Death of Conventional Strategies? [11/18 Patch Notes]

Agreed. Horses shouldn't have any problem wreaking havoc in an unwalled city.

Why not? Horses are the killing machine of the open field. They start chasing infantry through the narrow streets of the city and they are seriously hampered.

House to house work is for ground pounders or actual tanks that just mow the houses down.
 
Edit: Slowpoke, while I immensely value the effort of modders to improve the game, things like beaker overflow should be in the base game. There's just no good reason I can think of why having no beaker overflow sounds like a good idea.
It's a ham-handed and easy-to-implement tool to slow down tech research, when alternative methods to accomplish the same object would be much better.
 
- Forcing players to take promotions immediately just compels microing which units fight what when, so that they earn the proper amount of experience at the proper times. The problem is the instantaneous self-heal, not the ability to defer promotions.

That was my first reaction too...yet another thing to micro. Insta-heals really need to go away (although they may exist as a crutch for the AI that doesn't know when to retreat).

Replacing insta-heals with an extra move (burn a promotion to get all your movement and attacks back, but no healing) could keep the good aspect of insta-heal, which is saving a unit's life, and have less of the bad side, which is unstoppable rampaging horsemen.

- Regardless of how few GPPs you make Scientists produce, it's still going to be the case that it is only desirable to produce Great Scientists and Great Engineers. At best, altering that calculus will promote early Workshops. The other GPs need a buff.

I don't think other GPs need a buff...it's the scientists that are out of whack. They are the easiest GPs to acquire and they are way too strong. I'd go with either (or a combination) of the following:

10-turn delay between lightbulbs. Great Artists can't chain-bomb; I think delaying scientists like that would work well too. You'd need to space them out instead of saving them to blow through an entire era instantaneously.

Partial teching. A GS should not necessarily finish an entire tech, but should give you a certain amount of beakers based on your era/the game clock/your worst unresearched tech/etc. Great Engineers work this way.
 
A whole new batch of strategies to discover :)

I think they should make it so granaries recover some of the maritime loss. They need to have more reasons for buildings other than removing maintenance.
 
Partial teching. A GS should not necessarily finish an entire tech, but should give you a certain amount of beakers based on your era/the game clock/your worst unresearched tech/etc. Great Engineers work this way.

Something in this vein is the correct approach. Civ 4 restrained players with the game clock and tech preference. The former was a good mechanic; the latter was not. The simplest resolution is to limit GS contribution to research with something along the lines of (Z X elapsed turns), with the only remaining problem being the quibbling over the value of Z. I tend to think that Z=5 is probably the right number. Others may disagree.

There's just no good reason I can think of why having no beaker overflow sounds like a good idea.

Sloth on the part of the coders is the only sustainable explanation. I can see how the present situation benefits them.
 
What about instead of mandating the purchase of SPs, the game simply enforced a ten-turn delay between getting them? (Like the delay in using Great Artists) If you saved up culture for Rationalism or Order, it would still take you another 30 turns to plow through the chain, which is pretty reasonable.
 
I think they should make it so granaries recover some of the maritime loss. They need to have more reasons for buildings other than removing maintenance.

Yes, it would be interesting if the patch gave a small boost to granaries.

Would they be balanced if the produced +3 food instead of +2? A small cost increase could occur if necessary.
 
Happiness buildings seem to always be destroyed, and usually culture buildings.

But I do wish fewer buildings were destroyed. It would be nice to lose a city and recapture it without that city being utterly worthless for the next few centuries.

I traded a city 3 times with an AI in my last game and the Colosseum was still standing. It seems to be random, but there may be weighted odds for different building types.

The halving of population and the massive building destruction is pretty harsh. It would be nice if:

A) Buildings get damaged and must be repaired at a fraction of their original cost before they function again. They did this with terrain improvements, and it works nicely.

B) Pop growth is doubled while the city is in revolt. This simulates the return of people who fled during the fighting.

C) No pop loss for recapturing your own city.
 
Mostly I think if I'm going to be prohibited from saving my SPs until renaissance, the earlier ones need to be buffed. Especially stuff like +1 food in capital and new cities start with a little food. That's just weak.

Regardless of what else happens with the social policies certain ones need to be made more useful so that from a gameplay point of view it is not just the case that certain policies are almost always blatantly preferable.

Landed Elite, Legalism, and Monarchy are examples in the Tradition tree. Collective Rule in the Liberty (which you mentioned). There are some other examples.
 
That was my first reaction too...yet another thing to micro. Insta-heals really need to go away (although they may exist as a crutch for the AI that doesn't know when to retreat).

Replacing insta-heals with an extra move (burn a promotion to get all your movement and attacks back, but no healing) could keep the good aspect of insta-heal, which is saving a unit's life, and have less of the bad side, which is unstoppable rampaging horsemen.

I don't think other GPs need a buff...it's the scientists that are out of whack. They are the easiest GPs to acquire and they are way too strong. I'd go with either (or a combination) of the following:

10-turn delay between lightbulbs. Great Artists can't chain-bomb; I think delaying scientists like that would work well too. You'd need to space them out instead of saving them to blow through an entire era instantaneously.

Partial teching. A GS should not necessarily finish an entire tech, but should give you a certain amount of beakers based on your era/the game clock/your worst unresearched tech/etc. Great Engineers work this way.

I think your Promotions suggestion is probably too complicated to ever see the light of day, but everything else you wrote is a logical extension of where the game has started to head - slowing down all types of slingshots. All GP should contribute a set amount based on era, and there should be a limit as to how often they can trigger a GA. One solution might be that it's once a game per category. That's still a lot of GAs. Otherwise you have to use them for their alternate purposes.
 
What about instead of mandating the purchase of SPs, the game simply enforced a ten-turn delay between getting them? (Like the delay in using Great Artists) If you saved up culture for Rationalism or Order, it would still take you another 30 turns to plow through the chain, which is pretty reasonable.
That would be a problem for people pursuing the Freedom SP + Cristo plan to achieve the cultural victory.

Another sensible change that I've seen proposed elsewhere is for Social Policies to be paid for as soon as you earn them so that the culture costs increase immediately, but you can still save them to spend later.

[Edit: And thinking on this really highlights the beef I have with the 'Designer's Intent' crowd. Apparently everyone is supposed to play the game with some arbitrary restrictions on what we can and can not do so that we honor some amorphous idea of what the designer 'wanted' instead of playing the game as it is presented. The Social Policies are a great case in point. Let's say that the designer's 'intent' was for all Cultural Victory games to be long, 400 turn extravaganzas. Then why are the Social Policy cost-reduction Social Policy and Wonder in the game? Any rational person is going to try and pursue these items as they clearly facilitate victory. And it is also sensible that you would want them sooner rather than later... so poof!, now a person is hoarding Social Policies and doing Tech Slingshots, playing the game 'wrongly' because they use 'exploits'. Now we get stuck with patches punishing player behavior rather than addressing the underlying issues that created the behavior.

Also, if there are people saying 'I don't use these exploits', then why do you care if they get patched away or not? By definition it won't change the way you play the game anyway so it should be a non issue. And I don't see any top players here 'whining' or 'complaining' about having their strategies nerfed. If you read these comments carefully you will see that they also want these 'cheap' ways of playing the game removed. The difference is that they want a carrot instead of a stick. Instead of a direct prohibition on the 'bad' behaviors, they want alternatives to be more attractive so that the 'bad' ways of playing the game wouldn't be as necessary to achieve the same results. If this happened, the game would also be more fun for the 'intent' crowd since everyone gets more enjoyable options.

[/endrant]]
 
What about instead of mandating the purchase of SPs, the game simply enforced a ten-turn delay between getting them? (Like the delay in using Great Artists) If you saved up culture for Rationalism or Order, it would still take you another 30 turns to plow through the chain, which is pretty reasonable.

That's reasonable, but will prevent only the worst abuses (Communism bombs and BC Babylonian Rifles). Forcing a ten turn wait for Secularism would be an adverse effect, but not a crippling one. If I pop Renaissance in the early 90's, I can still have my cake and eat it too, since Unis are a slow build.

Any way you slice it, the basic problem is that the Classical and Medieval SP trees are comparatively bad for most purposes. The result is that forcing SP selection rewards strategies centered around Ancient SPs.

A) Buildings get damaged and must be repaired at a fraction of their original cost before they function again. They did this with terrain improvements, and it works nicely.

True that. The repair mechanic is fantastic. Failure to protect improvements is penalized, but not in a punitive manner.
 
My thoughts on the each change (for those willing to read my long post)

GAMEPLAY

* Science building track adjustments (cost, specialist slots, GP Points, etc).
(NK) This sounds like too much nerfing I fear. The only change I would make is for libraries to only be able to support 1 specialist. This will also slow down GS births.

* Amount of damage caused during naval combat increased. (NK) Good.

* Melee horse units combat value lowered, and now receive a penalty when attacking cities. (NK) Again I fear an overnerf here. All I would change is to have the vanilla early game horseman movement reduced from 4 to 3 tiles along with making the AI better at using horse units and making more of them.

* Lowered bonuses received from Maritime city-states.
(NK) Again I fear an overnerf coming. All I'd do is to not have Maritime CS food bonuses increase with era. (Other CS bonues can still increase with era)

* Removed maintenance from defensive buildings. (NK) Good to see.

* Multiple unit upgrade track adjustments. Most (but not all) units now have a full upgrade path from start to finish. (NK) Nice to see.

* Open terrain penalty lowered. (NK) Great to see as I felt it was too much previously.

* Policies must be selected the turn they are earned.
(NK) Wonderful and noting that when I've tried to save them by right clicking I must've screwed up along the way as I built more cites and then my saved SP's required more culture than originally ?!?

* Promotions must be selected the turn they are earned. If it’s as a result of combat, then the beginning of the next turn. (NK) Again a very good change.

Well... to me it looks like this game is going to become more difficult to win on Immortal and Deity for sure and perhaps Emperor level will become more of a challange.
I've also read that cities will now heal quicker and fear that the horseman nerf may make taking cities in the early game a bit too difficult or costly if the cities has a garrisoned range unit and especially if support by a GG.

As for SP, Tradition really needs to be buffed up. Also, re SP, yes later era ones are more valuable, but both Order and Honor are quite useful.

.. neilkaz ..
 
However, the SP and promotion changes seem, as others have pointed out, adressing the symptom rather than the disease, where the symptoms are that people are saving up SPs and promotions, but the disease is actually that the SPs are poorly balanced (hello +1 food in capital), and that the instant heal promotion probably could be taken out of the game alltogether.

Why should something earned in the ancient era be as powerful as something earned in the modern? Likewise things discovered in the modern era should have a higher cost then those in previous eras. That is how everything has worked in Civilization games except for the social policies until now.
 
Ah yes. I like that. Especially the thing about taking policy right away and the city attack penalty for horsemen. Bring some spears with them!

For multiplayer, France will be less cheesy to play and i think these 2 points will help balance in that sense.
 
A) Buildings get damaged and must be repaired at a fraction of their original cost before they function again. They did this with terrain improvements, and it works nicely.
I like this idea, would be great. Maybe repairing costs half the original hammer cost?
Or something like the Total War series way of damaging buildings, where you pay a gold cost to instantly repair, depending on how much damage was done?

I think a better thing for population would just be to have capturing the city reduce the population by much less - maybe by 1-2 per capture. Even recapturing a city will still probably result in some civilian casualties.
I don't think the city should grow at all while in revolt. Revolt should be unambiguously bad.
And so the best solution for avoiding making capturing too good is to increase the period of revolt (but leave it at zero for liberated cities), while still having large unhappiness costs through the period of revolt.

* Science building track adjustments (cost, specialist slots, GP Points, etc).
(NK) This sounds like too much nerfing I fear. The only change I would make is for libraries to only be able to support 1 specialist. This will also slow down GS births.
How can you possibly conclude its too much nerfing when you don't even know what they're changing? They might be making public schools cheaper for all we know.

* Melee horse units combat value lowered, and now receive a penalty when attacking cities. (NK) Again I fear an overnerf here. All I would change is to have the vanilla early game horseman movement reduced from 4 to 3 tiles
Movement cost nerf is bigger than a mild strength nerf (12 ->11).
I don't think knights and cav needed a strength nerf though, particularly with a reduction in open terrain penalty.

* Lowered bonuses received from Maritime city-states.
(NK) Again I fear an overnerf coming. All I'd do is to not have Maritime CS food bonuses increase with era. (Other CS bonues can still increase with era)
How can you possibly say overnerf without knowing what they're doing? Their nerf might leave them more powerful than not having the bonus increase by era....
 
Maybe another way to go for the SP saving question is to introduce an "inflation" factor like there is for unit maintenance. If SPs were more expensive if you waited before picking them up (on top of settling more cities, that is) you would be incentivised to spend your SP picks as soon as possible: because you are saving culture that way. This would still require the early picks to be at least somewhat competitive, though.

I would like to stress again: The problem is not forcing the social policy choice as such, the problem is that there are work-arounds to this, and they are very micromanagement-heavy (timing builds and stockpiling money to bribe a bunch of city states upon entering the new era). Since micro of this kind is not very fun due to you not really deciding anything, but just microing because you need to do it in order to allow you to decide something, the change is perceived as detrimental to my gameplay experience.

And since the change won't actually prevent me from doing what I am doing in regard to Social Policies (much), I resent it. Do I need to add that this will make ICS even more interesting? A strong ICS type is to pick up some Liberty policies and maybe Freedom and (if you can afford it) Secularism when you hit the Renaissance, which is quite early.

Making science buildings worse may nerf ICS a bit due to the reliance on scientists but without more information we cannot tell for sure. It might actually end up nerfing big-city strategies even more than ICS if science buildings become too expensive: After all, sprawling empires have a larger global population because of comparatively cheap access to happiness buildings. Maybe we will see a slightly less quickly-expanding ICS version to appear, similar to the way India is played.
 
I would like to stress again: The problem is not forcing the social policy choice as such, the problem is that there are work-arounds to this, and they are very micromanagement-heavy (timing builds and stockpiling money to bribe a bunch of city states upon entering the new era). Since micro of this kind is not very fun due to you not really deciding anything, but just microing because you need to do it in order to allow you to decide something, the change is perceived as detrimental to my gameplay experience.

If you want to work around, it will be available, and if you don't want to micro, you don't have to. Sounds fine to me.

And since the change won't actually prevent me from doing what I am doing in regard to Social Policies (much), I resent it.

Huh? Why resent it if it doesn't impact you?
 
[Edit: And thinking on this really highlights the beef I have with the 'Designer's Intent' crowd. Apparently everyone is supposed to play the game with some arbitrary restrictions on what we can and can not do so that we honor some amorphous idea of what the designer 'wanted' instead of playing the game as it is presented. The Social Policies are a great case in point. Let's say that the designer's 'intent' was for all Cultural Victory games to be long, 400 turn extravaganzas. Then why are the Social Policy cost-reduction Social Policy and Wonder in the game? Any rational person is going to try and pursue these items as they clearly facilitate victory. And it is also sensible that you would want them sooner rather than later... so poof!, now a person is hoarding Social Policies and doing Tech Slingshots, playing the game 'wrongly' because they use 'exploits'. Now we get stuck with patches punishing player behavior rather than addressing the underlying issues that created the behavior.

One of the major appeals of Civ is the flavor: its basis in world history. That reaches the audience on a more personal level than other games like MOO or SMAC. That appeal is also a liability for the designer...they can't just add zombieninjapiraterobots into the game because it would improve gameplay. Everything needs a least a nod towards historical plausibility.

In space-based games, nobody thinks it's weird if you can research to anti-matter death rays in 2700AD instead of 3200AD, but in Civ, having riflemen running around in 200AD is jarring.

It's not about the designer's intent, it's about our expectations as players. We expect the game to unfold in a certain way. A cultural victory before transoceanic travel? That just doesn't make sense.
 
Actually, I think the SP change is even worse than making it desirable to bribe a bunch of city states the turn you advance an era. That's a hassle, but anyone can do it. Optimal is bribing the city states X turns in front of the era change, so you hit the culture for a new SP the turn you advance. That's a real PITA to pre-calculate unless you keep your city count and culture output constant.
 
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