Rebalancing Proposal

[Seek]

Updated Feb 25.

There has been a *lot* of discussion in the last few days regarding the overabundance of gold, happiness and culture, among other things. This discussion was spread over a number of threads with many excellent suggestions by everyone! (What a great community we have here!) In my experience it's rare to have a VEM game last to turn 300, I can usually forget about whole aspects of the game (such as gold or happiness) after a certain point and overall it just feels like decisions don't have a lot of weight after the Medieval era - It seems apparent that a lot of VEM users agree, and find games a little too easy with yields and resources so plentiful. What we have is, as Txurce put it, "a creeping inflation of benefits" pure and simple.

Since my initial proposal to alter Specialists' yields was not met with much enthusiasm by Thal or the community, I'm dropping that idea. Also, rather than pull out the nerf bat (well, maybe a little), which I don't think anyone wants, I think the best place to start is to adjust and rebalance costs first and foremost. I've culled what I think are the best ideas from amongst these discussions in the Opportunities, Specialists and Yield Balance threads and compiled what I think should work, taken as a whole:*
*Some of these ideas are mine, but many are not. I'm not going to give credit to each person individually because of time restraints, but you know who you are - Thank you all!

Science

• Raise tech costs by a flat 25% (or more) across the board. The tech tree just flies by, 'nuff said.
  • Update: Should probably be done like other tech cost increases with gradually increasing percentage increases through the ages.
  • Update 2: Scientists' science output halved for v131.1 beta, so the above may not be necessary.

Culture

• Raise policy costs to account for tech cost changes, so the Culture Victory is not available too much earlier than other options. Reverting to the 2.3 exponent that was in place from v117.2b - v124 would be a good place to start I think.
  • Update: Artists' culture output halved for version v131.1 beta, so the above might not be necessary.
• Move the Archeology tech back to the Industrial Era to slow culture rates, making Autocracy and Order available to more Civs. Thematically I don't foresee many people having a problem with this (archeology "developed ... during the 19th century" according to Wikipedia) but it may make Scientific Theory too easy to beeline, so this might require some further adjustments.
• Have culture from City-States be added *after* modifiers - it quickly spirals out of control because small empires will often have many modifiers and always lower policy costs.
  • Update: Another alternative could be to have CS culture and food limited to a percentage per city, somewhere around 2/3-3/4. See kc_bandit's win time (t169!) for an example of how unbalanced CSs are for small empires.
  • Update 2: Thal makes an excellent point that if the AI were more likely to be competitive for CSs this exploit would be dulled, so the above suggestions may not be necessary.

Gold

• To balance their worth with Merchant specialists, Villages should lose some of their yield (as it is now, it's never worth working Merchants because unless they're on desert, villages grant 2 more yield than Merchants). I think that -1 and/or -1 is a good place to start. Thal mentioned getting rid of the tech tree +1 on Economics, but I personally like the tech bonuses, so would prefer a change that was persistent throughout the game.
• Research Agreements' cost should be raised by a significant amount, starting them at ~400 in the Classical era and scaling up by era to >1000 in Industrial/Modern eras. Since they are so desirable, this will help increase decision-making a great deal, I think.
  • Update: RA costs altered in v131.1beta.
• Lower AI values of luxury resources by 25-50%. The money earned in GPT will become much more important.
  • Update: While I still think this could be a good idea, it hasn't seen much enthusiasm in responses. What we could do instead is slow natural border expansion significantly and raise tile-buying costs (they are excessively cheap now) which will slow luxury acquisition and therefore sales. Regardless of people's opinions wrt lux sales I think this would be a good idea anyway.
  • Update 2: What would be ideal, of course, is if the AI valued resources appropriately, valuing them differently in different eras and/or would only give full price when a) at Friendly status and b) needed the resource. (I suppose this is obvious, which is why I didn't originally mention it, but AFAIK it's not possible to do with the current modding tools.)
  • Update 3: Ok, one more idea: Lower AI gold bonuses. If the AI doesn't have as much gold, the player won't have as much gold. I recall seeing someone post recently saying that they find King *harder* than higher difficulties because there is so much less gold available. While that's probably an exaggeration, it is a great point: If the AI doesn't have 45k in the bank it can't give it away in a peace deal, if the AI doesn't always keep a decent savings luxury sales and RAs won't be so automatic, etc. But again, Thal's working on getting the AI to spend more of it's cash, so we can look foreword to that.
• If nothing else, costs for Opportunities (Events) should be raised to some degree to meet the levels of benefits gotten from them. One thing that could be implemented to allow more flexibility would be to give price/reward options, like Events in Civ4 - one could choose a high benefit for a large cost, a middling benefit for a moderate cost, or a free selection with a small benefit. [Rejected by Thal] Another idea (which may not be possible to implement) is to make Opportunities' benefits and costs era-dependent, so for example an event in the Classical era would cost 50 and give 1 while an event in the Industrial era would cost 200 for 4.
• If possible, have Great Merchants' gold returns from trade missions depend on distance from Capital (like Civ4) and/or [Rejected] give some turns worth of CS benefits (, , or units) right away, lowering the gold and influence a bit to compensate. Could give them extra movement to reduce micro hassle as well.
• Make rush-buy costs more consistent in the late-game (in other words, raise the cost for rush-buying units and buildings in the Industrial and Modern eras).
  • Update: One suggestion worth thinking on is to raise units' rushbuy multiplier (maybe gradually increasing through eras and/or excluding Vanguard units)

Happiness

• This is tricky, but I think that there is too much happiness from Social Policies in general, especially since Piety and Enlightenment no longer block each other. I think these changes are reasonable:
  • Aristocracy: -33% from population in the capital (from -50%).
  • Mandate of Heaven: Remove monuments from the list.
  • Cultural Diplomacy: +1 for each CS friend and +2 for each ally [1/CS is plenty] (from +2/friend, +3/ally).
  • Humanism: Remove Libraries from the list.
  • Monarchy: I would like to see the happiness from Wonders here behave like happiness buildings and be limited to population, but IIRC this isn't possible.

So that's what I have so far, I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts on these proposals (am I nerfing gold too much?) as well as other suggestions and ideas!

[orangecape]

I like a lot of what you said here. One thing I think might be critical to this discussion is the marginal utility of extra gold. There are some gold expenditures that are nonnegotiable. You need enough gold to pay for your buildings, workers and a reasonable standing army. You need enough gold to bribe CS that are defensible (nearby, on islands, far from Ghenghis Khan...) and have luxuries you need. You need enough gold to sign some RAs.

After that you end up either tossing gold randomly at CS states that aren't particularly good for you or buying buildings. In this case gold is awful because the cost of allying bad CS allies is a very poor return on investment and buildings are bought at 3-4x the cost in gold compared to hammers. Once you have enough gold for the basic stuff outlined above gold quickly declines to being worth 1/3 of a hammer.

This means that if selling extra junk, trade routes and unavoidable gold sources can let us buy all the basic stuff then any extra source of gold won't be valued. I think this is the case and it without any attempt to make sacrifices to get more gold you can pay all the bills handily. Here we have 3 options.

1. Accept that gold has really terrible marginal utility. This is the status quo. You don't care about gold and you don't make tradeoffs when it is a choice - you always go for more hammers, food, culture, etc. Hence Merchants being ignored.

2. Increase gold marginal utility. The only way to do this that I can see is to lower rushbuy costs. It is fairly straightforward to make all buildings cost 2x their hammer cost in gold and this would mean that gold has a real value. After all, even if hammers get things done faster in the long term they lack the flexibility of gold. In this case you would still want cities with lots of hammers for wonders and hammers would be useful but you could find a real, effective use for gold if you got more of it.

3. Decrease gold supply. In this case you reduce the gold supply so much that you *can't* cover the basics if you ignore gold. If trade routes / selling / rivers / GAs don't make enough gold to pay the bills you would have to make villages or run merchants just to keep up.

I like a combination of 2 and 3. Reducing the gold supply such that you need a little focus on gold to pay the bills and making rushbuying cost effective would mean that Merchants, Villages and other gold sources would be real decisions and 1 gold could easily be the equivalent of 1 hammer. I think that rushbuying units should be expensive but that buildings should be cheap; that makes a lot of sense to me too since I like forcing people to actually maintain armies instead of simply sitting on a mountain of gold. If units cost 4x their hammer cost in gold to rushbuy and buildings cost 2x we would always face the dilemma of hanging on to more gold to prepare ourselves for war emergencies or spending it right now to get buildings up and running.

[Zaldron]

OK, there are a lot of great ideas here. I have some random comments in about the same order here.

* I think the tech cost increase is a great idea, except I'd make it more like 10% in the first two eras: I don't fly through those techs already.

* As long as you don't win science by default when going full-on for cultural (which was the case for several recent versions) we definitely need an increase in policy costs. I don't mind winning after turn 300 as long as the AI isn't in the future era in turn 250.

* I'm not sure how I feel about moving back Arch. It might work out nicely but I'd want to see it in action.

* If we make CS culture apply after modifiers it'll be pretty much worthless after mid-game, because of other culture sources that *are* multiplied. I think with an increase to the culture required (correspondent to the tech increase) we'll be just fine applying it before multipliers.

* I think -1 food could be a great village tradeoff (although rather unrealistic as villagers would be farming). If deserts floored food at 0 (not taking the village penalty), that would even add an extra interesting element to the game.

* I would only pay 1000 gold for a late-game RA if it had the per-turn *and* the completion bonus. Otherwise I'd rush buy a building, unit, or buy a CS with the money.

* If you lower the value of luxuries, this brings up a couple problems. First, if a *single* CS wants the resource you'll get more influence just buying that resource from the AI for say 120g rather than paying 250 minimum to bribe the CS, let alone if multiple CSes want the resource. Second, even if there aren't CSes to bribe it allows for faster expansion at a small expenditure *and* would provide a cheap way to improve the capital's per-happy science bonus. Better (I think) would be to make it so you can only ever do lux-for-lux trades or something like that.

* I don't like the idea of a bunch of extra micro to move GMs far away: That just adds un-fun like the vanilla money brokering so you can always keep all your RAs up at all times. I do like the instant bonuses but if that could have been done I bet he would have changed culture bomb to add culture to a nearby city.

* I'm not sure about rush buy costs to be honest. I have more experience with tall, and as an example I can build say a broadcast tower in 4-5 turns with production, or 1300 gold which could be 8 turns of net empire income. Making these costs even higher would make it even less worthwhile.

* For happiness I think the number one problem is the patronage policy. I'm almost always having to manage happy until I get it and almost never afterwards. The problem is it doesn't scale at all with the number of cities you have making it really effective with smaller empires. What about just +1 for each friend or ally (ally already gives you their happy lux) and another benefit like GA points?

[Seek]

Originally Posted by orangecape

I like a combination of 2 and 3. Reducing the gold supply such that you need a little focus on gold to pay the bills and making rushbuying cost effective would mean that Merchants, Villages and other gold sources would be real decisions and 1 gold could easily be the equivalent of 1 hammer. I think that rushbuying units should be expensive but that buildings should be cheap; that makes a lot of sense to me too since I like forcing people to actually maintain armies instead of simply sitting on a mountain of gold. If units cost 4x their hammer cost in gold to rushbuy and buildings cost 2x we would always face the dilemma of hanging on to more gold to prepare ourselves for war emergencies or spending it right now to get buildings up and running.

I like a combination of 2 and 3 also, and it's precisely that which my proposal was aiming for. I was also trying to make gold's utility extend beyond rush-buying (for tougher choices with what to do with it).

I'm on the fence about your idea for building costs to be 2x. I'm not completely convinced that will change the value of gold in a positive way - for instance, it could make wonder-spamming more powerful vs the AI because the AI will most likely be oblivious to the changed efficiency of rushbuying buildings and it won't employ it (does it rushbuy much now?) - but I'd be willing to try it out in a beta. Increasing unit rush costs to 4x sounds like a great idea, however, and (in addition to the excellent points you made) could make Militaristic CSs more valuable which is certainly a good thing.

[Seek]

Originally Posted by Zaldron

OK, there are a lot of great ideas here. I have some random comments in about the same order here.

1* I think the tech cost increase is a great idea, except I'd make it more like 10% in the first two eras: I don't fly through those techs already.

2* As long as you don't win science by default when going full-on for cultural (which was the case for several recent versions) we definitely need an increase in policy costs. I don't mind winning after turn 300 as long as the AI isn't in the future era in turn 250.

3* I'm not sure how I feel about moving back Arch. It might work out nicely but I'd want to see it in action.

4* If we make CS culture apply after modifiers it'll be pretty much worthless after mid-game, because of other culture sources that *are* multiplied. I think with an increase to the culture required (correspondent to the tech increase) we'll be just fine applying it before multipliers.

5* I think -1 food could be a great village tradeoff (although rather unrealistic as villagers would be farming). If deserts floored food at 0 (not taking the village penalty), that would even add an extra interesting element to the game.

6* I would only pay 1000 gold for a late-game RA if it had the per-turn *and* the completion bonus. Otherwise I'd rush buy a building, unit, or buy a CS with the money.

7* If you lower the value of luxuries, this brings up a couple problems. First, if a *single* CS wants the resource you'll get more influence just buying that resource from the AI for say 120g rather than paying 250 minimum to bribe the CS, let alone if multiple CSes want the resource. Second, even if there aren't CSes to bribe it allows for faster expansion at a small expenditure *and* would provide a cheap way to improve the capital's per-happy science bonus. Better (I think) would be to make it so you can only ever do lux-for-lux trades or something like that.

8* I don't like the idea of a bunch of extra micro to move GMs far away: That just adds un-fun like the vanilla money brokering so you can always keep all your RAs up at all times. I do like the instant bonuses but if that could have been done I bet he would have changed culture bomb to add culture to a nearby city.

9* I'm not sure about rush buy costs to be honest. I have more experience with tall, and as an example I can build say a broadcast tower in 4-5 turns with production, or 1300 gold which could be 8 turns of net empire income. Making these costs even higher would make it even less worthwhile.

10* For happiness I think the number one problem is the patronage policy. I'm almost always having to manage happy until I get it and almost never afterwards. The problem is it doesn't scale at all with the number of cities you have making it really effective with smaller empires. What about just +1 for each friend or ally (ally already gives you their happy lux) and another benefit like GA points?

1. Fair enough, I almost added something similar in the OP.
2. I think we should be aiming for games to last ~350 turns, like vanilla. It feels more epic! Something I forgot to add is that production may become too powerful with the tech cost increase - we don't want people running out of things to build.
3. I'm not 100% on it either, but my gut tells me it's a good idea. The Industrial age could use some more techs anyway.
4. This is an issue I thought of, and I almost suggested a max%/city instead (ie, only 3/4 of a CS's culture can go to any one city) but that seemed punishing. Right now playing OCC is silly powerful because of CSs, but lowering yields from CSs would make them worthless to wide empires. Perhaps there's another alternative we haven't thought of yet..
5. Wouldn't the farmers be the ones farming and the villagers, um, villaging?
6. Thanks for the input, maybe I overshot it by a bit.
7. These points are valid ones, but if (as is the intention) overall gold is lowered by a significant amount it won't be as "cheap" as all that. If there's an imbalance wrt CSs we can make the quest give a smaller reward if it's exploitative. The main thing here is not buying, but selling luxuries, which is undeniably exploitative - like you, I would much rather see lux for lux trades occur more frequently than simply selling all excess luxuries which is the norm now, but by the same token I wouldn't want to force it on the player.
8. I have confidence Thal can add the CS bonus, and he said he was considering adding culture to city with a Great Artist in an upcoming release. The GM micro might make that idea not worthwhile there, it's true.
9. Orangscape's post has me rethinking about the rushbuy suggestion, he made some very good points in his post which I responded to. I'll have to mull it over some more.
10. That sounds reasonable, just because every other gain from CSs change from friend/ally it doesn't necessitate it.

[orangecape]

`@Zaldron

Re: RAs

I always like to think of it in terms of cost vs. return. Would you exchange 1000g for 1000 beakers? In the current game I would say yes, we tend to have enormous sums of gold lying around and science is always useful. That said, in the late game an RA is going to give you thousands of beakers so it is *worth* thousands of gold. In the early game it is going to give hundreds of beakers and thus is worth hundreds of gold. When I was building a mod I set RA costs extremely high (I was using the vanilla RA mechanic) so that it was 2500g in industrial and 4000g in modern. Those were still getting you roughly 3500 and 5500 beakers respectively though so they were a good investment and once I got past the sticker shock I signed up for them - carefully. Buying four marginal CS or a few units might be better than 5500 beakers or it might not - hence the choice. I can confirm that this *really* helps the AI use up its massive quantities of gold on hand though!

[Zaldron]

Originally Posted by orangecape

`@Zaldron

Re: RAs

I always like to think of it in terms of cost vs. return. Would you exchange 1000g for 1000 beakers? In the current game I would say yes, we tend to have enormous sums of gold lying around and science is always useful. That said, in the late game an RA is going to give you thousands of beakers so it is *worth* thousands of gold. In the early game it is going to give hundreds of beakers and thus is worth hundreds of gold. When I was building a mod I set RA costs extremely high (I was using the vanilla RA mechanic) so that it was 2500g in industrial and 4000g in modern. Those were still getting you roughly 3500 and 5500 beakers respectively though so they were a good investment and once I got past the sticker shock I signed up for them - carefully. Buying four marginal CS or a few units might be better than 5500 beakers or it might not - hence the choice. I can confirm that this *really* helps the AI use up its massive quantities of gold on hand though!

If I had "unlimited" gold of course I would trade 1000g for 1000 beakers. However in most of my games I'll have under 1000-2000 on hand at any point (CSes, buildings, trades, RAs, etc). I might have a net gold income of 150-250 and a net beaker income of 1100-1400 (these numbers are from memory), so in those circumstances I would never trade 1000 gold for 1000 beakers, or even 3000 beakers.

[Txurce]

Excellent comprehensive job, Seek. Assume I'm in favor as written in the OP except:

I would leave the value of luxuries as is. They're worth the most early on, when I have the least access to gold, and worth less as I have more. That seems right - and I don't want to lose most of the early-game investment options because of a reduction.

I would leave CS culture as is, applying before modifiers, for the reasons Zaldron stated.

Having unit rush-buy costs being double that of buildings strikes me as too unbalanced, almost by definition. For example, I think it would really hurt in the case of an early AI rush.

It seems as if you nerfed gold too much in total, but Thal has already taken a basic crack at gold reduction in the beta, so we can adjust from there.

Similarly, Thal has made an adjustment to RA costs, so let's see how that goes before proposing something different.

On a predictive note, if games approach the 350-turn mark, with the human losing some of his edge to the AI, nukes are going to become a major, unwelcome factor that will probably have to be addressed.

[Thalassicus]

I like the Archaeology idea!

I agree about gold and have been taking steps to give it better status.

Happiness (and AI-luxury trades) depend a lot on playstyle. There's an abundance of happiness in tall-empire games, but conquest games struggle for it. I've done a few things to shift this around: Honor give more happiness, while Tradition gives more food to consume happiness. I also eliminated the vanilla Tradition policy which gave happiness directly from population. I've been planning to redesign the later policy trees, so I will look for ways to expend more mid/late tall empire happiness there.

A few versions ago there was feedback policy rates were too slow, and people asked for culture victories to be shifted from late-Modern to late-Industrial. If policies were too slow then, and too fast now... I want to avoid bouncing back and forth a lot. I think I'll leave policy costs alone for a while so we can get a long-term view at it.


I did not like Civ 4's approach to events. They were random incidents of good/bad luck scattered through the game, and Civ already has luck built into map creation. My goal with the new system is to provide immersive and challenging choices about how to advance society. Free/cheap/expensive tiers are usually not challenging decisions because we pick the best option we can afford.

In VEM rush-buying depends on how developed a city is: higher-tier buildings get a discount. If this discount did not exist we'd automatically buy in undeveloped cities, and build in developed cities.

============

I'll respond to the rest later; gotta head off for now.

[Txurce]

I'm on board with all of the above.

Originally Posted by Thalassicus

I did not like Civ 4's approach to events. They were random incidents of good/bad luck scattered through the game, and Civ already has luck built into map creation. My goal with the new system is to provide immersive and challenging choices about how to advance society. Free/cheap/expensive tiers are usually not challenging decisions because we pick the best option we can afford.

Still thinking about benefits inflation, something like +6 science for 150g seems like a steal - how much would an Academy cost? I think the very fact that opportunities give you a shot at something you wouldn't otherwise have is advantage enough - what they offer ought to come at full retail. And if we can't afford it at the time, so much the better!

[kc_bandit]

Okay, I need some help here, because I don't experience this at all in my games, and it could just be that I have found a "broken" strategy that is really fun for me to play and makes the techs/policies whiz by.

But first - Txurce, I have been meaning to post this for a while, but have never gotten around to it. I always appreciate your posts and your steadfast opinions on various topics. You are obviously a great resource to this forum and help make the game more realistic/balanced/fun, etc. And I mean this in the most positive way possible - you remind me sometimes of the dad who knows better and tells his kids they can't get everything they want because in the end they won't appreciate it and will end up throwing it away. The comments about creeping benefits making the game easier, etc. are usually spot on but not fun to hear sometimes.

Back on point - Is it not extremely important to this discussion to disclose what difficulty level and/or maps you are generally playing on? Wouldn't that make a huge difference in this discussion?

For example, I have been playing with Isabella a LOT recently, as I have posted before. Her starts are incredibly fast and allow me to concentrate on building wonders while I sell luxuries and buy buildings and units. I just finished a King level difficulty Pangea Plus game that I finished on turn 188 with a culture victory. Everything finally just clicked for me in terms of micromanaging the specialists, timing the use of GSs as well as GMs for max value - and timing the techs to complete at the best time to coincide with social policies.

Is it possible that I am just playing with a broken strategy or I am just playing on way too easy a difficulty level? I have found that I can either go Tall/Peaceful, Tall/Conquest just taking capitals and razing/selling/puppeting other cities, or I can even go Wide (meaning ten or more cities for me anyway). But I don't have any of the issues/concerns raised here. I base my strategy around a gold economy. I have tons of income but I use it. It is never wasted or just sitting there.

And I have never met a CS that is not important or not useful. They all have luxury resources. They all have strategic resources. They all give happiness, science and production boosts. The more allied CS's you have, the better. Plus, the more you have, the less the AI has.

Also, when someone says they rarely get to turn 300, I am like what?? How could a game ever last that long? I guess you could rig the game to make the policies and the techs come much later, but isn't that just going to make our advantage amplified over the AI. By turn 200, wouldn't you have the game wrapped up with tons more culture/science than any AI and then it just becomes a drag as you trudge through hitting Next Turn waiting for the policies and techs to complete? Or, if you want to conquest, you take your huge high tech army and march to various capitals with impunity?

By the way, I am actually hoping the answer is "Uhm, look newb, play on a real difficulty level and see for yourself." Because if the answer is "Oops, maybe Isabella needs to be nerfed" then I am going to be a Sad Panda.

Anyway - my primary question is that this discussion seems to be missing important pieces of the puzzle such as:

1) Difficulty level
2) Map size
3) Game speed
4) # of AI's, CS's

What am I missing??

[Txurce]

Originally Posted by kc_bandit

But first - Txurce, I have been meaning to post this for a while, but have never gotten around to it... you remind me sometimes of the dad who knows better and tells his kids they can't get everything they want because in the end they won't appreciate it and will end up throwing it away.

I died laughing when I read that. And it nicely balances the accusation of being 16 years old over on the 2K site!

Is it possible that I am just playing with a broken strategy or I am just playing on way too easy a difficulty level? I have found that I can either go Tall/Peaceful, Tall/Conquest just taking capitals and razing/selling/puppeting other cities, or I can even go Wide (meaning ten or more cities for me anyway). But I don't have any of the issues/concerns raised here. I base my strategy around a gold economy. I have tons of income but I use it. It is never wasted or just sitting there.

And I have never met a CS that is not important or not useful. They all have luxury resources. They all have strategic resources. They all give happiness, science and production boosts. The more allied CS's you have, the better. Plus, the more you have, the less the AI has.

I think it's a good strategy at a competitive level that you've finally cracked. No need to question it, in my opinion.

Also, when someone says they rarely get to turn 300, I am like what?? How could a game ever last that long? I guess you could rig the game to make the policies and the techs come much later, but isn't that just going to make our advantage amplified over the AI. By turn 200, wouldn't you have the game wrapped up with tons more culture/science than any AI and then it just becomes a drag as you trudge through hitting Next Turn waiting for the policies and techs to complete? Or, if you want to conquest, you take your huge high tech army and march to various capitals with impunity?

When my science games don't go well on Emperor, I can tip over into the 300s. Now: would the AI suffer disproportionately if we slow down techs to force the issue? My guess is Yes, on the whole. The heavyweights will have no problem hanging in there, but the also-rans will probably disappear in the rear-view mirror.

Anyway - my primary question is that this discussion seems to be missing important pieces of the puzzle such as:

1) Difficulty level
2) Map size
3) Game speed
4) # of AI's, CS's

1. VEM is balanced for all levels. Most players play King or Emperor.
2. I think the game is balanced at standard size maps; I don't know whether there's a warp playing on other sizes.
3. Definitely balanced for standard speed.
4. 7/16, I'm sure: the standard.

5. Map type: I don't think there's an official position on this, but it is definitely balanced on Pangaea, Continents, and their variations.

[kc_bandit]

Moved. Wrong thread. Sigh . . .

[orangecape]

@Txurce

Re: Unit vs. building rushbuying.

My suggestion of units costing 4x their cost in hammers to rushbuy doesn't seem that different from vanilla or VEM - 4x the cost is pretty normal until you get to later game units due to the exponential scaling. Defending an AI rush isn't going to change much except....

Buildings under my suggestion are cheaper to rushbuy, such as Walls. I know the AI rushbuys Walls and units for defence but I really don't know if they rushbuy buildings on a general basis. What I do know is that if we undertake to reduce the excess of gold in the game the AI shouldn't have such enormous stockpiles sitting around rotting. How exactly they spend their gold and how intelligently they allocate it is not something I am at all sure of - they do plenty of stupid things but it is hard to measure, obviously.

The reason I suggest making rushbuying buildings cheaper is that presumably the game environment will change such that gold is a tight resource. If that is true then there is a real cost/benefit analysis as to whether to get more gold, food or hammers. Right now I think buildings are so expensive that any gold beyond the basics is a waste, which is why Merchants are so maligned.

[Txurce]

Originally Posted by orangecape

My suggestion of units costing 4x their cost in hammers to rushbuy doesn't seem that different from vanilla or VEM - 4x the cost is pretty normal until you get to later game units due to the exponential scaling. Defending an AI rush isn't going to change much except....

What I do know is that if we undertake to reduce the excess of gold in the game the AI shouldn't have such enormous stockpiles sitting around rotting.

The reason I suggest making rushbuying buildings cheaper is that presumably the game environment will change such that gold is a tight resource. If that is true then there is a real cost/benefit analysis as to whether to get more gold, food or hammers. Right now I think buildings are so expensive that any gold beyond the basics is a waste, which is why Merchants are so maligned.

I agree with much of what you wrote, and favor a clear difference between unit and building purchase costs. But I do have a concern about such a stark difference - 2:1 - because it threatens to tilt against certain playstyles.

With regard to the early game, if an archer still costs more or less 250g, I'm fine with it.

The AI's mountain of gold offends me aesthetically but, as you note, it's otherwise irrelevant. If they did spend it, by the way, much of the game would need to be recoded, or a lot of us would shift to Warlord!

[Jaybe]

2. I think the game is balanced at standard size maps; I don't know whether there's a warp playing on other sizes.

Thal has stated standard/standard speed; or large/epic (which is MY standard); with huge and marathon untested (which was my standard with civ4).

[Zaldron]

Originally Posted by Txurce

The AI's mountain of gold offends me aesthetically but, as you note, it's otherwise irrelevant. If they did spend it, by the way, much of the game would need to be recoded, or a lot of us would shift to Warlord!

One thing about the mountain of gold I noticed just recently is that I got the AIs to buy peace for a ridiculous amount of gold. I made about 45K gold from two peace treaties after I did some fair damage and captured a couple cities. I'm not sure if this is a problem.

[Thalassicus]

@kc_bandit
I play on standard speed, standard size, emperor, continents-plus with default advanced game options. I'd recommend trying these settings.

From the website's Features & Tips section:

These average map settings are tested with VEM. Games with different settings might not be as balanced.

• Continents or Pangaea (and their “Plus” versions)
• Small or Standard maps on Normal speed.
• Large maps on Epic speed.
• Default advanced game options.

For a long time I've felt Isabella's fixed-amount gold from finding wonders is too powerful in the early game, and rather useless in the late game. This is why I reduced it from vanilla's 500. The yield bonus alone is very good. With the addition of the scout I think Spain is great. For the past month I've therefore been considering focusing Isabella's trait on:

"Double yields from Natural Wonders, and starts with a free Scout."

I probably should have done this when I added the Scout. I think buffing her without a corresponding balance adjustment might have overpowered Spain.

Originally Posted by kc_bandit

And I have never met a CS that is not important or not useful. They all have luxury resources. They all have strategic resources.

The resource placement system is designed to avoid maritime/cultural citystates when placing strategic resources. If non-militaristic citystates regularly offer strategic resources it's a bug, so please post a thread about it on the bug reports forum.

In my searches of AI variables I've never seen something to adjust the AI's target gold reserve. This is my highest priority on the long-term todo list (bottom of the spoiler) for when we get access to the game core.

[kc_bandit]

Interesting. I never noticed that about the strategic resources. I guess it just seemed like they all had at least one source of horses, oil, coal, aluminum, et al. Iron is rare, but it's rare everywhere on the map (unless you are an AI named Korea in my last game that had 6 iron for his first two cities).

Yeah - I saw the nerf to Isabella in my email (is it okay for me to agree with the nerf but also despise it??).

I'll take your advice on the early city state conquering strategy and try it out again. I read the strategy a few weeks ago and tried out Khan for about a hundred turns. I took two city states really early, one of which was culture and one was maritime.

I think I get such a kick out of racing the computer for early Wonders that I just felt way way behind where I usually like to be at turn 100. It's more of just being used to having powerful production/science/culture cities up and running, making allies and trading versus having a massive killing machine that needs and wants to be fed. But I will try it out!

I just beat my cultural victory record on King difficulty last night - turn 169, 1100 AD!! (Light Infantry in the 11th Century are slightly OP, by the way).

I actually bought three workers and chopped four forests at the end to shave off a turn. I thought that was kind of ironic to be chopping forests to build Utopia in 5 turns instead of 6, but it just happened that I needed 68 more hammers to shave the turn (chopping down trees for Utopia just seems wrong).

It was a sick start for Isabella - coast, river, adjacent mountain, three whales and a fish all right next to the shore, 3 iron (discovered later) AND marble (also lots of hills and a three deer to help with early production).

To top it off, ten hexes to the NW was the the glorious Great Barrier Reef which if anyone doesn't know, basically = win for Isabella if you find it that early, get the 400 gold and two 4x4x4x4x plots. I have never expanded that early - ever. But I took the plunge and delayed investing in my initial city to buy a Settler - even before I got my first policy - and I saved up more gold to expand/buy the Reef plots during the time it took my settler to get to the city spot.

Unfortunately for me . . . and Ragusa, they were right next to the Reef and decided to expand onto one of the plots exactly one turn before I settled Barcelona. That really ticked me off and I immediately started planning for the eventual death of Ragusa - which I was able to do with some Frigates and a Conquistador, but many turns later and they were actually allied with me when I declared war, LOL. If I had gotten both plots within Barcelona initially then it would have been even more ridiculous.

I think I may like this game too much . . .

[kc_bandit]

PS - I found this interesting. Of the 12 CS's in the game, not ONE was Militaristic. They were all maritime or cultural. I had never seen that before, not that I was complaining.