Acken's Minimalistic Balance for singleplayer (and AI improvements)

Either we have very different take on realism, which is entirely possible, or different preference how the concept should work which more likely to be true. When it takes double the firepower to take a single unit than it does to take a city I suspect foul play not realism.

This could be design I just hoped it wasn't but rather a case of overtuning. Realism aside, it makes going wide totally dependable on neighbouring AIs while I feel that hiding in the corner is tempting enough as it is. On the hand with friendly neighbours one can take out a few of them with handful of units so RNG plays a larger part than it currently does.

Played on Immortal with the new patch. No crash this time! Continents plus map, and it was a close game right to the end.

A few remarks:
*Despite having gold luxuries, the gold pantheon, full tradition and a huge capital (Hanging gardens + Aztecs...), and taking piety as my second tree, (with Tithe) I had little cash to spare until after I was done taking policies from my ideology and took commerce. Not that I was broke, but I couldn't spend as easily as I did before you updated the mod. Without Tithe I would have been broke, only making profit because of resource sales, despite loads of tradeposted jungle.
* The city strength and hitpoints seem fine to me, as the AI can take advantage of it just as well. Undefended cities historically fell relatively easily, so that is fine. Gameplay wise, the AI seems to gobble each other up, so that means you actually have someone to challenge you in the late game. Only a wide AI can challenge a human player: an AI that turtles fails to do so as efficiently as a human. Trying to outtech the Germans who have 3 cities for each one of mine? Difficult, nearly impossible. Didn't catch up till the information age by using efficient slingshots (rationalism, oxford, bought GS, first to satellites --> Hubble. ) Any tweaking that would take away this challenge would fail to be worth it, IMO.
* I won with culture just before the persians built their spaceship (the whole bulbing to Hubble was because I thought I wouldn't make it). Tourism values seem fine.

Thanks for the mod, the game was thoroughly enjoyable!

Idea for city defense: Give them some of their strength back but make damage to a city cost a flat value of food. The player is generally better at exploiting just how much damage they can safely take anyway so this will also make the AI stronger.


Idea for warfare: Expanding on the first one, make units cost a flat food value, and make the act of fortification cost a flat food value from the city you built it in based on the amount that you heal(units from militaristic city states and other sources would do a flat cost to the capital and be bound to it). As I said about the player handling taking damage well, this is even more true for units which the player often saves while the AI loses them.


While I think it would make the most sense for these costs to be fairly high I know that this looks like a difficult thing to balance so I would suggest making the costs very low and just buffing them each patch til they're where you want them. This would stop our cheap hit and runs working so well on the AI if it actually costs something to heal up, and food (ultimately population) definitely makes the most sense. If you do this you might want to rework starvation too so it goes to the top of the barrel of the lowered pop instead of staying at the bottom.


Idea for difficulty: The AI gets alot of free early units and techs and such things that seem more early focused than all game focused. Even though those boosts may benefit them all game many are probably best right at the time that they get them. I don't know if you're doing this already with some of the updates I'm seeing on difficulty but replacing free stuff for more all around percentage boosts would help remove being forced into the early game catch up strategy.


For Testing:If anyone here wants serious tests you should try world builder and build a map for you to always play on. The reason to do this is that if you always get the same map and circumstances your tests are easier to compare. I actually went and made one but I don't feel like using it anymore, however if you want to do it here's some tips:

*Play a few games on it first to get used to it, or your earlier tests will be far inferior to your later tests and it will skew the results. This may happen anyway if you take something like Game #4(Your first real test maybe, the ones before were to get used to it) vs Game #10 but it's alot better than Game #1 vs Game #10.

*Give your planned lands all strategic resources (except maybe aluminum) or else you're going to develop a strategy without certain ones which won't represent a real game. Between that and developing one using all I think having them all is the lesser of two evils, especially with how easy it is to get them from the AI currently anyway.

*Since it's the same every time you'll know where everything is at the start so make an early game plan that deliberately doesn't take more advantage of that than you would expect from chance.

*The scenario builder picks the enemy civs and city states at random so when you place them don't pick random for their starting positions pick them in order since you already obtained them randomly anyway, and the purpose is the same game every time so the testing works better.

There's some other things to do too but if anyone's interested in this kind of thing they'll probably fix it themselves(such as adding barbs and ruins, if you choose). If I ever feel like using mine and with this mod I'll tell you how they went.

Speaking of testing I'm going to go play a diplomatic victory aimed game on immortal as Siam with Liberty, Commerce, Autocracy and try out winning with gunboat diplomacy while using a fair amount of custom houses to test out Great Merchants. This will be a regular game, not on the test map I mentioned.

khaciv said:

Hi Acken, having fun but it keeps crashing. I attached the save in the hope that it proves to be usefull. Should crash within a few turns.

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Hello,

Please try the following experimental DLL to continue your game. I was able to so it should work for you too. The crash is a bit obscure to me right now but it seems to work...

This dll removes some parts of the AuI integration so report if you see strange behaviors (outside of vanilla's stupidity).

https://www.dropbox.com/s/hskcvn2okaj2x4h/CvGameCore_Expansion2.dll?dl=0

You will need to place this dll in the mod folder and replace the previous one.

Acken said:

Hello,

Please try the following experimental DLL to continue your game. I was able to so it should work for you too. The crash is a bit obscure to me right now but it seems to work...

This dll removes some parts of the AuI integration so report if you see strange behaviors (outside of vanilla's stupidity).

https://www.dropbox.com/s/hskcvn2okaj2x4h/CvGameCore_Expansion2.dll?dl=0

You will need to place this dll in the mod folder and replace the previous one.

Click to expand...

Thanks, i'll report if it works.

khaciv said:

Thanks, i'll report if it works.

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Edit: Hmm actually I'm not sure you can put the DLL like this without rebuilding the mod file. Wait a minute I'll just upload the whole mod for you

Edit: Here you go. Link

Played another game, this time as Byzantium. Cataphracts were very strong when I rolled over Greece. They did not have that many units as they were fighting and winning a war with Spain.

They did a strange thing with their early workers and moved them towards my warrior when we were at war. https://www.dropbox.com/s/o3rjhs71hxeg09b/2015-08-24_00002.jpg?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/8m2etr3frqrl1x0/2015-08-24_00003.jpg?dl=0

Resource balance and pantheons:

Piety opener is really good as a first pick, less so later.

Gifts of Wisdom is rare but it is very strong early as cocoa is top tiles and the early science makes a large difference. It got me 6 faith/6 science per turn early, which almost doubled my science and got me early Cataphracts and Petra in my 4:th city. I would remove the pantheon, and change Sun God to include cocoa and exclude wheat.

I did not get a chance to try nature's blessing as it was taken but it seems like a common and strong pantheon for getting first religion.

If you keep the pantheons for citrus and cocoa I suggest you make the following change: instead of boosting the yield from calendar and trapping resources make all plantations 2 gold, all camps 1 hammer and remove the base gold from citrus and cocoa. Apart from balancing citrus and cocoa with the others, it decreases early gold and makes improving plantations/camps important for more than luxury trades.

I would remove earth mother, but if you keep it, salt can likewise lose its gold.

chumchu said:

If you keep the pantheons for citrus and cocoa I suggest you make the following change: instead of boosting the yield from calendar and trapping resources make all plantations 2 gold, all camps 1 hammer and remove the base gold from citrus and cocoa. Apart from balancing citrus and cocoa with the others, it decreases early gold and makes improving plantations/camps important for more than luxury trades.

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For plantation that is already the case (almost). Plantations in general give +2 gold (total 4) but not for citrus and cocoa (total 2).

Camps give 2 gold to luxuries and 1hammer to deers.

civawesome said:

Idea for city defense: Give them some of their strength back but make damage to a city cost a flat value of food. The player is generally better at exploiting just how much damage they can safely take anyway so this will also make the AI stronger.

Idea for warfare: Expanding on the first one, make units cost a flat food value, and make the act of fortification cost a flat food value from the city you built it in based on the amount that you heal(units from militaristic city states and other sources would do a flat cost to the capital and be bound to it). As I said about the player handling taking damage well, this is even more true for units which the player often saves while the AI loses them.

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Way too complicated for something I'm not sure would really work.

Idea for difficulty: The AI gets alot of free early units and techs and such things that seem more early focused than all game focused. Even though those boosts may benefit them all game many are probably best right at the time that they get them. I don't know if you're doing this already with some of the updates I'm seeing on difficulty but replacing free stuff for more all around percentage boosts would help remove being forced into the early game catch up strategy.

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Free stuff act as an intercept increase in difficulty when trying to raise the slope would start to make things simply not fun. AI changes are there to first help it achieve its goals. If it then makes it already strong enough then yes diminishing the intercept is a possibility.

For Testing:If anyone here wants serious tests you should try world builder and build a map for you to always play on. The reason to do this is that if you always get the same map and circumstances your tests are easier to compare. I actually went and made one but I don't feel like using it anymore, however if you want to do it here's some tips

Click to expand...

The problem is time.

A mod version of the DCL will be what will help me get multiple results on the same map. I simply cannot code and test 10 times a map. The NQMap is already fairly similar from one game to another.

Speaking of testing I'm going to go play a diplomatic victory aimed game on immortal as Siam with Liberty, Commerce, Autocracy and try out winning with gunboat diplomacy while using a fair amount of custom houses to test out Great Merchants. This will be a regular game, not on the test map I mentioned.

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Don't hesitate to give a report

Acken said:

Edit: Hmm actually I'm not sure you can put the DLL like this without rebuilding the mod file. Wait a minute I'll just upload the whole mod for you

Edit: Here you go. Link

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It worked perfectly, had no problems finishing the game. Will start another this week.

You guys can now always try the experimental version that I'm currently using (links here and at the end of OP).

Experimental version (use if you want to help with testing):
Mod
Change list

I obviously suggest finishing a game before you try a new version.

Those 2 files will be updated regularly. Try them if you don't want to wait longer for official versions (workshop) and help with the testing process.

I played two more v2 partial games at Demi-God. One Pangea, the other Polynesia Large Islands. In both games the AI really warred a lot, and on Pangea the majority of civs attacked CS's, which has seemed odd. On the Pangea game, Sweden never allied a CS, but took 4-6 down while not at war with the ally, so some kind of risk/reward formula seems broken? He steamrolled Poland with the GW and decent border spread very early, which should perhaps not happen at all, so the city changes you outlined for v2.x sound good.

I did experience some issues:
- I'm 90% sure that AI units were upgrading outside of their borders.
- I finished Aesthetics, but the v2 Large Islands map showed no hidden antiquity sites. I exited and reloaded, still nothing. (In my v1 Large Islands game they showed up.) Do I need Archaeology to see hidden sites?
- It seems like almost no AI start with Piety, although as time goes by you do get a few Reformations. This is not exactly an "issue" - but it does seem odd, considering so many civs went Piety in BNW.

On the plus side, I remained pretty solidly in the middle of the demographics into the Renaissance in both games. So the overall "balance" (player situation vs average) feels right. Thanks for your efforts on this!

chumchu said:

Played another game, this time as Byzantium. Cataphracts were very strong when I rolled over Greece.

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I can second this but looking at it from the other side as I played few Deity starts. In one of them miss Theo backstabbed me on T38, and next turn there were 4 Catas on my
border and next turn I lost an expo, 2 Spears & an Archer. Her Spears then appeared in the horizon and probably Catapults started rolling after that but the great visionary I am I decided to throw in the towel at that point. Like I said earlier there's no counter measure for early aggression given the stats stay as they're now.
Sure, I could have build a couple more Spears instead of something else but I was already at unit cap so I built something else so few thoughts.

1) any chance of removing the non-combat units from the unit counter and/or increase the cap based on capital for example - the current cap is ridiculously low
2) Archer are only useful against barbs & cities
3) CBs aren't that much better either but at they don't get one-shotted by Spears

AI units starting with double is fine but nerfing archer line while buffing melee is killing the ranged units while they're OP against cities which seems an odd combo to me as I've said before this could very well be due to design philosophy I don't agree with.
I'd rather see the double cover, perhaps a little buff for melee, - xx% against cities for the archer line, cover 1 baseline for siege units and a slight nerf for (an unmanned) city attack or something along those lines.
The current model still doesn't require siege units at any point to capture a city.

AI seems to be now willing to start a war against me after stealing few workers and a quick peace which is welcomed but it can also be bribed with nothing against each other which seems rather odd at first but I don't mind it.
Negative modifier from settling comes basically out of badly placed capital and anything beyond that which supports hiding in a corner and an early caravan is far from guaranteed DoF which is fine.

One question still which has always bothered me. Is there any way to influence the CS allies' actions when a war breaks ie is it possible to order one to go & kill and telling one to only defend which would later affect the diplo modifiers if a CS got conquered?

*** note ***

My Deity games were played before these newest experimental changes which at first seem to be a move to the right direction.

double post

1)Unit limit cap is just dumb. I will remove it entirely.
2)Well they should be less useful against cities now ! More seriously archer are cheaper but they shouldn't really be useful beyond killing barbs and warriors. CBs are the go to unit against Spearmens.
3)If CB hit Swords too low then I agree it's a problem since they are supposed to be contemporary. Same goes with Crossbows against Longs/Musket. Crossbows seem to do decent damage based on my recent playthrough.

I haven't made a pass on UUs and Deity is a little crazy right now. So I'm not really surprised to hear stories of someone getting rolled by these UUs like cataphracts or legions. UU balancing will have to wait as there are a lot of them.
The AI may lose some free techs if it reaches some techs too fast for the player to do anything at all.

Regarding archer line weakness I think their melee tankiness is justified. They should get wrecked when undefended. That's probably the only thing Beyond Earth got right. On the other hand if they do pitiful damage then yes it's a problem. I felt it was okay but if necessary I could see giving them a ranged damage bonus on hills and when garnisoned.

Grendeldef said:

AI seems to be now willing to start a war against me after stealing few workers and a quick peace which is welcomed but it can also be bribed with nothing against each other which seems rather odd at first but I don't mind it.

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This doesn't sound right unless they hate the other person a lot more than you. Which sounds ok. Bribing someone that want to kill you should be a lot harder than it used to. Try bribing Theodora in the previous game for example.

I feel the archer line, UUs aside, do their support role relatively well against similarly advanced units. They are supposed to get wrecked when no melee are there to block. Probably one of the only thing I like about Beyond Earth by the way.

But with more testing from my part I'll see if a change to cover or ranged strength would be needed. A possible change could be to buff ranged units ranged damage on hills and/or garrisoned and/or in forts.

Negative modifier from settling comes basically out of badly placed capital and anything beyond that which supports hiding in a corner and an early caravan is far from guaranteed DoF which is fine.

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I do not understand what you mean by this.

One question still which has always bothered me. Is there any way to influence the CS allies' actions when a war breaks ie is it possible to order one to go & kill and telling one to only defend which would later affect the diplo modifiers if a CS got conquered?

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Not without heavy coding which is beyond my current capabilities.

Edit: After reviewing my code there is indeed a way to reach -100% modifier to bribes when the target is viewed as Unforgivable and the AI already plans to attack it.
Considering the bulliness of the current AI I can reduce those modifiers or make them multiplicative rather than additive.

For transparency here is how it works:
Base bribe values goes from 500 to 1250
Modifier for opinion of target (for or friend) -50% to 50%
Modifier for attitude toward target (war or peace) -50% to 100%
Modifier for opinion of asking player -25% to 25%
Modifier for attitude toward asking player -25% to 50%
Modifier for warmongers -50% to 50%
The 50% is transformed into 100% if the asking player has a weak army

All these are additive and negative value are a diminution of the cost of bribing.

I'll probably make these multiplicative rather than additive. So that two 50% modifier decrease it by 75% rather than 100%.

Very short reply as I need to go roller skating before darkness but I started more Deity games with latest experimental version and things are much better, proper response later.

Acken said:

I do not understand what you mean by this.

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Settling cities gives negative diplo modifier very/too easily - after settling 3 cities everyone regardless of where they're, when we met or how many cities they have seem to think I'm settling too aggressively and even the 2nd city triggers this quite quickly. I also assume that this is partly to blame/thank for the lack of early DoFs.

I don't mind the Archers being squishy but relative to them the AI Warriors are OP so perhaps they should only start with cover I instead of II.

I tried out Siam immortal on a continents map but made a huge mistake and died for it. I made wall in all 6 of my cities before making enough units when I should have realized that extra spearmen would have been worth more than walls. I had 2 people surrounding me.

Then I downloaded the nq map and am trying pangaea for the first time. It looks like it packs the map with strategic resources and there's generally more land on a pangaea than on continents. This is not on the experimental version because I didn't know about it. I'll probably use it in the future though.

I'm surrounded by city states and Carthage is south of me. They tried to attack a couple of them so I took advantage of that and declared war on them and continually liberated the city states from them. They had the largest military but this lucky position kept me from even losing a unit because the city states get their palace bonus back when liberated while Carthage does not get one.

I'm at turn 131 right now and I have a huge religion because I kept my 5 other cities (started with 6 again) at 1 pop til it spread to them from the capital. The problem is that I picked tithe but I have 23 happiness from religious beliefs.

My religion is:
Founder: Tithe
Followers: 2 happiness from temples in cities above 5 pop (pretty sure this counts as city happiness but I had 16 from religeous before the cities were at 5 and plus I only have 6 cities anyway)
and 2 culture from temples and opera houses
Enhancer: Religion spreads 30% further

My guess is that my religion somehow has another of the happiness founders or maybe even both. It's in 26 cities so maybe those two could give that much. If you want I can send the save(s) but I don't know how to post them.

Also Siam doesn't seem to get its bonus on culture from city states anymore, maybe because you changed the yield. EDIT: They're not getting any from maritime either, maybe the whole civ's bonus broke somehow.

Despite the potential bugs I'm going to finish the game.

Grendeldef said:

I don't mind the Archers being squishy but relative to them the AI Warriors are OP so perhaps they should only start with cover I instead of II.

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I don't see why the AI needs to defend so much against what are supposed to be supporting units anyway. Plus if they actually still need it (which I doubt) then AI archers would be op against us.

Acken said:

1)Unit limit cap is just dumb. I will remove it entirely.

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Correct me if I'm wrong but for at least the first half of the game isn't tall richer than wide? If you do this it might give tall the potentially to have the greatest military which doesn't make sense. Although if you gave wide some sort of gold bonuses, if they would actually need it, that could fix the problem. By tall and wide I'm referring to self made cities in both cases. I know that wide ones made by conquest are generally better at everything since they have even more land.

Grendeldef said:

Settling cities gives negative diplo modifier very/too easily - after settling 3 cities everyone regardless of where they're, when we met or how many cities they have seem to think I'm settling too aggressively and even the 2nd city triggers this quite quickly. I also assume that this is partly to blame/thank for the lack of early DoFs.

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Nonono, this is because the whole "too much cities" system has been overhauled. Before it used to be a all or nothing system. Now it has 4 different levels. The minor levels are really small diplo hits.

I don't mind the Archers being squishy but relative to them the AI Warriors are OP so perhaps they should only start with cover I instead of II.

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Well Cover is now available right away and the AI seem to really like it. On the other hand Cover is nerfed (25 instead of 33). If this is problematic one of the following 3 is possible:
-Less free XP for the AI
-Cover back to level 2 requirement
-Cover down to 20%

v2 - Weirdness on the WC vote triggered by Industrial. The only way I lose is if I vote for Austria (she is the leader with 7 votes, I have 4). Morocco always voted for Austria, and the other 3 always voted for me. I have done no DOF's, played a pretty safe turtle game, lots of lux trades. Nobody has brought anyone back to life. Morocco and Austria are in last place, I am next lowest. Screen cap and save attached.

Acken said:

1)Unit limit cap is just dumb. I will remove it entirely.

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Excellent, I can live with this very nicely indeed.

Acken said:

2)Well they should be less useful against cities now ! More seriously archer are cheaper but they shouldn't really be useful beyond killing barbs and warriors. CBs are the go to unit against Spearmens.

3)If CB hit Swords too low then I agree it's a problem since they are supposed to be contemporary. Same goes with Crossbows against Longs/Musket. Crossbows seem to do decent damage based on my recent playthrough.

Regarding archer line weakness I think their melee tankiness is justified. They should get wrecked when undefended.

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The 'problem' here is that Archers can't go anywhere near any AI units atm - if there's possibility to give AI Warriors only one promo to start with it'd solve the problem. It's after all a starting era unit and as such all of them should be relatively equal and far from being one-shotted by contemporary units.
CB vs Spears is fine but since Swordmen got buffed there's an imbalance I feel but this isn't so bad as one by this time will have Spearmen for tanking. XBows are fine as they won't get one-shotted for a while.

Acken said:

I haven't made a pass on UUs and Deity is a little crazy right now. So I'm not really surprised to hear stories of someone getting rolled by these UUs like cataphracts or legions. UU balancing will have to wait as there are a lot of them.
The AI may lose some free techs if it reaches some techs too fast for the player to do anything at all.

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No doubt UUs are a wild card now so I wasn't worried about Cata as such but the total lack defensive measures against that era units.
If possible, I'm all for removing some if not all the starting techs while making early techs very cheap for the AI - if nothing else it'd be interesting to see the consequent tech paths. Also it could make the start less binary in terms of survival.

Acken said:

This doesn't sound right unless they hate the other person a lot more than you. Which sounds ok. Bribing someone that want to kill you should be a lot harder than it used to. Try bribing Theodora in the previous game for example.

Still managed to start a war just by asking in my latest Harun endeavour but sadly I've rolled quite a few maps without saving anything apart from the current start which seemed good/interesting enough, after a couple of turns it seemed excellent/too good but I kept going until around ~T10 I was convinced it wasn't so and kept playing, very peacefully.

Acken said:

Not without heavy coding which is beyond my current capabilities.

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I was afraid of something like but I really dislike the current system.

Acken said:

Edit: After reviewing my code there is indeed a way to reach -100% modifier to bribes when the target is viewed as Unforgivable and the AI already plans to attack it.
Considering the bulliness of the current AI I can reduce those modifiers or make them multiplicative rather than additive.

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Aah, ok. I didn't have the patience to ask everyone on every turn to DoW someone but other than this very cheap bribe the mechanic seems to work much like unmodded - some work, most don't.

Acken said:

Nonono, this is because the whole "too much cities" system has been overhauled. Before it used to be a all or nothing system. Now it has 4 different levels. The minor levels are really small diplo hits.

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Live & learn even though quickly browsed through the notes I don't mind the changes and a single caravan should not be an automatic DoF I just had one of those wtf moments when I was with 3 barely reachable from 2 civs by caravan and never DoWed anyone and still everyone though I was ICSing like Hiawatha.

Acken said:

Well Cover is now available right away and the AI seem to really like it. On the other hand Cover is nerfed (25 instead of 33). If this is problematic one of the following 3 is possible:
-Less free XP for the AI
-Cover back to level 2 requirement
-Cover down to 20%

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In general it's fine as it is but when AI units have their cover II right away they should not be able one-shot archer-line units - that's tipping the balance too much the other even if Swordsmen are actually useful again.

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Grendeldef said:

In general it's fine as it is but when AI units have their cover II right away they should not be able one-shot archer-line units - that's tipping the balance too much the other even if Swordsmen are actually useful again.

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It looks like in all later melee vs range comparisons throughout all eras including info (mechanized vs bazooka) the difference between their combat strengths is about 2x, while sword vs composites is almost 3x. I think melee combat advantages get increasing returns so this is huge. Melee vs ranged strengths seem to differ a little but the sword vs composite's almost the highest at 1.6x, the rest are 1.25-1.45x. It looks like the composite could actually use a buff to 8/11, and the regular archer might be better at 6 ranged strength. I know they don't have to be the same but with what I saw him do with the other units it looks like that's the plan.