City specialisation and combat: the problems of 1UPT

I found this mod yesterday and have tried to read up on the changes. Great work! I could not get it to work with the 2013 fall patch so I apologise if these ideas are already implemented. I am very much looking forward to trying it out and helping out with the project.

There is a problem with 1 Unit per tile that has rippled through the design of Civ V that I think may adressed in better ways than how it was adressed in the design, namely how do you avoid clogging the map with units while avoiding an uneventful early game.

This can be seen in why the boosts to production are so small (ca. 10%) and the boosts to science so large (50%). This makes sure that there are always new buildings and insufficient production to build them. Further by making national wonders dependent on building a lot of useless buildings in secondary cities you eat production. Further, by having a very low impact from converting hammers to wealth/science you leave the peaceful player with little to build except buildings. This is boring design.

Why not free the national wonders from requiring the building in all cities? This mod already exists and I think it works well without leading to clogging. Since the hammer costs increase with each city it still penalises wide empires but not nearly as much as before. Price them according to how strong they are.

It would be great if you could use them to increase the benefits from city specialisation. As it is now national college is too strong and come too early which leads to an early game glut of science, which obsoletes ancient/classical units way too fast and it is almost always built in the capitol which is the biggest city at that point. It does not even make historical sense ("national"). National college should be about 25% science, 1 Great scientist point, 1 culture if it comes this early or stronger if moved back in the tech tree. The very bland Iron Works could give bonii to manufactories and and great engineer generation for instance 25% production, 25% engineer generation 2 prod from all manufactories.
(Academies are also too strong in comparison to manufacturies and customs houses. Academies 6/8/10 science, Manufactories 5/6/7, Customs house 7/10/13.)

So how do we remove clogging?

For peaceful empire making converting production into science and gold more lucrative and adding culture and faith convertion as well. (A (hammers^1/2)/25 multiplier seems about right meaning that 25 hammers will increase your science/gold/culture/faith output by 20 % whereas 100 hammers will increase it by 40%.)

For warfare a solution is to make it cost gold to heal units which is both realistic and has interesting gameplay effects. I'm thinking around 1 gold per healed hammer. Healing a warrior from half to full strength would cost 20 gold (40hammers/2) and a pikeman 45). There would need to be some changes to promotions and pillaging should give less hp.

The effects are firstly that it depopulates the map as you would now sacrifice more units than before. With good balance you would want to heal some core units with high xp and sacrifice the others. Secondly that it makes wars less all or nothing, since the difference between 1 and 0 hp it not as huge as before. As it is now, the winner of a battle loses maybe 1 unit and has to wait a while for the others to heal whereas the loser loses an army. Think of the outcome failed sieges. Thirdly that it would increase the difficulty of the game with proper AI coding. As it is now the player can defeat an AI siege with minimal losses and proceed to take all their cities barring happiness problems. The AI can neither keep units alive nor pillage as it is now which leads to alot of units shuffling around your cities while you kill them with archers. The Japan AI does not do this as much however and can therefore bring its production superiority to bear and take your cities. It is probably easier to code it to grind your cities than to rotate units and avoid casualties. I envison more of this.

A bit more space to manouvre and more battles away from cities would also be nice. If cities are made weaker it will not be as dangerous to move by them and you will need to shield the city with things like melée units in forts. An option to increase the distance between cities is to make it possible to utilise the fourth and fifth ring around the city for production. This allows for cities to grow profitably beyond 30 when you usually have used most good tiles and specialists. To balance this bonus to tall strategies you could lower the happiness cost of cities from 3 to 2 happiness.

The largest problems with this change to upkeep apart from the effort is the micromanagement of more units, especially reserves moving to the front. More early gold would probably be needed as well.

That's a number of issues rolled into one post.
The CEG statesmen here will take issue with a number of your ideas.
I like most of them.
I strongly agree that the low-production high-growth cities should be more useful for the civ. That's why I gave them back their specialists from G&K and reduce the prereq variable for national wonders to only 2. The mod has already reduced their price somewhat. My strategy is to have 2 low production high growth cities building the national wonders. I do wish their was a way to take less than 20 turns for the wonders.
Thal has already implemented Gold and science from turn 1. You can up the rate yourself as the game progresses.
Many of your ideas can be done by yourself by minimods of CEG or using ModBuddy or other mods by players.
For ex., I always raise science values and lower production values through quick changes in the Handicaps and Gamespeed files. Thal likes making units hard to produce for the sake of helping the builder AI's. I actually just play with warlike civs and make it harder to produce buildings than units. Sometimes I add in a peaceful civ or two and try to protect them.
I like the gold for healing, but think it might be very challenging to program. Better would be to have a medic-type unit that starts with the medic promotion. Maybe Thal can bring back his vanguard units that we used to use for that purpose.

Why don't you propose a short list that summarizes your proposals. It may take a few days for the statesmen to reply.

I'm glad you've found the mod and that you enjoy it: Thal has done great work.

But I guess I disagree with most of the premises here; I don't find the early game too uneventful, I think it is good that national wonders require buildings to make them a mechanic that strongly favors Tall empires rather than Wide ones, I don't see why we should need to make it easy to convert hammers into science (if you want that, don't get science, get food) or anything else (the conversion processes should be an emergency feature, not a regular feature; for regular yields you should plan your improvements better), I don't see it as a problem that hammers only give you units and buildings, I worry that trying to link national wonders to tile improvements is likely to be something the AI won't know how to benefit from, I think that some congestion late game is a good thing in that it makes unit placement more meaningful, I'd strongly oppose adding mechanics like making healing cost gold or trying to encourage the player not to preserve units (that doesn't sound fun at all), and I don't think we want to force higher city spacing.

I can see that some people might enjoy playing the game this way, but these all seem like major changes that move dramatically away from vanilla, and a major design goal of the mod is only to make dramatic changes when there is an unambiguous gameplay need.
Basically, I don't think that this is the right mod for these changes.

I agree that national college might be too strong, and I agree that there are problems with great improvement yields.

I don't see the first paragraph as a problem. If you want to build up an army, you don't need to keep adding more and more units to it to hold or take territory typically. I don't think building buildings and wonders is necessarily boring. It's only boring if you never have to fight or defend. Plus you can augment building production with gold.

I don't see the specialists as an early game function, especially with the great works system for cultural specialists. Happiness costs per city are 4 in the mod. I don't think we need to lower them, and this is especially true if the idea is to reduce city clutter and expand the city ring, you wouldn't need as many cities anyway.

I wouldn't mind seeing the older 3/4 of cities requirement for national wonders return if possible, as a means of making them a little more viable for wide. But just one city and they'd have to be much weaker and less valuable in the first place.

Gold to heal units is already essentially in the game. You have upkeep for units, which then are doing nothing while healing in the midst of a war. This also makes no sense with the ability to pillage-heal available. The purpose of the pillage-healing is partly to help the AI, and to provide incentives to fight wars that are more about extracting demands and weakening opponents than seizing territory.

I think we already went through enough getting rid of the vanguard units and adjusting the units without them. I'm fine with the medic promotion as it is rather than as a dedicated unit line.

Agreed the national college is too powerful.

Welcome!

Regarding National Wonders, I'd like the 3/4 requirement of GEM back as that encapsulates easier access and does keep favouring tall empires a litte. Seems like the best solution. I do think the National College is a bit strong, but I'd adress that by re-arranging the tech tree in that section a little bit.

Ahriman said:

, and I don't think we want to force higher city spacing.

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More spaces between cities would certainly help the AI and wars in general, but I agree we shouldn't force it and the lower amounts are necessary for smaller maps. It's the problem at the base of civ5 which is why I hope that civ6 will revolutionize wars and units again towards less micromanagement and more player comfort. But we can't change that and to be honest, I don't really get how healing-through-gold would help clogging?

To make the AI more competitive, which does lose its unit way faster than the human player, one would make them rebuild their units faster in war times. But those proposals would often look like the AI cheating (as does extra healing or so) which is why the op posts proposal goes into the right direction by making the new feature available to the human as well. The idea is to basically make the AI units more persistent instead of teaching them how to move out units to heal them in the back line.

I'm just not sure gold is the right way to do that. And I don't think this would avoid the frustration factor either.

Hands off my National College!
It's the only way I can stay within 2 techs of the AI.

It is a great resource if placed strategically.
And if you all think it needs some nerfing, I can always adjust it myself.

There are much bigger issues to fix. Processing time is the main obstacle for me to play.

CIV 6 is news to me. Where is the rumor?

All the talk about Civ6 is just speculation, nothing has been announced and I doubt anything will be announced for a while.

Are you still playing on a laptop? You might be suffering degraded performance if your system is getting too hot and you don't have an additional fans/ventilation.

I think all your ideas are very good and it definitely worths a try, just not in this mode.
As you can see from above many of us are well used to clogging our maps with units already (including myself). That's just how civ 5 is played.
But that doesn't mean your ideas are not good.

gdwitt said:

Hands off my National College!
It's the only way I can stay within 2 techs of the AI.

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Haha, well sorry, yes of course

I was at most speaking of introducing another tech prerequisite, but I don't think that idea gains much traction around here, so no sweat

CIV 6 is news to me. Where is the rumor?

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Sorry again, I was just speaking theoretically. I do believe there will be another civ game sometimes and I do believe that the combat system will be central to it when they get around to that 2 to 4 years from now

Hands off my National College!
It's the only way I can stay within 2 techs of the AI.

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Is it not boring that there is only one way? Because of the enormous increases in science during the game, other ways like trade routes, messenger of the gods, natural wonders, jungles pale in comparison. Would it not be a good think if the game got harder, since you can always go down a difficulty level whereas we have run out of the harder ones?

I don't see it as a problem that hammers only give you units and building

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If you look at the formula, the main difference to the current one is that it gives less science/gold/culture/faith for each hammer produced but more science/gold/culture/faith from each of the other yield prodcuced in the city, i.e. it benefits cities highly specilised in other yields than hammers.

I don't find the early game too uneventful

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Neither do I, but if you lowered science/production too much it would be.

I don't think we want to force higher city spacing.

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Neither do I as it will hurt wide startegies to much. What I want to do is to make it so that you can work tiles furter from the city center to make the game more consequent, as it is now, you get the resources but can not work the tiles, as well as create incentives for more open space on the map.

I don't really get how healing-through-gold would help clogging?

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Again, it is about incentives. Do you withdraw your warrior to heal, or do you push on and go out with a fight. A substantial gold cost to the former alternative makes the latter alternative better in comparison. Let me be clear, you would not hela faster, and you only heal through gold. On a larger scale this means more sacrificed units. As it is now war is about minimising losses and the AI is horrible at it. As regards plunder, it should be a strong move to take the fight to your opponents territory, it also means that territory and improvements are now more important to defend to deny gold to your opponent which also takes away focus from cities.

I agree with the mods intentions of minimising changes from the original civ, it makes it much more accessible and you can use existing code. However, there is limitations on what you can do if you stick with a bad design. If it stops you from improving the gameplay through an elegant simplifying solution it has gone too far.

Take fishing boats and coastal cities for instance: why can not workers build fishing boats while samurai can? why do we have the expensive fishing boats which gimps coastal starts that already need to take detours in the tech tree? The solution in BNW has been to increase the power of coastal cities by boosting naval trade routes and lighthouses to absurd levels which means that a coastal city can be either very bad or very good and it depends almost entirely on how many sea resources and trade route opportunities it has. Why not make workers able to build fishing boats and make ordinary coastal tiles decent and improvable by buildings/wonders/workers instead of having to resort to gimmicks such as god of the sea, merchant navy and the above mentioned trade routes and lighthouses.

I think the only problem with 1UPT right now is that the AI just can't seem to handle it. Otherwise I think it's a great improvement over past Civ games.

Regarding the National Wonders building requirements: Definitely would like to see the 3/4 requirement from GEM make it to this mod. It just makes more sense and plays better, in my opinion.

Gedemon (author of many great mods) has a Combat and Stacking Overhaul mod allows unit stacking. The mod should be compatible with CEP.

I believe your point about the new Samurai fishing boats build is worthy of being discussed further.

Too many times now I have had a city on a peninsula with resources off the coast on the otherside to which my city faces. The only recourse was to sail a fishing boat, often through territory not my own, to access these tiles. To be able to send a land unit to those tiles and build a fishing boat improvement would be an asset.

Perhaps we could remove the fishing boats, or make them perform the task better/faster/more productive, and give the BUILD_FISHING_BOATS_NO_KILL build type to workers. Then we just have workers improve ALL the tiles with resources. (Thinking about this as I write I realize boats should be kept to perform the OIL RIG improvement, as there hasn't been a BuildType designed yet to do that without consuming the unit.)

It should be a relatively easy mod, just give workers that ability upon researching SAILING in the same way they gain the ability to do other tasks with new techs.

Although work boats are significantly cheaper in CEP, it could be worth looking into giving workers the ability to improve sea resources. However, I do not know how well the sea improvement AI code would work with AI workers. It's worth some testing though.

I think the only problem with 1UPT right now is that the AI just can't seem to handle it. Otherwise I think it's a great improvement over past Civ games.

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I think 1 UPT is a huge improvement upon earlier civ games, it is the main selling point for Civ V with me. I just feel that the implementation could have been better and that relatively small fixes have the potential to do much good.

Firstly, there is too little focus on maneuver because of the cramped map. This is mostly because of cities and their powerful attacks creating large no-go zones (also they are breaking the 1 UPT rule since you can stack crossbow+city attack+galeass for instance). Cramped maneuver is really good in Diplomacy where it leads to diplomacy between players whereas in Civ V it stops the formation of fronts and the application of combined arms. I see two main ways to redress this, the first is increasing the distance between cities, the second is decreasing/removing city attack. The designers strategy of derping with production might be necessary, but it is hardly optimal. A higher flan attack bonus would not go amiss either.

Secondly, battles are too lopsided and too focused on elimination of units. The winner loses few units if any and gains experience. The loser loses most units and their accumulated experience. The focus on elimination also increase the value of ranged units since they can pick of the last crucial hp without exposing themselves to danger of elimination.

Thirdly, the AI is bad at combat. Specifically it maneuvres too much, it gets its units eliminated too often for too little gain and it loses really hard, especially against cities. My current solution is to play multiplayer =).

My preferred solution is cost for healing and nerfed city attacks (50% at least). With these changes in place and properly tested i would underp the production system.

A new thread started to discuss the concept.[fishing boats]

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I'm glad you like the idea.

A higher flan attack

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So, is that like a pie in the face? [flan="an open pastry with a savoury filling"]

Just kidding.

Your 2 points to redress the "problem" I believe are not attractive IMO.

Being forced to place cities further apart should never be an option in the game. The player should have the last say in where they go.
Removing or diminishing the city attack likewise is not the solution. A city as it is now can be taken with 3 or 4 ranged units and a couple of melee units. Removing the city attack means they can just walk in and take over. Remember, garrisoned units now don't have to be ranged. You can station a melee unit and it's strength augments the city defenses. This means it is the CITY doing the defending.

If you attack my city with ranged units only you can't take my city. But you will lose those units very quickly when my swordsman/knight moves onto them. It is a trade off.

As for AI inabilities. Penalizing the player for poor AI isn't the way. The AI gets bonuses to offset any perceived inefficiency in strategy like extra free units and reduced unit costs, etc.

Agreed removing the city attack is not attractive. We might consider reducing the city attack bonus in oligarchy (tradition), to say, 25-30% from 50 and replacing it with a 10 XP bonus or the XP/turn bonus for defensive units/garrisons. But I wouldn't fiddle with the default city attacks. The current system already favors ranged units too much as it is, and removing the city attack would only do so more.

Pretty sure we increased the flanking attack value and decreased fortification already in the mod. That should already help the AI since it tends to wander around and also have more units (making flanking a little more likely). Going further down that road just creates exploits for the human player in my view.

I see flan attack as a promotion like the Impis first strike. The opponent will be demoralised and have -20% combat strength.

As it is now, cramping and especially elimination is a part of what makes ranged units so powerful. You are correct that it will be harder to defend your cities. I see this as a good thing. As it is now 1 ranged unit in a city is usually sufficient against the army you described, and sometimes twice as much if the AI is commanding them. With diminished city attacks you have too meet even smaller armies them on the field of battle. When there are battles instead of shooting matches, melée units are more important. They keep ranged units away from your cities and they keep other melée from keeping your ranged units away from cities.

Regarding the National Wonders discussion here's my 2 cents:

I think they should be used exclusively by tall empires as a way to compete with wide empires. I know wide empires have a science penalty, but it's relatively small. The extra science from those extra cities usually more than compensates unless you've got a bunch of puppet cities. So, I favor keeping the 100% requirement, or at least having it be very high, maybe 90%. 75% is too low and allows wide empires to have the advantages of both wide and tall.

Regarding the National College, it's a very powerful building. I've been experimenting with moving it from the Philosophy tech to the Education tech. In normal games you don't start to expand more rapidly until you reach the medieval era when you can get Arenas up and going and start having enough cash to buy city states. It's hard to expand beyond 2 or 3 cities in the ancient era. So a wide empire and a tall empire aren't going to look all that much different early on. In the classical era a wide one would have maybe 4-6 cities and a tall one would have 2-3 cities. Once you reach into the medieval era the two empires get even further apart in terms of number of cities. By the time the Education tech comes along (late medieval), then a wide empire is really expanding while a tall empire is not. So with National College coming at Education, then really only tall empires will be able to take advantage of it.

If it's in the medieval era and a tall empire has 3 cities, then most likely each of them already has had a library up and running for a while by the time they get Education, so a National College is no big deal and the highest tech city would build it. By the medieval era, a wide empire might have around 8 cities, with maybe 4 or 5 of them having libraries. They're probably also planning on conquering/creating new cities too. Requiring that wide civilization to get libraries going in all of their cities (or maybe 7 out of 8 of them) would be a significant cost to that wide civilization. They would have to halt expansion for a while to do it (not building any new cities). That's the way it should be.

With National College coming earlier (at Philosophy), then it's much easier for a wide civilization to get it. At that point they're looking at having 4 or 5 cities with probably 2 or 3 of them already having libraries. It's easy to just rush buy a single library, then build the National College, then go on a wide expansion path in the medieval era and beyond. You get the benefits of both wide and tall that way. The player should be forced to choose between the two styles, not have their cake and eat it too.