[Vote] (5-13) Ancient Ruin Change Proposals
- Thread starter Hokiefan00
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So imbalance is fun?
I can understand the sentiment, it is possible for the pursuit of balance to stamp out uniqueness and originality, creating the "boring as hell" concern. It absolutely can happen, and its something to be mindful of.
Now in this case, I personally don't see it, I mean the remaining ruins still seem pretty varied to me in what they provide, but I can respect the concern.
pineappledan
Deity
up till now a warrior could do a pathfinder’s job at least 75% as well, upgrade sooner, protect me from barbs better, survive (ie protect my investment) better, and they do not evaporate into irrelevance while I wait for deep ocean travel to unlock.
It’s really, REALLY hard to justify ever building a 2nd pathfinder. I sometimes wonder why we even have a button for it. With 18a I might press that button. That seems like it would actually add uniqueness; there is something I might want to do with a unit that ive never wanted 2 of in all my years of playing VP.
It’s really, REALLY hard to justify ever building a 2nd pathfinder. I sometimes wonder why we even have a button for it. With 18a I might press that button. That seems like it would actually add uniqueness; there is something I might want to do with a unit that ive never wanted 2 of in all my years of playing VP.
I frequently get a 2nd pathfinder if I get a gold ruin early to get potentially more ruins more easily. They are just faster. I typically play on large and I'm aware that that's not what we balance for, but at least in that setting you easily have enough room to also give some exploration promotions to a second recon unit making them vastly superior to a measly warrior. You must also be joking that a warrior has more surviveability over a speedy pathfinder. Before deep ocean travel they are also excellent units to steal barb camps, split enemy armies and pillage their resources/trade routes or a very flexible garisson.
The difference between a Pathfinder hitting Upgrade or Tile Reveal on your first ruin is ridiculous. Compared to anything else, there's no competition. It steam rolls so hard (too hard) into picking up all of the other ruins in your vicinity, and you get access to remote regions first (embarking, mountain walking) which compounds the issue. I don't really see a way that those rewards can be balanced, and I don't think they are fun in any way. They feel bad when the AI gets them and eats all your ruins, and they feel bad when I get them because they obviate the entire early scouting mini-game.
pineappledan
Deity
Not joking. In the barbarian PvE phase, Warriors have more CS and 33% vs barbs. At low-med difficulties They can fortify and heal through 3 barbs surrounding them while a pathfinder can barely survive 2 hits. In an early pvp, pathfinders can't outrun a horseman except in the most ideal situations, they can't tank more than 3 hits, a pillage action takes half their entire movepool, making them a sitting duck, and their squishiness makes them a high priority target. They just don't have the stats to do anything of value without being suicides.
So if I have early barb problems I will go survivalism with my early pathfinder and have it tag team with the warrior. And it does a decent enough job, but no its not equal to another warrior. I would never build a 2nd pathfinder over a warrior if my goal was to deal with barbs.
The only time I build a 2nd pathfinder (which is quite rare) is when I have a very large initial landmass and my early pathfinder get hung up with barb hunting or protecting a vulnerable city or something.
The only time I build a 2nd pathfinder (which is quite rare) is when I have a very large initial landmass and my early pathfinder get hung up with barb hunting or protecting a vulnerable city or something.
1. Yes
2. Biggest adventure of civ for me was always - the map. Nothing more exciting than playing on a beautifully imbalanced pangea, where there are super rich areas and crappy ones. Everyone battling for this rich valley. Making the map "balanced", making it mathematically regular, is the worst thing that happened. That is not how our Earth is
3. In this particular case, what I am referring to, is that you plan to replace "qualitative" features (gaining technology, getting "advanced weapons" which is full unit upgrade) with "quantitative" math-based bonuses (gaining some science, gaining some experience). Much less fun. Back in the days it was a hell lot of fun stealing full technologies, now it's a chore to click through a swarm of spies leeching some gold here, some science there. What used to feel like an adventure, now feels like freaking accounting.
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pineappledan
Deity
Totally agree that there is no good reason why ruins need to be balanced against each other. They are random rewards and the different value of each of them is part of their randomness.
However, I would still prefer if they all gave numerical bonuses. If the proposal that only allows scouts to get bonuses doesn't pass, then there's still that bonus on recon units that gives them 25% more for discovering ruins. That bonus only works on numerical bonuses like
gold or 
production, it doesn't give you more if the ruin gives you a free population or free tiles.
I like the free
science instead of a free tech, because if I prioritized something to research, that's the tech I want finished. Not some random other tech.
The rest of the ruin rebalancing just seems like raising the floor on the worst ruins which... that's fine. the XP one is still kinda poopy even with the change, but 1 ruin still has to be the worst one. The GAP one needs to go because it makes the first golden age too fast, so I totally support that.
However, I would still prefer if they all gave numerical bonuses. If the proposal that only allows scouts to get bonuses doesn't pass, then there's still that bonus on recon units that gives them 25% more for discovering ruins. That bonus only works on numerical bonuses like
gold or production, it doesn't give you more if the ruin gives you a free population or free tiles.I like the free
science instead of a free tech, because if I prioritized something to research, that's the tech I want finished. Not some random other tech.The rest of the ruin rebalancing just seems like raising the floor on the worst ruins which... that's fine. the XP one is still kinda poopy even with the change, but 1 ruin still has to be the worst one. The GAP one needs to go because it makes the first golden age too fast, so I totally support that.
usadefcon1
Prince
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That makes it a nice tradeoff. You get a tech but not necessarily the one you want.I like the free
N.Core
1st Class of Neoa
I kind of agree with this. In fact, I rather want to make all civs able to pick Native Tongue (or even come by default for all Recon units) if imbalance or unfairness is the concern here. But, sadly, AI is unable to do that and they would just pick randomly.
Do you want to upgrade your unit? Go ahead and get it.
Do you want +1 Population? Go get it.
Need a free tech? Just grab a ruin. (Although to be fair, this is a broken reward and should be replaced with something else.)
So then the balance concern is on the map and how it generates the ruins, not the ruin reward itself.
Yeah, I meant we could still have variety by having both qualitative and quantitive bonuses AND quantitive could be balanced, so in general they aren't worse by that margin.
*Variety* is fun here, not *imbalance*. Imbalance is a sideproduct of variety, usually not wanted. That's the exact reason we have all those balance discussions. It's not to cut variety (like having only 1 civ - perfect balance, lol), but to keep variety with all the unique civ and balance them, so there are less OP and UP civs.
That's obvious for civs and other aspects. Why are ruins so different, where imbalance itself is fun instead of variety?
Tekamthi
Emperor
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Aye, a game of tic tac toe, perfectly balanced.
Who here seriously claims they won or lost a game cuz they did or didn't get a particular ruin bonus in turn 5?
This change is a little silly. Can it be implemented in such a way that we can modmod back to vanilla rewards (ie not hard-coded at dll level)? As pointed out, proposal here is a shift to boringness and mundanity for the sake of math.
It's a "Million Little Things"
Tekamthi
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True, and yes there are definitely circumstances that lead to advantages, the early game especially where these little things count most -- I don't dispute that there are some rewards that are better than others, nor that in some circumstances these can be leveraged into even greater advantages -- but I think that's the fun alluded to by some here. The goody hut rewards are small enough in the scope of the game that they are far from automatic-wins, and the fun is trying to convert that early tech or super unit into a grand strategy, and/or find counter-play to advantages developed by opponents. Flattening everything to irrelevance is balanced, certainly: the proposed rewards are all equally unimpressive.
Religion mechanism has far greater imbalances in the early game, but we all agree it's fun to have this. Corporations another one, huge, game-breaking imbalance. If you make it to late game with no corporation somehow, you lose far more often than you do from not getting good hut rewards. But we aren't nerfing these into the floor.
Game already has difficulty settings and up to 43 civs to balance out these small inequities. If you're racking up huge advantages from the goody huts, I'd suggest your game difficulty and opponent#/map size are miscalibrated for your skill/knowledge level. And the rewards are already somewhat neutered compared to civ-series standard. Remember when these used to be a risk/reward mechanism? They've since been changed to reward-only, and flattened already at least once subsequently iirc.
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