Unit Healing rates

Might only work on recent SVN versions of C2C.

Healing rates modmod is now added to the SVN.

Main changes:

• The global value is the base healing rate of any units without any modifiers. [Default: 5-10-15-20 | Now: 4-7-10-10]
• SH is the promotion Self Heal & Self Repair.
• Fortitude is the only value I havent changed.
• Changed City base modifier relative to friendly territory to 0, hence a city without healing specific buildings will not offer better healing than friendly territory.
• Removed the healing effects from "Woodsman III", "Combat IV" & "Combat V" promotions as they upset the balance terribly.
• Removed the "can heal while moving" effect of "Self Heal/Repair III"
• Reduced group size impact on healing from 5→3% per group size.

@TB: What does fortitude in self heal promo do?
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"My take on Promotions"; it includes all the changes made in "Healing Rates" and here are some of the changed promotions:
(might be outdated)

I've also made changes in promotion requirements and nerfed bully/sting/bottleneck/swarm. I've tinkered with loose formations/forward observer/hit&run as well.
-Added 2 new promotion trees -Survival I-III & Pathfinder I-II. They are meant to bring structure to what promotions are available at one time and will perhaps replace some of the specific terrain promotions at a later stage.
-Survival promo grants 5% withdrawal chance, 5 % protection against collateral damage and a small defense bonus.
-Pathfinding I makes your unit ignore a movement penalty of 1 (same as Hit & Run did before, however in this modmod it does not.)
-Pathfinding II Same as Pathfinding I; sum of 2 less movement penalty.
-Removed Hillsman and Forestry; as Pathfinder fills their roles.

Here are a list of requirements for most (I probably forgot some) promotionlines: (might be outdated)
Some in-game examples:

This does make hunting more difficult, so if you want Rwn's dangerous hunting modmod you should make sure that you let dangerous hunting files overwrite the files from this modmod (Not the other way around, as that would make hunting impossible).

Installation: Just drag & drop the top folder called assets to the caveman2cosmos folder and overwrite what's there. Do not put it in the "My Mods" folder.

Curious, if "Woodsman III", "Combat IV" & "Combat V" promotions have healing effects (and I know they do) why even have the SH line at all.

We have healers in the game and upper level promos that aid to healing, so why more promos?
As alberts2 said "C2C is too Big!" Why keep making it worse? It should be reconsidered and reconsolidated what was already here before the SH line was added. The whole SH line needs removed from the mod impo.

JosEPh

JosEPh_II said:

Curious, if "Woodsman III", "Combat IV" & "Combat V" promotions have healing effects (and I know they do) why even have the SH line at all.

We have healers in the game and upper level promos that aid to healing, so why more promos?
As alberts2 said "C2C is too Big!" Why keep making it worse? It should be reconsidered and reconsolidated what was already here before the SH line was added. The whole SH line needs removed from the mod impo.

JosEPh

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Funny thing about combat 4 is that it made it faster to heal in neutral- than friendly territory (5% faster), combat 5 made it equally fast to heal in enemy territory as in friendly. I think a new more focused healing promotion-line was a necessary addition.

So combat 5 made you heal 15 % in friendly-, 20% in neutral-, and 15% in enemy territory.

The self heal line lets us stop cramming bonuses into a few lines of promotions and gives another entirely valid approach to promoting aside from trying to get direct combat modifications, which adds another 'interesting decision' to the entire unit promotion matrix. Do you trust your units will survive to make it worthwhile to have expanded on their healing abilities, moving the unit towards the ability to heal while moving, or do you rely instead on increasing the immediate combat lethality while allowing the unit to take longer to recover after a battle?

Then let's consider too that self heal is also really just a term for 'intensive fortitude'. Hell... rename the whole line if you want to think of it more effectively to its intention. It also adds base hitpoints to the unit which will make it last longer in combat, although the effectiveness of this could be somewhat debateable when the unit is pitted against a more lethal one. Most effective in otherwise equivalent fights. (Also consider that it's a double edged sword for city defenders as it allows rams to attack longer and take the city defenses down further when they attack a unit with added HP but not much added lethality.)

If all of the class specific healing, along with self heal promos, were to be encapsulated into a game option, with the default returning to be something more akin to the original arrangement of super simplicity where healing is concerned, then I could see some players being more happy with that. But then... I ask myself... why would players want to greatly complexify building, tech, civic, and unit selections but want to keep promotions roughly at vanilla depth as C2C was before all the new promos you gripe about? Doesn't make any sense to me.


@Toffer... I think you've probably done quite well to rebalance the errors in the original design release. To answer your question, fortitude really doesn't do much at the moment. It was a step in the direction of preparing units to be able to obtain improved abilities to resist and recover from diseases, poisons and critical hits (afflictions), and resisting negative effects of elemental damage sources. Once those are in the game, (which an initial poisons mod could be made anytime here - I was officially waiting for equipment to be fleshed out first) fortitude will have an impact. It may as well be made to be invisible until then. I just took the opportunity to establish where the primary modifiers for fortitude would come from among promotions.

Thunderbrd said:

But then... I ask myself... why would players want to greatly complexify building, tech, civic, and unit selections but want to keep promotions roughly at vanilla depth as C2C was before all the new promos you gripe about? Doesn't make any sense to me.

Click to expand...

I'm fine with having more promotions, but when you get lines and lines for every upgrade and you can't possibly even use half of them, there's a few too many. Of course, the same could probably be said of the unit, building and resource choices too.

Uploaded a new version that also reduces the healing modifier between group sizes (Size Matters) from 5% to 3%. So units with group size solo heals +12% faster (was 20%) than units with group size battalion.
Example of unit without the self heal promo: Solo: 16-19-22; Battalion: 4-7-10; Trillion: 1-1-1 (trillion healed this slow without my changes btw.)

Edit: A solo unit, like the "Master hunter", will with "Self Heal" promo heal as much as: 27-28-29 % HP per turn.

Good call. I always figured those may need fine tuned. Interestingly enough, size matters healing rules make it harder for cities to have their chief defending units recover as quickly. With this fine tuning of the whole healing values it should be more strategically satisfying the way it plays in that regard.

Changed City base modifier relative to friendly territory to 0, hence a city without healing specific buildings will not offer better healing than friendly territory.

This is a final version of this modmod.

@T-brd,

But then... I ask myself... why would players want to greatly complexify building, tech, civic, and unit selections but want to keep promotions roughly at vanilla depth as C2C was before all the new promos you gripe about? Doesn't make any sense to me.

Click to expand...

Because your view has become and has been for sometime Myopic. You have tunnel vision over the War making part of the Mod and BtS. You've forgotten or completely failed to consider that not all players of this Mod want to be war mongers like Shaka or Monty. Many of us don't mind defending our Empire but otherwise enjoy a game that allows us to Build, Not Fight All the Time!

Now you did make your Main Combat contributions Options (thank you for that!). But you've spilled over into the Non option part of the Main mod with these excessive Promos. And yes I do consider them very excessive. I tried to state that to you for at least 3 years now. Iirc it was when you added in the Astrological Sign promos that I 1st brought up my objections for more Promos and you laughed it off and said your goal was "to have 5000 promotions". You're getting there.

But you're not the only Modder that went tunnel visioned so your not alone in that regard. Hydro ranks right up there with you. He went overboard on crime, pests and hidden building chains among other things. And now the Mod is down to just a handful of Modders because the Bug Fixing Has not and Can not Keep Up with the content providers. And alberts2 nailed it again the other day (as did koshling before he left), C2C has gotten too big, too complex, and needs a "hair cut". Too many "nits" left unchecked and unfinished and no one wants to groom. C2C is now a Shaggy Beast and harbors lots of little "buggers". All parasites to the Mod's long term health.

JosEPh

I somewhat agree here with you Joseph. But more on the second part. The main focus on the mod was on the civil site for a looong time, leaving the combat mostly unaltered. I also think that 5000 Promotions are WAY off and way too complex, but if they were more unit and era specific than we can add a couple more. If a single unit will have 100 different (even 20 are too much) promotions available at a given time, it gets frustrating. But I'd say 10-15 is a nice choice. And we should avoid too complex promotion chains, as we have them currently with buildings.

It's hard for me to say (since I made HEAPS of buildings by myself), but we need someone without a tunnel vision who goes through them and tries to get rid of some, merge them, reduces building chain complexity or limits the available buildings somehow. I think rwn's specialized cities is a great and promising step in the right direction.

We put a great mod together, but from time to time it's necessary to remove some clutter... If it is not too much work, the removed stuff can be made optional for those who like it; like most of the combat mod is optional atm.

I agree that promos need a proper cleanup, but I don't think we should remove more than a couple, if any. Would much rather see them rebalanced and hidden away through other promo requirements.

example:
All the unit class specific promos could be set to require drill I promo.

I'm thinking about the promos that give a percentage against Throwing, or melee, or mounted units etc. Sidestep and shock is the name of two of them.

A promo we could easily remove is poisoned arrow tips that is given to one nations archers in an event. The event can still exist only it should give the same poisoned tips promo as the poison crafter hut gives. Currently they give two different promos with the same exact effect, name and icon.

While I really (really, probably more than 99% of the population ^^) do enjoy complexity, I also somewhat agree with JosEPh_II here. My feeling with C2C is that a lot of "potential features" have been implemented, but not so many have been really exploited (and balanced) past a demonstration of the feature itself.

Complexity is good when it leads to (informed) choices, to different strategies; when it's something that requires at big effort to understand but with little to no gameplay effect, that's not so good. I've been looking at how Properties are working, that's a very good example to illustrate my point.

The system itself is excellent, very interesting to see how the game simulates diffusion of crime and pollution and opens a world of possibilities. However, a first problem is that it's nearly useless - you could have a static value that is defined by pop and buildings, the difference would be imperceptible. Meaning that players can get frustrated by not understanding it, and if they do understand it, it won't really change how they'll play (make some crime- and disease-fighting buildings when it starts to get high. Is a -5 crime/turn worth a 1 maintenance? No idea, it's far too complex to estimate and will matter little in the end).

I feel it's a waste, but I can live with it. However, what's more disappointing is that the actual effects of those properties seems to have been added without really considering how it'd affect the global gameplay. A few examples:

• What's the point of adding crimes that require over 1000 crime when no player in its right mind would ever let crime get so high - the city is already completely crippled, adding 40 (!) and 20 (!!) won't really matter...
  
• Education varies widely - see my other post, each point of education exceeding pop consumption increases your trend limit by 25. Meaning that when your city gets 1 more pop, or when you build something providing 3 more education points, your education buildings can jump between level -2 (Unaware) and +2 (Brilliant) in the blink of an eye! That's a whooping 20% difference in food, hammers, commerce, science and so on.
  And the difficulty level has a strong effect here since it can increase the pop consumption two or threefold, giving widely different play experience between even two close difficulty levels (depending on which side of the "0" fence you can be with buildings) and a widely different balance, tech speed etc. I'm not even sure it actually increases the difficulty since the AI also has to manage it, it just messes up the balance.
  
• In a slightly similar way, disease is far too all-or-nothing: you get no penalty if you're in the negative and few if you're in positive, but when you suddenly hit 100, you're crippled by new diseases buildings.
  Also in the early game when you found a new city, you take 5 from disease reaching 50 after just a few turns and there's literally nothing you can do to prevent that. If that's a way to limit city growth, I don't think it works well (compared to simply reducing base free ): it hampers early city (to the point that it makes early food irrelevant due to too many ) but can disappear later on, making it less relevant to later growth. If it wasn't designed to impact city growth, well, it's not very fun since you can't prevent it. Ditto with pests by the way (it's just a nuisance that happens at certain pop levels... seemingly for no real reason - it the goal is to make growth/happiness more difficult, there are much better and more understandable ways to do it).
  
• It's just impossible to know and memorize all the prerequisites and effects from the disease and crime building. At least for education it's relatively understandable (at each threshold you more or less get the same additional bonus), but for those it's just something you suffer, not really control. You might discover experimentally that Trade is dangerous because it can suddenly create Black Markets in many cities, but honestly, was that an intended effect? (if it's to make up for the new gold provided by Trade, it doesn't work well for the same reasons as above)...

When adding a new "module", it should be either "self-sufficient", meaning that it's designed to add a layer of complexity in the decision process (for good or bad ; it's also easy to make it optional), or it should be designed to adress a specific issue (such as decrease a too abundant or ). Here I feel that it was a little of both - it significantly alters the game balance, but the "big picture" doesn't seem to have been taken into account (see how much you get from education with a minimal effort). SizeMatters also suffers a bit from that when an adjusted unit strength is not equal to its base strength: if the unit is in need of rebalancing, it's not up to SizeMatters to fix it but to the base game! (unless of course the imbalancing was caused by a new feature from SizeMatters)

And there are many other examples of that - from civics to terrain improvements and housings (most buildings in fact), it feels like they were added with "intuitive" values for their yields and cost, without real consideration for the overall game balance. For promotions, I'd say the problem is slightly different though (I'll post about that in another message).


Well, that probably sounded harsher than intended, I certainly don't want to point finger at anyone contributed to make a still great C2C (it's not like I know whoever contributed to what feature anyway...); I believe it's rather a question of lack of "leadership", i.e. one or several persons who define the vision of the mod, make clear decisions regarding the direction of the mod, say "yes" or "no" when someones wants to add or remove something... Still, personnally the lack of global consistency and balance is my biggest annoyance.

My two cents advice would be to stop adding new "potential features" for a time and instead try to balance how each feature impacts the game and work together, make them more understandable, maybe remove a few (at least until someone actually makes them work) and even actually use all the existing features to add depth to the game! It'd be a large and maybe less fun project than coding new things (I'd be ready to help for what it's worth), but I sincerely think it'd tremendously help to build a "functional" balanced C2C to use as reference for new features.

Now regarding Promotions specifically, they indeed allow different tactics for units. Problem is, the step to properly understand them is huge. Not only you have to read all the promo descriptions available, but you have to know what they lead to, what they unlock, if there might be a very attractive promo hidden behind several other ones (think of Hunter 3 which requires Hunter 2, but also either Woodsman 2 or Guerilla 2). Look at the promo tree in the Pedia, it's awfully intimidating (and slow to load...).

The result, for me anyway but I guess I'm not the only one, is that I use nearly always the same set of promos that is easy to remember and efficient (though probably not the most efficient). Such as Combat X - you can't really go wrong with it - or Hunter for Hunter units.

I don't think the number of promotions is the problem, but more how different they are from each other and how they unlock each other. I'd much rather see a very narrow set of early promotions (maybe 2 or 3) that are significantly different from each other - say, one makes your unit better at attacking, another at defending.
Then, as your unit gets xp, the newly available promos are increasingly specialized, but always depend on the promos you've already selected (if you're building a unit specialized in attacking cities, you won't be bothered by a promo that increases its defense in forest - unless you've also selected defensive promos that lead to it).
You wouldn't spend too much effort trying to find the "best" promotion for your bunch of mass-produced units with 1 or 2 free starting promos, but when you have a unit that starts to get a lot of xp, it'll stand out from the others and the player will be more ready to investigate the new available promos. There could be many, many promotions, but as long as they are not available right from the start but rather that you get to them by progressively specializing your units, it's not overwhelming.

@Rwn,
I bow before your eloquence, well said and detailed.

My bumbling attempts fall on ears that have tuned me out over the last 5+ years. Just because I lack the skill you possess and I am deemed to get "emotional" in my responses. At the age of 63 I'm tired of arguing, but it seems that is all I do. I have been with this Mod since the beginning and long before many of it's modders joined in. But I'm just a tester/player who can't walk away from this mod. I've invested too many years, too much leisure time into it. I want what will make the mod better for All Types of players. So I voice objections when I feel and/or see that segments of the players are getting overran by other player segments, If you understand what I mean.

Well, I've cluttered Toffer90's modmod thread long enough. Because it's his modmod. And modmods give players choices. But one last warning; Once a modmod becomes integrated into the Main, then choice can and has been in some cases removed from the player.

JosEPh

JosEPh_II said:

Iirc it was when you added in the Astrological Sign promos

Click to expand...

That was actually me at StrategyOnly's request. I wanted them to only come into play when you had the Astrology Tech, go out of use at Astronomy and be based on the Zodiac of your base culture. That way they would be a bit of fun without overwhelming stuff. SO said no to my suggestions

Rwn said:

Now regarding Promotions specifically, they indeed allow different tactics for units. Problem is, the step to properly understand them is huge. Not only you have to read all the promo descriptions available, but you have to know what they lead to, what they unlock, if there might be a very attractive promo hidden behind several other ones (think of Hunter 3 which requires Hunter 2, but also either Woodsman 2 or Guerilla 2). Look at the promo tree in the Pedia, it's awfully intimidating (and slow to load...).

Click to expand...

I tend to like that I have to explore different promotions to see what hides behind it and not knowing exactly what I'll find at every turn. My memory is good though so I only experience this once and might enjoy it more for it.

Rwn said:

I don't think the number of promotions is the problem, but more how different they are from each other and how they unlock each other. I'd much rather see a very narrow set of early promotions (maybe 2 or 3) that are significantly different from each other - say, one makes your unit better at attacking, another at defending.
Then, as your unit gets xp, the newly available promos are increasingly specialized, but always depend on the promos you've already selected (if you're building a unit specialized in attacking cities, you won't be bothered by a promo that increases its defense in forest - unless you've also selected defensive promos that lead to it).
You wouldn't spend too much effort trying to find the "best" promotion for your bunch of mass-produced units with 1 or 2 free starting promos, but when you have a unit that starts to get a lot of xp, it'll stand out from the others and the player will be more ready to investigate the new available promos. There could be many, many promotions, but as long as they are not available right from the start but rather that you get to them by progressively specializing your units, it's not overwhelming.

Click to expand...

Here we are of a similar mind.
I would propose this set of starting promotions.

Combat I

Survivalist/Outdoorsman I

The latter would have mostly terrain combat bonuses and replace Rugged combat, wetland combat and fieldsman.

Special promos such as banditry, shadowstalker and the like doesn't really need to be in theese trees as they are only available to special unit classes.
I could not figure out where to put the sidestep promotion (perhaps it should just require Combat II). Combat IV would still unlock sentry and combat V speed.

JosEPh_II said:

Well, I've cluttered Toffer90's modmod thread long enough. Because it's his modmod. And modmods give players choices. But one last warning; Once a modmod becomes integrated into the Main, then choice can and has been in some cases removed from the player.

JosEPh

Click to expand...

Not at all, I rather enjoy your rambling. Carry on soldier, rattle your sabre as much as you want here.

This thread is open for discussion on all topics about promotions and mod balancing.

Toffer90 said:

I would propose this set of starting promotions.

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That looks exactly like the kind of thing I had in mind

The Loose Formation, Hit'n Run and Forward Observer are in both trees, is this intended? Not that I see a problem with different paths leading to the same promo.

IIRC, hunter promos are exclusive to hunter units (except Hunter 1) and Great Hunter promos to Great Hunters (IIRC), so they should probably be set in a dedicated hunter promo line.

For special units, there could simply be a 3rd starting promotion with a specific tree available just for them (so you have a mini "rogue" tree, a mini "assassin" tree, a mini "merchant" tree, etc.).

I'm not even sure it actually increases the difficulty since the AI also has to manage it, it just messes up the balance.

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The AI doesn't ever manage it at anything but Noble setting so the AI's management is the same regardless of difficulty level the player is at.

SizeMatters also suffers a bit from that when an adjusted unit strength is not equal to its base strength: if the unit is in need of rebalancing, it's not up to SizeMatters to fix it but to the base game! (unless of course the imbalancing was caused by a new feature from SizeMatters)

Click to expand...

Agreed but I wasn't going to argue the points I wanted to make regarding the rebalances it introduces. Additionally, much of the rebalancing is intended to work with Fight or Flight and may not be particularly keen when you aren't (thus the combat mod as a whole works best if all together.) I had some ideas as to how certain units should be adjusted and this was a way I could introduce said adjustments without causing friction to do so as it was isolated within the option and thus a subtle suggestion rather than something I felt should be enforced on all.



Whatever you do with the promotion tree, by all means it should be extremely tested. You're basically going to force a lot of units down very predefined paths to reach what it is you want to specialize them in that way which is going to make them much much more difficult to specialize. I wouldn't limit it to quite so few starting nodes but I get the concept of having some kind of general route direction being important from the beginning.

Also, you may find that there are many promotions that, due to the extremely limited number of selections a unit just built can make in the Prehistoric to Ancient era, will be very rare to see utilized because you can't get the unit to the point of being able to select it. I think you might be able to see this in the difficulty in assigning Sidestep a home in this tree.

Ironically, if this were going to be done RIGHT, which is really a matter of trying to define primordial skills and increasing refinement, you'll probably need to add MORE promotions so that you can show where different path strings can blend. Example: Combat leads to Shock and Withdrawal as options, and if you have both you unlock a promo that strengthens withdrawal against melee units.

All I can say is it needs a LOT of thought to route paths like this and do it in a way that it won't be exceedingly frustrating to those who wanted to be able to specialize their unit roles in many different ways.

@Joe: I have personal narrow vision on the war side of the mod because I feel that the vast amount of work before me has been done on everything else, leaving a massive sense of imbalance. When you take a count of the amount of new wonders and then consider the amount of new promotions, which do you think has had a lot more added to the game structure? I could probably ask the same question regarding just about any other game element.

When I say I would like so many promotions as 5k what I mean is to include injuries, poisons, diseases, equipment, emotional states, not 5k skill promos. As for those, there should be clear chains. It may be surprising for you to hear this but there are quite a few things there that I don't like either. What drives me nuts are one off promos like 'forward observer' that represent a random mix of benefits that don't unlock or lead to anything more and don't represent a pinnacle of achievement to justify their inclusion. So they come across as chaff in the first available selectable promotions and don't really help the unit to specialize much.

But then, if I were taking a controlling approach and crafted the whole promotion tree from scratch, without any consideration for the contributions of others, there are quite a few I would remove.

And I'm never going to be so arrogant as to think that my own contributions shouldn't be tweaked or rebalanced. But if we're going to evaluate them again, we really should understand all the considerations put behind them. I didn't just make them to be cool but to serve a purpose. And if you want a complete explanation of purpose on the healing promotions, I'm happy to explain it - it goes pretty deep. Looking at Toffer's approach to adjusting Self-Healing, I see answers to the problems with an understanding for the design structure. I strongly feel it should be made core unless we're to make the whole healing system as it stands now an option.

The problem was that the old system was terribly flawed and needed a lot of rebalancing. So it was already broken and this was an attempt to fix it. A dramatic attempt perhaps but it was the full vision and I had a hard time justifying not going the full distance with it and creating something arbitrarily simpler for the core.

However, I do regret making it core but it sprouted from the naval review in a way that made it tough to see an alternative. That said, I think it could be reconsidered as to the reason it was deemed un-separable from the Naval plans and a more simple core version could be structured. But it wouldn't be a project to take lightly.

And would it really be any more fun to make it simpler? Why not just say there's one base healing rate that applies across the board and remove the need for healer units? That would certainly be simple. Is 2 or 3 healing promotions really a sufficient enough step up in presenting modifiers to healing even justified at that point? Does that begin to compare to the magnifying glass we've placed on civics and buildings?

Here's the reality of it... units should be able to develop the ability to personally heal faster because they are more hardy than others. The ability to do so should be balanced against other core potential benefits they may be able to take and as generic as this benefit may be, it should compare in value to other generic benefits, like learning how to fight with greater skill (Combat). This thinking is finally possible to add to the game because finally, healing is made more granular.

That said, it was admittedly imbalanced a bit in its initial release.

Rwn said:

The Loose Formation, Hit'n Run and Forward Observer are in both trees, is this intended? Not that I see a problem with different paths leading to the same promo.

Click to expand...

Intended.

Rwn said:

IIRC, hunter promos are exclusive to hunter units (except Hunter 1) and Great Hunter promos to Great Hunters (IIRC), so they should probably be set in a dedicated hunter promo line.

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I don't really see the problem as none of the hunter promotions are required for anything else... except Hunter I → Camuflage, but as you said, hunter I is available to everyone.


@TB: I won't be making any changes to the promo tree in any foreseeable future, was just contributing to the discussion, it might lead to minor changes that I would be happy to make though.
And yes, the promo tree would be hard to fix without rebuilding it from scratch as you pointed out.

btw. AI can change their difficulty through the flexible difficulty for AI option in BUG menu, this was probably what Rwn meant..