Balance and Gameplay discussion.

Gresharas said:

Second: I really like the new steamships and use them often. But I also feel that there are a bit too much of them, it feels... crowded. Usually one end building a lot of stuff that need istant upgrade to the next model. True, it is historically accurate, but gamewise it annoying. Maibe it could be viable to remove a couple of them? The problem begun with Ships of the Line [which one almost never use, along with the ironclad gunboat] and end right before the modern ships [destroyer, battleship]. In-between of them there are a lot of "patchwork fleets"...

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Yes, I agree with this too. I liked having a couple of extra ships, but there does seem to be too many. At pre-industrailism (I think) there are up to 6 different ships that you can build. This feels a little cluttered.

OK, I hear your concerns, and sort of agree. Keep in mind though I already dropped one steamship, and got quite a bit of resistance and and complaints from upset users. So I'm not sure I really want to drop another steamship, that said, for balance and gameplay I can easily see cutting out the Protected Cruiser. I'll start a thread for voting on it.

achilleszero said:

I cant recall if coporations have been changed, but I do know that corporations have always scaled with map size in BtS. You'll get a lower bonus per resource on larger map sizes. Could this be what your seeing?

And by minus gold per corporation, do you mean the initial gold it costs when you found a corporation in a new city? Thats always been there too (subtracted from treasury).

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Nope not the initail cost of setting up.
In LoR, once you have set up a corporation and you hover over icon in the city screen (under the religions icons), it shows +9 -7
I dont remember this happening in unmodded BTS. This -7 doesn't seem to relate to the amount of corporation maintainence payments either.
Is it a new 'tax' to stop corporations being so useful? Or what does it mean?

That's standard BtS behavior. The only thing that has changed with corps in LoR, is that some corporations, like Cereal Mills have been buffed to make them competitive, but these tweaks are slight.

I noticed maintenance oddities with corporations as well. It seems like in LoR all corporate maintenance is concentrated in the HQ city, instead of being spread out to each city containing the corporation as I remember it being done in vanilla BTS. Makes corporations REALLY expensive, and negates any strategy to actually mitigate their costs or profit from them financially. I won the game before I could spread it to my neighbors, and I had vassalized them all and forced them to give me huge amounts of resources (+70 hammers for thirty or so metals resources) so that may have been a factor, but still.

There is no change in corporations, just minor tweaks to output. What you two are noticing is normal BtS behavior. Corp maintenance can be extreme if you have a lot of resources and is increased by anything that effects normal city payments, ie distance and civic maintenance costs. But no, LoR is not making corps any more expensive or less viable, the only difference between BtS and LoR corps is that some corps like Creal Mills and Aluminum Co have been slightly buffed.

Ok your right, the huge numbers which weren't matching just threw me for a loop, but after more in depth investigation it turns out everything is fine. Apparently the maintenance costs displayed in the corporation screen take into account maintenance modifiers like courthouses.

not sure, if this the right place to post it, since it's not exactly a balance issue, but I'd appreciate some more ex-ante documentation of the revolution effects for various civics. sure, after a while you know what civics affect you how much and you should be able to figure the basic effects out by pure logic, but a little reminder in the effect description tab certainly would not hurt and likely help newcomers.

like, at the most basic, put a note in the slavery civic : slightly decreases empire stability. or for democracy: moderately improves empire stability.

it would be best, if it contained the actual numbers, so you know exactly what you are dealing with, but I'm not sure whether they are constant or dependent on difficulty, map and empire size and other factors. therefore, a simplification as above would also do.

I figure it's probably something for the revolution proper forum, so if you think it's a good idea, I could drop a post there too.

That's all done in 0.9.6 I have exposed the civic revolutions values, and they only display if revolutions are active, so the information wol't show up and confuse people that don't play with revolutions on. Currently 0.9.6 is listed as a test build, but it will be the official release sometime tommarow, just making sure no major bugs shake out of it in the test release phase before making it the official version.

Also the next version of RevDCM will expose the stability effects, which will be a major improvement. Currently only city or local rev effects are shown to the player. But that's not in 0.9.6 yet, as I have to wait until RevDCM is updated to merge that in, but jdog has announced that stability (ie empire wide revolution effects) are exposed to the player in the upcoming build.

phungus420 said:

That's all done in 0.9.6 I have exposed the civic revolutions values, and they only display if revolutions are active, so the information wol't show up and confuse people that don't play with revolutions on. Currently 0.9.6 is listed as a test build, but it will be the official release sometime tommarow, just making sure no major bugs shake out of it in the test release phase before making it the official version.

Also the next version of RevDCM will expose the stability effects, which will be a major improvement. Currently only city or local rev effects are shown to the player. But that's not in 0.9.6 yet, as I have to wait until RevDCM is updated to merge that in, but jdog has announced that stability (ie empire wide revolution effects) are exposed to the player in the upcoming build.

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awesome! so my wishes are already considered.

are these versions compatible? ie can I continue my old game (dled just yesterday)?

No, unfortunately 0.9.6 is not 0.9.3 (and by extension 0.9.4) save game compatible. Too many changes makes it so the engine cannot load saves from prior versions. Plus there are a couple art issues (missing buttons and what not) in 0.9.6, which is why it's under the test version instead of the main download link. However these are fixed, and 0.9.6 will be most likely updated to the main version tommarow sometime. So if I were you I'd just finish your current game, and update to the next version when you finish.

it's not such a big deal. as I said, I only found the mod recently and mostly checked on the civiliopedia to understand the new stuff and play around with map scripts to find one I liked. I only sank about an hour or two into my current game, so it's not much of a loss (and I even drew a valuable conclusion from it: slavery is in fact viable here. in earlier versions of revolution it totally messed with rev. stats and was a sure ticket to civil war.)

phungus420 said:

There is no change in corporations, just minor tweaks to output. What you two are noticing is normal BtS behavior.

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Thanks for your reply, that makes sense to me. I think it is just a while since I played BTS, and a while since I got to Corporations.

I like the tweaks you made to the corporation resources, it made sushi and cereal mills about equal in my game, therefore both a viable proposition.

something entirely different: is there any way to counter riflemen other than your own riflemen? in vanilla bts, grenadiers had a bonus, which made them quite viable, but they now have a melee and city attack bonus. and mounted units, let alone artillery is not really an option.

my guess is, you want to sort of simulate than in that era battles were in significant parts large armies of riflmen vs one another, but since I don't think I saw this discussed here, I figured I'd just as well ask. all comes down to numbers, tile defence and promitions then, eh?

Shadowhal said:

something entirely different: is there any way to counter riflemen other than your own riflemen? in vanilla bts, grenadiers had a bonus, which made them quite viable, but they now have a melee and city attack bonus. and mounted units, let alone artillery is not really an option.

my guess is, you want to sort of simulate than in that era battles were in significant parts large armies of riflmen vs one another, but since I don't think I saw this discussed here, I figured I'd just as well ask. all comes down to numbers, tile defence and promitions then, eh?

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...and Cannons.

phungus420 said:

That's all done in 0.9.6 I have exposed the civic revolutions values, and they only display if revolutions are active, so the information wol't show up and confuse people that don't play with revolutions on. Currently 0.9.6 is listed as a test build, but it will be the official release sometime tommarow, just making sure no major bugs shake out of it in the test release phase before making it the official version.

Also the next version of RevDCM will expose the stability effects, which will be a major improvement. Currently only city or local rev effects are shown to the player. But that's not in 0.9.6 yet, as I have to wait until RevDCM is updated to merge that in, but jdog has announced that stability (ie empire wide revolution effects) are exposed to the player in the upcoming build.

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does that include technolgy notes? I think it was mentioned somewhere that some techs (astronomy? railroad?) reduce distance stability effects and maybe other effects. that could be included in the tech description.

otherwise, I really like the additions for civics and leader traits. very detailed and informative (almost too much, omg all that information!). good job

Hi,

In LoR battering rams have an iPower rating of 3, which is the same as axemen, swordsmen, and capped rams and higher than archers and spearmen. The AI will build a stupidly large number of rams and park them all over the place. This can make it very hard to keep your power rating up without building your own huge stack of useless rams. I play with custom game speed settings that have most things at marathon or slower but unit costs the same as normal speed, which exacerbates the problem to the point of unplayability.

Was setting iPower so high the only way you could get the AI to build enough siege? In vanilla axemen have a higher iPower than catapults, and that's apparently not a problem.

Thanks for pointing that out. I will reduce the iPower rating for rams in the next release

- I tend to play the early game over and over so I can't comment on anything past 1600 AD or so, but barbs seem underpowered. I've never seen anything but warriors and (very rarely) archers spawn before the whole map is fog busted, and I've never seen a single barbarian naval unit. Barb cities are never defended with anything stronger than archers, even if I let the AI squash them. This is with raging barbarians disabled, but I don't think you should have to enable that to get any kind of challenge at all.

Maybe you could pick a date, based on map size and/or number of civs, at which a good player is expected to have revealed most of the map, and boost barbs past that point. Make cities pop up much more frequently and give them better/free units, including naval units. If nothing else, piracy should be as much of a factor as land-based barb activity.

- It seems strange that the work boat is one of the best units in the game for exploration. Depending on the map, intrepid fishermen can circumnavigate and make contact with most civs very early in the game, especially considering there are no barb galleys. I don't see any reason why fishing boats should have two moves. If you went as far as not allowing them to leave your borders, galleys would be much more useful.

- One unit I'd like to see in the game is the pavise crossbowman, if you can find art for them. They could be crossbows with a bonus against archers and increased cost. Make them a UU for the Byzantines, or HRE if that civ gets put back in.

The Pavise was a common accoutrement of Archer units in the Middle Ages (particularly Italian Mercenary Crossbowmen), and not a unique unit in it's own right. And having the Workboat as an efficient explorer for coastal areas is something I don't have a problem with, as historically it has not been uncommon for fishermen to constantly look far afield for new and fecund fishing grounds.