Balance - Less Rancid Resources

This component has been combined into the Balance - Improvements modcomp. This thread will no longer be updated.


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This simple mod increases several food resources by +1 when improved.

• Banana
• Cow
• Deer
• Sheep

This mod is now available in the Civ V Mod Browser (Main Menu > Mods > Browse Mods, search for "balance - ").

Rationale: By default, most food resources are no better than a normal improved tile. This provides slightly more interesting decision-making for cities, and balances the food resources if other improvement mods are used (Farms, Mines&Lumbermills).

Did you mean "better than a normal improved tile"? Because in my version they are exactly 1f better than a normal unimproved tile.

Yeah, if you mean, +2 compared to a normal tile, then I completely agree.

Right now, rivers are way better than a single or even 2 wheat resources. EACH river tile gives +1 food after Civil Service, so you end up with like 6 "wheat" tiles. Sure, it evens out in with a tech in the modern era that gives +1 food to every tile, and I guess "wheat" is back on top, but its too little too late.

SevenSpirits said:

Did you mean "better than a normal improved tile"? Because in my version they are exactly 1f better than a normal unimproved tile.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the correction, was a silly statement I made.

I don't understand, food resources give +1 food on an unimproved tile. Then you build a farm for a total of +2. Then you get civil service or fertilizer and get +3. Why does it need more?

Was that a clever way of saying that you should build farms on your cows instead of pastures? But some of the food resources are in the hills, where you can't do that.

Anyway, time for me to go try out this mod and almost certainly like it.

Bridger said:

I don't understand, food resources give +1 food on an unimproved tile. Then you build a farm for a total of +2. Then you get civil service or fertilizer and get +3. Why does it need more?

Click to expand...

You can only build farms on wheat resources - other resources only allow you to build the matching improvement on them. For example, Sheep is +1 food and only allows a +1 food pasture. Post-CS, it is at best as efficient as a river tile (and it's worse by 1 gold if it's not riverside).

You should remove the additional bonus for wheat tiles, they are already the best food resource in the game.

I've been sort of on the fence with wheat, was hesitant to include it with the others. You're right that it's already valuable since it receives farm-tech bonuses. Anyone else have additional thoughts on this?

I think the whole plan of changing the food bonus resource values is misguided. If you read Assets/Gameplay/Lua/AssignStartingPlots.lua you will see lots of documentation about their purpose. Basically though they're a tool for balancing starts. For example, sheep is to add food to hilly areas, wheat is to add food to plains/desert areas, cow is to add food/production to grass. The reason this is deemed necessary is because they tried to go for having large areas of the same terrain, compared to civ iv where it was all kind of a mix of everything for balance reasons. Here they wanted to give the other way a try, and the bonus resources are their balance tool, and you're changing it!

Also if you read that file you'll see that it's pretty hardcoded. As in, it's assuming certain values for the resources, and will not work correctly (in a balance sense, not a code sense) if you change those values and don't change the code in that file. So I'd leave the resources alone personally. (Note: The balance code seems like it could be improved though - it undervalues base production and overvalues grassland.)

But ignoring all that for now... wheat is already extremely good. I'm not sure what this mod's goal is but making wheat better is certainly the most influential part of it, whether you consider that good or bad.

I agree with the change a farm built on wheat should be more productive than a farm on a normal plot. However for balance we need corn back or wheat more plentiful .

I'm prone to agree with trickster and SevenSpirits about wheat, especially because I see "if it ain't broke don't fix it" as a key principle to follow in this kind of modding. (Which, in general, all your Balance mods do a great job of.) If wheat's already good, you don't need to make it better.

@SevenSpirits
Thank you for all your feedback on the various bits of work I've done, it really helps to get a different perspective. You provide your views in a reasoned and thoughtful manner, and I really appreciate that, as a lot of people might be tempted to simply say "all this is overpowered" and leave a thread without helpful feedback.

The goal of the mod is partially to work in conjunction with others (such as the farms mod) to keep food resources valuable, and also to make food-resource heavy locations an interesting choice for settling a specialist-focused city. You're absolutely right about start locations and that the file specifies everything is very finely tuned. I'm planning on fiddling with that some when the C++ becomes available. There's also something to the thought about combining the improvement mods together into one package designed to work together, which is something I'm considering... though the different parts do seem to have varying degrees of acceptance, which is why I've left them separate for now. Maybe when I come up with a few more ideas...

Based on discussion here, I'll remove wheat from the list.

I have a different suggestion, and I decided for this thread now, rather than the buildings one.

What about tying the bonus to e.g. the Granary Building?

It would work like the Mint / Monastery and give +1 food to sheep, cow, deer and banana ressource.


With your change for Granary to 0/turn the Granary becomes a no-brainer. If it does not cost anything in the long run, so you should invest the and take the goodies. With the change it would make sense building it if you have some bonus-ressources and not otherwise.

Downside is of course the name of the Granary. It would make sense for wheat and not the other ressources.

Lazy Knight said:

I have a different suggestion, and I decided for this thread now, rather than the buildings one.

What about tying the bonus to e.g. the Granary Building?

It would work like the Mint / Monastery and give +1 food to sheep, cow, deer and banana ressource.

Click to expand...

Now I have this delightful mental image of grain silos filled with rotting animal carcasses, overripe bananas, and more generally every food product except grain!

(Of course this is not meant to be critical of the idea, I'm just amused.)

Lazy Knight said:

I have a different suggestion, and I decided for this thread now, rather than the buildings one.

What about tying the bonus to e.g. the Granary Building?

It would work like the Mint / Monastery and give +1 food to sheep, cow, deer and banana ressource.


With your change for Granary to 0/turn the Granary becomes a no-brainer. If it does not cost anything in the long run, so you should invest the and take the goodies. With the change it would make sense building it if you have some bonus-ressources and not otherwise.

Downside is of course the name of the Granary. It would make sense for wheat and not the other ressources.

Click to expand...

Oooo that might actually be very interesting... I like it! It would take care of both problems at once. Thanks for the idea!

Edit:
I've been thinking about it a while, and the term "Granary" doesn't strictly apply anymore in Civ V. A granary is for storage, and in Civ these have always revolved around a storage mechanic, keeping part of each population increase cycle for the next one. This is no longer the case. A more accurate concept to depict an increase in food available in a town from outlying areas might be:


Farmers Market

• 2
• 1 on Banana, Cow, Deer, and Sheep

Any other opinions on this subject?

I personally don't think wheat is overpowered at +2 food. I don't know about you guys, but when I place cities right now, I IGNORE food resources.

Civ IV wheat: +2 food, health, happiness with building
Civ V wheat: +1 food

Instead of making wheat +2 food though, I suggest just making all food resources (including wheat and fish) give +5 happiness with a certain building.

Right now, resources are about evenly spaced out, and sometimes you get really lucky, and get a bunch of happiness resources. Sometimes, you are really unlucky, and 70% of the resources in your "area" are food resources. Resource placement always had luck as a factor, but at least you were certain that you were going to get something. Now food resources are literally worthless (even with this mod's +1 food, its still worth much less than any other resource. With city states, food is not a factor anyway...).

I dunno, getting happiness for food resources sounds more like something Refrigeration would unlock, or some kind of social policy.

Thalassicus said:

Farmers Market

• 2
• 1 on Banana, Cow, Deer, and Sheep

Any other opinions on this subject?

Click to expand...

How about follow civ4's lead and just call it the Grocer? That way we don't end up with two buildings with similar names - market and farmer's market. And it wouldn't give people those amusing visions that SevenSpirits had.

Great idea! I'll do that, thanks for the idea.