaining influence.

I consider it Tier 1 because it is one of the fundamental yields, and so heavily affects gameplay.

2) Melee Units are Weak (Land and Sea): In general, ranged units are significantly stronger than melee units. I think the problem is that while ranged units are very good against melee at base, but against cities they are much much better. Cities just chew up melee units. So generally you build a bunch of ranged units with just a few melee to actually take the city. It is against historical accuracy, and makes unit building boring.

I consider it Tier 1 as melee constitutes a few portion of the military game, a core aspect of the system.

3) Policies are heavily imbalanced: Several core policy trees are weaker than others, even at the things they are supposed to do well. This cuts out a key area of the game, and forces you down certain playstyles.



Tier 2

1) Faith Beliefs Imbalanced: There are many faith benefits that are simply superior to others, limiting choice. However, this is not as serious as the policy imbalance, as beliefs are also a measure of time. The people who build faith quickly get the better beliefs, so a strict balance is not as important. Hence its a Tier 2 issue.

2) Faith Spreading is exceedingly difficult in most cases. It is very very hard to spread your religion when the AI is trying to spread theirs. It results in large amounts of faith spent in a constant back and forth with the enemy as religion gets changed over and over, often making it not worth the attempt. Because Faith spreading is a key aspect of many beliefs, I consider it a major issue, but as its not a fundamental aspect of the game I put it in Tier 2.

3) Hammer Imbalance vs Food: In general I find food to be a slightly stronger resource than hammers, particularly due to rivers. As such I farm most everything I can, including mountains near rivers. This imbalance is much less than the gold imbalance, hammers are plenty useful...so its a Tier 2 issue.



Tier 3

1) Leader Imbalances: I'm a SP guy mainly, so this issue might matter more for MP players, I don't know. There are many leaders that are plain weak or just so uninteresting that it would be good to balance.

However, there are plenty of leaders to choose from, so I still have a nice variety of competent leaders to choose from, hence a Tier 3 issue.

2) Some military units are very weak. Example is the core lancer unit, which rarely sees use. Its a factor, but as it is only a few units in the grand scheme of the game, its a Tier 3 issue.

3) Building Imbalances: There are buildings that I build very rarely (such as walls or castles) though no building I never build.

I consider this Tier 3 as there are still plenty of buildings I do find useful, and so it is not a key requirement.

4) Wonder Imbalances: Many wonders aren't that great, but I still have plenty to choose from so not that big a deal.


I may add more to my list later, but that's good for now.