[MOD] LOR Balance Tweaks

Version 1.7 of Legends of Revolution Balance Tweaks Is Now Released

Legends of Revolution Balance Tweaks is a modification designed to
Improve the balance and game experience at higher difficulty levels.
It is compatible with version 0.99b of LOR. To install simply unzip the attached
file into your Legends of Revolutions directory. It is recommended you keep a copy
of the Legends of Revolution installer as removing LOR balance Tweaks will require reinstallation of Legends of Revolutions.

Balance Tweaks added by this MOD

Mechanics Tweaks
It is now possible to pillage your own roads
Civilization culture no longer vanishes once their last city is captured
Happiness per city from hereditary rule now capped at 5
Deity and Emperor tech bonuses restored to the Start as Minors game option (Warning: will significantly increase Start as Minors difficulty)

New World Tweaks
New World barbarian civ can now be set to receive delayed bonuses in the RevDCM options screen
--Barb civs are very weak and primitive on initial contact with the Old World
--Barb civs that survive develop rapidly and can become very powerful
New world barbarian cities will consider joining a nearby minor civilization rather than form a new minor civ
New world civs will now tend to form large empires rather than small groupings of 2-3 cities
Overall New World barbarian civs are much more competitive

Revolution Tweaks
Revolutions now scale to game difficulty
AI gets stability bonus based on higher difficulty levels (+20% on Deity, -20% on Settler)
Human player gets scaled stabilty penality on higher difficulty levels (-20% stability on Deity, +20% stability on Settler)
Minor Civs now get a stability bonus (helps New World barbarians form large empires)

Unit Tweaks
Barbarian Nomads increased in strength (Strength 3 -> 5)
Battering Rams now take slightly longer to tear down walls and cultural defenses (Bombard of 6% -> 5%)
Battering Rams now less likely to withdraw from combat (Max damage on attack 30% -> 80%)
Trebuchets take longer to tear down walls and cultural defenses (Bombard of 14% -> 10%)
Pikemen city attack penalty removed (Penalty of 10% removed)
Knights given bonus versus melee (Bonus of 20%)
Knights given a penalty when attacking or defending cities (Penalty of 20%)
Musketmen given a city defense bonus (Bonus of 25%)
Special Forces are now the only unit that can obtain a 100% withdraw from combat rate
Guerrilla III promotion withdraw rate lowered (50%-> 20%)
Woodsman III promotion weakened slightly (-1 first strike, heal rate 15% -> 10%)
Pathfinders now upgrade to riflemen instead of cavalry withdraw rate lowered (20%->10%)
Privateers production cost increased to vanilla BTS cost (65 hammers -> 80 hammers)

Wonder Tweaks
Leonardos Workshop decreased slightly in cost (Cost reduced by 25%)
Great Lighthouse increased slightly in cost (Cost increased by 20%)
Trafalgar square moved to Military Tradition and whale bonus removed
Shwedagon Paya now unlocks all government civics instead of all religion civics and is slightly more expensive (+10%)
Pyramids now unlock all religion civics instead of all government civics and are slightly cheaper (-10%)

Bug Fixes
Fixed a bug in base LOR that lets the herb event to occur more then once
Fixed a bug in RevDCM that caused barbarian minor civ settling to not scale properly with game speed
Fixed a bug in RevDCM that resulted in the happiness bonus from capturing cities not scaling properly with game speed
Fixed a bug in base LOR that resulted in New World barbarian civs sometimes not getting all the bonuses they should

Maps
Adds the Totestra mapscript to the game

The balance reasons for many of the above changes can be found in the following post
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=12490303&postcount=243

Credits:
The code for pillaging roads was taken from FFH More Naval AI by Tholal
The code for limiting happiness from monarchy was taken from Darkciv by Evertebrate

The following are changes I plan to someday add to LOR Balance Tweaks. However no promises on when I get around to doing it

1) Fix magic disappearing reappearing culture
(Fix added in version 1.3)

2) Enable the player to pillage their own roads.
(Added in version 1.3)

3) Make the new world more challenging
(Added in version 1.5)

4) Increase the negative consequences for razing cities (pending)

Revolutions have made capturing and holding enemy cities very challenging (as it should be). However, raising enemy cities is almost consequence free. This distorts gameplay such that the optimal strategy is to always raise a captured city rather then try to hold it. If the land is desirable then a colonist can always be brought in to settle it otherwise it can be left empty. Raising cities should have consequences comparable to the negatives associated with capturing and holding cities. However, I am not certain what they should be or how to code them. Better balance in this area would make for a more varied and challenging experience.

5) Limit happiness bonus of monarchy
(added in version 1.6)

6) Pyramids re-balancing
(added in version 1.6)

7) Re-balance and new promotion modifications
(added in version 1.7)
Woodsman III adjusted to limit "forest harvesting of AI"
Guerrilla III adjusted to limit 100% withdraw rates in early game units

The following are balance problems in the game that I might or might not someday address. However, some are beyond my current modding ability

8) Ranged bombardment
Fun mechanic but overpowered because the AI does not know how to handle it. It currently makes the game much easier and must be turned off for an optimal experience. However, it has amazing potential if the AI only understood it.

9) Great generals are no good in the field.
You are almost always better off putting them in cities as great instructors. It should be a tough decision on what to do with a great general and attaching them to a unit should be a viable option. I am thinking of moving the fall from heaven hero promotion mechanics (gradual experience gain over time to a max of 100xp) over as a game option for when great generals are attached to units. This would make a unit attached to a great general gradually get quite powerful and make great generals more fun.

Edit: Spirictum makes a good argument below that great generals are powerful provided you make them 100% withdraw units and use them to farm great general points. He is right but that is a broken mechanic that I have fixed it (I think) as of LOR tweaks 1.7) With this fix great generals may now need some sort of boost in the field but more playtesting is needed.

10) K mod
Its great and well thought out ideally it would be in LOR

11) The 100% problem
The ability to achieve 100% sucess rates with superspies and 100% withdrawl rates with great generals causes balance issues. For spies it allows the player to easily destroy a neighboring civ via forced civic changes especially once you have built the Cristo Redentor wonder. For generals it allows you to form risk free withdrawing units that can never die and generate unlimited great general points. Both mechanics can be fixed by capping the max success rate. I am considering capping both at 98% in a future version of LOR tweaks.

12) Shield Bug
Due to problems with the AI pathfinding code is is possible to prevent the AI from attacking you by forming a wall of units that block any approach to you cities. The AI will interpret this as an impassible barrier and not attack.
Edit: This bug is fixed in K mod so addressing #10 will take care of this as well.

Unfortunately I'm no help to you in the modding sense as I don't have that skill set as yet, but I would be very interested in helping out, especially with the two above listed issues. Thanks for working on it.

Bloodstone said:

Unfortunately I'm no help to you in the modding sense as I don't have that skill set as yet, but I would be very interested in helping out, especially with the two above listed issues. Thanks for working on it.

Click to expand...

Increasing the challenge associated with city razing will be the easier of the two to tackle. The question is how to achieve a better balance so that the decision to capture vs raze is a difficult one.

Options include
1) Free enemy units spawn on city razing
2) Worldwide diplomatic penality for city razing
3) Others

With option 1 the question becomes how many free units should spawn and at what strength.

With option 2 the AI would not understand it and I am not certain it would be a mechanism that added much fun to the game.

Hi Chronis

Thanks for making this mod and adding to LoR, which is already a great mod. I have a question about the change for magic disappearing reappearing culture though, how much harder does it make the game? Is it possible to win a domination victory with this change? and how do AI warmongers cope? I completely agree that it is stupid that all culture magically disappears when you wipe a civ out, and reappears when the pop up again causing problems across your empire. But on the other hand, if captured cities are still causing culture problems centuries after that culture was wiped out, it sounds like it could make the game too hard and make it less worthwhile to ever capture a city rather than raze it.

I've been playing LoR since a long time. I'm not sure if I downloaded it when it first appeared or sometime later. I remember 2 UUs, Hitler, Cleopatra, King Jong-Il (or the other one, not quite sure), Poland, being able to use inquisitors in vassals. And I played it a lot, I simply substituted Vanilla civ for LoR as my "vanilla game" and kept playing some other historical mods.

And I've convinced some friends to do some multiplayers on LoR, so lots of multiplayers here too (2, 3 and 4 players).

Because of that, me and my friends started thinking on how to improve LoR, but none of us knows anything of modding. Long time I didn't come here, and now I see someone trying to make some balances, so I would like to give some ideas and comment on what has been done.

Chronis said:

Mechanics Tweaks
It is now possible to pillage your own roads
Civilization culture no longer vanishes once their last city is captured

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2 Great additions. It's a lot more realistic, I must only thank you for such benefits.

Chronis said:

Unit Tweaks
Barbarian Nomads increased in strength
Battering Rams now take longer to tear down walls and cultural defenses
Battering Rams now less likely to withdraw from combat when attacking cities
Trebuchets take slightly longer to tear down walls and cultural defenses
Grenadiers changed to a gunpowder unit
Cuirassier moved from military science to military tradition
Pikemen city attack penalty removed
Melee units can only be upgraded to more advanced melee units
Knights given bonus versus melee
Knights given a penalty when attacking or defending cities
Musketmen given a city defense bonus

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What I Agree:
Musketman given a city defense bonus seems nice indeed. They are weak.

The Knight changes are awesome, it had to have it this way. I'm not sure if you specified how much bonus anywhere, but I presume you're talking about 25%.

Pikemen city attack penalty removed seems neutral to me as it seemed to you, I agree as I don't disagree.

What I disagree:
The Battering Ram may be exactly what you said in your post about it in non-Huge, non-Marathon, non-WorldGen, non-Deity, non-BarbWorld, non-RageBarb and non-RuthAI. I must admit that since last year I've been playing on the affirmative of these options, and for the mapgen I used PerfectWorld and then changed to Totestra (which doesn't come in LoR). I agree that things may need changes but Deity in special (and I think that's the strongest factor for my argument) mustn't become more unbearable as it is now. Under these options, Battering Rams are almost useless as it is too the thought of being a conqueror in antiquity. Only if your traits put you in the military path, you'll avoid having to lose lots of money to have an incredible army of 12 attacking units (some of them Battering Rams) to fight against a stack of 30 Archers, or 10 Chariots, 5 Spearmen and 10 Archers, or 2 Swordsmen, 5 axemen and 12 Archers. Maybe only by luring with a worker you may remove most of the army from the city, but slavery keeps popping archers for him. And most probably this is a guy with 1 city, as most of them have armies this size for a long time in the early game.

For Early warfare you need to be lucky to have a medium sized neighbor, so you may take him by killing the troops in the field by confusing them. But your idea is to make the Battering Ram even weaker? So it take more time to bombard, giving more time for the enemy to use slavery and pop lots of archers (or worse), or increasing your maintenance costs by using double the number of Battering Rams, still giving more time for the enemy to strengthen itself. This allied to the fact that they will die easier, will make the early game even less city-taking under these harsh circunstances.

I think Battering Ram if it shouldn't remain the way it is, it should be rebalanced but not made worse. It's already too hard the way I described (what gives the full of advantages Deity AI use sheer force of numbers against you).

Nomads may come only when you're already full of swordsmen and stuff. Yeah, I agree they are weak in this situation. But when they come too early for your first metal, followed by axemen, you change your mind. Rarely I have anything besides Archers when Nomads arrive. Minor Civs make the game slower, and when barbs start around 3500BC in huge numbers, Nomads come as early as 1000 years later, together or just after Archers/Axemen. Having the Horseman as a later 2 barb makes it fair to have the Nomad and the Horseman as they are. A 5 or 6 Nomad would destroy any attempts under these options.

I don't think stopping the melee units upgrade tree will be better for the game. You may give city raider to your later units, but everything in later combat becomes defined by tactical advantage. Even if you have 10 CRIII Marines, if you can't reach his shore, or attack his crowded hilled city at once, or avoid ranged bombard from other ships or land siege and after Flight don't control the skies yourself, CRIII or that GGen you saved from antiquity with 400XP won't be able to do anything. And for me it's logical that veterans from old weaponry could be trained in new weapons and retain some of their knowledge (melee, mounted or archery). It's not the Axe, the Bow or the Mount, it's the Men.

I don't think changing Grenadiers to a gunpowder unit only will be good for the game. Maybe they'll be better as gunpowder, but for that it should be taken into account the Ottoman UU, your rebalanced Knight, the relation between Grenadiers and Hvy Footman and the ones between Cannons and Grenadiers. I would rather make a topic to discuss that.

You said to move back the Cuirassier to Military Tradition. IMO this is moving it forward. Military Science may seem a way farer then Military Tradition, but actually it's easier to make Military Science before Military Tradition. Machinery + Feudalism -> Guilds -> Gunpowder + Engineering -> Muskets + Civil Service -> Military Science. It's cheaper then going to Nationalism and then taking Military Tradition. And being Machinery, Feudalism, Guilds, Gunpowder, Engineering, Muskets, Civil Service and Military Science all military techs, and Philosophy, Monarchy, Theology, Divine Right, Nationalism, Music and Military Tradition not being military techs it's logical to have it in Military Science. And it becomes even better, as you need Military Science to get Rifling, what unlocks Cavalry with Military Tradition. If Cuirassier is in Mil Tradition, it may even become available and obsolete in the same turn, as you may want to go through replaceable parts to Rifling before Mil Tradition, or just after, making it a brief unit.

I'm not quite sure about the Trebuchet. I would need to study more about it to see if there is a reason it reduces defenses better then the Bombard. Actually I just don't know if it's valid due to my own lack of knowledge on the topic.

Chronis said:

Wonder Tweaks
Leonardos Workshop decreased slightly in cost
Great Lighthouse increased slightly in cost
Trafalgar square whale bonus removed

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Nothing for or against these, it seems irrelevant to me.

Some things that are a must to be discussed:

The Super Spies of Christ:

The Super Spies of Christ are those few spies you built in the beggining of the game, promoted them to Deception III and then you just kept using them on missions and they never failed. When you finally builds Christ the Redeemer, your spies become a weapon of mass destruction incredibly better then Nukes. Send them to someone, at least 5, then when you feel ready change all your civics to the worse combo you can imagine for that player (normally Despotism, Barbarism, Slavery or Serfdom, Descentralization or Mercantilism and Theocracy), and then use your spies to change him to these civics. You may even change to a religion you want to make his (specially if it's a minority in his empire) I guess (not sure if you may change civics and religion on the same turn with Christ). Pass the turn and change back to what you were using. If that's not enough, send the spies again and again to do the missions just after the AI changes back and faces Anarchy (it's harder to do that against Spiritual leaders, but it's doable and effective as well).

Your penalty of 1 turn will be nothing to you, and your target will just collapse. So if you have uber spies and Christ, you win the game. If you don't have the spies, just make lots and send them, that's effective too.

God Iroquois:

There is no one on this game better then the Iroquois, specially Hiawatha. They may have 2 spies with their Longhouse (barracks), and this means getting a Great Spy early on. 2 Great Spies early on and the run to Alphabet let you make spies with Deception I already and you'll use them on ppl that are being overwhelmed by your EPs. You should make an army of Spies and with them get Gold, spread culture, get Techs and mostly get XP to make the uber spies that don't die. With Uber Spies you'll get gold and tech from espionage missions, will get troops by revolting cities you spreaded culture, won't need siege weapons most of the time, and more. I still haven't tried a single player game with hiawatha, but I'll and may bring the result here for analysis.

Later I'll bring more things here, but now I must go. Lots of ideas for this game, specially for that new trait they were developing and stopped.

Dave_uk said:

I have a question about the change for magic disappearing reappearing culture though, how much harder does it make the game? ...If captured cities are still causing culture problems centuries after that culture was wiped out, ... is it worthwhile to ever capture a city rather than raze it.

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Sorry for the multi month delay I have been busy with other projects and have not checked here in a while. The answer to your question is yes it will make the game significantly harder for warmongers especially if you play with revolutions on. It will probably only make the game a little harder if you you play without revolutions.

Spirictum said:

What I disagree:
The Battering Ram... This allied to the fact that they will die easier, will make the early game even less city-taking under these harsh circumstances.

Nomads when barbs start around 3500BC in huge numbers, Nomads come as early as 1000 years later, together or just after Archers/Axemen.

I don't think changing Grenadiers to a gunpowder unit only will be good for the game. Maybe they'll be better as gunpowder, but for that it should be taken into account the

You said to move back the Cuirassier to Military Tradition. IMO this is moving it forward. ...If Cuirassier is in Mil Tradition, it may even become available and obsolete in the same turn.

The Super Spies of Christ: The Super Spies of Christ are those few spies you built in the beggining of the game, promoted them to Deception III and then you just kept using them on missions and they never failed. When you finally builds Christ the Redeemer, your spies become a weapon of mass destruction

Click to expand...

Hello thanks for the feedback here are my thoughts.

Regarding Battering Rams: These were not in the original game and added in to make is possible to conquer a city in the early game. The battering rams as originally implemented made it much easier to conquer in the early game (in my opinion too easy). Battering rams as originally implemented in Legends of Revolutions are faster at taking down city walls and culture then catapults despite being both cheaper and available much earlier. With my changes they are still almost as fast as catapults.

Regarding Nomads: I have never played a game where I had Nomads appear before I gained access to metal and I play with raging barbarians. At strength 5 they can be easily managed by a spearman. If you have no metal then they may be a problem but if you have no metal on a deity game you are probably dead anyways.

Regarding grenadiers and stopping melee units from upgrading: I agree that this is not an ideal solution. The problem is that the city raider promotion is horribly overpowered not in the endgame as you stated but in the midgame. Grenadiers with city raider III attack with a strength of 22 versus the typical defender of equal tech musketmen of strength 9. This opens a window in the midgame where you can roll over all opposition with ease. The AI is not smart enough to attack in mass when you are in the field and concentrates all its units in its cities where they are easily killed. Grenaiders as melee are horribly overpowered and have to go back to being a gunpowder unit (which is what they were in vanilla BTS) Not allowing melee units to upgrade may be going too far to correct this problem however, I will think on it.
Edit: Melee units will be able to upgrade in version 1.5 Grenadiers will stay as a gunpowder unit.

Regarding Cuirassier to Military Tradition I did this because it was reverting it back to the way it was in vanilla and I felt Military Tradition was a little dull without them there. I also felt military science was pretty good without them. But I am interested in hearing more about why you feel they should not be returned to their original vanilla bts location in Military Tradition

Regarding SuperSpies This definitely sounds like a balance issue that should be tweaked. Any suggestions on how to fix this without making the game less fun?

Edit: Oh by the way if you just want the mechanics tweaks without the other changes you can copy the CvGameCoreDLL.dll file to your CIVBTS directory and leave the others. This will allow you to pillage your own roads and keep culture for dissapearing without changing anything else.

Considering that the bomb rate of BRs was higher then that of catapults, I agree with the change. What I keep disagreeing is that BRs cause any serious effect in city conquering on huge, deity, marathon. It's not uncommon to face 20-30 units in a single city (maybe in the earliest period when no minor popped from a barb, you may find an AI city with 8 warriors and 1 archer, but if you left your region without a sizeable army - preferably sizeable enough to make a "shield" around your cities - your doom will come when a SoD with swordsmen, chariots, spearmen, archers and a GGen appear outside your borders). What do you do against 30 archers? Make an army of 20 BRs and 15 troops? If you already have anything better then an archer, the odds of your rival having it too are really high, because that means more time for a minor to pop with Swordsmen to crush your unprotected land, or your fellow neighbor with 8 warriors and 1 archer. And how to get enough money for this on Deity? There you have 5 free units, with the 6th coming when your capital is at least 5-pop, imagine 35 troops plus your defensive troops, totally unbearable.

Actually it's not hard to survive a game on Deity if you can't get an early metal. With the shield glitch the AI will most of the time avoid you, so you may run to compass and then you're safe. But 5 Nomads will ruin your shield, and therefore let the AI come. If you want them stronger, put them to 4, that seems fairer to me, because nomads are "substituted" by Horsemen, a 6 unit, too close to a 5 previous unit. And as they are now, you'll definetly lose on deity if you can't get a metal, because nomads are the most suicidal barbarian (maybe that's because it's a 2 unit, and I rarely care for barb horsemen as they come too late) there are. And on Deity with Raging barbs they come for you pretty soon.

Now that's a mistake. You should see the Combat Explained guide in the war academy of civ IV here on civfanatics. If a Grenadier is attacking, he doesn't get the bonus, they actually are converted to penalties against the defender, and mathemathically this is totally different. If you have a CR III against a CG III, the relation will be even (considering 25% stationary bonus to musketman), so if this is between a grenadier attacking a musketman the attacker will have 57,14% of winning (not so tremendous as a 22 grenadier). The following shows the calculus for your Grenadier with the best promotions a gunpowder unit can have against another: Combats I & II and Pinch:

Grenadier: 12 (base) + 20% (combat up*) = 14.4
Musketman: 9 (base) + [100% (CGIII + stationary) - 50% (pinch + city attack bonus)] = 9 + 50% = 13.5
Odds: 14.4/27.9 = 51.61%
*combat promotions are calculated on the unit's strength, not as a modifier for the defender

So the difference is that they got slightly nerfed to become almost equal in power to their apparently weaker defending counterpart unit. OTOH, Grenadiers will now obliterate any Hvy. Footmen and Pikemen, as they don't have any bonuses against gunpowder, and the grenadiers do have against melee. IMO they got stronger becoming a Gunpowder unit, and now they can have the Flank and Guerilla ups, letting your old Field Generals to become 100% withdraw units faster then before, where you could do this only with Squad Infantry. The Janissary is a gunpowder unit for a good reason, not a bad one.

Now I understand why you said to move them "back" to Military Tradition. I have lost my count of years that I don't play vanilla BtS because LoR got its place, so I had forgotten about that. My statement remains the same: Military Tradition is not in a military path of techs (it starts a military path, but lots of techs necessary to get it are not military ones), while Military Science is, and changing them to Military Tradition allows the player to completely ignore Cuirassiers, as you can unlock Cavalry upon researching Mil Tradition (if you get rifling first, which is not impossible), or have them for such a small time that they become avoidable.

The Super Spies mod has been corrected on Sword of Islam by embryodead, maybe it can be imported. In his mod, spies are never 100% safe of getting caught. But I've seen that if the counter espionage mission is performed, all deception III spies revert back to the stage they can be caught, so maybe it doesn't need to be revised in the way edead did, but just make the AI more willing to execute such missions when heavily attacked by spies. I presume that Security Bureaus also revert this situation, but I didn't check it (nor I know if it's possible/easy).


Another thing I would like to see is the AI being able to know better ways of targeting another player. If there isn't a path through land in which the AI can attack your cities, it just reverts to attack someone else or get lots of ships to attack you from the sea. But that's not only possible if you have peaks all around your land: land troops block the tiles they are in for the AI, so if you have a "shield" of units covering all possible tiles the AI can take to reach one of your city tiles (not the BFC, the city tile itself), then they presume you're inaccessible, and will revert to attack another player or use ships against you (Never tried to see this on the sea though).

If the AI could understand this we could finally reduce the amount of troops the AI gain as extra garrisons on higher difficulties (and of course teach it to use Siege Weapons as an offensive force), to make the game more balanced. I always use the shield glitch on deity because it's almost impossible without it (huge, marathon with minors popping with 30 units, most of them horse or metal needing on a big continent). Maybe BRs would be good again if this is implemented, because 5 BRs are useful against 10 troops, not 30.

And about that GGen issue you are thinking about I should disagree with you about field Generals being innefective. Actually I never put a GGen on a city for 3 reasons (of course in terrible and unique situations I may put a GGen on a city, but that's only in emergencies):
1- The AI loves to do that, so if you want a troop producing center, conquer one with 2-4 GGens (not so hard);
2- Field Generals are awesome weapons, after you can make explorers;
3- Inducing 2 or more cities of the same player to rebel to you gives more GGens then you can produce (if you keep them revolting), so unlimited field generals combined make you invincible.

The reason why I say they are awesome weapons is based on the following idea: GGens are only slightly better then normal units in the beggining, but if taken enough care, they transform into uber units that may kill more and more as the XP grows. If enough care is given they will eventually become 100% withdraw generals (melee will need to become Squad or Marine to do that, while archery need to become Muskets, but explorers are already a possibility for that). 100% withdraw explorers are like a snowball:

- Make a 100% withdraw explorer (Guerilla III + Flank II + Tactics). Now it may attack every turn, so you get GGen pts every turn;
- Get XP with it to put more ups. For the best XP gathering, put the following ups in order: Leadership (doubles XP), Combat I, II & III (for the Combat III unlockings), Blitz* (if possible, follow it with Morale***), Commando (if possible follow it with Morale) or March**

*of course this is only after you may put blitz, and that's obviously after Pathfinders, so ignore it if you can't put it yet
** Commando is better if you are attacking your enemy, and march if you are defending, just in terms of XP gathering
*** Morale is only good (to XP) if you have Blitz or Commando

-After that get a Medic III and Woodsman III to make your stack of 100% withdraw GGens heal fast;
-Then up to Combat VI (+ healing in neutral and enemy territory)
-Finally you're done with ups concerning XP gaining, now get whatever you want.

The best part of this is that these Gens won't give you a heart attack because you lost a 99.99% battle. Actually they will give you joy, because they never die attacking, and eventually you will win battles of 50%, 30%, 18%, 11%, 6%, 1%, 0.5%, 0.11% (yes, this 0.11% really happened with me, and it attacked and won twice, the second being 0.2% success, imagine my joy ).

Not to forget that the more gens you have and the more they attack per turn, the more gens you make and more gens you generate because of that. Lucky battles give you an absurd number of points, and when you have already 20 GGens (yes this is totally possible in LoR) these absurd battles are won more oftenly.

Last but not least, these Gens, beside being invincible, GGen-generators, fast XP and Ups gaining units and versatile in Ups they relieve you from the need of siege weapons. In the end they may attack a city 3 times each without dying and reducing the defenders' health (including the top defender, allying the safeness of Range Bombard with the power of normal collateral damager units.

And not to forget that you may upgrade Pathfinders to Paratrooper and Cavalry, so actually when you may finally upgrade your Pathfinders they become uber powerful, and in the end you'll have 100% withdraw Air Assault, Gunship, Modern Armor and Special Forces, not to mention having blitz on helicopters, guerilla and woodsman on tanks and the best special forces ever.

Chronis said:

Free enemy units spawn on city razing

Click to expand...

This should be pretty easy to implement since it is already in the game via "random" event, just change the requirement from only Emancipation to all Labour civics.

Yeah but the current implementation is very simple. It just gives you two partisans per city raised that's it.

Ideally what I am thinking about doing is have the razing of a city trigger an automatic revolution but instead of spawning units you can build it will spawn units that the enemy empire can build.

Furthermore I want to add in enemy reinforcement spawns that occur over time in the area around the destroyed city (with the total # of enemy spawns set by the culture of the destroyed city)

Chronis said:

Yeah but the current implementation is very simple. It just gives you two partisans per city raised that's it.

Click to expand...

Nope, it scales with either population or culture level, not sure which.

That's right its been a while since I looked at it. If I remember correctly I believe it scales with culture level. Producing a few more units on higher culture levels. Regardless its pretty week at the moment. What I have in mind is to make something much more powerful. Powerful enough that the player will have to think long and hard before razing a high culture high population city.

Hi Spirictum

Thanks for your reply. It’s interesting how we currently play very differently it speaks to the strength of CIV 4 as a game.

Regarding:

1) Battering Rams: You stated that you agreed with the changes to battering rams so I will move on.

2) Nomads: If I understand you correctly you don’t like them at strength 5 because they make it harder to exploit flaws in the AI path finding code the “shield glitch”. Ideally the “shield glitch” would not exist. If LOR tweaks make it harder to exploit a bug in the AI code how is that not a good thing?

3) Grenadier: You are correct my numbers above were overly simplistic. However your numbers assuming maximum upgrades for all units is not really realistic either. Let’s look at a simple scenario of Grenadier with CRIII compared to a Grenaider with Combat III when attacking a fortified musketman with CG III. The Grenadier with city raider III has a 30% chance of winning. The Grenadier with combat III only has a 13% chance of winning. This is an overly simple example but it illustrates that letting Grenadiers have CRIII makes them significantly more powerful attackers. True Grenadiers will now obliterate any Hvy. Footmen and Pikemen but as those units are quite outdated by the time Grenadiers come around that is not a big problem. As to letting Great Generals become 100% withdraw units faster that is more of a problem with the changes LOR introduced that lets withdraw rate climb above 90% (see my comments on great generals below)

4) Cuirassiers at Military Tradition: I agree that the change makes it possible to pretty much skip Cuirassiers if you so desire. However, that in and of itself is not really a problem. Currently military tradition is not a competitive tech at all and there is little reason to ever research it quickly. Instead the only smart way to play is to make a beeline for military science. Restoring cuirassiers back to their original location at military tradition opens up an alternative tech progression possibility. In my opinion the benefits of that are not insignificant.

5) Super Spies: I agree with you completely this should be fixed. However as I don’t use spies much in my games this to be honest is not that high on my priority list.

6) AI changes: AI changes are very complex and honestly beyond my abilities at the moment. However I disagree that using the “shield glitch” is at all required to win on deity. Here are a couple of strategies that have worked for me on deity.
A) Barb Spawn Busters: Barb cities always spawn near desirable resources. They especially like food and metal. If you make five warrior early (the max you can have outside your city without extra support costs) and place them on the five most desirable locations it is often possible to prevent any barb cities from spawning anywhere near you and thus prevent any minor civs from forming near you. You have to micromanage the warriors and run away for a turn or two when barbarian archers walk by but it can be done.
B) Range Bombard: With range bombard turned on you can make a stack of catapults that pulverize attacking AI stacks. This allows you to mop up with other units without taking significant losses. You have to make a beeline to catapults to make this work as you need them up before you get wiped out. I think this is overpowered as the AI does not understand it so I play with it off.
C) Woodsmen III: If your border city with another civ has forests leave them up and train a stack of Woodsmen III heavy footmen. These guys can wipe out anything in the forest and the AI will keep sending stacks to their doom in the same forest. With raging barbarians you can get 3-5 woodsmen III warriors by selectively using warriors to defend your capital (move your archers out of your capital leaving only a single warrior to defend whenever a single barbarian warrior is near your capital and the barbarians will always attack your capital). Pay to upgrade that stack of woodsmen III warriors to axemen and you are set if the AI does not have horses. If the AI has horses you either need to get woodsmen III swordsmen which is much harder as warriors don’t upgrade to swordsmen or make a beeline for heavy footmen and upgrade the warriors to heavy footmen.

7) Great Generals: Wow you really play quite differently than I do. I always settle all my great generals in my city with heroic epic and use that city to generate my army. Your approach sounds very effective. I had forgotten until you mentioned it that LOR raises the maximum withdrawal rate from 90% to 100%. Everything you posted makes me think that this change is makes withdrawal overpowered. I have a question for you. If this change was not in place and if withdrawal was capped at 90% like it is in base civ 4 how would that change your opinion of great generals.

ad Military Tradition: Maybe it would help to move the Kremlin there if you think it is too weak? Communism is good enough as it is.

Imp. Knoedel said:

ad Military Tradition: Maybe it would help to move the Kremlin there if you think it is too weak? Communism is good enough as it is.

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I don't want to do that because it would disrupt game flavor. People expect the Kremlin to be associated with Communism.

I do think Military Tradition is weak but that is not the reason I moved Cuirassiers back there there are a lot of week civ techs that you just avoid until you need it as a prerequisite for something else. With Cuirassiers at military science there is really only a single competitive tech progression (beeline for military science as fast as possible). No other tech paths have viable military units. That is not optimal.

However, I don't what to change anything in LOR tweaks that make the game less fun. As military science is still the best path even with the move to Military Tradition it may result in a lot of people skipping Cuirassiers all together. This is one of the changes in LOR tweaks that I am most ambivalent about.

Chronis said:

I don't want to do that because it would disrupt game flavor. People expect the Kremlin to be associated with Communism.

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Personally that's a thing that has always irked me since it was actually built centuries before the Bolsheviks took over, and since it also unlocks Russia's UU I thought there'd be a nice synergy additionally to the earlier build date.

That is true but modern associations are important too.
The actual statue of liberty was made in France but if you put it in the game
as a French building it would be jarring to say the least. For better or worse
the Kremlin is associated in our time with communism.