Getting Started

Thanks

These are -awesome-.

OK, dumb question but....how do we play the game with the Mod in play?

Aussie.

In the mod browser (main menu > Mods > Browse Mods), go to installed mods. Make sure the ones you want to use are enabled.

Then hit back, and click single player.

To play with mods you have to go through this mods menu, can't do normal single/multiplayer from the main menu.

I M liking these quite a bit. I stated out with Valkyronn's economy mods which is basically a combo of several of these but with production times chopped 80% and research times lengthened to 150%.

Couple thoughts:
- Interestingly I dont think the shortened production times are necessary any more as citys are much more powerful with the increaseed hammers and food but the 150% research time is a must. I would love to have it as a singled out mods can you make a BalanceMod just for lengthened research time 150%?

- It is still the best to find a bunch of hills with a river running down them, plop down a city and then plant farms on them all so you have a bunch of 2 food, 2 hammer, 1 gold tiles. seems silly that hill farms are just as good as flatland farms. Can you make a Balance mod that makes farms 1 food less productive when built on hills?

- ok now for left field: Suburbs are always much more financially robust than small towns far away from a city. Can you make a small Mod that makes trade centers +1 gold when built immediately adjacent to your city center?

Thanks for allof your Balance Mods. I love that they are all singled out so I can mix and match as I choose. You have made this game from a 7/10 to a 9/10 already!!! (on Emporer so its a challenge of course)

Burrito

This has made the game much more fun to play. The AI has also clued into this and has strategically sought out food resources knowing it will have faster growing cities. much better than vanilla!

Burrito_X said:

I M liking these quite a bit. I stated out with Valkyronn's economy mods which is basically a combo of several of these but with production times chopped 80% and research times lengthened to 150%.

Couple thoughts:
- Interestingly I dont think the shortened production times are necessary any more as citys are much more powerful with the increaseed hammers and food but the 150% research time is a must. I would love to have it as a singled out mods can you make a BalanceMod just for lengthened research time 150%?

- It is still the best to find a bunch of hills with a river running down them, plop down a city and then plant farms on them all so you have a bunch of 2 food, 2 hammer, 1 gold tiles. seems silly that hill farms are just as good as flatland farms. Can you make a Balance mod that makes farms 1 food less productive when built on hills?

- ok now for left field: Suburbs are always much more financially robust than small towns far away from a city. Can you make a small Mod that makes trade centers +1 gold when built immediately adjacent to your city center?

Thanks for allof your Balance Mods. I love that they are all singled out so I can mix and match as I choose. You have made this game from a 7/10 to a 9/10 already!!! (on Emporer so its a challenge of course)

Burrito

Click to expand...

I also was using Valkyronn's Economy Mod with all of the Balance Mods and found that it was excessive. Fortunately it is easy to customize either mod to your liking. Just navigate to your \Mods\Economy Mod\ folder and edit the files there with a text editor.

To get rid of the 20% building and unit cost reduction, just open the files BuildingCosts.sql and UnitCosts.sql in the SQL folder and delete the single line of text in each file. You can customize how much of an increase in technology costs as well. Open up TechCosts.sql and you'll see:




Right now I'm using:
-10% unit and building cost
+20% technology cost

along with these balance mods (to good effect). One request for Thalassicus: can you make a package of all the mods available on the mod browser?

@Burrito_X
1) Certainly, I'll put something together.

You're right that two production mods combined would be excessive, since the change to mines and lumbermills comes out to about the same thing for a city that relies mostly on these for its production. (If mines get 3->4 = 33% increase in production / 25% build time reduction. Slightly more of a bonus for lumbermills (since they can be chopped for immediate gain), less bonus for cities without either.) Valkrionn and I agree completely on that concern with the game - skewed research/production ratio - we simply have different thoughts on how to approach it, and I think both methods have their merits.

Valkrionn's excellent method has the advantage of not altering the relative value of improvements, simply the game's pace, which is a superb and straightforward choice. My reasoning for adjusting farms, mines and lumbermills instead is I feel trading post spam in the default game trumps almost all other improvement choices, and makes deciding how to improve a city rather boring. Rather than nerf trading posts, I slightly buff a few other improvements, and in doing so shift the production/research ratio to hit two birds with one stone. The reasons for picking Engineering have been explained elsewhere, primarily so it doesn't come too early and upset any opening-game balance, which is very delicate as the effects amplify.

2) I'll think about riverside farm-hills a while and see if I can come up with something, or a rationale to leave them as-is, either way.

3) Along the lines of point 1, trading posts already feel very powerful, and this might disturb that balance. You're right that it does make sense to have some reward for having them close to the city, as visually that looks much better... there's even a field in the xml files that makes it easy to buff improvements adjacent to a city. My concern is that it might reduce player choice though, pressuring someone into always building TP's again, only now in the tiles around your city. Having the same values anywhere in the city radius gives more flexibility. Personally, I always build TP's next to my cities anyway and farms/mines further out because it looks nice, and has practical considerations (more valuable ones slightly less vulnerable to pillaging - not that non-barbarian AI ever does that yet).

@usmle
Sure, I'd been thinking about doing that for a while. I'll include each one in a separate folder so people can still delete the ones they don't want.

Thalassicus said:

My concern is that it might reduce player choice though, pressuring someone into always building TP's again, only now in the tiles around your city. Having the same values anywhere in the city radius gives more flexibility.

Click to expand...

On the other hand, this makes the choice of adjacent hexes with fresh water more interesting. Whereas before fresh water hexes would almost always be farms, now you have to decide whether you want to utilize the fresh water for a farm, or the adjacency for a trading post...
Since there are many advantages to putting a city near rivers and lakes, it seems to me that most of the adjacent tiles WILL have fresh water. The choices on these hexes are more meaningful. In the rare cases where there are more un-watered tiles than watered tiles, you just load them up with TP... but I think most of the time, there will be enough fresh water access that there is still an interesting choice to be made.

As for the hill farms, it makes some sense that they wouldn't get a civil service bonus. It's not as though the workers can make the water from the nearby river flow uphill to water the farm. The hill farmers would still have to water their plants the old fashioned way.

I played a full game using all of the latest Balance mods (Oct 7). I played Siam on a Large Oval, Warlord, with standard settings otherwise. I've been winning regularly on King, but rather than moving up, I went down to Warlord to get the achievement (although it looks like it didn't count for some reason). I pursued a Diplomacy victory. City states were still quite useful (although I was playing as Siam, so they certainly ought to be).

I must say I really like the way that the mod plays. The terrain around a city and it's improvements are much more meaningful (beyond happiness and strategic resources). I was able to produce and use units before they were obsolete. I was regularly switching cities between different emphasis to good effect. The passive improvement bonuses at different Techs made exploring the Tech tree more interesting.

It's hard to say if the AI handled it well. A few civs did very well (Greeks, Russians, Romans) while some others were crushed by those civs (Germans, French). The Songhai made the mistake of capturing Warsaw, and I razed/puppeted all of their cities except their capital after liberating it. They were nice neighbors from that point on.

I'm not sure if it was because I was on Warlord or because of the improved yields (or both), but I teched very quickly, at least in terms of game-years. I think I got the Diplomatic victory around 1800. I haven't played enough games to know whether that is early for that victory type.

In summary, great mod!

Some screens of my last game using your mod (Greece, King Difficulty):

Best hammer city, thankfully china kept all those forests LOL:


Best Gold city... i had what would have better a site later in the game.. but already comitted to this one early in the game:


As you can see from the citadel, it was the edge of my empire at the time..

Best Science City:



Hopefully these will give you a rough idea of the production & specialist building tweaks you've made.

I've now played 3 complete games (marathon, small to standard size maps) with all your balance mods combined. I've got to say that, while I agree with you, Thalassicus, on most things to address, in the end I'm coming to the conclusion you might have chosen the wrong approach to "balance". At least in my opinion, of course. Let me explain:

I play at Prince, meaning at a level where neither you nor the AI has major advantages, to actually see if things are really balanced. And it's also the relative level of difficulty I always play in strategy games, I hate when the AI is able to put up a fight only by cheating resources and money.
Well, what you did for most things - resources, buildings, wonders, etc - is buffing up what was definitely underpowered. However, from what I experienced, you as the player will be able to exploit this new - better indeed - balance, but the AI won't. For istance, it is now much easier to have highly populated cities, making your gold come from the population itself rather than from trading posts sacrificing growth. This "advantage" grows exponentially and affects pretty much everything: when before you would have struggled to reach 12-13 population in a certain city, now it easy reaches 20 population in the renaissance, heavily boosting gold, production and research ON TOP of the already boosted improvements. You will be faster to build improvements, buildings and wonders that further increase this boost.
The AI however keeps spamming mostly only trading posts: as such their cities are still rather small, and have no advantage from the buffed up improvements since they still disregard 'em even if they should now be seen in most cases as more valuable than a trading post. And I guess they suffer from the very same idiocy when choosing which buildings to build now that improved farms+improved food resources+less costly food buildings sum up to be so utterly awesome.

I usually get to a point where I have tens of thousands gold (also thanks to the several less costly buildings) and I don't know anymore where to spend 'em, since the AI is still "bottlenecked" as before and is even less capable of putting up a fight now that I'm buffed up and they're not. I even have the luxury of pretty much build everything in every city, which is a thing that was substantially removed in vanilla CIV V, as you have to REALLY consider what path to specialize each city in, if you don't want to end up being in debt: which is a limit and a mandatory strategic choice I really like.

Of course, it's not your fault the AI seems incapable of adapting to the new balance, but probably this means that rather than buffing up everything that was underpowered, a better approach could be buffing something up here and there, while nerfing other things to keep things "in the middle".

While I thank you a lot for your effort, and your good tweaks, I believe I'll uninstall 'em (or just tweak a couple of 'em myself to my liking) and probably go for a much less extensive modification. No doubt, however, it must play a lot better on higher difficulty levels, it's just that, as I said before, having a capable opponent only because it has like 150% bonus all around is not my cup of tea.
Naturally, again, this was just my opinion and hopefully constructive criticism, keep 'em coming Thalassicus, it's the constant effort from modders like you that will in time finally address the game shortcomings

Just want to say thank you and keep up the good work.

OK completed another game and some more thoughts -

Definitely to the person who posted a few above, civ 5 pretty much requires that you play on emporer or above. Even in the vanilla game on prince you get a lead over the comp in the medieval period and they never catch up.

Not sure what you mean by you money coming from your population since you can only fit about 4 merchant specialists in the buildings = 8 gold extra. Is there another way I am missing? I get the majority of my money from the tiles. In fact now I go broke much more often now becasue I build a lot less TPs and farm out the river valleys.

The comp while still making a lot of TPs now makes a substantial number of workshops as well (though I think thats from Valyronn's economy mod). Ultimately the AI just has a hard time balancing the food / pop / happy / building / money see-saw. Thus the only solution is to give the AI huge fudge bonuses by pumping the difficulty. Shame since the AI and Diplomacy from Civ 4 was amazing. It was ridiculously hard to win civ 4 on emporer and only a few people could beat it on deity.


ANyway the best mod of the whole bunch is the better GP person buildings. love em, and it adds a lot of variety.

Burrito


PS - one more request: could you make a balance mod that ups the Artist specialists to 2 culture instead of 1? they are useless as is.

BTW --> Kadath

I think the main problem you are getting is from using the mod that makes buildings maintenance cheaper. I dont use that one at all and the highest I got my balance up to was a few thousand after a golden age. In fact in the modern age I have to micro my citizens on specific tiles or I go broke! (damn puppet states build every building under the sun)

That being said if you want good AI its all about civ 4.

Not that anyone cares but here is the batch I am currently using
- Valkyronn's economy mod with the production bonus edited out (includes food resource bonuses and a wealth mod)
- Freshwater farms balance mod
- Greater Person Improvements Balance mod
- Sensible Tech mod (reorders a few techs so you cant for example get nuclear subs before getting regular subs, also includes the mine and lumbermill balance mod)

I'm not really understanding how more population equals more gold either. Population doesn't produce gold on its own. You get it from tiles, specialists, and trade routes.

Furthermore, having more food resources doesn't really mean more population in the long run. While it makes a big difference in a one-city-challenge, it doesn't mean much in a typical game where you are expanding. Usually, you'll run out of happiness before you get to a point where lack of food is significantly slowing your growth. Adding more food beyond this point doesn't really help.

What the food DOES allow you to do is build fewer farms and more mines/mills/TP without starving. Given that the AI builds relatively few farms, I kind of expect that these changes will HELP them because they will actually be able to use MORE of the trading posts that they've built.

I don't think you can say the mod is broken just because you can win easily at Prince. Winning at Prince is easy with or without the mod.

I completed a gradual research mod. It took much longer than anticipated as there's limited information on what SQL commands are available to us. If you try this out for a game or two, I would love feedback on how you feel this makes the tech progression. Too small, just right? I chose rather small values to start with, and it curves upwards.

It's not strictly a balance mod, but I included it on the first page and zip file. You can also search the mod browser for "Gradual Research."

Thank you for all the fantastic feedback! I'll read through it now that I'm done with that modcomp.



@MasterDinadan
I do agree some sort of bonus to improvements next to the city might be interesting. I feel there is choice involved though - if the tiles are not plains. On freshwater hills you might need a mine or two to boost production if the city is surrounded primarily by grassland, desert, coast, etc. Building TP's close to your city also has the advantage of making them more defended against pillagers (though the combat AI currently doesn't pillage at all, I think, unless it's barbarians). In late game you could also conceivably work a lot of freshwater farm tiles for specialists, but you start reaching specialist caps. Eventually, there comes a point when other improvements are more valuable than additional food.

I'll think it all over a while. In the meantime, if you really want to try it out the necessary information is in the CivVImprovements.xml file. The option is named Improvement_AdjacentCityYields. So you could do something like this, I think:


You could even create and release your own mod based off this, would be a great way to learn the tools.


@R0GERSHRUBBER
Civs being crushed by others is rather common in Civ V now. When they go to war, if either AI gets the upper hand they start going on a rampage across the continent. Tech does go rather fast, I've been working on the gradual research mod mentioned above to adjust it. Glad you like the mod!


@Gorey
Thank you for the feedback, it is helpful to see various perspectives on how people specialize their cities with these changes. I see you have 170/turn, were you using the Fewer Bad Buildings mod? Seems to match what I've seen in my test games.


@Kadath
Thank you for the feedback. I'll look into the AI settings to see if things can be tweaked.

The AI does dynamically alter their strategies based on potential yields for each improvement, I've seen quite a few farm-heavy cities. Even before I started modding I noticed a lot of leaders tend to build dozens of farms in their empires, the changes seemed to actually benefit the AI those situations. It does depend though, this has been on large continents maps with immortal epic settings. This is why it helps to get different perspectives, so thank you, and I'll see what I can do to make the AI favor certain strategies a little more.

That said, I've actually been considering changing the -/turn in the Fewer Bad Buildings mod to - cost instead. What are everyone's thoughts on this, if you've been using that mod? This is the approach I took with most underwhelming wonders.


@Burrito_X
I'm glad you like the better GP tile improvements, that seemed to be one of the more controversial mods I released. It's good to see some people are enjoying it. I always felt the default GP improvements were very weak when compared to the power of golden ages or the immediate-use abilities.

I've been very careful about tweaking culture settings on buildings, specialists or improvements as I haven't played many cultural games. Feedback in one of the other threads seemed to indicate even +1 to landmarks made them overpowered for cultural victories, so I changed it back and have been avoiding further adjustments in the realm of culture.

Are you planning on putting the combined file on the browser in game?

Your mods are making Civ 5 bearable

I wish I could give you a hug.

Glad you like the mods, thank you!

I might do a combined file online at some point, at least for some of the components that are synergistic together (the improvement mods: mines/forts/farms/resources/etc). The browser makes it simple to get all the mods you want with a download button next to each, and people can choose exactly what they'd like to use without extra hassle.

Like mentioned in the first post, I try to have high cohesion with each individual mod, something that's valued in the SE industry. Maintenance is much more difficult on a sprawling airline ticket system that's all lumped together in one big program, for example, than when it's organized into distinct, independent modules that work together and can be updated independently. I can update just 1 component and people don't have to redownload everything that wasn't changed.

Thalassicus said:

Civ V's method of data updates make interchangeable parts like this so much easier than in IV.

Click to expand...

Absolutely, and I'm loving it!

I'd never have been able to mod a civ into civ4, but once I saw Solver do it with just a single xml file and a bunch of (less necessary) dds files, I was delighted to find I could finally create a new civ with not much difficulty (though not very polished).

Thalassicus said:

@Gorey
Thank you for the feedback, it is helpful to see various perspectives on how people specialize their cities with these changes. I see you have 170/turn, were you using the Fewer Bad Buildings mod? Seems to match what I've seen in my test games.

Click to expand...

Yes im using all of your mods, though during that game i think you came up with two more? Ruins and something else.

You are quite the busy bee

I'd just like to say that this collection of mods are way more sensible than the other "balance" mods i tried. I had to quit a few of those games because it was just a wee bit too much.