Leaders: BNW Adaptation

This is the thread for leader design. There's too many leaders to find a consensus on everything, so we just need to make sure we're happy with most of the leaders.

Update: I finalized the list below for the first major release, which should be ready by the end of August. We can alter the list further once we can play this initial plan.



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I believe each leader should fundamentally change gameplay in some interesting and unique way. This is my main goal for leader design. For example, Polynesia can cross oceans from the start of the game, giving them an advantage in trade and alliances. This "exploration" theme dramatically changes Polynesian gameplay.

I believe these are important for good leader design:

• Theme
  Does the leader have a common theme unifying their 3 uniques?
  .
• Uniqueness
  Does the leader's theme dramatically change gameplay?
  .
• History
  Do the bonuses represent the most important historical aspects of the civilization?
  .
• Complexity
  Intricate strategies are more fun than simple ones. Gaining +X% gold per luxury creates more complex strategy than a simple +Y% flat gold to the whole economy.
  .
• Active
  Indonesia's free luxuries let us actively participate in earning happiness, which is more fun than a passive +X happiness bonus to some building.
  .
• Time
  We want to use the bonus, so earlier and longer-lasting bonuses are better.
  .
• Generality
  Leaders should be useful for a wide variety of strategies and map types. A leader shouldn't focus too much on one type of terrain.
  .
• Ease of implementation
  Most things require either hours to complete (creating new effects) or minutes to complete (copying & tweaking existing effects).

Here are the leaders, themes, and bonuses, with ideas for ways to improve the leaders marked with ► arrows. Completed ideas are marked with a ✓ checkmark.

thought i was the only one up at this time....guess not

Yeah, I stayed up late last night watching a bunch of scifi movies, which affected my sleep patterns tonight too.

For the Celts:

I was thinking of adding the Donon temple (unfortunatelly better documented in French than in English) as a replacement of their grand temple, which would give them some sort of benefit from other religions existing in their capital city like gaining all follower beliefs of the religions present in that city?

Or perhaps allowing their holy sites to give a +10% strength to adjacent units?

The warriors seems fine as is to me.

Still don't like US with a UU as a settler. Very weak. What was wrong with the Pioneer Fort? If they have a UA that helps settlers already, what's the need for a UU version?

Have to think on the Celts. Super faith-accumulation isn't all that impressive, so they don't need another raw source. Religious benefits from trade or buildings/national wonders would be useful though.

Changes to Arabs, Ottomans, Dutch, and Ethiopia look okay for now. Depends on numbers for balance mostly. Is Liburna going to be just Roman moving forward (or would that just be the Roman naval UU for a "liburna" unit, which would then have to get renamed to something else so Rome can use the proper title?)

Arabian caravans needs to be on par (preferably better) than their sea trade. Otherwise their unique playstyle is pretty weak. The +range alone does not accomplish this?

I'm thinking of renaming the Liburna to something generic like "Raider" or "Galley" so the Romans can have a unique version. The Roman navy is sorely under-represented in most entertainment. Naval dominance was required for such a vast largely-coastal empire around the Mediterranean. It's also rare for a leader to have both land and sea unique units. I plan on replacing their bland unique ability with something more interesting to represent Adaptation later. The Assyrians have the original plan of tech assimilation.


@Naeven
I agree Arabia's +50% caravan range loses value quickly. I haven't figured out how to make Arabian land trade more desirable. Morocco gets +2 gold per trade route, and we don't want to overlap them too much. Maybe a unique Caravansary?

Marocco theme is not caravans, rather than both sea & land. I don't think the Caravan buffs makes Arabia more similar to Marocco than any other unique trade buff. Except they both also share dessert bonus. But it's different types of dessert bonus, so I think it's fine.

I could see the +gold to be changed to another yield to make Marocco more special than the general +gold trade uniques. Current UA Seems to make Marocco the most rewarding to send trade routes to, we could expand this rather than buffing their own TRs, attracting lots of foreign trade gold.

unique Caravansary could work for Arabia. But their UB is fine already. I'd rather see the caravan bonus worked into their UA.

I feel trade and religion fit best for Arabia, so I assigned their old "luxuries" theme to the Netherlands, a civ we were having trouble with back in December. The luxury theme perfectly fits the Dutch history of early capitalization. Ottomans and Netherlands are two civs I'm very happy with in this new plan.

My initial thoughts were here:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=12597924&postcount=9

Still don't like US with a UU as a settler. Very weak. What was wrong with the Pioneer Fort? If they have a UA that helps settlers already, what's the need for a UU version?

Click to expand...

Agree with this. A UU settler is very weak and boring. We've had this discussion many times. Pioneer fort was fine.

I'm thinking of renaming the Liburna to something generic like "Raider" or "Galley" so the Romans can have a unique version.

Click to expand...

I don't like the idea of making Rome a naval civ with a UU. Their strength was the army, they were mostly conquering people who didn't have much of a navy at all. Even the iconic battles with Carthage are land battles.

I much much prefer Rome with a big capital-wide focus (which is interestingly different from most civs), with a legion, and with a UB (aqueduct, cloaca, baths, something) that gives happiness and so makes wide easier. They don't need a naval UU, but they do need something to help them have a wide empire.

Renaming Liburna to Galley is good. Liburna is too obscure for most players.

I don't think tourism bonuses fit arabia very well.

Will the Pictish warrior hill bonus stay for upgrades?

I still don't like the Jelling stones. Bonuses from national wonders are too narrow, particularly for the AI. Plus it's a fairly weak effect, and it's too similar to Assyria.

Naval movement rates feel lower in BNW; I think England would be better off with the extra movement rate - especially as it applies to embarked units. Embarked units move very slowly now.

Sea trade route range feels very strange for Ethiopia, who were primarily a land power.

As discussed elsewhere, the France UA is boring and weak. My suggestion was +culture in the capital for each social policy you have.

I really dislike prototypes for Germany, it has terrible flavor and isn't very useful.
And +1 congress vote *per city* is potentially game breaking.
I prefer the engineer and scientist bonuses. German engineering is a nice theme.

I think the "trade office" is boring for Netherlands, the sea beggar was quite fun.
So I'd probably put the effect back to Arabia. We are fixing something here that isn't broken.

Songhai still doesn't work for me.

I think +production on farms for Sweden is going to be game breaking. Already, it is much easier to just farm everything, use lots of specialists, and get gold from trade routes. An extra production for every farm is going to be very, very strong.

I'll try to make some constructive alternative suggestions.

I see your point, but the problem is that the gold bonus for Arabia is not actually the bonus, it's compensation for caravans being weaker. The +faith/tourism is the actual bonus.

I meant your new UB Bazaar was fine, and I agree the bonus is perfect on Nethetlands.

I'll do a few civs at a time ;-) But am I correct that we let BNW civs rest for the moment.

Arabia: The trade routes we know them for aren't only desert based. The Dow rules the Indian Ocean and Arabian traders brought Islam down the Suaheli coast and east to Indonesia. Gameplay wise I'm not sure either land routes are a distinct enough thing to base a unique on. They will profit probably from the redo/clean up of the social policies, but I don't see anything wrong with extending the religion spread to sea trade routes (= viable the whole game), but let Arabia treat desert like roads for trade routes (similar to Iroquois and forests). That should be better than twice the range for caravans, inthat it's not a straight bonus, but an adaptive one. Alternatively, Arabia was important in storing and developing science, so a science bonus on land routes?

Germany: 1 delegate per city seems quite strong, not? As a warmongerer, I'd want happiness buildings anyways, no? Plus, there are many zoos in Germany ;-) So that might need testing? 1 Delegate per Great Person born in this city?

Russia: How close are they now to the Shoshone? I'm not sure they are particularly enticing or distinct atm. And the soviet era is severly underrepresented. So I propose a Soviet (factory), cheaper to build (earlier ideology), and a science boost or the border expansion... Does the Cossacks promotion stay to tanks?

Personalities: Conquerors often attack too early for my taste to be succesful. Shouldn't one cov with medieval or later uniques go on a "settler spam" first, just for variety?

So, that's 4 points, enough for now ;-)

mitsho said:

Arabia: The trade routes we know them for aren't only desert based. The Dow rules the Indian Ocean and Arabian traders brought Islam down the Suaheli coast and east to Indonesia. Gameplay wise I'm not sure either land routes are a distinct enough thing to base a unique on. They will profit probably from the redo/clean up of the social policies, but I don't see anything wrong with extending the religion spread to sea trade routes (= viable the whole game), but let Arabia treat desert like roads for trade routes (similar to Iroquois and forests). That should be better than twice the range for caravans, inthat it's not a straight bonus, but an adaptive one. Alternatively, Arabia was important in storing and developing science, so a science bonus on land routes?

Click to expand...

This makes a lot of sence tbh. Tho religious spread on trade + dessert unit & caravan movement is still a pretty weak UA. (Mostly due to force converting spam). So then the UB will need to be very strong. Also you kinda recreates the Byzantine dilemma, bonus on religion but no bonus to actually create the religion.

Agree that tourism isn't exactly what we associate with Arabia nowadays, but then again, there's the great pilgrimage to Mekka each year.
Maybe a Grand Temple UB that provides tourism for each follower of the corresponding religion?

Germany might need some work, as has been said by others, but I have no better idea right now

Apart from that: Good work! I guess we should try these suggestions rather than theorycrafting for a few more weeks...

There are a lot of interesting ideas here for Arabia, a lot of them make some historic sense and seem like valuable abilities.

But I think we need to pick a set that are coherent in terms of fitting well together.
We don't want to be pushing them in all kinds of different directions with religion bonuses, tourism bonuses, faith bonuses, trade route bonuses, science bonuses etc.

I definitely don't think that tourism makes sense for flavor or gameplay. The Mecca pilgrimage is already modeled to some extent with belief choices. We can have faster religion spread through trade routes encourage the Arab player to go religious, but not require that they necessarily do so in a pilgrimage way.

I'd prefer to keep the old bazaar, which let's us keep the Sea Beggar for the Netherlands.

It would be useful to have some data: how much longer can Arabs have caravans? How much extra gold does that really bring?

Mitsho's ideas seem interesting, but I think religious spread on all trade routes, desert movement, desert counts as roads, and longer trade routes is too much.

There's also the issue that they have one of the best UU's in the game, so we don't want the rest to be too powerful.

How about: market doubles luxuries, camel archer, desert movement, longer caravans, all trade routes double religious spread?

Russia: How close are they now to the Shoshone? I'm not sure they are particularly enticing or distinct atm. And the soviet era is severly underrepresented. So I propose a Soviet (factory), cheaper to build (earlier ideology), and a science boost or the border expansion... Does the Cossacks promotion stay to tanks?

Click to expand...

I suspect they'll be somewhat different. The Shoshone are vastly better at getting land, but the strategic resource bonuses for Russia are non-trivial, and use the Cossacks promotion stays to tanks.
Having said that, I'd have no objection changing the Krepost to something else, it is a weak UB.

Personalities: Conquerors often attack too early for my taste to be succesful. Shouldn't one cov with medieval or later uniques go on a "settler spam" first, just for variety?

Click to expand...

Agreed. Conquest shouldn't just mean from early game, because very often early conquest fails. It would be nice to have some more focused on medieval or Renaissance assaults, if there is some way to do this. Civs that have powerful UUs in those eras in particular; Japan, and Ottomans are good candidates for medieval and renaissance conquerors.

Hmm, I thought the distance on trade routes didn't add gold, only opened up new cities.
That's how I read the wiki at least.

How about we make Germany about engineering, in a similar way to how Babylon is about science?

Germany could get a free great engineer at metal casting, +25% production for great engineers, and +production or science on manufacturies?

That would still help out an aggressive militarist Germany, but would help to make them feel more industrial, and less about gothic barbarians.

Hmm, I thought the distance on trade routes didn't add gold, only opened up new cities.
That's how I read the wiki at least.

Click to expand...

My understanding is that longer trade routes generate more gold. That's why longer trade routes are useful. Purely opening new cities is pretty weak by itself. But I'm not 100% certain.

"The per-turn gold value of the Trade Route increases with the distance of the route, the difference in local resources between the two cities, and the existence of Markets and other trade-related buildings in your city."
http://well-of-souls.com/civ/civ5_bravenewworld.html#trade_routes

"- The greater the distance the better the rewards"
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=12288206&postcount=1

I agree it should add gold, but I don't think it does. If it does, I'll drop my objections on Caravan range.
It could also be that the range gold is minimal.
Tho is 50% range enough to make it on par with sea trade?

EDIT:
Checked ingame Civilopedia now again, doesn't say anything regarding range adding gold. Only Gold revenue & resource diversity.

Tho is 50% range enough to make it on par with sea trade?

Click to expand...

I doubt it.

But sea trade requires you to have a navy (or, it should, if the AI were more aggressive) while land trade doesn't.

EDIT:
Checked ingame Civilopedia now again, doesn't say anything regarding range adding gold. Only Gold revenue & resource diversity.

Click to expand...

The in-game civilopedia is pretty useless.

Ahriman said:

I doubt it.
But sea trade requires you to have a navy (or, it should, if the AI were more aggressive) while land trade doesn't.

Click to expand...

I totally agree overall. But if we are theming a civ on Caravans, then the caravans needs to be better for that civ, and that civ only.