New Resource's for CEP - Basic

It could be useful for larger maps so that more players can have a unique resource, or just to add some variety to games if CEP were to randomly select a certain number of resources from the total pool to place on the map each game. I'm not sure how CEP handles this. I'm for this part. I am not really for extra strategic resources part because it seem it would complicate CEP when its already such a major task to balance the current resources and buildings.

These are the resources taken from the link Horem provided above.

Amber
Aloe Vera
Tobacco(L)
Tin
Manganese
Titanium(S)
Poppy(L)
Coffee(L)
Oak(S)
Exotic Hardwood(L)

By request, these resources were made for other modders:-

Barley
Wild Berries
Cacao Trees(L)
Mango Trees
Flax
Tea(L)
Coconut
Rubber
Corn
Jade(L)
 
I'd say this should be started the other way around. Do we need more ressources?

  • Strategic: No, the combat system works well without so far.
  • Luxury: More of those don't change anything for the game really, but making large maps easier. Smaller ones already are easier since more ressource types are around. Is there a system that "caps" the number of luxuries found per map? In any case I'd say this is simply "window" dressing and any mods that adds such luxuries should work alongside CEP without problems. So I don't see the need to incorporate them into the mod. I myself happily use the More Mercantile Mod that creates diversity for Mercantile City States for example.
  • Bonus: These are the odd ones out since they are connected to the terrain. They are used to "equalize" city positions and make certain things valuable. Now I wouldn't mind some variety f.e. to jungles so that we don't only have bananas, but also Rice. Or to add Glass or Olives to desert and near-desert. But just adding more bananas, stone and oasisses work just as well for the moment. There's also the question of the yields these new ressources should bring. For deserts, there's already one that adds food and one that adds production f.e. . So these changes can wait in my opinion and need to be more than just adding variety.

If there are sensible things to do here, it could be "outsourced" to a modmod. For example if you know how to do it, why don't you do it for Thal and he can concentrate on the leaders :) Hope this post wasn't too discouraging :)
 
@ Mitsho - Not at all dude, I figured as the mod stood that there might be issues with unbalance and the likes, it was one of the reasons I just wanted to throw it out there, to see how you guys felt of such things, I intended it on been a modmod rather than incorporated.

Does not need to be all of the listed resources, a select few, ones that people feel would benefit the most.
 
Coffee, Tea, Tobacco all seem rather important. Possibly some kind of timber. Glass, olives, rice also sound appealing.

I agree this sounds more like a fun add-on than a need. Insuring compatibility between the mods would be the higher priority. Balanced yields, along with some sensible spread on the map (including the communitas map?) would be the major points.
 
It sounds like a nice addition, I certainly wouldn't be against it. But as others said, there's little need for it in most games.

It could possibly help on very large maps, but I'm pretty sure that the max. number of luxury types appear only on larger maps already in vanilla. If we had a formula how they appear, we could discuss it better.

The absence of coffee and tobacco seems like they wanted to avoid "drug reference" written on the package :lol:
 
I don't think we really need more resources unless there's something new to do with them, e.g. strategic resources.
 
More is better. I like playing larger games. The extra resources reward the civs that waste happiness, hammers and gold on exploration and settlers. The expansionist AI will certainly benefit.
I still have not seen a solution to many city states ending up with the same resource.
 
I don't think we really need more resources unless there's something new to do with them, e.g. strategic resources.

You're absolutely right of course, but then again it depends on type as stated above. If we were to introduce new strategic ressources, we'd need a gameplay reason, f.e. wanting to lose the payoff balance between land and sea units for strategic ressource (and create a new naval ressource). Now I don't think that's a good idea, making myself chose between tanks and battleships is a good decision.

Bonus ressources are tied to balancing of the terrains and apart from maybe a different jungle or desert one, we don't need it. But a bit more flavour I wouldn't mind here, Pigs added to Cows, Rice added to Wheat, etc. ... But that's flavour.

Luxury ones on the other hand are tied heavily into map generation as they are completely similar to each other. And they are capped per map size and number of civs, so adding more just adds flavour, mostly...

I still have not seen a solution to many city states ending up with the same resource.

If you mean mercantile city states, there is a mod for that. But then again it's a balance question. If you are talking the regular "on the map" luxuries, I haven't really found that as a problem...
 
I largely agree with all that has been said.

Of the list of resources, I agree with Mystikx21 that coffee, tea, tobacco all seem important, and glass, olives and rice also sound appealing.

Most of the other resources on that list (e.g. manganese, flax) seem - well obscure isn't quite the word, but perhaps more detailed than the flavour of Civ, more into Anno or Europa Universalis territory.

Rice I think would make a nice flavour substitution for banana near rivers.

Spoiler :
I don't know if there are the tools to do this, but my pseudocode would be
Code:
IF tile-type == banana
AND tile-has-freshwater = true
THEN set tiletype = rice

However the big question is, "how about a new strategic resource?". We're all agreed we'd need a gameplay reason.

Well I'm a committed peacemonger, I go for cultural and diplo victories, I've never won a domination victory. And I do find that towards the last third of the game I can be stuck in the "click-next turn, wait for ages for the PC, click again" cycle, which is not fun. It's not nearly as bad with BNW, but it's still there.

Also, even when going for tourism victories, I'm finding I'm getting diplo victories "accidentally" by the time I can win with tourism.

So some gameplay reason to force me to acquire a "mid/late game" strategic resource that would speed up tourism, that might give me a big incentive to invade someone to acquire it would be nice.

How about this for an idea?

Maple/Concert Hall

  • Maple spawns in tundra - visible with biology.
  • New building "Concert Hall", available with Steam Power. Requires maple to build (similar to Aluminium/hydro plant).
    • Flavour note: The Violin family of instruments are made out of maple and spruce. Pianos are often made of maple too.
  • Concert Hall has a couple of :culture: points, two slots for works of music - and crucially a specialist slot for a Great Musician :c5greatperson:. This makes the Concert Hall the only spammable building for GM/GA/GW, but only up to how much maple you've got.
  • Concert Hall GM generation effects are non-functional if you've a maple deficit.
  • Adjust tourism boost of Hotel, Airport and The Internet as necessary for balance.

    Especially, in my view, nerf the Internet.

Effect of this change on gameplay

Spoiler :
This would create a cultural strategic resource that isn't quite as essential as oil is for the warmonger (warmongers expand more by their nature, grabbing extra oil as they go), but nonetheless providing the cultural victory an important strategic resource of their own. By sticking it in tundra, you may manage to pick some up by settling, or you might be grabbing a small distant "colony" city.

So cultural peacemongers would be given an incentive for some mid/late game expansion, with limited "war aims" without turning them into full-blown warmongers.

With these adjustments you'd get more early tourism, so people would be creeping up on cultural victory from earlier, but without quite so much of a sudden rush towards it at the end.


What's the gameplay "problem" this is designed to fix?
Spoiler :


Despite the changes in BNW, a cultural victory isn't an equal alternative to domination. You can win a domination victory in the Renaissance if you're good enough, earlier on maps that don't need Astronomy. Cultural victory is a timer: thanks to its enormous dependence on Airports, Hotels, the International Visitor Centre and the Internet, there is no way in the world you're going to win a cultural victory before the Atomic Era, indeed I doubt it's possible before the Information Era.

So while BNW gave us cultural players more to do while we're clicking end-turn, what we're left with is still a clock:

  • Domination players are asked to win fast
  • Peacemongers research the top half of the tree as far as Telecommunications. If they're generating lots of cash and CS are still alive they then choose Globalisation and buy a diplomatic victory. If they they're not generating cash but they are generating culture they choose the Internet and win with Tourism.
  • If the Peacemongers are secure enough to hold off the warmongers but all the CS are dead and they've got poor culture then it's the space-race.

This is fun for warmongers - it gives them lots of options - but still doesn't give many options on the cultural side. BNW has us doing more management with the artifacts game, but still not much in the way of choices.

This proposal also addresses a common problem in how the cultural player goes about winning. At the moment you save up generating your GMs until the end of the game (by not building the guild), by which time there are one or two cultural AI powerhouses you can only overcome with a GM bomb, and who won't give you Open Border for anything less than a major city. So you stack up GMs and when ready DW, invade and GM bomb for victory on the same turn as DW. Really rather gamey, don't you think?

With my change you'd generate GMs earlier, and use them when Open Borders were actually available for purchase. Since their tourism is fixed when they're generated, you don't keep them hanging around.

The Concert Hall would give the cultural player more variety in ways to win. They could go wide to grab lots of Maple and spam Concert Halls. But if they do they're going to find it harder to fill out the social policies they'll need. Relying on Concert Halls will also boost their tourism earlier, making them more visibly a threat to the other players. That may cause more DW's, worse for trade (which will damage the economy, making going for early tourism more dangerous, and especially less closely tied to the diplo victory).

And if you spend all your early, cheap GMs in the insdustrial era and don't win early, you've wasted them; GMs will quickly get super expensive (exponential cost, remember) and it will be much harder to win in the info age than it is now.

But, and it's a big "but", it gives the cultural player the possibility of victory in an earlier era. So culture becomes a true alternative proactive victory type, rather than merely a signal that the opposition failed. That's more fun.

Sure, you could hold back building Concert Halls until the Information Age too, then spam GMs when you've got Hotels, Aiports etc. But think how many turns of GM point generation you're sacrificing to do that, compared with building multiple musician's guild-cum-museums in the industrial era! Choices choices...




Questions of balance

Spoiler :


GMs aren't useful for much else, so the risk of unbalancing the rest of the strategies is limited. If we filled this new spammable building with GAs everyone would have wanted them for perma-golden ages. So let's not do that.

Also, if GMs spawn early then the tourism they generate is fixed early. So you won't be saving up ten GMs for a mega culture bomb in the info age; if you choose to start generating them in the industrial you'd better win by then or in the early modern era or you're screwed by exponential costs.

By adding a new industrial era building, we're forcing people to choose between building this first and building factories. And factories mean an ideology. Choices, choices...

There are lots of other levers we can pull to fine tune the game balance.

The Hotel, Airport, International Visitor Centre and Internet all give mega tourism bonuses. If adding the Concert Hall makes cultural victory too easy, we can turn these down, as hard as needed.

The big risk that I see is people holding back building the Concert Hall until they've got Hotels, Airports, etc, so each GM gives mega tourism points (as now) and they can suddenly flood the world with EMI's entire repertoire. But this becomes much less attractive if we turn down the bonuses from the tourism boosters: people would be sacrificing far more turns of GM generation than at present (because it's essential N turns multiplied by how many Concert Halls) in return for a reduced late-game boost.

Another lever we could pull is to say each GM requires Maple, not just Concert Halls. That will disincentivise keeping an army of them hanging around unspent. You'd need to give the first n GMs maple-free, otherwise maple becomes essential for tourism victories, which is undesirable.

On the other hand this is encouraging tall cultural players to go out, settle more cities, possibly go to war to settle, another building to build (and if you want it early, it's just when you need to get those factories out to grab an ideology), reveal your escalating tourism potential, and suffer all the AI jealousy that comes from all of that. Perhaps the Concert Hall will need boosting, not nerfing, so that people build it at all: in particular it may need to generate a few culture points to off-set the extra cities that may be needed to grab extra maple. If necessary, boosting the Concert Hall with some fat :culture: generation will further discourage people from artificially holding back from building it, and will give non-tourism players reason to build it (and so reason to compete for maple).

I'm assuming the map generator can also control the scarcity to some extent the distribution of maple.
 
i think there is room for more resources. But i like to simply get the More Merchantile mod (link) that adds 9 new resources.

It fixes the problems you can run into on huge maps and doesn't has a big impact on the map itself.
 
Judging from the README of Barathor's More Luxuries, the problem with Large/Huge maps is that some (or even all) civilizations won't receive a unique regional luxury, which negatively affects luxury trade between civs. This is not solved by adding more luxuries which are exclusive to mercantile city states.
 
I agree with what's been already been said, more flavor is good. So stone , jade and amber tiles. Bananas, cocoa, rice, tea, etc... tiles. Some more CS resources. Maybe when random events are back these new tiles can have their own event you can take advantage of.
 
Back
Top Bottom