City Development

I've created a new menu at the top of the website, and all details of the mod components have been consolidated into that one place for easy reference.

Website: civmodding.wordpress.com

This thread is now just for feedback on the City Development component.

Nice, I might actually start building more than monuments, markets, banks, stock markets (think I'm forgetting about something else) in my cities.

Where do I find the Mod Browser?

Never mind, found it.

I do think that buildings along with many other things need to be addressed. Perhaps instead of dropping prices of buildings is to increase the monetary bonuses of other things? More money for luxury resource? More money from trade with cities? Add international trade?

I don't know if its possible, but one thing I'd like to see is for Courthouses to reduce the total maintenance cost of a city by-say-10% to 25%. That would give Courthouse a use for non-warmongers, whilst also alleviate some of the punitive maintenance costs for buildings!

Aussie.

Both interesting ideas BjoernLars and Aussie_Lurker, I think those would be interesting additions to the game. For now I'm trying to focus on things that won't have a significant impact on gameplay though, just a few annoyances or especially weak parts of the game here and there, and things to improve the choices players have (tile improvement strategies other than pure trading post spam, for example).

Late-game happy buildings are incredibly expensive to build and support. There is a very notable lack of useful buildings past the Industrial Age, and some buildings that might seem cool (Hospital, etc.) are really not.

Updated the Buildings and Wonders mods and merged them into this new one. This'll be the thread for both now.

If you use either of these mods, please download the update (from the Mod Browser or the zip file) and delete the old versions. I fixed a bug with the wonders, and also made some changes to buildings component. Granary, University and Museum were removed from the list. The Granary is now buffed in the Plot Improvements component, where it gives +1 to several food resources.

If you'd prefer to not use one of the two components in the newly combined mod, simply delete the appropriate XML file from the mod's folder (Buildings or Wonders).

Any chance of changing happiness buildings from flat +x amount to percent based like circus giving 25% happiness based on city population it was build in? And it would be best to balance it somehow to map sizes, so it would be possible to expand more on bigger maps. In my recent game at the end half of the world remain unocuppied which is kind of wierd.

Hey there!

Couple of questions before I DL this awesome mod.

I already have the 2 seperate mods, and as I was explained in another thread, updating mods doesn't break savegames, but... now I'm technically deleting 2 old ones, and adding a new one. Will savegames be affected?

Also, I have another mod that already boosts the Castle and Military Base buildings (Active City Defenses).

How do these mods interact? Will they stay at the normal maintenance cost from the other mod, or will they take the reduced price to 1 and 2 g/turn from your mod?

If they take your change, is there any chance you can tell me how to alter that? I haven't done any modding before, so if it's too complex to explain to me, then never mind...

Thanks for your great collection of Balance mods.

EDIT: I must have missed this from your last post:
"If you'd prefer to not use one of the two components in the newly combined mod, simply delete the appropriate XML file from the mod's folder (Buildings or Wonders)."
I'll see if I can somehow find and open those files, and find the buildings I mentioned, and remove them.

@Tutkarz
I'm not certain I'll be tackling the happiness system in such a significant way as changing happiness buildings from a fixed to % effect. I'm leaving really big gameplay changes like that up to the devs or for non-balance mods.

@Herex
I do not believe savegames should be affected in any negative way, it's worked fine on my computer after deleting the older versions. Here's how mods work now in Civ V:

1. Civ V loads information into tables in computer memory.
2. The mods load, and alters that information.
3. The save file loads, and uses this altered information.

None of the core game files are changed on the hard drive, and I do not make any changes such as adding new units. By deleting (or disabling) a mod, you simply remove step 2. Mods with changes like new units/structures should always have a check set (when the creator makes them) which requires it to be (a) not active for savegames that started without it, and (b) active for savegames that started with it. (This check is designed to prevent that sort of problem - the Affects Save Games option when creating a mod in ModBuddy, on the mod's properties page.)

In regards to this and Active City Defense (Tomice created a great mod by the way, I'm using it too!) I believe that whichever mod is enabled second will have the maintenance costs used. If you want to use vanilla maintenance costs, simply load this file:

D:\<username>\Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 5\MODS\Balance - Buildings and Wonders (v 2)\Balance - Buildings.xml

Now look for the parts that affect defensive buildings:

Delete those parts, and save the file:
Or you can keep the maintenance values but change them to whatever you want. Have fun!

Thanks you so much for the help, Thalassicus! I'll try it out next time I play.

However, I'm not sure if you answered my first question, but maybe you did... in a way.
I'll just delete the 2 old mods, and apply this new one, and hope everything works. (Though, I'll go alter the files, like you suggested.)

Thanks again.



VVVVV Awesome.

Ah yes: savegames will be affected by the new changes, but they won't break or be unusable. It's basically simply 2 mods in 1 folder. There's not many updates, primarily just to the Granary alteration, which was moved to the Improvements mod (since it now deals with food resources).

Hey Thalassicus, your balance mods are working great! I think a big change you could make here that would make the game a lot more fun would be to national wonders. Some of them are pretty cool with good effects (see oxford), some aren't... ugh Ironworks!

But the biggest problem is that if you're not going for a small empire, cultural win, you're just never going to build even one of these as you need one of the prereq building in EVERY CITY! This totally sucks. The reason they did this was obviously to balance out smaller empires (in Civ 4 you HAD to have 6 cities at least) but there's a simple fix. Do you think you should change it so that say, to build oxford, you'd need a uni in every city if you had fewer than six cities (i.e small empires can get it built) OR if you had more than 6 cities you'd only need 6 uni's before you can build it (so big civs can build them too!)?

This will retain the ability of smaller (e.g three city) civs to get the national wonders easier, whilst at least making it POSSIBLE to build them if you have many cities. Building maintenance also balances this out, still favouring small empires.

Really hope this can be done. I miss my national wonders!

I think the circus is imbalanced compared to a colosseum.

- both cost 150 hammer, but circus needs horse/elefant.
- both have 3g maintenance.
- colo gives 4 happi, circus only 3.

my suggestion is to lower the costs for circus to 120, because you need additional resource und raise the happi to 4 for both.

btw: thanks for this great mod

Honestly, I see no reason to change the Circus.

You shouldn't really compare it to the Colliseum, but to the Theatre.
Iif you need more happiness, and you got Colliseums in all your cities, you wanna make all the Circus' you want, before making Theatres.

Yeah, the various buildings have different cost-effectiveness, seems the developers intended to have a progression of what to build, but without forcing it.

@bobbyboy29
I agree about the National Wonders, I miss them. I built them all in my first game, but then realized the maintenance hit made it way too expensive and not worth it at all. They're just things I ignore now, sadly...

What you describe will probably require c++ access. I like the general idea, will have to scale with map size of course.

Thalassicus said:

Yeah, the various buildings have different cost-effectiveness, seems the developers intended to have a progression of what to build, but without forcing it.

@bobbyboy29
I agree about the National Wonders, I miss them. I built them all in my first game, but then realized the maintenance hit made it way too expensive and not worth it at all. They're just things I ignore now, sadly...

What you describe will probably require c++ access. I like the general idea, will have to scale with map size of course.

Click to expand...

Yeah I had a feeling that would be the case. For the moment, would it be possible to change the requirement to need the required building in only 50% of your cities? It's not as good a solution but at least its a short term improvement.

One aspect that's more for variation then balance...but if you took off the prereq restrictions for most buildings?

So if I wanted to build a museum before building a monument I could. It helps get late built cities more productive quicker.

@bobbyboy29
I'll try and see what's available.

@Stalker0
Yeah, probably more of a fullblown mod, though it's an interesting idea.