Hey! Congratulations on the Phd.
Rebalancing tech costs in a sensible fashion is something I intended to do but never really got around to. The big thing to be careful of is that the visual "tiers" in terms of left-right distance in the tree don't necessarily map very well to the actual power tier, for many of the military units. So it would be very good if each major military tech in a particular tier took a roughly similar beaker cost to reach - but those with fewer requirements (ie fewer benefits from intermediate techs) might take slightly longer while others take slightly shorter.
This is something I'm open to, but haven't given considerable thought to myself yet. I've found my own experiences playtesting pretty positive in regards to the tech tree and the only change I've made is to require the later suspensor units to also require Holtzman Generators, which could be skipped before.
The other particular spot I've noticed is that it's usually easier/quicker to get to shieldfighters some time before you or the AI can get Heavy Troopers, and at that point, any cities with master guardsmen are toast. I also think caution has to be taken to not make it
too balanced. It's very possible to go too far to a point where the game is no longer as fun, you take away any type of fun gambits to try, every decision gets you to the same point as another, and well, you end up like Civ5
.
And I am being serious there, it's possible to over balance. Not only does it lead to what I just mentioned, but it can take away from immersion if taken too far. I played a few games of Sephi's Master of Mana FfH2 modmod some months ago which he's done some cool things with, but in the tech tree, every thing was very perfectly 'tiered' in many instances, and everything in each tier has the exact same cost(in most/many cases). When I looked at the tech tree, I always felt like I was looking a spread sheet, not a game.
We had lots of plans and thoughts with the Axolotl tank - my preference was to have it give some kind of Immortality mechanic a la FFH, where each Axoltl tank could make one of your infantry units immortal (so when it died, it just reappeared in your capital - or in the city with the tank).
It's not a bad idea for several reasons, but there are a few caveats. First, how would you 'appropriate' which units would be 'immortal', perhaps a free promotion with a variable max player instance?(which is definitely doable with a little Dll work) The other thing is units respawning immediately and for free after death could throw off to a degree the, ah, 'economics' of warfare in civ if it happens very often.
Follow me on this. You have five cities with axlotl tanks, so a max of five units can have, let's call it, 'clone donor' promotion (let's not entertain actually using that name of course
). You could game such a system by giving them all to some throw away melee units before attacking a city, as each is killed, you have can give the promo to a new unit, suicide him.. and down the line. If you make it a normal promo (requires a level up) I can just about guarantee that due to several aspects of human psychology, almost no one will ever prefer 'wasting' a promotion because they weren't about to send that high level unit on any suicide missions anytime soon anyway. If he dies in a freak 99%:1% odds attack, they could (and most would) just reload instead
. If anyone reading has
never done that, let him speak now.
I'm also not entirely happy with the current setup--the code changes I recently made and described were done to make the current system useful and useable, not because it's necessarily the best approach. It still lets you (the player) create an infinite, if imperfect, stream of clones, which is a little too powerful, even if fun. Because of the issues I mentioned above, I do think (and my ideas are still forming and changing on this issue as I consider alternatives) that forming clones of a live specimen
as currently coded works best in terms of gameplay, but there needs to be some kind of breaks on the system, some way to limit the possible clones at one time that's transparent and easy to understand to the average player.
What you mentioned with
each Axoltl tank could make one of your infantry units immortal
has given me an idea that might work. For each UnitCombatType (I don't support only applying this to melee, restricts the player too much), you can have up to the number of axlotl tanks the player has. If you have 5 axlotl tanks, you can clone have up to 5 clones that are melee units, up to 5 thopters, etc. etc. A little UI work where the BUG unit production experience usually goes to show the player if they still have clones left before trying to build a particular unit, and what it's likely to clone even... and it could work well. Clones recieve a promotion on being built that keeps our count for us, and keeps us from cloning clones, and it sounds (on paper so far) like a good system.
Oh, and sorry everyone if that was a bit long winded, just kept having ideas as I typed, but I think it might have been worth it if this works out a good idea
.